So since the last update to this site, I’ve had a slew of new experiences and things going on, not the least of being able to see the Tumbler (the unamed batmobile from the Christopher Nolan Batman movies) in person! But let’s start at the beginning…
Vicksburg, Mississippi Civil War Memorial
I was extremely excited to get a chance to go on a slight detour while on a road trip to go and see the Vicksburg National Civil War Park which was a sincerely powerful and somewhat emotional thing for me. Not only because as a living history reenactor, one tends to put themselves in the literal shoes of how the people of the past lived, but because you begin to empathize with the loss, the trials, the triumphs, and all of the often overlooked details that no school history book will ever touch upon.
The centerpiece item of the park is the USS Cairo, which is an incredibly powerful statement of that era’s engineering and invention in time of war.
Many personal items varying from shoes, to dinnerware, to utensils and tools were available for viewing in the museum next to the Cairo. When you do any kind of living history, these are the kinds of things that help develop an edge in being as accurate in your impression as you can possibly be.
What I really liked seeing on many of the items were the human touches of natural wear and usage in some cases, and the purposeful markings of names and symbols scratched onto the bottoms of items like the bottoms of plates from soldier’s personal mess kits. My mind goes to the moments in times when some young fellow was scratching his initials into the bottom of his plate. What was he thinking? Where was he from?
The best part of the restoration and preservation effort of the Cairo was that visitors can board the ship and walk around the inner area and get a true sense of the cramped and robust majesty of this old ship.
I was walking around in it trying to imagine being completely encased in iron and wood with the acrid smell of gunpowder and the loud sound of the cannons as they fired going on all around you… the feelings must have been overwhelming for the men inside of there.
Ironclads always come off to me as being more like a step in evolution to the modern day submarines in design and the USS Cairo’s inner dimensions made my head swim with the visuals of how much this was a machine of war built for defense and offense and not even batting an eye in the direction of the word comfort. Granted, I’ve only just started really researching and looking into the history of Ironclads, but I’m already hooked.
And just take a look at the paddle wheel and the massive steam engines it had. I don’t know what it is about seeing huge cast iron engines like these that get me all weak in the knees, but I remember years ago when I read about this in passing in a history book, the one paragraph dedicated to it just did no justice. It was like when I saw the German U-boat that is installed inside at the Chicago MSI. It’s one thing when we are armchair historians, but another to get out there and see these behemoths in person.
New Orleans – or, there is not enough Lysol in this world, to ever make me want to go back to Bourbon Street.
Now that might sound like such a terrible thing to say about New Orleans, but let me start off by saying that I always try to keep an open mind when I travel because it’s all about various cultures, people, and places being different and me learning something in the process.
My first real impression of New Orleans was the really clean and neat bed and breakfast hotel (that is very pet friendly) in the Garden District called “Creole Gardens“. Like many buildings in the south, it was painted in the kind of colors that no self respecting bible belt resident would even look at in Sherwin-Williams. I found it to be a breath of fresh air and a nice compliment to the warm and colorful personalities that ran the establishment. If you have the app Trip Advisor for you phone, you can check out my review on there (under of course, the Artisan Rogue)
The room I was in was supposed to be haunted, but not even one ectoplasmic bit of residue was to be found over the course of the days I slept there. I did leave an audio recorder going to see if I could pick up any sounds or talking or anything out of the ordinary. Zilch on that as well.
Every bit of Creole Gardens had me feeling like I was right at home, but I revel in places that have character and a semblance of not being the touristy kind of crap that all to often I feel people fall victim to. There was nothing but a genuine stretch of chaotic love that was cobbled together in the building.
Now being a pet friendly hotel in the Garden District of New Orleans is a challenge from one point as the neighborhood is a little dodgy and you want to make sure that your dog has a really good harness on it (especially if it likes to chase cats because there are a lot of random loose ones in the area just sitting on porches)
If any of you ever stay there and do bring your fur kids with you, there is a really nice park (granted a few homeless people abound there, for me that’s not an issue, I see and interact with homeless people while working at Power & Light in KC all the time, but for some people, they might feel uncomfortable) that is about a block and a half’s walk away.
Now. I am far from a tree hugging hippy, but I do love nature, and I would probably chain myself to a tree if I had a good reason to. These trees would be a reason to do so.
Like some kind of crazy creeping Treant from the Lord of the Rings movies, the way these trees grow are really like nothing else I’ve seen. Almost like they are embracing the earth, weighed down by age and size.
had to fight the urge to go climbing up the arms of the trees. For one, I’m not 14 anymore (well… at least not physically), and two, I’m pretty sure I’d have been breaking some city ordinance and I had not budgeted for bail money. This time. Just kidding. But really. I didn’t.
Upon going down into Jackson square where all the touristy stuff was I managed to catch a performance by a former Disney artist turned night show performer (video on that coming soon) named P’Link Floyd. The man clearly loved performing for people, and had a mastery of the banjo that was undeniable.
I could go on and on about the people there from the street performers to the panhandlers, to the living caricatures that were tourists (I really did see a group of Japanese tourists each with iPhones and 2 cameras EACH in tow that were talking pictures of everything that would not mug them. I thought that kind of stuff was made up by the Zucker Bros. comedy writing team. (…for all of you born before the seminal comedy film “Airplane!”, go google it.)
