Aztecs, Amphibians and Transferred Consciousness

So if you've been checking out this blog for a while, or even if you just scroll through my posts over the last few years, you'll know that I like to work on personal projects centered around short stories and books I enjoy. There was this, and this, and oh yeah this. But it had been some time since I'd done any personal projects like that. Close to a couple years. With assignments, the move out to the East Coast, among other things, it just wasn't in the cards. So I wanted to take some time recently to work on another series, and chose some Julio Cortázar stories from the collection Blow-Up. My descriptions of the stories below definitely contain spoilers. So if you haven't read the stories and want to, just look at the pretty pictures, ignore the words, and then go out and read them.

This story is probably my favorite in the collection. It centers around a young, French bachelor named Pierre and his relationship with a young woman named Michéle. As the story unfolds, we see that something is going on with Pierre: he starts experiencing brief personality changes, and having strange memories: details of a house he's never been in, dry leaves, and songs like Im wunderschönen Monat Mai. Michéle sees some of these odd changes, and it reminds her of someone and also terrifies her. The memories become more frequent and disorienting, and the changes become more menacing. Michéle contacts a couple of friends to ask for help, as she's alone with Pierre at her parents' summer home. It's clear that Pierre is not himself, at least sometimes. The story ends with Pierre ascending the stairs to Michéle's room and entering, thinking she looks older for some reason, and Michéle screaming while her grabs her hair, feeling "all the pleasure that rises and drenches him..." Meanwhile, Michéle's friends are on their way to the house, and recall the Nazi soldier who attacked and raped Michéle during the occupation when she was a child, and was subsequently caught and executed by her friends: "I remember how he fell, his face blasted to bits among the dry leaves."
I wanted to depict Pierre's consciousness warping into the Nazi, and I liked the leaves floating through the composition as a reference to the connection between his random memories and elements that are significant to the Nazi's death. Using the two different typefaces also alludes to the personality switch, and the color palette hints at the Nazi soldier.

"The Night Face Up" is about a man who gets in a motorcycle accident and is taken to the hospital. Lying in bed, he starts to dream about running for his life from Aztecs pursuing him through the jungle, but wakes to find himself safe in bed again. However, his drowsiness is overpowering and he continues to doze off, each time finding himself in the same dream, continuing, with his pursuers getting closer and closer with each dream, until finally he's captured and hauled off to the temple. In his last dream he's carried to the sacrificial altar, and smells the smoke, and sees the blood dripping down it. As he shuts his eyes and tries to wake up again, he realizes that he can't. The altar is real. The hospital bed was the dream. And a man with a knife approaches him while he lies face up, between the bonfires on the temple steps.
I wanted to show the tranquil hospital scene being torn away with surreal pieces of an alternate reality revealed behind it. The title continuing through both scenes represents the man experiencing both universes. The typography is also treated with a very hazy, dreamlike movement through the composition. The grayscale of the hospital and color of the temple elements also reinforces the idea of the hospital being the actual dream, with the popular conception (whether correct or not) of dreams being in black and white.

This is the first story in the collection, and it's a great introduction to Cortázar's brilliant, metaphysical storytelling. A man visiting the zoo happens upon an axolotl exhibit. He finds the little salamanders so fascinating that he returns again and again to watch them, seemingly obsessed with "their little pink Aztec faces... The anthropomorphic features of a monkey reveal the reverse of what most people believe, the distance that is traveled from them to us." He begins visiting them every day, and starts to feel that he's "projecting a nonexistent consciousness" on them: "I imagined them aware, slaves of their bodies, condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, to a hopeless meditation." He marvels at one, his face pressed up against the glass, peering into the unblinking eyes, staring for so long that he suddenly sees his own face. He's looking into his own face, on the other side of the glass, and realizes he's an axolotl, in the aquarium. His consciousness, his human mind has been transferred to the body of an axolotl. He sees the man return to look at his exhibit, but the visits soon taper off. He thinks that for a while he had a chance at re-entering his human body, when the man was interested in the axolotls, but for now all he can hope for is that the man writes a story about them, thinking he made it all up.
I had the idea of reflecting and morphing the man's face into a weird, symmetrical image, but the end result was just as much the product of experimenting with manipulating the faces. I wanted it to refer to when the man looks into the aquarium glass at the axolotl, and then sees himself as his consciousness transfers to it. The moment of the transposition of his essence, and one of the images ended up resembling a little axolotl face. It came about accidentally, but worked out perfectly.

