539. A Most Fundamental Biologically Incorrect Cartoon::: "Frantic Squirrel Helps Stuck Bird Get Out of Cage"

Caption I included on Picasaweb: It's just a few days away from my first ever Comic-con, and I had to switch my mental processes from music to cartoons. I asked myself what are the fundamental images I need to draw such that a Comic-Con alternative adult comic audience will better understand my Biologically Incorrect cartoons? Ever since I went through Self-Standardization (Victoria's SI units for cartooning consist of fine-point black sharpies, a simple black-white-gray color scheme, and white xerox paper), I realized that I needed to re-draw certain images that were unforunately constructed in pencil or other form of pen. Not only do publishers want originality and audience comprehension, but they also want consistency and standardization from the author. So, I'm going back to my fundamental images that I live by my absurd life, and re-drawing them to near-"human perfection." One image I keep going back to is "Frantic Squirrel Helps Stuck Bird Get Out of Cage." More on the Biologically Incorrect Blog 539!

I decided that if I were my own country and had a designated flag, the little green square with ths squirrel and the bird in a cage would be on the flag. It summarizes my existentially absurd pursuits of life of trying to simultaneously occupy two spaces: being stuck in the box, and always trying to escape and jump outside of the box, always trying to avoid the belljar of repetition and slipping into an hourglass of novelty and growth. This "Squirrel and Bird in a Cage" image has received much attention from my past blogs... Blog 253 (the origins and history of the bird-in-a-cage idea, Dr. Miriam Polne-Fuller, Dr. James Reichman, LAP Records, Robyn T., QR Cover, Advisor Oran), Blog 317 (images I gave to my UCSB advisor as a present), Blog 329 (Biologically Incorrect and Ecology of Scale Images derived from the Elephant-Oak-Tree Story), and Blog 489 (elaborated and darkened images of the Bird in the Cage for the Biologically Incorrect PR page... dead end page!). Not only that, I decided to experiment with a Zazzle Page (http://www.zazzle.com/stokastika) and Deviant Art Page (http://stokastika.deviantart.com) using these image-logos as the first two items of display on each page.... Heck, it's a start! Since I have discussed this bird-in-a-cage so much before, it is questionable to expand this discourse! As others would say, "Get Over It!"

Such is finding passion in the Absurd life of the Absurdist Existential Environmentalist. So I was trying to be an environmentalist and then I realized how impractically absurd it is to be an "environmentalist" and so now I am a Human-Environmentalist Existential Absurdist, or something like that. I try to send out meaningful messages, but then I come to realize how meaningful messages have become overall impractical to materialized... and so I fail... because I'm always a bird stuck in a cage, and I'm always that squirrel trying to get the poor bird out of the cage. And so it goes. And so on (Slaughterhouse 5). The sad thing is that I bet corporations will love me because I try to send some kind of quasi-preachy environmental message and then I self acknowledge my failure to practice what I preach, and that it's all modestly impossible anyway... so there you go... my absurd values align very well with corporate environmentalism... at least on the surface... ha ha! I hope no one reads this blog, down this far....

It's funny, I even remember back in the fall of 2006 that I imagined that my first music CD cover would have the squirrel and the bird in a cage, and that it would be neon-green so that it would stick out of the pile of dull-colored CD jewel cases that are more so covered with poofy blong hair and elaborate make-up rather than some existential structure or image that could possibly have meaning to the core of existence (like Jack Johnson's cover "To the Sea" or something like that. And now? FINALLY! I did what I sought out to do, back in 2006. Yippee! Slowly, very slowly, things are off the to-do list... ideas get off the to-do list to some final-like form. I'm glad Comic-Con is coming because it certainly motivates me to reconsider my roots and fundamentals of how to advertise and represent my cartoons!

I have been living a good summer. Chris Lods was right. I argued with him over a burrito at Freebirds last school year that everything we do today is built upon history, but Chris made a point that we have no obligation to history and that every day is a new day for new opportunities and to break the habits and burdens of history. Janelle Monae tells me to be a thrival, break all bad habits of history, whether family history or collective history. Even in this modality, the present is built upon the past... but why should the past ever be a heavy weight? I'm embracing this modality this summer... and let whatever positive trickles of history blossom in my mind to its novel and fullest creative potential... Trickle... then EXPLODE! Thanks Chris. I guess I'm kind of being Zen Buddhist right now, eh?

