Holy Shit! More Doodles!

Won't win me any awards but they're not too bad, I think. Some of these drawings are from my sketchbooks when I was still in college, a time when I was more inclined to do stuff without expecting to get paid for it. Others are from my notebooks, which is why you'll notice handwriting peering through the paper from the pages beneath it. Scanner's dead and gone so I took pictures using my webcam instead, thus explaining the shitty quality. Click the pics to view the full images.



I go nao.

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Holy Shit, I'm an Artist!

Writing for a Living Sucks Part VI: Kalashnikov Blues

Consider the Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947, a beast made for sound and fury:


Anyone with a nominally decent grasp of the action movie genre would know it as the AK-47, or possibly as the Kalashnikov. Fully automatic, it spits out 7.62 millimeters of pure death at a rate of 600 rounds per minute and with a maximum effective range of about 400 meters. The M67 projectile that erupts from the its barrel was designed to blossom in human flesh at 13 centimeters from the point of entry, causing massive tissue trauma, substantial organ damage, and a particularly nasty exit wound. Due to its unsurpassed durability and reliability, it quickly became the standard infantry rifle of the Red Army and is still currently used by most of the member states of the former Warsaw Pact. It is the favored thunderstick of irascible mujahideen, genocidal warmongers, Third World hordes, European extremists, and communist firebrands. It was this implement of destruction, this potent totem of human wrath in the blood-encrusted fists of an angry and desperate peasant that turned a ragtag band of barefoot farm yokels into a formidable army that succeeded in driving the American war machine out of Vietnam. Truly, this primitive-looking union of wood and steel is one of the most terrifying instruments of warfare ever invented.

Nevertheless, awesome as the AK-47 may be, no one in his right mind would deign it fit to be used as a farming tool. Against flesh and bone it is undoubtedly the stuff of nightmares, but against the earth it is the dullest spade imaginable. Tools, like the men who make them, have their own natures. A thing that goes against its nature is liable to break. A plough taken into the battlefield will shatter beneath the hail of bullets. A rifle tied to a beast and dragged across rice paddies will rot in the mud.

A storysmith compelled to tell tales for which he cares little will lose his soul.

I’ll tell you this: one thing I’ve never witnessed is a writer asking another why he writes. One quiet night in a foxhole, a soldier might ask his mate what drove the man to enter the service. Over the steam of cappuccino, a teacher might prod his colleague why he wants to impart knowledge. Yet a writer never thinks about the other guy’s reasons for spinning tales. This is because it’s pretty much the same for wordslingers everywhere. Before money, before rockstardom, even before the need for self-expression, the greasy marrow of it is that a man starts telling stories because he believes there aren’t enough of the ones he enjoys. I think that’s also true for musicians, for painters, for fashion designers, and for every bloke in the business of making stuff up out of pure brain jizz. A dude must follow his nature.

That is, until he starts selling out.

Listen. Within snooty circles, an artist is considered a sellout when he starts doing his alchemy for money or to please his audience. Art, they say, must be a purely personal act of self-expression. For art to remain genuine it must come directly from a man’s heart and must neither be responsible for nor answerable to the universe within which it is born. I say balls to that. Under this principle of purity, the only true artist is the dude furiously jerking off in his room and the only pristine objet d’art is the shameless man-spunk he left on the rug.

So what constitutes the act of selling out? Even in the network I belong to-- which is as mainstream as a television network can get in this country-- I wouldn’t really say that every writer I meet or work with is a sellout because a lot of them like the tales they tell. They’re being paid to fornicate with their minds and because they enjoy it no one has the right to call it prostitution. The true sellout is the angry fuck who sits in the dark, who desperately wants to spin a different and frequently darker kind of story, who is smoldering with a deep and barely contained hatred for the gutless and bloodless and toothless stories that are the staple of Philippine television, who is sick of writing stories he wouldn’t watch if he hadn’t written it-- yet who is also too cowardly to stop making a living and start making goddam art.

I’m talking about myself, of course.

I’m a Kalashnikov, a beast made for sound and fury.

Fully automatic, I spit out 7.62 millimeters of pure death at a rate of 600 rounds per minute and with a maximum effective range of about 400 meters. The M67 projectile that erupts from the my barrel was designed to blossom in human flesh at 13 centimeters from the point of entry, causing massive tissue trauma, substantial organ damage, and a particularly nasty exit wound.

I am an implement of destruction, a potent totem of human wrath in the blood-encrusted fists of an angry and desperate peasant.

I am one of the most terrifying instruments of warfare ever invented.

I am also an apostate of my own nature. I’m telling you, something’s gonna give.

PREVIOUSLY:
Writing for a Living Sucks Parts I to V

Veritas

What I’m supposed to be is a wordslinger, a son of that tribe of men conversant with the strange secrets of the universe, an oracle in the wilderness acquainted with the esoteric voices that spring from God’s vast belly, a hierophant who brings the great unwashed closer to the sacred and arcane truths of the cosmos.

What I’m supposed to be is a storysmith, a Zen musician of mortal emotions, a connoisseur of the spirit, a warrior-poet who drinks from the cup of life deeper than most of my brethren, who intimately experiences humanity, who understands what makes us rapt or wretched or divine or damned.

What I’m supposed to be. The truth is much more sober.

I’m hardly a prophet. The sum of my knowledge regarding the human condition can be boiled down to this: one day we were born, some day we will die, and all the unoriginal and repetitive melodrama in between is merely diversion. The bone of our celebrated free will is when we decide whether to take what we want or beg for what we need. The difference between the path of the fist and the way of the palm is that one holds the knife while the other suffers the wound. Of cosmic mysteries and principles I can profess no more insight than a chunk of coal.

That, more or less, is also true with regards to my capacity to experience depth of emotion. There was no real cathartic moment to write gloomy songs about. One day in my early teens emotions started sliding around me like raindrops on grave wax. The feelings that do come through taste adulterated, barren, and impotent. To illustrate: when my brother died in a tragically ordinary car accident, I pretended to cry behind dark glasses so as not to upset my kin. Not that I didn’t love the poor bastard. I’m just so far gone that had I been tasked to write Schindler’s List I would’ve put some ninjas in there. For starters. When one’s heart sits in a jar of formaldehyde under the bed long enough, one starts forgetting the taste of tears.

The only competency I claim to possess that qualifies me a seat in the crooked table of this allegedly noble craft is my willingness (enthusiasm, enemies would argue, is a better word for it) to chuck the truth out of the window in the name of entertainment. Screw truth, man, this is reality. I want my facts sensational, grandstanding, boorish. I want my truths uncouth, unwashed, unavoidable.

Strangely enough, for a specialist in the art of bullshit, one of my great fears is to believe my own pretensions. My paranoia spurs me to be painfully honest-- to myself, if to no one else. I am a truth masochist. Whenever I take some time off to assess my situation I take pains to be truthful about my own motives and feelings and the morality of my actions. That doesn’t necessarily mean I will do the moral thing when faced with a situation wherein I will profit by the immoral choice. I will lie or steal or cheat-- but I will not rationalize. I think that makes me even nastier than the liar, thief, or cheater who sincerely believes in the ultimate morality behind the immoral action.

And now, back to our regular programming.