Mmmmmm, beer!

This little spot was in last Sunday's New York Times' book review of Robert Coover's new short story collection, Going for a Beer.

 The review describes a few of the stories in the collection, including "Invasion of the Martians," and many others suffused with magic and mythology. The title story concerns a man whose life seems little more than a drunken haze, bouncing from one experience to the next, with the next experience happening before the current is even finished. And, of course, a fair share of them transpire at a bar. I wanted to combine the temptation of going down the bar for a cold one with some of the elements from other stories, and a beer bottle cap as a flying saucer ended up a nice way to do it. Go pick up the collection! Thank you to Matt, AD for this one!

But I'm gonna try for the kingdom, if I can

 After working on a book review illustration for Denis Johnson's novel The Laughing Monsters, I sought out more of his work. I came across Jesus' Son, a collection of his short stories about addiction, hopelessness, despair, and redemption. Although they are separate stories, published previously in places like The New Yorker and Esquire and The Paris Review, they seem to work as one cohesive story. They are all narrated by what seems to be the same person, though it's never explicitly explained who, in what may or may not be chronological order. In many of the stories, the narrator's nickname is Fuckhead.

I've made a mock cover for Johnson's novella Train Dreams, and what could be thought of as mock covers for some of David Foster Wallace's short stories, but with these I was picturing them more in their original form, in the magazines that first published them. As full pages, like the ones that accompany fiction in The New Yorker. If you haven't read any of these stories, first off: go get Jesus' Son, and read them! The whole book is 133 pages, it won't take long, and I assure you, you'll be glad you did. Second: these descriptions may contain spoilers, but that won't matter if you've heeded my first suggestion.

The first story in the collection, "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" finds the narrator seemingly at one of his lowest points. In a blur of alcohol, pills and hashish, he (yep, you guessed it) hitchhikes up the Mid-West in a series of vehicles manned by the suppliers of his booze and drugs. Along the way, on a highway in Missouri with a family that picked him up, he's involved in a head-on collision during a rainstorm. Oddly enough, he has foreseen this crash:

      I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we'd have an accident in the storm. 

     I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way.

Perhaps numb from the drugs, in shock from the crash, or both, the narrator wanders around the scene surveying the damage. It's this point, the aftermath of the action, that I wanted to focus on for the design. The title of the story already says "Car Crash" so I didn't want to reiterate that visually. Besides, his thoughts and reactions are much more interesting. As he passes the other car, where a man is "flung halfway out the passenger door," he describes both the vehicle and dying man with the same detached dispassion. "Moving toward the other car I began to hear rasping, metallic snores." And "He was snoring loudly and rudely. His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath." He relays the story of the man, eventually dying on the way to the hospital, very matter-of-factly. When a stopped truck driver asks if everyone is dead, he replies: "I can't tell who is and who isn't." I wanted to show the tire severed and disembodied, like a limb or body part strewn from the crash. I imagined the narrator looking down at a body, and seeing or feeling little more than he would looking down at a broken wheel. I wanted the garish background color to refer to his fried senses. To give the feeling of being so stoned, you can focus on little more than one object at a time. This story is the first thing I had ever read of Johnson's, and it immediately got me hooked. Within the first page, I knew I was going to love these stories.

