November, 2002

I walked up the street today, with the kids and the two dogs. Sophia noticed that there was some mysterious white slime on the shadowed part of the sidewalk, just five houses up on the left. I leapt into my biology memory bank and sorted through the thousands, millions maybe, of possible hits regarding flora. Just for her. Like a know-it-all reflex, I had an explanation, regardless of whether or not it was right. My children make me feel as if I could be genius.

March, 2008

Fast forward six years and I find the blind spot growing ever wider around the periphery of my life. My children are six years older, and beautiful, and strong, and smart and artistic. We feel that way about our children, don't we? We feel as if they are Gods themselves, beautiful angels destined for only the happiest part of their futures.

My youngest daughter asked about our pet pug, Coco yesterday. I went to pick up Coco's ashes after ballet. Try to explain cremation to a five year old. "We had Coco turned to ashes so that we could keep her memory with us always," I said lamely, not really knowing where this bit of insight would take the conversation.

"Daddy, will you put my ashes in a box someday? After I go to Heaven?"

Sometimes parenthood is a vast deception fraught with mythology and religion. Yesterday it was just another cheap stage show, with a greasy front man hawking bad magic tricks and tits and ass.

"Honey, let's just go by the coffee shop and buy a chocolate croissant."

The midday Marin valleys whisked by at 65 mph, golden cars receding as we raced along home. The sun had lit up the eastern horizon atmospherically, begging for a Dutch landscape painter to capture it.

"Daddy," she started, slowly, but gathered herself. "That's a wonderful idea."

If you've encouraged a child from your uterus into the world, or if you have filmed the event, (on tape or in your mind's eye), then you understand the pure love of that moment that I shared between father and daughter on the very difficult subject of life and death and croissants with tea.

If you are blessed to have one, or know one, hug your child today.
Unknown "encantador" Carefree - 16 years, 8 months, 3 days ago

Fall 1971.

Louis P., my Grandfather, came over to the house one afternoon. He had retired to San Gabriel. Their address is still emblazoned in my memory. I would write them every year, thanking them for either a Christmas present or a birthday gift. 422 S. Del Mar Drive, San Gabriel, 91775.

Anyway, Louis Peter was over to pick up some quercus agrifolia leaves. He said that they made great compost. I believed him in everything garden. He always had kept a garden. Even at 1189, some of my earlier memories are of playing in his garden, underneath his fig tree, next to the great metal swinging chair. In its later years, it had rusted a bit. But in those days, in the hey day of our young family, the grand parents backyard was like a great English park: fig trees and grape vines, rows of leafy vegetables, and the remnants of a homing-pigeon hobby around the back.

I could write a volume just about Grandfather. He had advice about everything. That’s what grandfathers do, I guess. I’m my own Grandfather now, I guess.

Straightening A Nail

Place the bent nail on a hard surface, like concrete or the side of your table vice. Tap the bent nail at the most severe part of the bend. Repeat until straight.

Placing A Mollusk on Your Bait Hook

Go to the public dock. Look for clumps of mollusks below the water line. Remove. Using a pocket knife, run the blade of the knife into the inside of the mollusk and scrape the shell, looking for the main value closing tendon. Once the tendon is cut, remove the mollusk meat. Wrap the mollusk several times around your bait hook and secure the wrap by perforating the remaining cartilage with the hook tip. This prevents the bait from falling off in the surf.

Cast your twenty foot surf rod and enjoy the pre-dawn calm.

Louis P. died in 1981 of an aggressive bone cancer. His last words to me, through my tears, were the following:

learn spanish

I'm not fucking around. That was the final thing he said to me. Among the thousands of hours we spent together, fiddling around in his many garages, on his many projects, hunting the ubiquitous gophers and moles, placing ladders for parades, the pre-dawn fishing trips, the errands, the hot Sunday afternoons, the endless days on end... forever in the early summers of my youth... and he died, leaving us all, especially grandmother, to soldier on without him.

I loved him.

