Slippers

Today’s daily sketch is of my slippers, essential for chilly fall mornings and during Sunday house cleanings.

Alone Again

One of the central tenets of The Artist’s Way is that you take yourself on a weekly “artist’s date,” which is basically spending two hours, alone, doing something you like to do. The idea, as I understand it, is to make time for fun and not be beholden to the wishes of others.

I took myself off to Mishka’s, a coffee shop some blocks from our house (there are certainly lots of closer coffee shops, at least five, not counting Starbucks which seems to have closed down), but this one makes excellent coffee, has a great European vibe, and has a lot of outdoor seating. I got my cappuccino and worked on a project for an hour or so and then went across the street to the Avid Reader, our local independent bookstore which changed hands a few years ago and is now one of the gems of Davis.

Intensely social, I have not often sought my own company, but it turns out I like it. Maybe this is a function of age or that we all got used to isolation during COVID or something else, but I am finding myself planning other ways to spend fun time alone. I have to go to Berkeley next week; this is an excellent opportunity to spend a couple of extra hours doing something fun: it’s about building a restorative practice.

Perceptual Crisis - The Board Game

I am not a board game designer and the thoughts below do not constitute an intent to design such a game, but I am wondering what a board game about the current political situation in the United States might be like — let’s name the game for now Perpetual Crisis.

There are lots of board game antecedents to draw upon, even in the fairly limited space of United States political history. One example is This Guilty Land, designed by Amabel Holland, which is about the political struggle over slavery in the antebellum United States. One player’s role is “Justice”, and the other player’s role is “Oppression”. Another game of note is Votes For Women, which is about the campaign for women’s suffrage starting in 1848 and running until 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment. A much more tightly defined game is 1960: The Making of the President, about the presidential election of 1960 (Kennedy vs. Nixon).

Also of interest are COIN games (short for COunter-INsurgency), which are a series of simulation games covering asymmetrical conflicts such as insurgencies and often featuring up to four factions. (An example of a COIN game is Cuba Libre, about the 1956-1959 Cuban revolution, with four factions being the Batista government dictatorship, the syndicate aka the mob, the student protestors aka the Directorio, and the Fidel Castro-led guerillas.) A lot of the mechanics I’m imagining for Perpetual Crisis comes from COIN games.

I think Perpetual Crisis would be a two-player game though. One side would be those striving for a liberal multicultural democracy, the other side would be the white supremacist neo-feudalists. (I recognize that feudalism is a concept very much in disfavor with actual medievalists these days, but neo-feudalism does seem to capture both the rural power base of far-right farmland owners as well as the technofeudalism of the Silicon Valley types.) The sketch map shown at right for the board is very much inspired by COIN games. This would be an area control game with the areas being a combination of culture regions of the United States as well as major cities. (Here I am drawing from the 11 culture regions put forth by Colin Woodard in his book American Nations; the regions on the sketch map are the Left Coast, El Norte, and the Far West). Having major cities as separate areas to control in addition to the culture regions helps capture the rural-urban political split.

The horizontal five-box tracks on the sketch map hold a token to track the sentiment of each region or city. This ranges from +2 (strong democratic sentiment) to -2 (strong neo-feudalism). As players take actions in the game, the sentiment tokens will shift left and right on the tracks. I could also keep the COIN mechanism of players pulling cards from an event/action deck during each turn. Shuffled into the deck would also be cards representing special election turns, with the outcome of the election causing changes in the abilities of either side. The result of the election would depend in part on summing up the sentiment of the populations of both the culture regions and the major cities. (The numbers 6 and 4 on the sketch map indicate the population of Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively).

COIN games feature a quite asymmetric palette of actions to take depending upon the faction, and that works well in this framework. For instance Vote Suppression or Political Violence would be a couple of the actions the neo-feudalists could take, whereas the democracy side might have Rally or Get Out The Vote as two possible actions.

So what is happening right now in game terms? The neo-feudalists are carrying out Terror actions in Chicago and in Portland. I don’t think those actions are degrading democratic sentiment in either of those cities, but it may be strengthening neo-feudalist sentiment in other culture regions. The actions are also reducing capacity on a resource track, due to the negative economic impacts of deportations and suppressing immigration. Meanwhile, No Kings 2.0 could be represented by the play of a Nationwide Rally event card. This might increase democratic sentiment by a point in several regions or cities.

