Men's Room Self-Portraits, pt. 6
March 09, 2009
January 15, 2009
Writing
I think I was in the 3rd grade when I decided that I wanted to be a writer. I think that we had some assignment to write a story and I really liked it. And from that time on, that was my answer to the question of "what do you want to be when you grow up?"
This was furthered in elementary school when we had a creative writing section of our Gifted class, in which I wrote my first longer story and learned a bit about description, etc. I read a lot at this time, Watership Down was my favorite book. I'd been into rabbits since I was little.
I continued to write throughout my childhood.
I wrote poems and stories, lots and lots of them. I remember in middle school, when our gifted class was publishing a magazine, that I wrote a poem called "The Warbler", about a bird that gets shot by a hunter for no reason, and it made a girl in my class cry, I assume because she was moved by it.
My teachers were supportive of my writing. I don't know if it was any better than anyone else's but they always made me feel "gifted". Maybe that was their job.
But I didn't just write at school or for school. Along with the many comics that I wrote and drew, I wrote stories, getting more intensive as I got into middle school. And it was in middle school when I wrote my first (and only) novel, Wolph.
I've come to have met a couple other people who wrote a novel when they were a kid. One of them is a known and respected playwright now. I did come to appreciate the novel quality of having written a "novel". It takes a lot of time and commitment. I remember riding my bicycle around the neighborhood while thinking through the story, how to develop it, how to finish it. And I did finish it.
By the time that I wrote it, in 8th grade, I had a small group of friends who enjoyed reading my writing and comics. They would sit around my room, waiting for me to finish a chapter and then read it. But that is about as far as it went. I still have it.
What I don't have is what was going to be a sequel to Wolph, in which I imagined a lot of people I knew in and developed characters accordingly. It was a more complicated story, and I wrote about 90 pages of it before a friend of mine, who was moving away, stole it and never returned it. I think he was sentimental about leaving people behind and he knew which characters were supposed to be which people or something. I never considered it completely malicious, but it did stop my novel writing. I never even tried to write a novel again.
But interestingly, I was developing this character who was in the novel called Bradley R. Davidson. He was meant to have been a murderer and an arsonist who was on the run from the police, while still a teenager. I wrote poems and essays by him in my typing class, dark poems about death and violence. And an essay titled: "How to be a Murderer and an Arsonist and Still be a Nice Guy." It was quite elaborate. He was going to turn out to be the hero of the novel, a surprise ending in which the character that seemed to obviously be the evil one turned out to be the hero. I actually had the ending relatively planned out.
Also, I started writing a series of stories that I called Another Stupid Story with a Moral (I think). I wrote 77 one page stories that ranged vastly in point and content, but were often humorous and extremely violent. I amused myself in the 9th grade by writing one a day until I hit 77. For years I had thought these stories lost, but then after over 20 years, I found the notebook in which I wrote them. I was pleased largely.
Also in the 9th grade, I started writing novellas that were based in part on dreams that I was having. I wound up writing three of these: Feral Nature was the first. I can't remember the names of the other two. I'll have to look them up. They were all related to death as well, and featured surreal, dream-like happenings. And no real shortage of violence.
I don't know why there was so much violence, other than it must have just been something I was working out at the time. It certainly was a theme. Also, by this time, I had read a lot of Stephen King books. I think I stopped reading Stephen King around that time too.
In 10th grade I discovered literature. And oddly it was Sinclair Lewis who I first got interested in. But as I went into the 11th grade and studied American Literature, I got more and more interested in literature, and eventually discovered Faulkner who became a lifetime favorite.
I also was writing poetry at this time. Lots and lots of poetry. All of it awful. But I wrote and wrote and wrote. But oddly, I didn't do a lot of homework, so I only wrote stories and poems.