317. Three Introductory Images/Gifts I Provide to Summarize My Existence

Biomathematika Sunflower. Taken in Summer of 2002. My father's giant sunflower by the garage. My father was the PA or Photography Assistant, propping the flower more upright because it was collapsing upon its own weight. I took the picture with a measly Olympus Camedia camera. Usually the images are off-color... except for this one!
Out of the Box and Into the Bird. Part 2 in a three part series. Based on an image of an unhappy bird seemingly stuck in a cage when there are multiple ways to get out. The tiny squirrel is trying to get a giant bird out of the cage. The tiny squirrel modified its perceptions and definitions and language systems, which allowed it to perceive solutions to escape the cage. And now its trying to save the big big bird out of the cage. It is indeed a scaling problem. This little squirrel is definitely going to need some help! (That image is in Part 3 of the three-part series). Scaling is an interesting process in human communication systems. Because it seems like ideas spread more like an airborn virus or parasite wood. You have a single seed but it can spread like wildfire across many minds quite rapidly. Existing technology allows immense ease of transport, like some form of collective nervous system. Good stories are more like benevolent tumors, invited mutations, so to speak. The bad stories usually get weeded out--unless you have lots of money to keep perpetuating your bad stories throughout the system. :-0
This piece is called "Existence in Context." It's based off of Van Gogh's famous image of the naked man in a circle and a square. I told my advisor Oran that Van Gogh forgot that humans need a planet in order to exist, so the picture was incomplete. I started off with a vague outline of my own body (hence the long hair), then adding layers, like the planet Earth, behind, then adding the branching fractal network connections and feedback loops that represent my flowing connections with the environment--including the heart and the mind. Multiple layers of consciousness here, eh? Far beyond the consciousness of a tunicate. I mean, I was a bag of guts a long time ago. I mean, my ancestors. Long, long, long time ago. Maybe when I was an embryo, I was more so a bag of guts than a mental entity. And now my bag of guts is fine. My brain is hard to manage. I mave much more of a mental existence than I would like. Visceral existence would sometimes be wonderful as well. But my brain keeps consuming and processing information even though my guts are fine. Wish I could turn my brain off once in a while, eh?

Maybe it is a big deal that the body in the image is female, not male. Well, I'll be dxmmed. I am a female and I am going to give myself some credit. My friend George noted that many females and some males tend to think non-linearly and contextually, whereas many other people tend to focus on one system and think linearly. My friend Herschel said that females by default are very non-linear thinkers. Our corpus callosum is extremely interconnected and we can multi-task. Oh. Cool. How come some guys know me better than I know my own self? Strange thing. I'm catching up.

These three images tend to be the "routine" gifts I provide to people who I really care about and also give them a window to the world that I know and have come to build for myself and care about. This is the intellectual bower that I tend: integrating my biological and geological knowledge and its applications to re-interpretations of human-environmental problem solving. I gave these images to one of my advisors, Oran, about a week ago.

I am soon going to hit the road toward the Santa Barbara Harbour, in which our lab will be going on an "educational field trip" hosted by Julie Robinson's husband! Woohoo! I am super-excited to meet everyone and get to know everyone better. Our lab is so diverse in interests and topics, it's amazing! But mostly on the intersection of science and society, institutions and governance. Whether it's science-policy, science-media, whatever. I wish I could see my lab-mates more frequently. I will pose the question as to whether once a week we could all meet up casually just to talk about stuff that's been going on in their heads and ideas to throw out onto the table. Almost like a writer's group! I would LOVE that! We'll see!

253. Formatting the Question Reality Manuscript via Lulu: Evolution of the Bird in a Cage Cartoon

I showed an image of this Bird in a Cage to my good friend, Robin, in Goleta, California, back in fall of 2005, and instead of placing pre-existing "holistic title page" of Question Reality in the front, Robin advised me to place this bird-in-the-cage in the front of the book. Robin stated that this would be more shocking and intriguing to people because it represents where most of society is at right now (or at least how society is overall operating). I consider the bird-in-a-cage to be like a visual koan: it automatically stimulates the mind into shock and encourages one to think. The dilemma, I found out later from my mentor, Dr. Miriam Polne-Fuller, that this bird-cage image that she showed to class was not her own creation. Perhaps it came from The New York Times or the New Yorker, but she was not sure. So... I ended up needing to create my own bird-in-a-cage cartoon. Please see below!
The Old Bird in a Cage. From The New Yorker or The New York Times? I sent an email to The New Yorker, thanking them for the inspiration if the source of this image truly was from their magazine. I encountered this Bird in a Cage image twice as an undergrad: (1) it was in the hallway of the Ecology and Evolution Department, right in front of Dr. James Reichman's office (a cool vertebrate prof I never was able to meet or take a class from), and (2) Dr. Miriam Polne-Fuller showed this image to her pioneering Shoreline Preservation course. Miriam showed a bunch of images and shared quite a few poems that stimulated students to think about things. Another image Miriam showed was something that looked like a mountain but ended up being the tip of a safety pin. Talk about being in a scale-funk! I suppose Miriam is in part practicing Chinese philosophy, and maybe she doesn't even know it!
The New Bird in a Cage cartoon. I added a little squirrel trying to get the bird out of the cage. For me, it represents the internal turmoil and synergism of my evolving self and this environment I am in. I seem to be the bird and the squirrel simultaneously. I am the bird, seemingly trapped in my own self-constructed trap, and then I am the squirrel who thought outside the box and is trying to get this trapped bird outside of her rut. The theme extrapolates to the entirety of society: trying to get the system to think outside the box in terms of human-environmental relations. And can a really tiny squirrel really get a very big bird outside it's self-induced prison? The image ended up being on the title page of my book.
Now with the help of new friends--returning to UC Santa Barbara, participating in the Blue Horizons program, meeting my friend Tariel--it is starting to seem a little bit more feasible to get this big bird out of the cage!