"Emergency" is a few stories later, and by now the narrator is working in an ER. Possibly in slightly better shape than "Car Crash," he's still strung out on pills, which he gets from his orderly friend Georgie. One night, a man named Terence Weber comes in with a large hunting knife sticking out of his eye. While the ER staff deliberates, Georgie, stoned and guileless, shows up to the parlay after prepping the man, with the knife in his hand. He had apparently removed it himself, without incident. The narrator then begins recounting when he and Georgie (after working two doubles with only eight hours in between) drove to the state fair, got lost, ran over and killed a pregnant mother jack rabbit but saved her babies, and got stranded in a sudden blizzard. I noticed throughout this whole story, how prominent the idea of sight is. Terrence Weber can still see out of the eye that's been stabbed, but his other eye is artificial, and obviously sightless. During the snow storm, the narrator calls out "Georgie, can you see?" To which he replies, "See what? See what?" They happen upon a drive-in theater, mistaking it for a cemetery because the speakers the narrator sees look like crosses at first. "I'm starting to get my eyes back," Georgie says, as the snow dies down. Getting back to Georgie's truck, he suggests they wait to drive home until it's late. With the headlights not working, under cover of darkness "We'll be invisible." After sleeping in the truck, and waking in the morning, the narrator seems to describe what could be a moment of clarity. "I felt the beauty of the morning. I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched." When designing this one, it worked out perfectly to show one of the rabbit's ears as an open eye. But the left ear is an eye too, albeit closed. It refers to one eye having sight, and one eye sightless (Terrence Weber). It can be two different people, one person sightless, and one having suddenly found sight (the narrator's epiphany). And it can represent one person, eyes closed and sightless at first, and then suddenly opening their eyes to something (again, the epiphany, or both characters, during and then after the blizzard).

"Dirty Wedding" immediately follows "Emergency." There is never any explicit note to suggest that these stories are supposed to be in chronological order. But if this story happened after the period described in "Emergency," with it's ambiguous, but seemingly hopeful end, the narrator seems to be back in a dark place, as often happens with addiction. He describes a time in his life when he was around twenty-five or twenty-six, and enjoyed riding the El train around town in Chicago. He has accompanied his girlfriend Michelle to an abortion clinic, but is asked to leave when, after the procedure, he callously asks her "What did they stick up you?" Retreating back to his solace in the train, he happens upon a girl nodding off, and follows her to a hotel where he can score some dope. I wanted to show the narrator as a moody, brooding young man. The shapes in the composition make up the windows, and lights of an El Train, and I wanted to use the destination sign for the title. The train, aside from being the setting for much of the story, is the sanctuary the narrator uses to avoid his responsibilities. He rides it away from the clinic, and the girlfriend he's upset and abandoned, but he admits: "I felt the cancelled life dreaming after me." It also transports him to his latest chance for oblivion, the Savoy Hotel, another sanctuary, and "a bad place" where he can get high, and escape even more. But the way he describes it, it sounds more like hell than a sanctuary. "Monsters were  dragging themselves up the stairs...There was a man with a tall black hat, a helmet of thick blond hair, and a sharp blond beard...Everything down there but the curtain was red." I liked the way the image ended up, with the narrator staring at the black space next to him, an emptiness that he's trying to get away from, but still follows him wherever he goes.

"Steady Hands at Seattle General" is the second-to-last story in Jesus' Son. Keeping with the pattern that I noticed, of the first stories exhibiting a dark bleakness, and the last stories (this one, and to a greater extent, the last story, "Beverly Home") showing more signs of hope and redemption, it differs markedly from "Car Crash" and even "Dirty Wedding." The narrator is now checked into a detox/rehab center. The drugs he's given to combat the withdrawal have him feeling well enough to shave himself, and his roommate, Bill, an older man who's been shot in the face two different times, by two different wives, and still bears the scars. This story is probably the funniest, alongside "Emergency." The narrator asks Bill to describe himself, as he is apparently feeling hopeful enough in his future that he plans to write about this episode.
     "Oh I don't know. I'm a fat piece of shit, I guess."
It's obvious that Bill doesn't share the narrator's more positive outlook. He finishes shaving Bill, and hands him a mirror.
     "What do you see?"
     "How did I get so fat, when I never eat?"
     "Is that all?"
     "Well, I don't know. I just got here."
     "What about your life."
     "Hah! That's a good one."
     "What about your past?"
     "What about it?"
     "When you look back, what do you see?"
     "Wrecked cars."
     "Any people in them?"
     "Yes."
     "Who?"
     "People who are just meat now, man."
The narrator holds up the mirror for Bill to assess his mustache, but it's also for him to evaluate himself on a deeper level. And Bill's cynical reply shows the stark contrast between their outlooks. His life, all his experiences, hopes, and dreams, boil down to nothing more than a series of wrecked cars. And the people he's known? They're nothing more than "meat" now. He's referring to others, but it's clear that's how he sees himself as well. Just a piece of meat, with nothing more to hope for or look forward to than the moment he's thrown into the grinder. The narrator tries to convince him otherwise.
     "Hey. You're doing fine."
     "Talk into here."
     "Talk into your bullet hole?"
     "Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine."