Now as the day wore on, the cuisines to be found in many of the places around New Orleans were not bad, but not unlike a kitchen with a seedy semblance of operation, when the lights go out. Out come the roaches. That’s not a racial joke, I saw one on Bourbon street that I don’t think I could have taken in a fair fight.
Now I had always heard stories and endless things about the infamous Bourbon Street. Stories about men and women both being served beverages with questionable additions, the extremely adult themed and oriented performance bars, the high number of transients, and all sorts of shenanigans and goings on like that.
But even someone like me, who has worked in the bar industry part time for many years, found Bourbon street to be way overwhelming. And not necessarily in a good way. I’m not a drinker, nor am I really one for the whole night life thing. I’ve worked for too many years part time doing security at various bars to ever be comfortable being out and about in a place like this. But I do have to admit the people watching from the balcony where I was sitting was pretty cool, if not interesting.
If there had been better light where I was sitting, I’d have gladly spent the night doing sketches of people because after about 4 hours of Bourbon street, all I could think was how do I get back without getting mugged? Now don’t get me wrong, the REST of Louisiana is what I really like. I found time to work with cattle, go looking for antiques and rare books ( 150 year old bible now added to my growing collection! 
), and enjoyed more humble less commercial food fair like beignets, meat pies, pork cracklins, and a crawfish boil. Those are the things that make traveling all the better, when you take the time to appreciate the quiet moments and soak in the stuff on the backroads and by ways. I know as I sat out on a small boat dock overlooking a pond, I felt the most clear sense of mind and body. I meditated for about 30 minutes on things, letting stressful aspects in my mind out, breathing in the sounds of nature around me.
The Avengers – My favorite superhero movie ever.
Now into more familiar area, after coming back from the deep south and having more tales to tell than I have space for on this update, I was literally counting down the days until The Avengers would be coming out.
Although I’m a comic artist, when I was young I mainly was into Gold Key comics and the storys of Uncle Scrooge by the great Carl Barks. But for a few years when Marvel was doing home subscription delivery of comics my mother was nice enough to get me two comic series for me for about a year. The first was Elfquest (which led to a major obsession with anything that the Pinis created for the next decade) and a superhero title, the Avengers. So for more reasons than the true to character portrayals by the actors and the incredible visuals and fantastic storyline that was being promised, I really had high hopes for the Avengers movie.
It didn’t let me down in the least, and I cannot wait for the sequel to come out.
Spectrum Fantastic Art Live! 2012 – The inagural show… and what a show it was indeed!
Now, onto the news update that I had been wanting to get to, for literally some years now. See when I first heard rumblings that the publication Spectrum Art was thinking about putting a show together so long ago, I was one of the first people to contact them about what it was, if it was going to happen, and more importantly, WHERE it was going to be held.
Fast forward about a year and a half, and Spectrum Fantastic Live has become a landmark event by simple fact that I cannot think of anywhere else shy of MAYBE GenCon or DragonCon that can pull this much art talent under one roof, but unlike those shows, the emphasis was very much on the creators and the artwork creations themselves.
One fellow in attendance that I was trying all weekend to work up the courage to talk to was the crazy talented Gerald Brom. We were so lucky to have him do a panel that covered his career and the ups and downs that he’s gone through over the years.
When a friend of mine first got me into the whole Dungeons and Dragons thing when I was in high school, my initial exposure to it had the works of Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, and Brom that graced the covers of novels for the wonderful worlds of Dragonlance, GreyHawk, and DarkSun. I knew that these guys were the real deal. So much detail, so much movement and life captured in the designs and compositions. But of the three, Brom was the one with the darker more aggressive edge to his paintings.
Stylistically, I don’t pull a lot of influence from his work nowadays, but for many years, I would spend hours looking at the work that Brom created trying to figure out just how he pulled it off.
Sunday brought a great chance to see the Tumbler and the Pod from the Batman movies.
The show had an overall attendance of about 2000 people. Which in reality, was a rather low number of attendees, but that actually didn’t bother me. See the thing about this show was that it felt like a group of artists that forged out together to found an art show based on the themes of sci-fi and fantasy, with prominence given to the understanding of mediums digital and traditional, and a chance for so many of us to finally meet one another after many years of mutual admiration, to the discovery of talent old and new.
I literally learned so much and got to meet so many very cool people. The best part about it was the unusual sense of comraderie that seemed to be everywhere and amongst all of the artists at the show. The photo below shows I believe almost everyone that had participated as artists.
It’s still left to be seen if next year will go forward as a show. This was very much an inagural effort on many levels for everyone involved. I know that the faces below will proabably change and the ranks may swell or shrink, but I do hope that Spectrum Live is given every opportunity to become the powerhouse event that it should be.
In Closing – Games Workshop comes to KC!
If you’re a frequent visitor to the Games Workshop website this is probably old news for some of you, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that a new Games Workshop retail shop has come to the midwest! This photo was taken about a week before the shop opened, but it was a great sight on opening day to see all of the GW fans, players and collectors coming out to support the new store.
So, with that, I will end this update and wish everyone the best until next time! Support your local artists, your local artists, businesses and farmers! – Mario, the Artisan Rogue