Dino Battaglia - Comic Artist Discovery

     The greatest tragedy of sequential art in America is the comic code authority that was enacted in 1954. This was government censorship at its worst, to assign an artistic medium to the children demography based on lies and to dictate material that shunned free speech. In comparison, Europe was exploring the art form in content that America would not and thus severely restricted European artists and comic content from reaching American audiences. One artist in particular that I recently discovered was Dino Battaglia.

     Dino Battaglia was an Italian artist and a friend of Hugo Pratt, who is known in America as the creator of Corto Maltese. But unlike Hugo, Dino was more interested in adapted novels and non fiction material for most of his career. His brush strokes were expressive, leading to natural form and depth that illustrated the world in a cohesive form but also in a minimalist sense that still left enough for the reader to embellish the details for themselves.

      It was a tragedy that Dino Battaglia's life was cut short at the age of 60 in 1983, but I feel the greatest harm of his legacy is that comics are still considered a medium of fictional stories and thus a good portion of his work, some consider his greatest work, of adapting classic novels and biographies are not substantially recognized or available in America, even though he was the winner of Best Foreign Artist award at the Angoulême Festival in 1975.

Shanghai'd in the heart of globalization.

     I made the jump again. I took my necessary possessions that I could fit in a suitcase and transplanted myself  on the other side of the world. Whether it what was out of boredom or opportunity as the culminating factor, the result is still the same: I'm an English teacher once again.

     I told myself that this time would be different, and it has been. I made strict prerequisites for the job search:
1. No kids. Teaching children was a great experience to shape no doubt in my mind that I never want children. Even working with these creatures of irrationality destroyed my own sense of fulfillment as the education system is completely broken and does not cater to children's natural strength but is constructed into drilling them into submission of the outdated industrialization economic model.
2. Large City. In my first year in teaching Korea I made the mistake of teaching in a country side city where my social and personal options were severely limited. Weekends came with tremendous pressure for meeting women, friends, and other cultural and travel experiences as I was stuck in the middle of no where for 5 days a week. I was quite stern with choosing Shanghai for my destination. Why move to New York if you can't live in New York City?

 

     In my urgency to arrive I found myself stuck in the hottest summer in Shanghai's history. The heat cooked the film of filth on the urban landscape giving a sick aroma of mold and garbage at every corner. It felt that there was no escape from the violation my nostril endured, but to embrace it as a memory of the middle kingdom. My initial impression was that Shanghai was a weird hybrid of Bangkok and Seoul, with a silent agony of endurance with the cultural collective to prosper. 

     There are two distinct economies in China: the family business, and the government business. The government in China is completely corrupt; a mob run enterprise of nepotism and cronyism from the children of the founding members of the communist party. The oligarchs reward themselves with luxuries while propping as many hurdles to systematically oppress it's population into economic servitude since China's entire economic success was providing massive cheap manual labor to the world. 

      With such a wall in place by the government of seclusion with indifference to it's own population, Chinese families attempt to create their own small shop businesses in hopes of creating a filial legacy which is rooted deeply in their Confucius tradition. It's family's distrust and skepticism of opportunities available to the underprivileged that education is not available and their children start working at an early age to support the family shop. Proper schooling is reserved for those with the available funds, there is no true public schooling and parents have to show residency in the city which prevents the opportunity for Chinese national migrant workers to register their children into receiving an adequate education. The lack of government subsidized education and numerous corrupt public works projects is self perpetuating the divide of wealth, that's why the streets of shanghai are littered with luxury cars for the rich and modified bicycles for the poor; this is the greatest scam of the communist government against it's own people in my own opinion.

    The lack of economic stability and opportunity for the general population has led to a culture of wealth hoarding from the top down and the consequences of self expression. It is a culture that works itself to a haggard state, whose main habitual purpose is to save money for the family or to start one. If only the privileged have the ability to express themselves or pursue interests in leisure then the culture will stagnant and fresh ideas for problem solving will be suppressed in favor of established thought, even if those established ideas are causing problems to begin with.

Where was I?