Unknown "encantador" Carefree - 16 years, 8 months, 6 days ago

Summer 1995

I remember driving up Interstate 5 with Dad. We were a day late to the backpacking trip in order to accommodate his schedule. We didn't know it then, but we wouldn't meet up with the group until the final day. It would be the last time he would go backpacking. He wouldn't see the Wishon Basin again. At least while he was alive. We took his ashes there after he died.

But that week, driving up, I had my Dad to myself... for the first and last time of my life. We talked a lot that week. Part of our conversations centered around the big shift in my personal life at the time. I had just graduated from film school. I told him that I was going to leave my wife and that I was in love with Lindy. I told him that after living through his divorce from mom, it was clearly better to leave a failed marriage than it was to live in denial of your best interests. He tried to talk me out of it. But his arguments seemed hollow. He seemed sad, like somehow he had fucked my life up, all of his kids' lives, by being singularly selfish. I think it broke his heart to see me going through the same deal he did all those years before.

Fall, 1972

I just went out to the garage, in 2002. I opened my gorgeous Sears mechanic’s mobile tool kit, and thought of my grandfather’s garage. At first, I thought of the little one he had in San Gabriel, when he lived on Del Mar Blvd. We would drive their, first down Garfield, then Huntington, take a right at the first light past Twohey’s, drive through San Marino, take a left on Las Tunas, then a right on Del Mar. Just before the railroad tracks. His little garage housed his tools and his stuff. He showed me the baby jar lid thing, the little trick where you screw down a baby jar lid into the underside of a cabinet. You fill the jar with bolts and then screw it into the secured lid. Voila! Instant under cabinet storage. I still remember that.

Unknown "encantador" Carefree - 16 years, 8 months, 9 days ago

I just got back from the veterinarian. Out here in the wilds of San Francisco, we don't really have vets, or buildings, or centrist christian temples in which to bring our zombie pets for final sacrifice. You have to have the juju to find the pet cemetary, magical lode stones and divining rods made of Barbie hair and worm tongue.

Over the hedgerow, beyond the miasma of the Republican Party, just a scattering of hastily stacked pyres remain: towering log structures erected to the jealous gods of wayward beasts and slovenly women. Occasionally, between stinging rail squalls, raving madmen and oracles will tie themselves to masts and sing the siren song calling the devout to ritual.

I have just returned from such a journey to the pit of the World, a humbling drive, shoulder to shoulder with medicated soccer moms and over-achieving viagra-popping bedroom executives, SUV to SUV, edging one another out of fast food turn lanes and ATM underpasses... intent on reaching the gates of our personal Hells.

I just got back, wiping the shit off of my ten-point crampons, the blood from my hurricane doors, the sweat from the collective sighs of all women, everywhere, who wait with baited breath to see if a black man can outlast a white woman come November.

The pets, those zombies that for weeks sat motionless in their free-fed menageries, staring at the combined mindfuck provided free of charge by MTV, Hugh Hefner and countless millions of dipshits across the Neilsen heartland, pinging gently on their morphine drips and dilaudid cocktails, sucking the soft marrow of reality entertainment and reinforcing the Old Testament conclusion that the Modern Age will end in 2012.

My erstwhile pets have been dispatched, effortlessly, with less concern than it takes for a rabid teenager to remove his tiny white underpants and swim upstream in the great flood of hormones and sexual perversity provided on the street corners of the Religious Right.

Gone. Finished. Released into the endless void of the great cesspool that exists at the periphery of this subfacebook community.

I mourn them. I eulogize them. I sing a sweet swan song of unrequited thumbing and random petting until we are all hard, swooning and drunk with the passion of white glue and steaming locomotives endlessly entering and exiting rocky tunnels and crazed porn stars on the alternative channels of Paradise.
Unknown "encantador" Carefree - 16 years, 8 months, 13 days ago

Here's an example of what I do in my capacity as a full-time faculty member at the Academy of Art... This particular post was to a student in my Advanced Portfolio class:

ok, i'm a fan.

it's really great stuff, and damn, i'm glad to see that you're upping your game by jumping into Animation Mentor. (It's really not a dirty word(s) around here!)