Overall, though, my writing, which was only read by friends, got a little attention. In the Buchholz High School chapbook Paw Prints, I think I was the youngest writer in there. A friend of mine was on the editorial committee and I'd written a story called The Sky, which was quite short, about two boys hanging out and then one of them dies in a transcendent fashion. My friend thought this story was great and got it in there. Along with one of my Bradley R. Davidson poems (now credited to myself).
Another odd thing, by this time, 10th grade, I had people tell me that I had developed "style". They said that people tried for years and years to develop style and I had it already at the age of 15. I recall saying that I understood the compliment, but hoped that my style would not always be what it was because I didn't think that it was all that good.
In the 11th grade, I was lucky enough to have a Creative Writing class. We had a cool teacher who gave us a lot of lattitude. Unfortunately, I started seeing other writers as competition and would lambaste their work. I really think that the teacher should have shot me down and told me that I was out of line. I wasn't giving helpful feedback, I think I just liked to insult things.
In this class, I wrote and wrote and wrote, poems and stories. Almost all of them were met with praise and appreciation. I say this not to make myself sound like a popular writer among my classmates, but I think that I genuinely was liked for my writing. Our class published a journal that year and I had the most stories and poems in it. Like a 3rd or a 4th of the thing.
By this time in my life, I was convinced that I was going to be a writer. I met with successes at these small levels, and I really thought the sky was the limit, so to speak. Maybe The Sky was the limit. Who knows?
My girlfriend of the time, Jessica, was a painter, very talented. Her parents were both artists and art teachers and I reveled in the romantic notion of being a writer married to an artist and living some profound life, writing great novels. I am pretty sure I even had the gall to tell my American Literature teacher that I expected that she would be teaching me to her classes before too long.
There is more to this, but I will write it from another angle.
Anyhow, I dropped out of high school between 11th and 12th grade. I had actually flunked enough classes to probably not be in the 12th grade anyways. But I took the GED and then started at the junior college. Here, I wasn't taking any writing classes, but I did get into literature even more, discovering another of my favorite authors, Melville. I was still writing, poems and stories. On and on.
In 1987, I was in Reedley, CA, and I took Creative Writing at the junior college there, then known as Kings River Community College. I wrote for the school newspaper (a little) (my best friend of the time was the editor-in-chief) but continued to write stories and poems. I think my work got a little better around this time. I don't know. That is all a matter of opinion anyways.
I wrote a story called The Lady Killer, about a boy who gets beat up by a girl. This ended up in the KRCC chapbook.
As the years went by, I continued to write. And it was stories and poems. I had a couple of close friends who actually read my stuff and who were very passionate in their belief in my "genius". In fact, one friend, Joe, told me that in speaking to his mother about me, she said to him that I was his "first genius", which he told me. Joe was a pathological liar so maybe that didn't happen but still that is what he told me. I think there was a sort of "in love" feeling (though our friendship was utterly platonic) that these friends had that probably colored their feelings about my writing ability.
In 1989, after a couple years back in Florida, I came back to California to finish college and to hopefully get into a writing program or something. Joe shopped my poems around a number of magazines. I got zero acceptances. Zero.
But when I finished my lower division units at junior college and moved to San Francisco, I officially became an English Major with a Creative Writing emphasis. I took a lot of writing classes. I took poetry, short story, playwriting, and screenwriting. I actually had a couple of good teachers in there. My work, which was certainly my most mature work, was appreciated but didn't stand out. Maybe that is just university for you. Nobody wants to be as effusive. It's not just all "you're wonderful, you're a genius". But at the same time, probably nowhere as critical or hard as it could have been.
It took 2 1/2 years to finish my undergrad there. And when I was done, I applied to MFA programs. I applied to some pretty prestigious programs. I think it was Brown, Emerson, and Syrcacuse. I wanted to go East. I took the GRE. I collected what I thought were my best poems. And I was rejected by all 3.
And a lot of other things occured in my life, too.
But this was the end of my writing. Of my creative writing. Of my poetry. Of my short stories. Of any and everything.