It's been quite some time since the last blog and with good reason. The reason is that after finishing the University of Oregon I moved to Phoenix, Arizona to live with my Brother, Paul. It was quite the polar opposite of my time in Eugene. Phoenix is a place lacking in real depth of human culture, the only sole drive in the populace is financial pursuits and status acquisition.
Though I will never live there again, I must say I learned so much about a new perspective and also about how to improve myself beyond the self deceptive philosophy of the extreme liberalism that I endured for so long at the University.

I became a better person and when it was time to move on, I did.

I moved to South Korea.

WHY? It's a question that caused quite a conflict between my father and myself. It was a simple answer - travel and money. After graduating from my University I entered the workforce during a horrible recession that is still continuing with a degree that did not allow me the opportunities that I desired, with the exception of being an ESL Teacher. I was in debt and I've wanted to Travel to Asia since I was a teenager.

I have been in Korea for a year and a half and it hasn't been too easy, I have been set back by challenges and tragedy. The challenge was how to communicate with Korean kids and develop their English ability and my effectiveness in the classroom. It was difficult as I believe I was given paltry support from my first school. They withheld books and other materials from me, and denied me government mandated teacher orientations. This hindered my progress with my teaching ability and the students class time.

The tragedy was that I almost died from a motorcycle accident. My first year in Korea I was living in Dongducheon, a horribly boring place 20 minutes from the DMZ populated by jaded Koreans and a major American Army base, Camp Casey, that seemed to house the biggest shitbags in the military. I bought the motorcycle as a way of transportation to get around the city and to get to work expeditiously as the Korean cab drivers were thick as thieves that would drive in the most misdirected manner to grind out the highest cost on the fare meter.

I had the motorcycle for only 3 months before I wrecked. It was late evening and I was riding towards old town for dinner when I was misdirected into turning into a back street which had no street lights or signs. I did not see the intersection of the single lane streets as the dark houses suffocated the area. Before I knew it, I was in the middle, just barely enough time to glance over to my right and see a bus coming right at me, no time to brake, just to flinch. I don't want to get into what happened really, just that the impact broke my right ankle, lower leg, and 1 rib. I spent 2 weeks in a Korean hospital, which is a horrible place to be, but I did get the care I needed and that's what matters.

I stayed for a second year in Korea as I needed to get a 2nd surgery for my leg to take out the metal pins. My current job isn't lasting entire year as the structure of the school is changing. I am happy with this as I have found a new job in a school in Seoul. I will finally become a Seoulite.

Categories: jonny baggs

A New Start

I want to start off by what just occurred to me suddenly this clear star night as I walked outside my brother's house. I looked up in the night sky and saw the moon and thought of an old family pet. He was a black and white shizu, my brothers and I named him Pepper for that very reason of his color. But what the particular thing that I remember about him when I looked at the night sky was a story my dad me about Pepper after his death a few years ago. My dad told me just prior to Pepper's death, in the middle of the night my dad was woken up by a troubling cry from Pepper as he was fidgeting from the floor. As my dad was scrambling from his own bed to aid in Pepper's plight, Pepper gained control of himself and went to the door, urgently waiting to go outside as Pepper. My dad opened the door and Pepper went outside and gently walked in the yard and stared at the moon. Pepper died shortly afterwards.

My dad told me that the sense was that Pepper knew that his time was up and he did what he could do at this moment to make his life better.


I live in Arizona now. I found myself constrained and not feeling that my life would benefit staying in Oregon at this period of time. I just could not tolerate the weather no longer, the utter lack of sun. My younger brother Paul lives here in Tempe, Arizona in the Phoenix area. I was given the opportunity and the support of family, in particular to my dad, to move to my brother's house and settle here in Phoenix area for the time being, and I took it. Though even thought today, I missed the vibe and scene of Portland, in particular the urban downtown experience. Though that's only because I haven't found the alternative here in Phoenix, which I will in a short particular amount of time. I will always note myself as an capable resource gatherer.

Almost Done!

