A Long and Very Windey Road

this too will grow

I have to take a step back, and pause, here. The topic is synchronicity, not the amazing story of my fabulously amazing life. I have to resist the temptation to get sidetracked into why this happened, and how that happened, and what was going on somewhere else that was weird, sad, funny, or otherwise worthy of re-telling, and so lose the thread in anecdotal trivia. And I also have to make some huge jumps in time to see the connections between events. Some of the connections are rather tenuous. Strands seemingly broken may not be tied together for years. So it was with the drawing.

I left the city. I had enough money to get me by without working for a while. So I camped out on the couch at my mother's house, and spent the summer surfing, and taking day trips on the bicycle. It was good. But I knew it couldn't last, even though I had no clue what the next phase in my life would be. I was on my way back from the beach, waiting at the stoplight at Garden Grove Boulevard and Golden West. I was absentmindedly gazing at the Harley dealership on the corner, and I heard myself addressing a bunch of first year high school students about the importance of getting a good grip on the English language. Where was this voice coming from? Some weeks later I registered for college. I threw myself into school with all the fire I had in me. It wasn't until I had actually graduated, and was enrolled in the School of Education that I began to doodle in class the way I had done in the office. Again, classmates would occasionally ask me if they could have the drawings. That summer, 1987, I bought a rapidograph, a tablet of Bristol board, and a big set of colored pencils, which lit an artistic burn that would sustain me for almost twenty years.

Jump to 1990. I bought a Harley from the dealership at Golden West, and Westminster. 1991, I was riding through a small town in West Virginia, heading back west after jumping into the Atlantic at Virginia Beach, Va. A voice in my head said, "Stay here." I didn't know it, but I had arrived for the first night of Bluegrass week at The August Heritage Arts Festival at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, WV.. I stopped there again, the next year. In '93 I again planned my itinerary to include a stop in Elkins. It happened to be on a Sunday, registration day for workshop classes. I thought, "Oh, what the hell, see what they have to offer." Music and dance are the main focus of Augusta, but they had classes in Irish folklore, which sounded just OK, and Celtic Stonecarving which sounded cool. But Stonecarving was full. So I signed on for the folklore class. As I left the registration center, one of the clerks came running after me, and caught me at the door. Someone had cancelled; there was an opening in the stonecarving class. The first day of class I sat across from a woman who had brought along the book, Celtic Art, the Methods of Construction, by George Bain.

JWM

A Change in the pattern

grows with click

It was early in 1979 when I left my job as night custodian at my old Junior High. I didn't really want to leave that job, but I kept hearing, from my girlfriend, and others, "You're too smart to be wasting your time doing this kind of work." I didn't think so, but I put in an application with the Gas Company, just to shut them up. I figured that a utility would be such a huge bureaucracy, that they'd forget about the app, I could tell everyone, "Hey. I tried", and the whole business would be forgotten.

The bastards hired me. I got a job in field service, and hated it from day one. I applied for other positions in the company, but never heard a peep. One day in the spring of '81 I was, as always, up to my elbows in rancid grease and cockroaches, and I just said, "Screw it." I drove back to the yard, parked the truck, and headed straight for the office. I had my speech for the boss prepared. I opened my mouth, and before I got the first syllable out, He said, "How would you like a transfer to the Hollywood office?" I took it. Within the week, my brother, who lived about three miles from that office, moved to New York, and I got his apartment on Melrose Avenue.

Out of the grease pit, and into the pressure cooker. I had always sworn, as genuine, bona fide, surf rat hippie individualist rebel type that I would never end up in some office job chained to a desk. I spent my days answering billing complaints, and doodled to pass the time while I sat there, tethered by the earpiece to my cubicle. People would pass by the cubicle, see the psychedelic stuff I was making, and ask if they could have it for their wall. One of the women in the office brought in a copy of Celtic Art, the Methods of Construction by George Bain. I just went nuts.

But I didn't last a year in the office. This time I didn't say screw it. I yelled,"Go straight to fucking hell, and take your goddamn gas bill with you, and you can shove your fucking meter up your ass!" I really needed to go surfing. Suddenly I had plenty of time to do it. But I wouldn't find the Celtic Art book for another ten years.

