Here’s another Oxfam World Food Day video with music by yours truly, produced by Fly’s Eye Films.
Genius Plaza 11.8 Finale - Again, the synopsis: In a brief 24-hour span problems arise and are, in one way or another, solved by this tightly-knit group of glorified toddlers who happen to have driver’s licenses and a wild, blind ambition to experience success as a cover band.
Well, it’s done and we can now move on with our lives. Although, for me moving on just means Genius Plaza 12 or some other jerk-off art project. I wanted to present all of these pages together for your reading pleasure, so I crammed them all onto one document, or as I say - “cockument”, and then that was totally illegible, so you get a bunch of links after the last page. Not the best storytelling medium, tumblr. Meanwhile, I’ll work on a better way of presenting it. Enjoy!
Mikey’s Five-Minute-Portrait of Patrick and me, painted and photoshopped onto a nice picture from our camping trip in Pennsylvania.
One of my oldest and dearest friends, Brianna Jacobson, runs this fun website Little Conqueror where she writes funny stories, tells jokes, and is definitely entertaining and prolific enough to make part of your daily blog reads. She asked me to do her website header, shown above, and I gladly partook of her website headerness.
Genius Plaza 11.6 - Here’s another page to my semi-autobiographical, meandering, experimental (and I use the term very loosely) comic series. One more page, then it’s likely back to the watercolor work, which I am excited about.
Genius Plaza 11.5 - In the parlance of our time, “Presented without comment…”, but we can talk about it if you want.
And here are the previous pages:
Genius Plaza 11.4 - Boy, oh boy… another Genius Plaza 11 page? The story is going that good, huh? It really needs to continue? Well, Yes, No, Yes, in that order. I think it’s a good story, really, it’s one of my favorites, but my boredom with it is now seeping in. GP11 will be done soon.
Oh, here’s all the other pages:
How Many Penises Do I Have To See Today While I’m Running? (doodle unrelated) - A while ago I wrote a little story about the weird underworld of gay homeless sex that I stumbled upon while running the trails in Prospect Park. Apparently, I am late to the party here and quite a few people that I’ve asked about this already knew that it was happening, that it’s happened for a very long time, and also know of a spot in Central Park where this public man-on-man action has been taking place for decades. I have had the hardest time wrapping my mind around it, that something so private happens in broad daylight in our parks apparently without consequence, and meanwhile I got a summons the other day for riding my bike through the very same park “after curfew”, like I’m 15-years old or something, but that’s a different story. It looks like the police turn a blind eye to this stuff – that’s the point I guess because I don’t know why they would… prison would be a great place to send these guys.
I’ve continued exploring and running the trails in Prospect Park despite my better judgment and now have not only pinpointed the exact spot where the lookouts stand guard but have seen quite a few disturbing bits of evidence scattered around the area. Exhibit A: a black teenage boy, eyes glazed over and distant, rushing down the hill past the lookouts while pulling his pants up. I’ll save you the details. Exhibit B: I’ve seen dirty underwear and drug paraphernalia scattered in the weeds near this same spot. And C: I have jogged at many different times of day and there are always two thuggishly-dressed black men looking off in the distance, checking their gold watches, then looking behind them, on the crest of the same hill in the woods, off the trails in the same spot no matter the day or time.
I’m no detective, but this seems easy to solve. There are dozens of cop cars sweeping the roads of the park twenty-four hours a day. Often times they park together in large groups of six or eight police officers (doing what I wonder?) They could start taking their little go-cart police cars that they’ve got into the trails to sweep the exhibitionists out. As I’ve said before, I am very, very disinterested in the gender or sexual preferences of the people having sex and I hate cops as much as the next guy, but I feel like I’ve stumbled upon a way they could be helpful and I would prefer they deal with it because I am not prepared to handle the fallout. What I am interested in, more than anything, is getting to jog in the trails in my park without putting these homosexual men in an even more awkward and embarrassing position than they already are.