I just started the third week of the program and never had updated the blog. Can´t really be critical as things haven´t changed too much - the program still sucks. Not only does it suck but this month is like redux, it hasn´t changed, it´s a repeat, nothing new is being taught, everyone, students and teachers alike, are just going through the motions becuase we just don´t care. Most of the students left, except those from Oregon. In class I can see the dull and muted eyes of the other students around me, bored, uninspired, just wanting to leave. I just don´t know how people can do it, is that why people say I´m the troubled one, becuase my lack of tolerance and ability to just sit there and let my mind just flounder? Just last week I had left class for a half a hour becuase I felt like my mind was being numbed from boredom, like the fire from the passion of the mind to learn and feel and experience things was being smothered to death. I can´t take it, and no sane person should. Today a fellow classmante, Eric, abruptly out of no where blurted out ¨I´M SO FUCKING BORED!¨, his head shook sparatically in a tremble that made his body to follow suit. And that´s what it is, I´m so fucking angry that this is what school thinks is education, to bore the person into thinking that learning is boring and uninvolving. Some people criticize me as if I have senioritis, I just think I have raw human sanity.

The Saturday excursions are still fun, but I´m losing interest in going to small towns and checking out old bilding and such, a person can only embrace ancient architecture for so long. It´s kinda sad that though the saturday is our day off, it´s sunday that is our free time to do what we want and it´s been raining every sunday, literately. I´ve had fun here but I lost interest, I´m ready to go. I found it apprehensible that our school is dead and that AHA has done nothing to help us become involved. I only found that AHA was only concerned tht we have a place to stay and that we pay our bills, they do want us to pass, as I am always on the edge of failing, not by doing poorly academic wise, but though attendence. But for the amount of money that we paid for you would think that AHA would have someone, like a tutor or somehting to help explain the material, but they don´t, which has been the worst in my veiwpoint, to not be able to ask questions about the material but only to sit there and listen to 4 hours of spanish lecture. This is something that wrote about enough, that school is more concerned with your behavior in class than what you learn, it says something of the institution.

I have to stay positive becuase to only focus on the fact that I´feel that I´ve been hustled $5000 and that I should have gone to Argentina instead will just drive me crazy becuase of how I could have used to money for other things, like a new computer. I mean $5000 is alot of money, and that was just tuition. But I´m almost done, one week left and that´s it, no more Advanced Highschool, oops, I mean Undergraduate College, HAHA.

Oviedo - 1 down and 1 to go!

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Oviedo to the 3rd degree

SO the 3rd week has come and gone, and in fact the 4th week is almost over as well, but I never updated the blog simply becuase week 3 sucked. As much as I try to take things into thE POSITIVE I´m sticken with senioritis, also my inability to sit still in a classroom enitment and endure the bleak boredom of the classroom, I´m would be considered a ¨problem student¨with teachers. It´s not also the class that makes me just fidgety or whatever, it´s the utter frustration of the study abroad program, the program is really intensive, in 1 week were taught 3 forms of past tense and 2 forms of future tenses with the irregular verbs and a slew of vocab and all this was tested last monday with only a week of class time. And god-fuckin-forbid if you have questions or you don´t understand some of the material, as I did, becuase your shit of luck becuase the teachers don´t speak english, so it´s fucking impossible to get an explantion of how to understand spanish from someone who speaks only spanish, it´s a contradiction, a conumdrum.

So week 3 I was told if I don´t act like a good child of ritalin, I was in danger of failing, even though I wasn´t the worst student of grade wise, but becuase my utter frustration and inability to particapate wasn´t to thier level, though that´s total bullshit. It wasn´t becuase I wasn´t able to particapate, it was becuase I wass acting like a ADD kid, which I think I might be, but becuase I was bored and frustrated I took a lot of ¨stepping out¨periods where I would leave the class and take a breather about 4 times a day. I think I always read if your frustrated or something, just about to hit your limit, a lot of psychologists oyu need to take a moment of breather to unstress yourself, but these fuck wad teachers say I need to endure thier bull shit class time. Just anyone with an observent eye only has to turn adn look at the sutudents and see the blank expressions on their faces of boredom to realize that the model of class time and structure doesn´t invigorate the mind, but dull it out, that´s school? For a place thatis culturally identifies itself as the institution of higher learning, school is so ignorant, arogant, and illogical, but heh, don´t rock the boat, eh?