Tug and Barge on the Hudson

My parents have been visiting New York from California for the holidays. High on my mother’s list of sights is the Statue of Liberty. Instead of paying the money to visit the island we decided to take the Staten Island Ferry  past Liberty Island. I spotted many boats and barges working along the river. This one was carrying garbage. I’ve been wanting to make a watercolor of one of these boats on the waterfront. When I do I’ll post it. I haven’t quite caught a good enough photo along the waterfront here in New York worthy of a watercolor. The photos I took this day were under a lot of cloud cover so I made this vector image. I did find this lovely blog called Bowsprite on New York nautical culture. It’s absolutely the best blog! The artwork is superb!

The Spanish Colony in Greeley

Over the last month I’ve been doing research for this graphic novel about my father’s childhood growing up in a work colony in Greeley, Colorado. My goal is to make it look and feel like Colorado in the 1950′s.  I am scouring the internet and looking into books to find images to get a better  sense of  the history in this region. I’m looking at maps and trying to get a greater idea of what it was like in Northern Colorado during the middle of the twentieth century. I’m  also concerned with fashion and what buildings looked like to make the backdrop more authentic. Most of all I am interviewing my father and his family to document their story.

I did get a chance to contact a woman named Sarah L. Brooks a school teacher that hosts this wonderful little website about the history of Greeley.

I also read this great  book  called The White Gold Laborers by Jody and Gabriel Lopez.  This is a story of the Spanish Colony a private housing project built by The Great Western Sugar Company for Spanish/New Mexican/Mexican laborers to keep them from living in Anglo populated Greeley in the 1920′s.

The images of the  Stoop Laborers and the Colony house in this blog post are drawings I made from the photo illustrations in “The White Gold Laborers” to get a better idea of how the comic will look.

Anatomy of a Protest

I am fascinated with the the way protests actually work and how the police respond to them. Many years ago  I had a chance to see a protest and understood that when the police responded they were reacting
and acting against the performance of the protest.  To me it made apparent that the act of protest is intrinsic in the act of policing people.

Anyhow The protest at Occupy Wall Street is interesting. I went down to check out the space and to see what people are doing to organize and maintain their civil disobedience in this little park near Wall Street.

Oddly enough I was there on Columbus day during a festival/street fair. The police made sure to keep the protest from spilling into the festival by placing barricades on and along Wall Street and boosted police presence in the area.

I walked into Zuccotti Park to see how the space was organized. I found that there is a library with books and even spotted LP’s( It would be cool to have a mix of records and selected recordings of the protesters) and other media to select.

A kitchen is located in the middle of the park with a Speed Rack full of kitchen supplies and dry goods on hand.  A dish washing station was operated by two people. They used a special gray water system from plants, rocks and a system of buckets and compost to deal with the waste water from their cooking and dish washing.

There was some music being played in the park by a loose group of  performers and there were lots of different organizations present in the space. Many protesters were sleeping and others were busy keeping the space clean by sweeping around the park.

I witnessed their voice intercom service that seemed to work as a way to communicate with the rest of the park protesters. They would repeat the news that was relayed by the person next to them and then send it forward to the next person as a way of getting news out without an intercom or loud speaker that they are apparently not allowed to have.

It’s very interesting to see how the police are dealing with the space. People are not allowed to block sidewalks and the police seem really uneasy about the whole protest.  They constantly tell people along the sidewalk that they need to move on and to keep the traffic flowing. As long as you are not blocking the sidewalk you are allowed to be there. It all hints at how precarious this space is as a place that is allowed for such a protest. I immediately ask myself when will the police just get tired of them and kick them out? I also feel that there are forces not seen that are keeping the protesters from being moved out of the park. Apparently the mayor and the owner of Zuccotti park among others are allowing this protest to happen.

Life Narratives

Lately I’ve been entertaining the idea of making a comic book. My favorite comic book writers are generally from Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly, and all the old Independent comics book companies that have come and gone over the  years.  I’ve been writing a small narrative loosely based about my life to see if there’s anything interesting to write about. How many more times do we need an autobiographical comic book anyway? I do think that the story of my parents life seems to be the most interesting part.

I do have some friends and one in particular James Reitano who has been making comics for years. I plan to consult him when and if I ever get around to making one.

The photo and drawing is of my parents. They were the coolest looking parents. My father was and is a musician and he had an old Triumph motorcycle and drove a 1959 Corvette and my mom worked at a bank and was a hairstylist too.  The drawing is a test run for the look of the comic.