Once Upon a Tuba

Long before I started spinning yarns, I was pretty handy with a pencil. Graphite was my weapon of choice for any art assignment that didn't specify a medium. That is, until one fateful day... which really wasn't all that fateful. Sorry to mislead you like that.

'Twas my freshman year of college, six years before I first started writing fiction, and three years before I was rejected from a short story writing course because I was an art major.¹ The professor spread out about 100 postcards on the floor and had each of us choose three to combine into a drawing.

One caught my eye right away: a work by my favorite artist, René Magritte.² I snatched it up and scanned the rest of the cards as my choices quickly dwindled. In the end I snagged a Picasso collage I'd never seen before and a photo of a desert landscape to round out my triumvirate of awesome.

I knew I couldn't resort to my usual grayscale pencil drawing, not with a desert sunset involved, so for the first time ever I ventured into the realm of chalk pastels. I merged Magritte's tuba, suitcase, and cloth-ed woman with a Picasso moth and set them against the desert backdrop. The result:

I'd hoped to come up with some clever way to tie this all back to story writing, but since a picture is worth 1,000 words and this one comprises three pictures, I'm already way past my quota. Instead, I'll just leave you with this:

More art should have tubas in it.


¹ That's a half-truth. I wasn't rejected for being an art major. I was rejected for not being an English major. It's probably just as well, since my other courses only afforded me 17 seconds of spare time that semester. (Seventeen seconds? / I can't write a tale that fast. / Maybe a haiku...)
² Ceci n'est pas une apostille.

We Who Are About to Dye Dilute You

Long before I began writing for fun and (no) profit, art was my creative outlet of choice. And though the image below is far from my best work, I've chosen to make it the first one I share here at The Wheel (apart from my computer animation) for good reason. Many pieces in my portfolio tell a story, but only this one comes with a story already in place...

What do you see when you look at this picture? I see my high school. In flames.

One morning in May during my senior year of high school, I arrived to find the front entrances blocked by police and a bunch of fire trucks. The place wasn't ablaze, however, so I circled around to the back entrance (using a somewhat illegal route through the neighboring VA hospital's property) and parked in the lot behind the gym.

The authorities kept us out of the school for an hour, but we soon learned the shocking truth: A substitute teacher had started a fire in my (commie) history teacher's classroom.

Sadly, it wasn't nearly as nefarious as it sounds. My (commie) history teacher (who wasn't really a commie (as far as I know, but he did teach The Communist Manifesto, collected Russian memorabilia, and only gave students in my A.P. Western Civ class who were communists A's (which is to say, none of us))) had been sick the previous day.¹ The substitute accidentally left a window fan running overnight, and at some point it fell into the room and onto a pile of books. The fan rubbing up against the books all night got them pretty hot, and by about 6:00am the friction had started a good ol' fashioned book burnin'.

The fire consumed the books, as well as a nearby television set, while the rest of the room sustained extensive smoke damage and was closed off for the rest of the year. Of course, we had no sympathy for the teacher, in part because he didn't give anyone A's (even though A is also the first letter of the Russian alphabet), and in part because, as an (alleged) communist, he shouldn't have cared about his belongings.

But wait, there's more! (Which I suppose was pretty obvious, considering I haven't even mentioned the picture yet. (Until now, that is. But you should ignore this instance. In fact, ignore this whole paragraph.))

Eventually, they let us inside and directed us to our first period class. I had Creative Drawing, where we were in the process of making batiks. (A batik is created by applying hot wax to cloth (or rice paper, like we used), removing the wax once it has cooled, and then painting the surface with dye. The areas that previously had the wax will repel the ink (as you can see in my meager example above).) We'd been at work maybe ten minutes when they announced over the loudspeaker that we should instead go to homeroom, and then return to our first period class. We thought this was pretty stupid, but we did what they asked.

When we got back to the art room, one of the hotpots (used to heat the wax) was steaming. One kid jokingly suggested we avoid it, lest we start a fire. But once the teacher returned to the room, one girl went over to get some wax. She lifted the lid, and whoomp! (There it is. Wherein "it" is oxygen.) As soon as oxygen reached the pot's contents, we had flames a foot high.

