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ANDREW
LENAHAN'S
STARBLIND
CHRONOLOGY
CHAPTER 1 - PREHISTORY: 1994 AND BEFORE
I was born at a very young age.
I was born on a Friday, in the middle of a snow-storm, which must have been a very traumatic event indeed, as I must confess that I've no recollection of the event at all, save that it happened, which is really more a matter of competent record-keeping than any sort of extraordinary feat of memory. Should anyone doubt it, I have a certificate that proves the whole thing. I've never much felt the need for certification of birth, as slithering out from someone's nether-regions hardly seems like an act deserving a lovely framed certificate on semiauthentic goldenrod parchment-esque paper. I can imagine the doctor clapping excitedly and exclaiming, "Ooo, you plopped out of there and you're not even deformed or anything! That's good for a lovely certificate! Next time, work in a double salchow, and I bet you'll be a shoo-in for a bronze medal at least!"
What I recall most about early domestic life was that everything was squarely centered around the tele-vision. The prime-time network schedule was held in almost religious reverence in the Lenahan household; we didn't have Jesus Christ, we had Joan Collins. Believe me, it's quite difficult for an infant to learn to require parental attention only during the boring bits of Dallas when Sue Ellen is talking to JR and nobody is shooting each other or bouncing downstairs to their doom. One might say it wasn't entirely the most healthy environment for a child to grow up in, but I suppose in retrospect it was all for the best: if one must live among mad people, they should at least be laid-back mad people. However, there's a good chance that such early bad experiences lead to my current disdain for TV, although that situation is hardly helped by the fact that nearly everything on TV is poo.
I'd never known my actual father. This has proved to be both a great source of personal trauma and a very likely reason why I still believe that the stork delivers babies.
The family member who I was closest to in my earliest years was my maternal grandmother, Mary Jane Lenahan. Over the years she taught me checkers and chess and gradually introduced me to old-time radio, a passion that continues to this day. Of course it wasn't actually still being broadcast by then, but we had cassette tapes of them from a company called Radio Reruns. I fondly remember Baby Snooks, Fibber McGee & Molly, and The Great Gildersleeve... but the favourite, by far, then and now, was the immortal Jack Benny. I still find that Jack is one of the few genuine influences on my life as well as my work, and I regard him as a true comedic genius--his jokes were beyond funny, but the best part was that he didn't even need them. He could easily make an audience laugh with just a word. In his later TV years, all it would take was a gesture, perhaps a raised eyebrow or a hand primly positioned at his chin. Jack Benny clearly owned his audiences in a way most comics could only dream of. By the way, for obvious reasons I highly recommend that anyone interested in comedy check out Jack Benny. Keep in mind that it may take a few shows to get the gist of it: comedy back then was much more character-based than most of what we see today. Trust me, it's well worth it. By the way, there's also a Jack Benny fan club located at http://www.jackbenny.org , which I am of course a member of. Wouldn't you know, there's a certificate for that, too!
Very little parental attention meant very little parental control, which for a young child is of course both a good and bad thing. I suppose I turned out mostly good... even now, years later, I've never been arrested. Perhaps the trick was that I had very little reason to be bad, as if I was, nobody would have noticed anyway. In any case, I largely had to raise myself, and kept the focus very much on the talents I possessed. I knew right away I was suited to art, and made sure to draw on every scrap of paper I could find, much of which was Kraft Foods letterhead, cast off from my grandfather, John Thomas Lenahan, who worked there. In my preschool years I taught myself to read using newspaper comic strips, and by the time I entered kindergarten I could write sentences and even make little comics of my own.
The schools in my area were unfortunately rather rudimentary, and had no idea what to do with a child who was so far ahead of the other students. They had a word for it, "gifted", but instead of regarding the supposed giftedness as a positive thing, it scared them out of their wits. And so it was that I came to a cold realisation that American public schools are utterly unfit for anyone more intelligent than a small kitchen appliance. Fortunately, by third grade I had been moved into private school at The Harrisburg Academy, a much more sensible and challenging learning environment. Of course a remedial basketweaving class held in an abandoned outhouse and taught by mentally-deficient chimpanzees would be an improvement on public school, but that isn't the point: the Academy gave me a quality education for the years I spent there, and I'm bloody thankful for it.
One advantage of the Academy was that the level of technology used in the classroom was significantly better than it was in public school. Gone were the chalk-slates of old... say hello to the class Macintosh computer, which was one of those boxy ones with the built-in screen. It even had a game on it, which was King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human. Since most people who have played this game are probably twitching violently in a rubber room somewhere, I'll describe why I still remember this game more than a decade afterward. These days, most games have multiple difficulty settings, such as 'beginner' and 'hard'. This game had only one setting: impossible. I'm not hyperbolising, either: it involved a lot of typing spells verbatim out of the manual, and one of the lines in the manual is wrong. Even besides that, the rest of the game is crazy hard. It involves, among other things, emptying the full bedpan of an evil wizard. And it's not some sort of metaphorical bedpan either, you actually get to see his little round CGA poops. I'm certain that part of my long-term attitudes toward computers and technology in general were formed when my first experience involved dumping pixelated wizard turds.
But it wasn't long afterward that I began my first experiments with computer artwork. The Macintosh included its own little paint program, roughly similar in abilities to the familiar Microsoft Paint still included with Windows. Of course at that point I'd been drawing for most of my life, but the potential of computer art as a medium seemed wonderful, even in 256 colours on a screen not much bigger than my ALF lunch-box. I experimented with the Macintosh paint program as much as I could, and actively sought an alternative for home use, even briefly trying to wrangle with the very primitive drawing tool in the NES version of Win, Lose, or Draw, with its pitiful Etch-A-Sketch-like controls. In 1992, though, Nintendo came out with Mario Paint for the SNES, which even included a mouse! It was an epiphany, and I spent quite a lot of time with it. Although the Mario Paint cartridge had significant limitations when it came to saving finished pieces, I managed to save mine anyway by dubbing the SNES feed onto VHS videotape. I saved the tape, and although the quality has deteriorated over the years, I eventually converted it to DVD. Compared to some artists, I have almost an obsession with preserving everything I create, including things that are never to be sold or otherwise given proper release.
OTHER CHAPTERS:
CHAPTER
I - PREHISTORY: 1994 AND BEFORE