As you can hopefully tell from these, I loved the stories in Jesus' Son, and enjoyed working on these immensely. These tales give a glimpse into lives that most of us will never know, without romanticizing. I've read a lot from Denis Johnson since first working on that review piece for The Laughing Monsters. He's one of my favorite authors, and Jesus' Son remains one of my favorite books.

Covering Oblivion

Yes, it's that time again, folks. More mock covers! This time I did something a little different. I made covers for short stories, choosing from the ones collected in the late, great David Foster Wallace's Oblivion. His earlier work Infinite Jest is one of my all-time favorite books, but I wasn't about to take that cover on just yet, so I decided that doing covers for his stories would be fun, and there are plenty to choose from. I've done something like this before with Vonnegut's short stories, namely "Fortitude." Making covers for my favorite stories and novels is my favorite personal work to do. With these, I wanted the covers to all have their own distinct feel, albeit with common stylistic veins running through.

For all four of these, I'll go through the plot/s of the stories, and my reasons for doing what I did in the covers. Explaining things sort of takes the magic out of everything. It's more fun to read the stories, and hopefully make those connections, and say to yourself "ah, I get it!" But for those who want to know right now, here it goes. If you haven't read any of them, and want to, I'll try to avoid spoilers, but I definitely can't promise anything, so be forewarned.

"Oblivion"
Not just the title of the collection, but also a story inside, "Oblivion" unfolds as a tale of a marriage under tremendous strain, after Randall Napier's step-daughter Audrey has moved away for college. Randall explains the cause of the problems: His wife Hope has been accusing him of loudly snoring and keeping her awake, despite Randall's insistence that he is still awake when Hope sits up in bed to scream at him about the supposed snoring. This sort of back and forth bickering might make for an amusing narrative of a middle-aged couple dealing with the absence of their daughter, until Randall starts relaying the hallucinations he's experiencing. Soon the picture becomes a little clearer why Hope insisted that her daughter Audrey attend college out of state. If there are going to be any spoilers in this description, they'll come in at this point. We soon get a sense of something disturbing going on underneath Randall's story, as the allusions to some kind of sexual predation build up.

As far as my reasoning for the cover illustration, at one point Randall describes a hallucination: he imagines Audrey's breasts moving up and down like pistons, and her head 'surrounded by a halo or, as it were, "nimbus" of animated Disney characters.' In the illustration the characters are morphed into some hideous amalgamation, doing exactly what isn't completely clear, but certainly sinister. I felt it would be a good way to depict the monstrous undertones of Randall's seemingly innocent story.

"Mister Squishy"
This story was one of my favorites in Oblivion. It takes place during a focus group for a sinfully chocolatey new product from the Mister Squishy brand of snack foods. Reading with the dry, mathematical precision of market research, the story details how Terry Schmidt, the facilitator of the focus group for the Reese Shannon Belt Advertising Agency, conducts the group with the ease of a seasoned pro, fantasizes about a married co-worker, and imagines his own face physically transforming into the crudely drawn, but loveable, smiling icon of the Mister Squishy brand (now one of the most recognizable corporate mascots in the country). He also spends his time at home cultivating botulism, and synthesizing ricin, which he plans to inject- or possibly already has?- into the new snack cakes his company is performing market research on. I think this one is a little more self-explanatory. The theme of hiding behind some sort of mask or veneer is repeated throughout the story. The employees at the ad agency all seem to be two-faced careerists. Companies' use of marketing and packaging hides what is essentially nutritionless junk food, along with the added fact that these particular sweet snacks may now be hiding deadly poison. Then there's also the man climbing up the outside of the building, wearing some sort of inflatable mask, and carrying what may or may not be a high-powered rifle.