The fire was contained, though. It only extended above the pot, not outward, and couldn't quite reach the (wooden) storage area above. Our teacher (a woman in her early 60s, and perhaps no longer with a firm grasp on all her faculties) grabbed the fire extinguisher, aimed it at the hotpot, and promptly... hit the side of the pot, knocking it over onto the counter. Which was, of course, lined with paper towels to catch the wax. In moments, the entire counter (about six feet wide, and extending the entire length of the room) was engulfed in flames.

The alarm sounded. I grabbed my painting and headed for the exit. The rest of the school poured back outside, fire engines summoned a second time. Some kids headed down the street to the 7-11, but the rest of us just sat back and laughed, contemplating where and how the day's next fire would spring up. An improper mixture in the chem lab, perhaps. Or maybe a piece of meatloaf would spontaneously combust in the cafeteria.

To our disappointment, we topped out at two fires that day. And even worse, the firefighters didn't believe us when everyone in our art class said we needed treatment for smoke inhalation at the hospital. Our laughs betrayed us, and we all had to go to second period.

And that, dear readers, is how a still life painting of a boot, an old rotary phone, and a potted plant will always remind me of the time my high school almost burned down. Twice. In one day.

THE END

¹ By the way, if you're wondering about the over-abundance of parentheses in this post, I've reverted to my previous standard for the sake of sentimentality. Prior to my blogging days, I only used footnotes when forced.

Before The Wheel

At this time 11 years ago, I was a ghost. An apparition. Friends would swear they'd seen me, perhaps at the dining hall or by the mail room, but always out of the corner of their eye, and they could never prove it. Late at night, they might swap stories about such sightings, about their brief glimpse of a spectre resembling someone they once knew.

It was my final semester of college, and I spent half my waking hours in the art building working on pieces for the art majors' senior show. The other half I was holed up in a computer lab, completing my other senior project: a 3 min 15 sec computer animation. With no time to spare for food or socializing, I lost 20 pounds and 30 friends.¹

Three minutes may not seem like much to you, but you've never been an animator.² For comparison, it took 8 people to complete Pixar's short Luxo Jr., which is 2 min 18 sec long and only contains 6 items on-screen (2 lamps, 2 balls, an electrical outlet, and the floor). Admittedly, Luxo was made 14 years earlier and is far superior, but I was doing everything myself, with 100+ 3D models, 80+ textures, 30+ lights, 4 cameras, and a total of 5,850 frames of animation.³

Back in 2000, it took 2-3 minutes to render a single frame. If I was lucky and no one else was using the computers, I could run 4 of them overnight and get about 800 frames rendered. The next morning I'd pick out all the mistakes (e.g. motion, lighting, timing, executive producer credit), then make adjustments and run the machines again that night.

Rinse, spit, repeat.

There are still plenty of mistakes in this. Close to fifty, at last count.⁴ For years, I told myself I'd go back and fix everything, but life and laziness always intervened. I finally stopped deluding myself a couple months ago — for one thing, I no longer have access to the software — and got a local video place to copy the animation from Beta tape⁷ to DVD.

The picture quality isn't great, but for the first time in 11 years, I have a digital copy. Thus, I've finally released it into the wild (a.k.a. the Tube of You). And since the Academy just awarded the Oscar for best animated short last night, I thought it fitting to share mine with you now.

Behold! The Hunt, the greatest computer animation ever made (by me):

Also, if you're interested, here's a list of all the Easter eggs I included in the animation.


¹ Neither of these is true.
² Or have you? If so, disregard that blanket statement. Instead, read this blanket statement: "I like blankets."
³ Okay, that's not entirely true. I didn't do everything. My friend Jared Castiglione was gracious enough to record two sound effects for me.
⁴ Don't try to count. Really.^5
5 By the way, when I tried to get a job in computer animation after college, everyone loved the video. Creative directors, Human Resources, graphic designers, even CEOs. Everyone, in fact, except the animators. All they saw were the mistakes.^6
6 Yet it was good enough to be shown at Temple University's NextFrame Film Festival. The site provides no proof of this, of course, since the 2000-2001 year is the only one without an archive page. Like I said, 11 years ago I was a ghost.
⁷ Yep, you read that right. Beta.