I remember drawing a lot when I was a kid. The first example I still have was from when I was about 8 years old when I would draw my sister's parakeet. It was a crude cartoonish 8-year-old's version of a parakeet, but it got the point across. In grade school all of my notebooks were filled with drawings of the Enterprise from Star Trek. Those were probably the most accurate drawings I made to that point. I also loved drawing the miniaturization machine from the Fantastic Voyage cartoon, as well as the Voyager (the ship in the show).

Before I plunged fully back into music in the late 1980s, at a time when I was feeling like my writing wasn't going anywhere (musical or otherwise), I shifted gears and took up a different art: painting. Throughout high school I took art classes and always got mediocre grades, and deservedly so. I had never received any formal training in those classes; the art teacher basically told us, "Draw something", or "Paint something", but I don't recall ever getting any formal training in techniques such as color mixing and perspective. So most of my attempts were pretty inept. I learned more from studying old Peanuts comic strips and creating comic books with some friends. My final art project in high school was attempting to paint the famous "bottle" of the Mount Tom range reflected in Easthampton's Nashawannuck pond. It looked like a cartoon.

My deep interest in art didn't start until my junior year in college, when I was at the University of Massachusetts. I had purchased from the local Stop & Shop grocery store a sizeable volume on the history of art in 1978. It consisted of large-format books about a quarter inch thick, one on each major artistic figure through the ages. The entire collection was about five inches thick. Many of the volumes were revelations to me. I was most taken with Edouard Manet. His work seemed so vibrant and fresh. But I loved so many others: Goya, Monet, Titian, Rembrant.... I finally began to recognize each artist's unique style. I got some canvas from a local art store along with some acrylic paint and started my journey. One of my first attempts was to paint my mother and father. The result was absolutely demonic and I tried to figure out what I was doing wrong. I was using paint like a pencil and still drawing cartoons. I watched Bill Alexander and Bob Ross on PBS, how they seemed to just smear color onto a canvas and out of it emerged a beautiful impressionistic scene. Their landscapes, painted in a mere half-hour, seemed miraculous. I noticed all the different brushes they used and their palette of multiple colors at their disposal. I'm sure there was a reason why they chose the colors they did, but I couldn't comprehend it at that point. What I did instead was to put blobs of three primary colors on my palette, since I knew from that I could make any color I desired. I would mix them directly on the palette as I needed. I started focusing on using paint to create light and shadow. My early attempts were still pretty terrible, but I was gradually getting away from cartoons.

At UMass, I took classes in scene design. For the first time, I learned foundational art techniques like perspective. It opened up a whole new world for me. It seemed magical. I got a big sketch pad and began drawing random lines and then connecting them to vanishing points. I can't remember our design teacher's name. I remember he looked like Jeff Lynne from Electric Light Orchestra and he had a British accent. But he gave us terrific assignments, gradually building up our skills. Eventually we were creating 3-dimensional models of our sketches. I remember building a scale recreation of the Holyoke apartment where I lived. The capstone project was the set design for a medieval play. I created my stage as a large stepped cross that I painted to resemble marble. I lined it with thin brass strips and coated it with acrylic polymer to give it a polished stone appearance. I got an A on that project and was quite proud that I had come so far in such a short time.

At home I began trying to recreate the paintings from the art books. I gradually taught myself simply by imitating what I saw. I particularly loved the impressionists and that's where I started. One of my earliest attempts was imitating Goya's "Senora Sabasa Garcia". Another was a tongue-in-cheek copy of a Titian self-portrait, substituting my own face. I was fascinated how slightly darker streaks in her veil could create the illusion of deeper creases in the fabric. Slightly darker accents under her eyes could make her appear suspicious. All it took was a very subtle change in color to create a dramatically different effect.

I created lots of pencil sketches as well, many still lifes. I filled an entire sketchbook with renderings of hypothetical roller coasters, both with a side view and an overhead view. I found the practice very relaxing. Eventually I attempted more complex paintings, re-rendering album covers I had. I was pretty proud of those and decided to give them to friends and relatives as Christmas gifts. Most of the recipients quietly discarded them.

To this day, I have very few example of my work from that period outside of some blurry photos I took. Since I had so little money back then, many of my paintings were applied to pieces of an old roll of vinyl wallpaper someone had given me. The main lesson I learned was that there was no magic to art; it was a skill that could be learned if I simply applied myself to it for long enough. My journey gave me a deeper appreciation of the true masters of the craft. Perhaps one day I'll continue my explorations.