I always chalked it up to burnout, but in retrospect, it was probably the rejection and the lack of feedback. I think I needed the encouragement, but I was discouraged. And I stopped writing pretty much altogether.
A few years later, I applied to SFSU for a Master's program in Cinema Studies. And I wrote a Master's Thesis, which is bound and has my name on it. With the help of computers, I think I finally learned about editing (something I always thought they should have taught in the English Department). I learned by doing and I don't think that necessarily was any good at it, but I had come to respect it as a skill.
I'm not too happy with my thesis now either. I don't really like anything that I've written. I have one story that I wrote in my undergrad, "Oh You Pretty Things", which was the only one that I had any affection for. But while I liked my ideas in my thesis, it's not so good. But it got done.
Around the time that my son was born, I started writing online about the movies that I see. I originally quailed at calling it a Blog but eventually gave in on that one. I've been working on it since 2002 and it's been a writing outlet. But I don't really edit it unless I see a typo or something egregious. I've never gained a following. No one hardly ever goes there. More now than ever before, but still, it's not like it's taken off. I feel vaguely embarrassed trying to get people to check it out.
Then I started this Blog, which I write to give myself an outlet on anything non-film related. But now, it's also become my forum for my proto writing of my autobiography. And these long, boring diatribes or what-have-you are the first attempts to get out of my system some of the facts of my life. I seem to have the sensibility that I can concoct something interesting out of it all eventually. And it's quite different for me. I never kept a diary. I never liked writing about myself. But that is the plan at the moment. And this is how I've come to get here.
January 12, 2009
Men's Room Self-Portraits, pt. 5
December 29, 2008
Comics
Comics. Comics and cartoons have always been in my life.
My mom would read the daily funnies to us from the paper. This started as far back as I can remember. I remember me and my sister sitting on her lap, while she read through Peanuts, Beetle Baily, BC, Broom Hilda, Nancy, Snuffy Smith, Momma, Blondie, and the others that were in the paper at the time.
She critiqued them, mainly based on her like or dislike of them.
Peanuts was always my favorite. From the day that I discovered the books, I started collecting them, and I would read them and re-read them on and on. I had a significant collection. And beyond that, one Christmas, my mom bought all these used comics of Peanuts, BC, & The Wizard of Id. I remember being kind of disappointed when I first opened it, used books and all, but ultimately it got me going further and further with reading daily comics.
My dad on the other hand only really had one that he really liked. He had an old hardbound copy of Homebodies by Charles Addams, missing the dust jacket. He liked those cartoons especially one in which a patent office man, holding a ray gun out toward the window, says "Death Ray? Fiddlesticks! It doesn't even slow them down!" This was an unusual thing for my dad.
And of course comic books. My favorite was Spider-Man. I actually grew up reading more Marvel Comics than DC. Not sure where I got this prejudice from, but I had it. I didn't have comics books all the time. They were more the odd thing every once in a while. But I deeply enjoyed them, fascinated by the advertising of weird mail-order oddities.
So, I always liked comics.
When I was in the third grade, I moved from Glen Springs Elementary School, where I'd gone from Kindergarten through second grade, to J.J. Finley Elementary. I was in the "gifted" class, sometimes called "enrichment" since first grade, I think. That's kind of a separate story. But anyways, at this new school, I didn't know the kids so well and one day, early in the school year, I think we had some free time and were reading comics in the coat room.
And one of the kids says, "We should make our own comics!" And the other kids agreed, and they moved over to a table, grabbed some pencils and paper and started working on a project together. I remember thinking to myself that this is what gifted kids did, they got ideas and didn't just consume, but they created.
Well, I liked the idea too, but not knowing them so well, I started drawing my own comics with my own characters. While theirs attempted to be more naturalistic (for third graders), my characters were largely stick-figures or very simple forms. I wrote my first comic that day. I think it was something like the Rocket versus the Flame. I may even still have it. I stapled it together. The story was probably more in my head than on the paper, but what started that day for me was the beginning of a cast of characters that I would continue to draw for four years.
