The Re-Animation of James Tim Walker

Parkinson's disease wants to take everything you ever worked at. Everything. It wants skills you mastered so long ago, you can't remember the heart and soul you put into acquiring them. It wants skills so basic that you assume that they will always be a part of you. To walk, to speak, to feed yourself, to stand without toppling are just givens of being human that most of us have down cold by the time we are ready for kindergarten. Parkinson's wants all that.

But before it takes the essentials of what we normally think we all share, Parkinson's Disease wants to hollow out all the things that make you the particular human that you are, that you have shaped yourself into. It wants to take the career you have chosen. It wants the ways you play and the time you volunteer to the causes you honor. This jealous disease demands you see less of your friends, and does its utmost to push family away. It goes to bed with you each night and gets up with you each morning, jealous, and zealous.

How do you tell this disease "no" when it has crept silently into every cell of your body and settled into every sinew? To defy such a thorough occupier you must catch it off guard. To surprise Parkinson's you must surprise yourself. You must re-imagine yourself to hold paradoxically what you can. Which brings us to Tim Walker.

Tim fell in love with cartooning early and passionately. He was good enough and disciplined enough to work at a number of well-known animation studios, from Bakshi to Disney. Over the years Tim worked with classic characters of American animation, including Scrooge McDuck, Tom and Jerry, Sylvester and Tweety, and The Flintstones. He was fortunate enough to live his childhood dream, and to find that dream fulfilling.

When Parkinson's came to call on Tim, it predominated on his right side. His drawing side. The hand most directly connected to his heart, the hand with which he built his career and his identity, seemed to rebel. It refused the simplest request, disobeyed the most urgent commands. Cornered by his disease, there was no way out but through the wall.

So Tim retaught himself to draw and write left-handed. You can verify for yourself how tough this is by trying it. I did and you can see the result above. Imagine the initial frustration he must have felt as neither hand would perform as he knew it should. No imagination is needed to see the joy he felt when he regained mastery, it is evident in the book of drawings he has completed since. (Tim generously sent me a copy.) The drawings are spontaneous and fluid, the last thing they say to their viewers is Parkinson's Disease. But follow them back far enough and you'll find a wall, a wall with a Tim-shaped hole in it.

A Cartoonist's Cause (Cross post from "Frozen Grin")

(Click image to enlarge.)

I've come across another place where Parkinson's Disease overlaps cartooning. Richard Thompson, a talented cartoonist and the author of the "Cul de Sac" comic strip has announced that he is also in the early stages of the post-diagnosis phase of the disease.

Unfortunately this insidious disease inflicts much damage before it is detectable. Parkinson's Disease is like a slow-moving brain injury that eventually robs its victims of the ability to initiate voluntary movement- to walk, to speak, to draw. There is no cure. However with careful management of the medications, diet, and exercise there is every hope that Richard will be able to produce his beautiful drawings for many years.

In the meantime, Richard's friends have organized a fund-raising effort on behalf of research into Parkinson's Disease through The Michael J. Fox Foundation Cartoonists are asked to contribute artwork for a book and auction to fund the cause. If you're not a cartoonist, but want to help, there is a button there which you can press to donate money.

For the theme of the book, cartoonists are invited to use the Cul de Sac characters as they will in their own artwork, interpreting them freely. My contribution appears above.

Me and Wii (part five: Flying disembodied Panda Heads)

Part freakin' FIVE? I agree, this is taking things a little far, and I promise to move on in the next post. Just hang in a bit longer while I wrap things up. The motivation for this series is serious. There have been many recent articles on how great the Wii is for people with Parkinson's Disease. Check out my favorite, courtesy of the British tab The Sun Banker stopped Parkinson's Disease by playing on Wii (thanks, Jo). This article touted the Wii's miraculous healing powers as being just short of those of the deceased Pope John Paul II, who is inching toward canonization thanks to his alleged miraculous cure of a nun supposed to have Parkinson's. No word yet whether there was a Wii involved.