(1) i wish that you could push your camera work in the first piece. that is, start wide with the medium shot, then whip dolly in to a tighter two shot, with the officer in the frame left near ground (soft focus) in order to get more of the facial/eye-dart impact of the scene arc. i'd love to see more of the mime's face and eyes. then add a camera change (don't cross the line) to frame center-right to capture the pencil toss.

the toss is a little weightless, but overall this is a solid piece that simply lacks the intimacy of the mime's expressions.

great work.

(2) the only thing that bugs me is your lack of attention to his left wrist animation. the hand just kinda flops around on a stick... instead of adding a nuanced action at the wrist. eye darts eye darts eye darts, especially at the final flourish... stay a bit on the final pose, and add the darts... maybe a little cliched, but effective here.

(3) you have duplicate geometry in the TV which is causing the render pops. find it and fix it. can you address your actor's lower half. if his waist/legs contained some weight shifting, it'd be more perfect. as far as the lighting goes, could you just isolate him with local noise lighting... you know, like the only light source in the room would be the TV with a noise flicker pattern? the white background is a bit antiseptic and distracting from the action/story.

(4) again, for some reason, our animation instructors completely excise camera. i don't understand that. EVERY animated feature deals with camera, scene arc concepts, staging and layout. for some reason, the kool-aid that our instructors are drinking makes them think that you guys can't deal with both primary/secondary animation concepts and camera. that's pure bullshit.

could you add a slow push-in dolly over the entire shot? the kind of move that, when he exits over the wall, you could easily put an iris-out over his ass as it slips over the wall. start with the same staging and finish tight on his exit.
you might have to show me some blocking to get this right, but i think you get what i'm talking about.

(5) he just seems to be motoring too quickly to re-inforce his apparent level of dismay. can you vary the strides a bit so that you don't blow the overall cycle but add a bit of sadness to the pace? he's really moving too quickly to sell this.

(6) it's good, but his eyebrows/eye darts are slo-mo and disconnected from the rest of his performance. tighten the keys up and make them less linear within your uppper face/shape work. fast in/out maybe would help?

(7) great wu-shu. and i hate wu-shu. i think the leg extensions blow it a little, but the grace of the upper body work is wonderful.

(8) the mentor work is great. the bag has volume, remember, and the way you dump it into the bin belies this. i'd mod the animation to include a slight hitch at the bin lip, (say 4 frames of hang while the interior weight shifts to conform to his force arc) and then drop it in... maybe a bit slower. it just sorta disappears.

(9) close but needs a bit of work. let the ant get UNDER the giant olive... he impossibly lifts the thing off axis.. which is possibly with superman ant, but less so as a lift exercise. let him struggle... lift, shift, bobble, lift, shift, wobble, etc. until he gets under the mass center and then, carefully, gingerly (have you ever lifted a damned heavy object?) he presses it... but with a crapload more knee wobbling, elbow shaking power indication. it's all too smooth and effortless which equates to weightlessness.

(10) another lovely ball with tail... but with a neat device, literally. this almost looks like it was animated on twos or threes. all of the anticipation and squash is super exaggerated, which is the point, but i wish it was SLOWER, more artful, which might work better with the gag. let the ball wonder (physically, since it doesn't have a face/eyes) about the trap. wtf is this? it looks scary... but oh well, let's do it! he just linearly jumps in there with a gratuitous anticipation squash. bah. still good, though, and worth inclusion.

your art is superlative. wish you had more. good stuff for your beaux-arts menu drop down.

i hope the rest of the animators in this port course see this. this is was it's all about. this is an entry-level animator on his way to the big show. take note.

mr. barty, you can now begin to brag and act like a typical snarky overly-self important animator. love you guys.

Unknown "encantador" Carefree - 16 years, 8 months, 13 days ago