The other kids probably never drew comics again.
I developed a format for my comics, a cast of characters, and drew and drew and drew. And I recruited my friends to draw the comics too. My best friends at the time started drawing and we shared the character universe, developed it, played with it. For years. Which I think is unusual for third to fifth graders. To have such a sustained cartoon universe.
One day, my friend Cliff, who was probably my closest collaborator, his folks were having a garage sale and we piled up our comics and sold a pile for a dollar to some guy. We thought that was pretty great.
As Cliff and I lost touch with one another, moving to separate middle schools, I continued to recruit new friends to draw the comics as well. This carried on through the entirety of the sixth grade, though what was probably perceived as kind of interesting in the younger years, started to take on a not so cool aura as our peers developed the social hierarchies that rule middle and high school. But again, that is more of a separate issue.
The characters Super Bug, Super Ball, Creature, Robot, and others finally got retired. I don't really know why exactly. It just happened eventually.
The next year, and I remember these things through school years, I developed a new comic. It was meant to be a daily newspaper strip and I wrote it every day, though sometimes several days at a time and sometimes running behind, but I wrote that cartoon for a year. It was called Jerk's Corner. And it was about kids in middle school, a social clique of cool kids and then there was Jerk.
Jerk wore glasses and typically wasn't very nice. He was nerdy, but kind of unpleasant, and though he wasn't well-liked, he was part of the social order. Sort of a Charlie Brown mixed with something unpleasant.
I probably was working out some issues with social stuff, as by this time, I'd become social pariah at school. And Jerk's Corner was one that I actually worked on by myself. No one else ever did it.
The next year, eighth grade, a made a new friend named Mark, and I started a new character, a superhero named Baby Bob. I made the format like my old Superhero comics and gave Baby Bob a couple of sidekicks, Blob Dog and T.D., a turtle who could run really fast. Baby Bob was a baby who was a supergenius, who solved a great deal of the world's problems within a few days of his birth. For some reason, a bunch of villains came about to cause him trouble, including his arch-nemesis, Death Man.
Baby Bob was made to be funny as well as adventurous. All of my comics had more humor than pathos, but they had both often as well. My drawings of Baby Bob were not stick-figures, but they were still very basic. Baby Bob had a big nose, a tuft of blond hair, a wrinkle on his cheek, and a body that was a triangle with feet, implying an oversized shirt with a big "B" on it. While this wasn't a huge jump from stick figures, it was a step away.
I did Baby Bob for about a year. I even started coloring them in with colored pencil. My friendship with Mark didn't last too long, so Baby Bob was mine and mind alone pretty fast. I tended to recruit my friends because they were my friends and not because they could write or draw. Sometimes that worked out better than others.
It was around this time that I suddenly decided to start collecting comic books. I had been down at the Book Gallery, one of Gainesville's few used bookstores, one of my favorite places to be, and had randomly picked out 5 Spider-Man comics, and I decided to start collecting comics. A new kid had just moved into the neighborhood, Brendan, and for some reason, I went over to his house and asked him if he's like to start collecting comics with me. A friendship was born. And a two-three year comic book buying hobby was also launched.
Around this time, I developed another new comic, The Ocean Police. This was based on the OP surf line, in a sense. The OP on their outfits, from OP clothing, also stoof for Ocean Police. There were two guys, a tall one with shaggy blond hair and a shorter guy with glasses. They patroled the beach with pieces of wood with nails sticking out of them and encountered monsters or bad guys who they bloodied and beat.
I moved from the format that I had developed for the two page comics and moved to a more full-page layout. Copying an aspect of "real" comics, I did covers and splash pages and then the comic itself would run about 8 pages. Also, influenced by comic books, I would draw in pencil, then ink them and then colored them (with Crayloa Markers, mind you). And I would recruit friends to do some of the work, too.