"The Suffering Channel"
This one begins with Skip Atwater, editor at Style Magazine, chasing a story about a man who makes exquisite sculptures of his shit. He doesn’t carve or mold them- these “miraculous poos” come out fully formed. But how to publish a story like this in a magazine like Style? The solution comes with the involvement of the subject of a previous story of Skip’s: a reclusive media mogul whose secret dream is starting a cable channel that broadcasts celebrities’ bowel movements. With this cover, I wanted to reference the themes on celebrity culture, fame, and art. Is it worth exposing our most private, intimate selves for a little exposure and fame? Turning your bowel movements into entertainment is something we may not be that far off from, as Wallace makes clear when the story lists some other examples of reality t.v. Another point in the story stuck out to me when making this. Two interns at Style discussing how saliva and excrement is not really gross until it comes out of us. 

"'It's maybe the same way we don't think about our organs, our livers and intestines. They're inside all of us-'

'They are us. Who can live without intestines?'

'But we still don't want to see them. If we see them, they're automatically disgusting.'"

The repeated image at the bottom of the cover was my way of paying homage to the way I used to watch t.v. With bad reception, floating screens, and bad static when an appliance like the vacuum was plugged in, before the ubiquity of cable, and the increasing importance of entertainment along with better technology made that experience a thing of the past.

"The Soul Is Not A Smithy"

The entirety of this story is the narrator's explanation of how his fourth grade civics classroom, complete with a chronological series of U.S. Presidents, copies of From Sea to Shining Sea, and handheld flags, was transformed into the scene of a traumatizing hostage situation. While substitute teacher Richard A. Johnson is lecturing at the front of the class, the narrator daydreams of a complex storyline involving a blind girl named Ruth Simmons, and her little dog Cuffie. However, while the narrator’s imagination runs wild, the substitute, who has apparently had a sudden psychotic break, begins scrawling the words “KILL THEM ALL” on the chalkboard, and emitting a terrifying, high-pitched moan. Although unbeknownst to the narrator, these events seem to subconsciously affect him, as his daydream is horribly deformed, and events take a gruesome turn in Ruth and Cuffie’s narrative as well. I think this cover is fairly straightforward too. Since the story takes place in civics class, I thought it would be fun to make that connection with George's visage. I imagined the narrator as a young boy, sitting in class trying to pay attention, but the topic at hand is slowly transforming into something else as he daydreams. And due to the frightening events going on around him, it's something disturbing, and potentially dangerous.  

Fortitude (updated)

I've recently been working on some personal projects revolving around short stories by one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut. This is self-initiated, not commissioned, or being published anywhere, I was really just working on it for fun. At the same time, I must admit, I've been trying to break into the publishing industry, with regards to my illustration. One of my wildest fantasies would be to illustrate a Vonnegut book. Sadly, since he's passed, it would have to be a reprint of one of his old titles, not that I would mind that. But, that would mean it would most likely be something that the amazingly talented Carin Goldberg has already had a hand in. Not only that, but the also amazingly talented Gene Greif, who has also sadly passed, contributed spot illustrations to those same titles that Goldberg designed. How do you follow these two giants? I doubt I could... so I decided to play around with his short stories. I own a collection that includes a few of his novels, as well as some shorts, such as "Fortitude."

 I'll try not to spoil anything for anyone interested in reading the story, but here's an explanation to give the image some context:

"Fortitude" is about a woman that is nothing more than a head, connected to all kinds of machinery to perform her bodily functions for her. Everything, down to her emotions, is controlled by the machine. I wanted to flip it around and show the controls on the machine being affected by her emotions. Her hair is the only thing connecting her to her original humanity, as it is not influenced by the machinery, but by her friend and hair stylist, Gloria.
Some background on "Fortitude"- it was originally commissioned by CBS as a comedy special in 1968, but was never made (it even includes stage direction, and instructions on camera shots). It was eventually published in Playboy, however.