JWM

Knot a Lot to Say

click to make all big

Synchronicity, or as I like to call it, The Web of Coincidence seems to be afoot these days in the blogosphere. All sorts of things are getting tied together. There is an enormously unlikely sequence of events that led to me being able to create this piece, and I may get into telling that story later on. This artwork is old. I did several of these pieces between 1993, and 1997. This was the first. It is one of the few pieces that I actually sold, and now I regret having sold it. I tried last year to break a long creative drought by starting a new one, but it didn't get far. The pencil sketch is sitting on the light box waiting. I call this sequence John's Impossible Knot because it's easy to begin, and continue, but very difficult to end. This sequence did not come from a how-to-draw-Celtic-art book. It is an entirely original composition, not a copy of anything. But that, too, is another story for another time.

JWM

The Web, and The War

How often it is, that small gestures begin great trends in our lives, and spin out events in a vast web of coincidence that catches us up, and connects us with others in ways we never imagined possible.


That was supposed to be, and it still is I guess, the last line in the follow up story to Reflections on a Talking Robot. The second part was not so much about adding new pieces to an already large collection. It was about being given a computer, which I did not want, and getting hooked up to the internet, which I figured was just a waste of time.

But before I continue, I would ask you, the one of several or so visitors to the world famous blog to consider for a moment how you came to be reading this. Perhaps you are one of the Gagdad Bob's Friendly Order of the Transdimensional Raccoons, or BabbaZee's Feral Remnant. Perhaps you are visiting from Robot Japan, or Toybox DX. Maybe you just stumbled on this place by accident the way I did a couple of weeks ago. In any case, trace the steps backward. You are here because you followed a link from somewhere else on the internet. How did you find that somewhere else? Keep tracing it back. What was your first field of interest when you first went on line? How did it change, and what changed it? What led you to get a computer in the first place? Keep it going, and you will begin to see a few strands of the Web of Coincidence that enmeshes all of our lives. Some time late in 1977, my girlfriend gave me a talking robot. Now I probably would have ended up with a computer anyway. Anymore, the computer question is more like: How did you end up with a telephone?

So take it out of the realm of cyber space. How did you meet the person who- Oh hell, you get the idea.

My first group of friends on line came from Ed Sanford's Robot Japan BBS. Before that, I had never spoken to a single other human being who had even heard of collecting Japanese science fiction toys. I was to find out that there is a scattered cult of robot junkies all over the world. I went from 'never heard of anyone else', to trading notes with people from more than a dozen different countries on every continent on the globe.

Now, the question gets a little deeper when you remove the narrow, and very specific element in common of Japanese toy collecting. I have come to regard the group from One Cosmos as a family of sorts. Ben and I were trading notes on this the other day. Who is Ben? Or Robin Starfish? or NoMo, or Walt, Julie, Ricky Raccoon, River, or, Van? I would not recognize any of these people if we were seated next to each other on a bus. Yet they are close to me, and they matter to me, and I value their opinions of me. I feel a deep connection to them that has deepened since I got this blog. What connects us then? Nothing but our words. And the blogosphere strips those words of everything but their meaning. I can't draw any conclusions based on voice, or even on handwriting, or choice of stationery, or even choice of font. And the typewritten words are composed of letters which have, in themselves, no meaning at all. What connects us is as close to pure thought as I believe you can get. And what is thought? See? We're getting pretty damn metaphysical here without even trying hard.

Where am I going with this? Just this morning I finished my morning prayers and went on line as I always do. Something, I won't say what, impelled me to check out Listening Now first thing. I began reading the latest installation of Ricky Raccoon's The War. I was idiot enough to major in English in college. I got dragged kicking and screaming through more "Great Literature" than I care to remember. Nothing prepared me for The War. It is hands down, the finest thing I have ever read. Let that last sentence be a strand in your own web of coincidence.

JWM

Reflections on a Talking Robot (part six) Kunimatsyua Comes to Town

...Then Kunimatsuya arrived in La Habra.