The Ocean Police didn't last a long time. By the time I started high school, I developed yet another idea: Rat Comics. The idea was a compendium-style comic with a Jungle Rat, a detective Rat, a Super Rat, etc. etc. Even though I didn't collect those old style of comics, I liked the idea of putting it together. I had shown my comics to a couple of other new friends who really liked them. I even had a friend tell me that if I made copies of it, he would buy it. I thought it was crazy that someone would pay $1 for my comic that I made. I went on to relate this to another friend.
My other friend, Travis, had an entreprenurial spirit that I hadn't developed up til that time, and his dad owned a print shop. He said, we can print it and sell it! This again blew my mind.
So, in the 2nd semester of 9th grade, we started publishing Rat Comics. We did four issues that semester. And Travis' father said that we needed to start paying for the services, so we should sell advertising. Travis, who had some relationship with the school newspaper (I was actually in the journalism class myself, for what that was worth), took their ad form and modified it for our purposes. We sold ads at relatively high prices, expanding the number of our readership quite fictionally. But we did it. We sold ads. Local businesses actually supported us.
In the 10th grade, we published two more issues. I was lazy about drawing all the comics so I started recruiting (my key verb) a couple of friends who I thought were talented comic book artists to do some work. And Travis started drawing some comics too, though his art was very stiff, as well as his stories (not that mine were any good either, mind you). And we even used some old Ocean Police comics despite the fact that they'd been colored in and copied poorly.
What I am trying to say is that the quality was not always, if ever, there. But we sold it. For a quarter, I think. We had it announced over the intercom and had it at the school store. We didn't sell many. I think we ended up giving a lot of them away. But as our advertising grew, we no longer needed to sell them, so we gave them away. Unfortunately, not that many people were interested. I think I saw a lot of them in the garbage.
I even heard a snide remark made by the mother of a former friend, saying that we tried to sell them, but had to give them away because nobody wanted them.
But I have to say, we did all this on our own, with no adult supervision. We didn't do it for credit, it wasn't so we could put it on a college application. We just did it.
There was this organization (who knows it probably still exists) called Junior Achievement (JA), and bored high school kids could go and local business people would host helping us form a little corporation, where we would build and sell something, earning a profit (small, small, small) but get it in shares. For God knows why, I did this. More than one year. We assembled First Aid Kits one year, I think we made trivets the other. And this IS the kind of thing that kids aim to put on their resumes.
I bring this up because what we did took far more initiative and innovation than all that other crap, and even if the comics were awful, we did this for 2 years, seven issues in all. Of course, by the time we got to the last issue, I was getting interested in hardcore punk and tiring of comics. We changed it into a magazine, and along with comics, threw in a couple of odd articles on nonsense.
I know this is off on a tangent here, but one of the articles was a review of popcorn at the local movie theaters. We didn't really research it. We simply made it up from memory. But Travis became concerned aobut litigation and replaced all the theater names with "Theater A", "Theater B", etc., taking every ounce of use out of the article.
Actually, with the Rat Comics there was more. I again pulled in my friends to this. My friends Brendan and Isaac didn't really DO anything, but we had them as President and Vice-President for no real good reason othe that we liked to hang out together. We had meetings at pizza places, joking about our grandiose plans to take over the world, including an issue called "Rat Wild" where we would have naked women with rat faces or something. Our plans also included getting an endorsement from Duran Duran, which we figured would help sell our comic to the masses of teenage girls who were so smitten by them.
And there was even an embezzlement story. We wound up with an office space at the print shop where we had a couple of meetings. But one day, Travis had said that some of the money went missing and suggested that one of us had taken it. It ended up with us getting ousted from the shop, us thinking Travis took the money and this was sort of the beginning of the end for Rat Comics.
Oddly enough, it had become so much more than drawing comics, it was probably inevitable.
