Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler is my favorite writer.

His work was hard boiled featuring tough talking thugs and fem fatales but there was always a humor interlaced among the dialogue.

"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”
― Raymond Chandler,

Man, that's writing.

“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

A poet.

So it was that I found myself buying to two volume hardcover collection of the complete works of Raymond Chandler from The Library of American Literature or something like that.  The only trouble is the dust jackets on the two volumes are what I would call...bland.

You can't judge a book by it's cover, but in this case I can.  There's nothing bland about Chandler's writing.  The man himself?  Well that may be another story.  He wasn't afraid to criticize the writing of his peers-- once calling Agatha Christie's mystery style as lazy.

He was right to attack-- one of the rules he puts forth in his book on writing is that things can't happen via coincidence or happenstance.  A murderer can't base his whole ingenious scheme on some bizarrely abstract accident and then expect to be successful.  Chandler's characters talked like real people but in a stylized way-- so I made my own dust jackets for the set;

Portfolio Peek: ELECTRIC LUCHADORE

I’ve long had a fascination for Mexican Luchadores and Astronauts and this concept art marries the two. You can find more of my work at the top of the page under PORTFOLIO.

HELP! WACOM CINTIQ TABLET no SYNC Go To Sleep -- FIXED-- by Me??!

Wow talk about mind blown check this out;

On Tuesday night I had a council meeting I had to get to at 7pm , so I was going to work until 630 but suddenly around 6pm my Wacom Cintiq got a little buggy. I’m running a Wacom Cintiq 13WX on a 2019 iMac Retina 4K with Catalina as the OS. My normally smooth ink line was blotchy— as if I was drawing with a leaky fountain pen. That’s not helpful. I checked a few common things, even looked at brush settings and nothing seemed to work.

I went into System Preferences to calibrate the tablet and lo and behold while the driver was installed it was saying there was no tablet connected. From there I went to DISPLAYS and that confirmed there was no tablet because it should have been listed as another monitor.

Shutting down for the night I figured I’d spend the next morning figuring it out. There’s nothing as fun as climbing under the desk and checking and rechecking wiring. I even did a SMC reset which is when you shut down your Mac, unplug the power cord, press and hold the start button for five seconds and then reconnect and start it up again— this is supposed to rejuice all your USB ports.

Nadda.

I did an internet search to see what I could find, Mac Forums gave me a bunch of suggestions but nothing worked, then I searched for the phrase above and what was the first hit? Well some bloke named Andy Fish wrote a blog post in October 2012 which said the following;

How to get your Mac to recognize your Wacom Cintiq and stop driving you crazy.

All right this was driving me crazy-- I spent a day and a half on the internet trying to find an answer to this and couldn't-- now that I figured it out here's the solution-- and it's actually so easy that's why it was hard to figure out.

The message is telling you that there is No Sync between your computer and your tablet-- so it goes to sleep.  No matter what else you think-- its purely your connection OR its the DVI/VGA switch on the side of the power unit.

1. Un plug EVERYTHING-- and I mean EVERYTHING-- trust me-- I half assed it multiple times and it didn't work until I redid EVERYTHING. 

2. TURN OFF both the tablet and the computer while everything is detached.

3.  CAREFULLY re-assemble your connection-- with special attention to the tightness of the connection joints.

4. Turn ON your computer-- let it completely load.

5. Turn ON your tablet-- it should reflect your desktop or at least not go to sleep.  Now you can go to SYSTEM PREFERENCES>DISPLAYS>DETECT DISPLAYS and set it up the way you want it.

NOTE:  If you go to SYSTEM PREFERENCES>DISPLAYS>DETECT DISPLAYS and you aren't able to click on GATHER DISPLAYS or DETECT DISPLAYS that means there is something faulty with your connection.

AND IF THAT DOESN'T WORK;

6. Throw the DVI/VGA switch and the tablet should come to life.

Trust me, I hear ya.  "I did that and it doesn't work."  Nope.   Do it the right way, making sure everything is connected and it WILL work.

My favorite part of the whole post was that last line— because even now, even though I was the guy that wrote this first post, I still was going to try to cut corners to get this to work and it only worked when I followed the instructions to the letter.

So basically spent a whole morning trying to find an answer I already had! That my friends is the primary reason I write this blog in the first place.

ROAD TRIP to see Comic Book Legend Jim STERANKO!