That is just a start in imagining this game. There is probably a place in the game for several resource tracks that work at a nationwide scale e.g. one tracking propaganda levels, another economic health, and another being quality of governance. So in each turn players could take actions that affect the nationwide resource tracks or those that impact specific regions or cities on the board.

A Good Drying Day

We’ve gotten a fair amount of rain the past several days (1.30”), but today was a good drying day for laundry. Here’s my pajama top and a t-shirt, sketched with Inktense pan colors.

The Artist's Way

Since my mother died I’ve been journalling a lot, early morning, three pages, morning pages style. There is a lot to process and writing the same old stuff over and over is a) helpful, b) kind to my friends, c) a palette cleanse for the day.

I tried doing the Artist’s Way back when I was living in Cambridge, Mass, and again in Santa Barbara, and got stuck (like so many people) in the middle. I liked the morning pages and I even liked the artist date, though I rarely did it, but it seemed like a Reaganite version of self-actualization with some new age gobbledegook thrown in for good measure. But I can journal, so I’ve been doing that since I got home, first thing in the morning like a good little artist. Rewriting what happened with my mother and the time I spent in Maine has at least spared my friends the endless repetition of it all…

But then a couple of videos about the Artist’s Way popped up on my YouTube feed and I decided to watch one of them. Like me, they balked at the God references; like me, they were half-assed about the artist dates. But they said they got a lot of value out of it anyway, and this has made me wonder whether stopping wasn’t a form of self-sabotage.

So I’m not sure I’m recommitting but I’ve read through chapter 1 and this time had a whole load of critics and many, many more champions to name. (I even wrote some cringy affirmations.)

My issue isn’t that I don’t think I’m an artist, though I genuinely don’t have aspirations to have my art hang in galleries. I like to make things and give them to others. My issue is that I value all of this so little that I don’t make time for it. This is what I’m going to be focusing on over the next however many weeks it takes. Stay tuned…

Fruit Bowl

We have a complete set of 24 of the Derwent Inktense paint pans, and I have been testing them out a bit. Here is a sketch of some apples in a fruit bowl using the Inktense pan colors.

Zettelkastening Comics

I was interested to read Numenius’ blog post from yesterday. I am drawn to movable pieces, whether written or drawn, and wonder how this might help in construction of a comic.

An important feature of a comic is that there be sequential panels, whether or not anything is written on them. But the number of panels, their size relative to each other, and even where they appear (cliffhangers work better if positioned at the bottom right hand of a recto page, at least in Western traditions, for instance), can all be worked through if ideas and panels are assembled as movable pieces.

I have a lot of index cards and at least three projects currently in the works on cards, held together with rubber bands. None of them is very large which helps. But this is giving me a lot of ideas about how to work, specifically with how to structure thought.

Jazz Band

This is my urban sketch for this past Sunday. I went over to Central Park where the biweekly Davis Craft & Vintage Fair was taking place. The local New Harmony Jazz Band was playing at one end of the fair, as they often do.

I am getting used to sketching in this 7”×7” sketchbook. It’s a little bigger than what I’ve been sketching in previously, but this lets me be freer with the sketches. I like the combination of fountain pen fine line work with a gray Pentel brush for bolder ink strokes. I am still pleased with the Derwent line and wash kit. It was nice to have that bold Inktense yellow handy for the tent canopy. And I figured out how to mix skin tones with the paint pan set: I used a combination of poppy red with the mango Inktense colors.

Collective Revisiting

Looking through hundreds of old photos with three generations of family members is an interesting experience. Perspectives change, what’s important changes, so many details are now lost to history…But we had a great time this afternoon sorting through some of my mother’s photos. There are more to go, but for now we are savoring the time we have with her, mining her memory and adding ours.

The photos above are the prints I’m keeping so far. I already have a lot of photos of our camping trips and of my parents in Bodega Bay and Spain. In this age where digital photos are at the end of your thumb and a smartphone, the magic of seeing old prints was a joy. More anon.

Back From Boston

I came back this afternoon from my short Boston outing on the train. Yesterday I took a ferry trip with a friend from the North Shore to the North End, Boston’s original neighborhood whose ethnic identity has changed from settler to wealthy Bostonian to red light district to Irish to Italian, though I doubt that many or even half of the people who live there now are of Italian descent: it’s turned into boojie wealthy, though unwise to own a car if you live here.

This morning my friend Linda and I went birding on Plum Island, where we saw a lot of migrating songbirds (including some warblers I haven’t seen for a while). Batteries? recharged!