Around this time I also drew a new series of Baby Bob comics in the format of The Ocean Police. These were probably some of the best comics that I drew. I mean, they were the most mature work I did simply because I was a little older and more practiced. My friends read them and enjoyed them. Sometimes they would sit around my room while I drew them and wait to read them "hot off the presses" as it were.
Of course, Rat Comics led to No Idea Magazine. My friend Var saw my comics over the summer of 1985 and said he wanted to do something like that. I told him I didn't want to do comics anymore. I wanted to do a magazine.
That was sort of the end of drawing comics for me. I certainly drew cartoons. I even drew comics from time to time. But nothing substantial, nothing that I did for more than a couple of one-offs. I did try to enter the Bay Guardian comic contest that they used to have every year, but I didn't even get an honorable mention. I also met other cartoonists with far more talent than me that I think discouraged me as well.
Of course, some of my cartoons that I drew on the backs of business cards actually got me a lot of failed opportunities. I was once offered to design some t-shirts by a local screenprinter, but we never got anything he liked. And I had a brief experience with Sega, when a guy who liked my cartoons tried to develop a game idea around them. That went kaput. But I did earn a little money. Little.
And eventually, I also started painting, which I was commissioned for. But again, that's not comics.
My appreciation for comics maintained and matured. I always and still do love Peanuts, but I got interested in Krazy Kat, Elsie Segar's Popeye, all Charles Addams. I also got into alternative comics, namely Neat Stuff, Lloyd Llewellen, Eightball, and Hate. And evenutally Yikes. But a lot of that alternative stuff I thought wasn't so great. Comic book covers would be slick and then the insides were boring.
Most recently, I discovered Tove Jansson's Moomin, which is brilliant and wonderful. I also really got into Doug Allen's Steven, though it's been a long time since I read it. I don't like the style of modern super hero comics, but I still love the older style, Jack Kirby and all. I far prefer it. And I love EC Comics, that I've read in reprints. I actually would like to read more and more of those.
I read the comics in the newspaper every day. I actually wrote a little article back in the early 1990's about the newspaper comics that I've always found amusing. I had hoped at one time to turn it into a regular thing. But I only did it once. Nowadays, I like The Fusco Brothers, Bizarro, Mr. Boffo, Get Fuzzy, and Baby Blues, and a couple others. Overall, it's disappointing. The newspaper strip is a dying form, though I know that some have adapted for the internet.
I've always liked comics. I relate to the narrative style, to the aesthetics. It speaks to me. Not all of it. Not everything. But it has been a part of my life. Drawing comics, reading comics. Everything.
December 24, 2008
Men's Room Self-Portraits
December 15, 2008
The Quotable Ken Coffelt
I've had an inspirational break-through. I had it whilst riffing one-liners and smart-alecky remarks one night, peppering a friend with my bon mots and witticisms. I decided to write my autobiography, and that some of its chapters could be just one bon mot long. Which, in itself, is almost good enough. But then, I decided upon a title:
The Quotable Ken Coffelt
Which is one thing if it's simply a collection of quotes, sure, but this is an autobiography. Brilliant, eh?
Beyond that, when just yesterday, at the SFMOMA, at a fantastic and wonderful exhibit called "Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900", I also came up with the title for the first chapter and the image that I would have to have on the cover:
Birth of a Louse
Which photographically is an image of the birth of a louse photographed in the 19th Century with microscope-enabled camera lenses. It's just this kind of poetry that I seek in the natural world, offering order and context without having to add anything additional.
So, though I would love to imbed the image here, it's not available easily online, so I will have to leave it to your imagination until such time as I not only have a publisher, book deal, editor, photographic rights, etc. You'll just have to take me at my word. Or words.
And of course, for some ongoing reason, I am thinking that I will publish this in installments here on Kennelco Blabber. Or perhaps, on some other blog or something. Let's just see how ambitious I become.
Don't thank me yet.
November 11, 2008
Men's Room Self-Portraits, pt. 3