In a future post I’m going to write about my own “Mount Rushmore” of comic creators, among the ones I’m certain about are Jack Kirby, Will Eisner and Jim Steranko. I had personal relationships with Kirby and Eisner, but until this past weekend I only had a casual nod and gesture relationship with Steranko. My connection to Steranko runs deep, and and I both were raised in tough neighborhoods and turned to boxing to overcome bullying. We share sentiments on a lot of things most notably the importance of the Second Amendment. I liked his work so much I made my own hardcover edition of his best work because I found fault with every collected edition of his I owned.

The oversized hardcover edition I made complete with dust jacket.

I made a decision to seek him out at the next show we did together but things went screwy quick. Shows shut down for two years. Steranko had arranged to make an appearance at my local comic shop for their 40th Anniversary (congratulations That’s Entertainment— now 42 years in business and soon the subject of another post) but thanks to the pandemic that too got cancelled. He was announced for a couple of other shows nearby but those fell through for various reasons. The Little Giant Show in Concord New Hampshire had him as a headliner so it was on a Saturday afternoon I made the 90 minute trip north to meet him and get the book signed.

His stylized signature now in the book!

I made it in good time, and thanks to son’s #2 and #3 who were doing the show for SUPERWORLD COMICS I was inside and talking to Jim like an old friend. We talked growing up poor, learning how to fight, the 2nd amendment, our aversion to tyrannical mask mandates, old movies, who the best James Bond is (hint: it’s Connery) and more over the course of 40 minutes. We even made plans to get together for dinner.

Most fun was when he invited me into his inner circle, Steranko’s Henchmen, and he gave me the secret password which comes with it along with a T-Shirt.

A great guy, and I’ll post more about his work in the future.

I Once Worked as a Butler... Well, Sorta...

Back around twenty years or so ago I was working as an art teacher at the Worcester Art Museum. If you’ve ever worked for a non-profit you know it’s not very lucrative. Part of my duties were to travel out to schools and do art classes for ones that didn’t have a budget for a regular art teacher. It wasn’t long before I did the math that the art museum was charging 3x what I was getting paid to provide this service, which in turn led me to cutting them out and charging it myself.

This lead to a parent contacting me in a fairly wealthy town to provide private art lessons to their pre-teen son. They felt he had a real burning desire to do art and wasn’t getting enough art education through his private school. I looked over his portfolio and thought he was pretty talented for a 12 year old so I agreed to take the gig. My memory isn’t all that great, I don’t remember having an interview with the parents, I don’t even remember the parents. I DO remember arriving at the address, taking the key out of the mailbox, disarming the alarm system and then working with this young man on his art when he came walking in about 10 minutes later after getting out of school.

This continued for a full season every Wednesday afternoon, and there would be a note on the kitchen counter for me which would usually have some kind of message like “we are concerned about his color theory ability” or “He’s not understanding Mid Century Modernism”— you know, normal suburban parent worries.

I liked the kid, he had talent, the trouble was he knew he did because he was constantly told that by teachers and family and he felt like at the ripe old age of 12 he had it all pretty much figured out. Start the acceptance letter for Pratt in Brooklyn.

This lead to some troubles because I would push him with an assignment, an assignment outside his comfort level which is truly the only way to grow, and he didn’t like being pushed beyond what he was really good atl. Those counter top notes would be my back and forth communications with mom, so in my response I would explain what I was asking him to do and why it was important for him to follow through.

At first, her replies were very positive, and she wanted him to get a real art education, but as we got further and further in he really began to fold and the notes would be excuses as to why he didn’t do an assignment. Then they got really strange. It started with a brief reference to whatever lesson we’d been doing and then include a casual “would you mind taking Rover out for a walk?” or “could you chop the vegetables and preheat the oven to 400 before you leave?” —??

I think I walked the dog, I like dogs and if they wanted to pay a dog walker $250/hour (that was what I was charging for private lessons) I was okay with that— but I stopped at chopping vegetables. My final note thanked her for the opportunity and a wish that the son would do well, but that if he didn’t learn how to push himself he could certainly fake his way through art school and come out with a degree, but that degree would be worthless because there would be no actual knowledge behind it.

I kept in touch with the young man and he reached out to me sophomore year at a lesser art school (his portfolio didn’t get him into the top schools) and he told me I was totally right and he wished he had seen it back then.

It was an interesting experience.