September 1, 2026

I no longer recognize heroes in modern stories. Over the last few decades, there's been a shift in how stories are told, particularly in television. When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and '70s, most television series featured heroes I could look up to and model myself after. There were many, but my favorites were William Shatner's portrayal of the original Captain Kirk on Star Trek, David Janssen's portrayal of Richard Kimble on The Fugitive, Jack Lord's portrayal of Steve McGarrett on Hawaii Five-O, Patrick McGoohan's portrayal of Number 6 on The Prisoner and Peter Falk's original portrayal of Columbo. What made these characters so admirable to me was their unfailing integrity, their incorruptible will to do their work as best as they could. All of them were obsessive about their mission. For Kimble, it was finding the one-armed man and exonerating himself. For Number 6, it was finding out who was Number 1 and getting off the island. For McGarrett and Columbo, it was bringing the criminal to justice. Kirk was a bit different as he faced a completely different conflict in each episode. But he always behaved with integrity in order to resolve the conflict.

In the 1980s, things began to shift. Heroes of unwavering integrity were considered phony, since they can't be found in real life. (But that was why they were fictional characters!) So writers began creating "heroes" who had one or more flaws. For instance, Sherlock Holmes was no longer just a brilliant detective but someone struggling with substance abuse. The characters had to feature darker sides to their personality to make them more relatable. But in my opinion, all that did was dilute their heroism. If they were just like me, then they were bound to screw up. And that wasn't what I wanted to watch. I wanted to watch someone who was better than I was. As a result, I simply stopped watching TV shows. Movies always pushed boundaries more than television and much more often showed flawed heroes. But I wasn't tuning into those week after week. Instead, I found myself going back to watching the shows of my youth that featured main characters who I admired.

Most of the series I mentioned kept their integrity intact right up to the end. It was no accident that all of them were helmed by lead actors who had a tight control over the series. The one exception was Columbo, which went off the rails in later seasons (ironically because of suggestions by Patrick McGoohan). Peter Falk chose to make the character less mythic and more "human". But that only resulted in some extremely awkward moments since he was going against the character's personality that had been firmly established by that point. (Watch "Last Salute to the Commodore" for a cringe-worthy example.) That's not to say that actors can't make the character evolve. But if you're going to throw out the qualities that endeared a character to its audience, why not just develop a whole new series around a different character?

So how did we get from Hawaii Five-O to Breaking Bad? I can't say for sure, but look at how society itself has changed in those years. I always enjoyed suspense movies (for instance, Hitchcock's classics). But I think I gave up watching those types of movies after seeing DePalma and Ridley Scott films. They weren't so much about suspense as reveling in graphic gore. Horror movies after that kept getting more and more extreme. My brother loved watching them. They just made me nauseous. Society had begun to take on a meanness, an angry cynical quality. That coincided, starting in the 1980s, with a government that began dismantling its previous support of working class families and throwing its support behind the rich, and seeming to take delight in the suffering of the general population. The anger and betrayal (and powerlessness) that people felt were reflected in entertainment that sought to capitalize on that anger by venting it on-screen. Television followed. I consider the movie Network to be a marker of the coming change. It predicted nearly everything the media has become.

The flood gates were opened on a new type of television, one that cared little about developing stories or characters. The shows were either about getting quick laughs or simply shocking the audience. They became a business with the sole intent of getting as many viewers as possible. It's no accident that the trend coincided with the dismantling of the nation's educational system. The sharp intelligent writing of the '50s and '60s gave way to the high school humor of th '90s and '00s. With media mergers all the rage, there were far fewer choices and limited points of view available. Cheaper-to-produce reality TV shows began flooding the airwaves, where there was no entertainment value unless there was constant conflict -- and the more outrageous, the better. Current streaming services are attempting to bring more quality back to television. But those services are driven by profit. They need lots of viewers. And is quality the priority of most current viewers? With so little education, can they even properly judge what quality is? For the services, whatever brings in viewers determines what they produce. So quality isn't necessarily their first priority; popularity is.

I no longer consume much media. When I do, I rely on the tried-and-true offerings of my youth that I know will bring me satisfaction. Even though I've seen them before, I still get a lot of enjoyment out of observing the remarkable craft with which they were put together. They may not be cynical nor realistic, but that's not what I'm after. It's comforting to have characters I can look up to, since there are so few of those around in the real world.