I was filling in a few extra hours at an inland surf shop not far from where I lived. One day, as I got to the strip mall I saw a couple setting up a toy store in one of the empty storefronts. There they were! Gaiking, Combattler, Voltes V, plus zillions of other figures I’d never seen before. Posters, books, trinkets, all sorts of Japanese science fiction, and monster stuff! I was Kunimatsuya’s first customer in La Habra, and the first thing I got was the coveted Daikumaryu, which is still my favorite piece. Remember the demon warrior Gaiking? The Daikumaryu Gaiking was the mothership, a machine dragon probably twice the size of an aircraft carrier, and capable of interplanetary travel. It housed the components of the warrior robot, and an attack force of mechanical dinosaurs, each capable of destroying entire cities. The dragon’s ghastly head became the colossal robot's breastplate, its weapon a monstrous sword. It was all just too bizarre.

In a real fight, they’d kick butt all over anything from Star Wars.

Most of these pieces have become sought after collectibles. Perhaps you're familiar with the Transformers hero Optimus Prime. The original truck-into-robot warrior was this guy:Daimos.

Voltes V is another of the world's most coveted toys.This set is configured like, Combattler, but is a much more sophisticated piece of engineering. Notice the folding airplane that becomes the head.

Several of the pieces I got were orphaned toys who had lost boxes for one reason or another, but were otherwise intact. The folks at Kunimatsuya gave me a good break on the price. They were very nice people. They had recently moved here from Japan and had two or three toy stores around the Los Angeles area. Communication was sometimes a little difficult, but when I saw stuff I wanted, pictured in the booklets that came with the toys, I'd point it out, and they would get it for me. I just went nuts.On one visit to Kuni's, the woman who owned the store brought this tiny figure out from behind the counter. She had brought it over from one of the other stores, and was rather insistent that I add it to my collection. Frankly, I didn't think much of it, but that never stopped me from buying another robot. It would be years before I appreciated the significance. He is production number GA 01 Mazinger Z: the very first first figure in Popy's line of chogokin (super alloy metal) toys. This one is about as rare as they get.

I got a lot of other stuff there as well- another bookcase full, and then some.

But nothing lasts forever. My girlfriend broke up with me, and Kunimatsuya went out of business. (The two events were probably not related). Those ingenious toys never did catch on in America. A few of the robots were packaged as "Shogun Warriors" and sold by Mattel, but those had a short market life, and soon disappeared. Popy was absorbed by the parent company Bandai. They later tried to market the gift-box sets with English packaging under the Godaikin label. The seventies were giving way to the eighties. Eventually even I had to admit that the surf bum life was getting old. I left my kick- back job for a more responsible position, which I soon grew to hate, and then quit. I went back to being a surf-bum, drifted for a while longer, and then started college just after my thirtieth birthday. The robot collection was boxed up, and put into storage. My last two acquisitions were the Golion set in ’83, and the Daltanias in’84- both in the Godaikin boxes. Godaikin never caught on either.

There is a peculiar twist to the Japanese imagination, particularly in their science fiction. They start with a concept that is just too outlandish to take seriously; then they treat that idea with such ingenuous and absolute seriousness that you get drawn in and hooked, almost despite yourself. But like sake, or sushi, It’s a twist not everyone appreciates. Whether it’s giant robots or Godzilla, some find it magical; others find it unbearably corny. The toy collection caused more than one rolled eye. (‘yeah, uh-cool toy. You paid how much for that thing?’) It was hard to explain- like I said, some find it magical. The money didn't matter. The robots were more than toys. They were the working models of outlandish concepts that just electrified my imagination.

I saw fantastic interplanetary battle engines of awesome scale and power.

Most people saw toy robots.

Epilogue:

I hadn’t looked at the robot collection in over ten years, and more than twenty had passed since I got Robocon. During that time I finished college, got a teaching job, got married and divorced, got a Harley, crossed America ten times over, sold the Harley, lost the teaching job, became a stone sculptor, and at the one point in my life when I had the fewest material prospects, I met the girl of my dreams and got married again. It was April of 2000, and I was standing in the living room, waiting for my ride to the ceremony on my wedding day. I was nervously flipping through channels on the TV, and I stumbled on to the very beginning of episodes one and two of Gundam Wing on Cartoon Network. This was something I had wanted to see for a long time-real Japanese giant robot shows. But the Gundams weren’t exactly robots, and the idea that a fifteen year old kid could pilot such a war machine was a concept just too outlandish to take seriously.

Luckily, my ride didn’t get there until episode two was over.

JWM