The twist, though, is the possible drug involvement. I’m not uptight, myself, and I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with a little recreational drug use by responsible adults – my opinion – but using drugs AND having sex in a public park where children play and families picnic together is waaaaaaaay out of bounds and may call for the involvement of authorities. It also points the dial much closer to prostitution than just a few lonely men finding love in the oddest places.
What this all means to me is that these men simply do not care, for one reason or another, and have positioned themselves as the squatting owners of this public space. By being consistently there, in that one spot, in Brooklyn’s one and only big park, they’ve made me and other trail runners/walkers/wanderers aware that we do not get to use this space, that this space is reserved for drug-addled homeless fornication, and that they are above the law and above the neighborliness that normal citizens gladly share with one another.
I am sad that they maybe do not have any place to go. I am also sad that they might be addicted to drugs and, perhaps, homeless to boot, but I’ve had my fill of accidentally seeing tumescent penises in the park this year and I like jogging on the trails and they’re the only trails I’ve got. The end.
Wait. Maybe the cops shouldn’t be involved at all. They’re terrible people with very small, prehistoric brains. Aren’t their outreach groups or social workers or shelters or churches or something that handle this stuff? Why are there still homeless people in this country?
GENIUS PLAZA 11.3 - Last night a friend was showing me some comics by some guy (gah! I can’t remember his name!) that uses blackness really well, and I was like “Oh wow! I should try something like that…” and today I followed through because I am a man of my word. Free pizza for every reader!
And then there’s also Black Hole by Charles Burns, which is really the ultimate use of the blackout style. I love that damn book.
So, after three pages of toying with Genius Plaza 11, I have come across a suitable style and will retroactively apply it to page one and two soon and obviously future pages of #11. The drawing is, and will probably continue to be, pretty blah and the story maybe only matters to a few people, but I think I made a little breakthrough with the look of it. Yay me.
Oh, I saw the movie Bellflower last night. It sucked. Don’t see it, even if its free.
Fun Facts About Indiana – This is not fair… I have an unfair advantage because I am from there. Its as if someone asked you to rattle off the ten worst things about an ex-girlfriend or -boyfriend – it would take you maybe thirty seconds and the list would be filled with the vilest of facts about them… “He cheated on me with his secretary” or “She used to hit me” or whatever. You get it. It is not likely I could pick one of the other states in our union and create such a thoroughly mean portrayal because only it’s citizens have seen its dark and disgusting underbelly. Another unfair aspect is that I did not include any of the wonderful and beautiful parts about living in Indiana, of which there are many. It might not seem like it, but I have a deep, genuine love for Indiana and it makes me sad that this is not a fictional portrayal – it is selective, yes – but factual.
People I have talked to on the east coast can hardly even picture where Indiana is on the map in their mind. “Somewhere in the middle,” they say. Indiana may not offer much, but it did give the world Michael Jackson. Indiana University begrudgingly employed Dr. Kinsey. A Christmas Story is set there and Larry Bird slept with a basketball every night in his childhood bed there. From a tree fort or a rooftop, you can look off toward the horizon over the rolling plains and almost see Illinois or Ohio without straining your eyes. In the northern edge of the state, you can play in the dunes or swim in one of the world’s largest lakes. Massive, bare fields in the winter, with puddles of mud and slowly decaying bone-colored corn stalks scattered thickly about, have a beauty to them that only recently I could appreciate. A farmhouse in the distance, isolated from all of humanity, helps you understand the true spectrum of personalities in this country, because who in their right mind would live so far away from human contact, from a friend, from help if its needed? (And conversely, who could possibly live in such close contact with their husband or wife or children without having someone else to talk to and not murder them?)
I realize that drawing such mean things about a place and then talking so sweetly about the very same place just underneath might make me sound crazy, or at the very least, conflicted, but keep in mind that I am from Indiana, the state with thousands of miles of sidewalk that no one uses.