Aside from the hype, why care about the Wii? First, many people with Parkinson's are unable or unwilling to leave the house for exercise. The Wii allows one to exercise at home, and in case you didn't hear me the first three (thousand) times, exercise is critical to managing PD. Second, one of the categories of skill the Wii tries to work is balance. Balance is a big area of concern to those of us who have PD. It is also one of the more intractable sides of the disorder. When I ask experts about what we can do maintain balance, there is little they can offer. The most practical advice came from a neurologist who advised honing your balance skills before falling becomes a problem. His idea is that if you "overcompensate" up front in the balance area you will have a longer glide-path down than if you neglect these skills before they are seriously menaced by PD.

This leads me to my two questions about the Wii. The first question: Is it interesting enough to keep a person exercising at home? The second: Can the Wii fortify balance in PD patients significantly over time? Alas, the answer to both these questions as tested unscientifically by one person with a huge stake in the answer will not be conclusive. One person is a pitifully small study sample and there are no control subjects. But with Parkinson's so much that is unknown that those of us afflicted must play our hunches as much as we responsibly can. With that in mind, this series will continue. But not until I get a significant amount of time under my belt with the thing so that I can render, perhaps, a little judgment on those questions.

In the space of a month, what have I learned about the Wii? There are a great variety of activities. This bodes well for prospects of continuing to exercise without being derailed by boredom. The experience can have a striking resemblance to reality. Ironically this is especially vivid when something surreal is happening, like getting struck in the face by a flying, disembodied Panda head. And one can genuinely work up a real sweat exercising with imaginary companions. There are certainly aspects of the Wii that are off-putting. Call me oversensitive, but I find garish color and cloying graphics well, garish and cloying. But so far, on balance the machine is ambitious and successful as one part of my exercise routine.

Exiled from my comfort zone

Here is my University of Alaska Anchorage talk, with links galore. I am posting it here underscore the point that life continues even after a diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease. My aim here is to make the case and that growth is not only possible, it may come as a beneficial side effect of trying just to maintain your place.

How one cartoonist was forced into picking
the locks that restrain creativity

Speaking in an academic setting is a little outside my normal turf, but I’ll try to talk in long sentences and use big complicated words so you can understand me.

Last time I remember speaking here, I had the pleasure of introducing Mike Carey at a dinner celebrating the honorary doctorate he was awarded several years ago.

That event was a personal triumph for me as well, as I was able to work of the great underground cartoonist R. Crumb into my remarks, which I’ll bet was a first for a U. A. A. academic ceremony.

Not long after I was diagnosed in early 2002 with Parkinson's Disease, an old friend paid me a visit. A person of warmth and intelligence he predicted a fruitful, if difficult time, a prediction based on experience with others who had faced severe illness. I appreciated the comfort offered, but deep down, and for that matter, from right below the surface, I filed this under "Yeah, right."

Seven years down the road my friend is looking clairvoyant. Since that diagnosis, I have been surfing my strongest creative roll, period.

If his prediction were more detailed it would have included these shocking developments...

The end of my indifference to computers as graphics tools and the shameless embrace of Photoshop, iMovie, Audacity, and Flash animation;

Production of numerous animations for the ADN Web site (as well as a series of personal projects) for which I wrote scripts, and music, did the drawing, and where I had to, supplied the voice and did the foley work;

The launch and maintenance one of the first interactive political cartoon caption contests anywhere, Name That'Toon;

The creation of both an ongoing blog on Parkinsons Disease (Off and On, The Alaska Parkinson's Rag,) and Frozen Grin; and...

Extensive Collaboration with Dr. David Heydrick, a neurologist with Parkinson's Disease on materials for his Web site and a DVD designed to help patients deal effectively with their disease.

All this while remembering to take my pills.

Such a description of my future would have seemed way too implausible for the "Yeah, right" file. It would have gone under under “No way” or possibly “Can I have some of what you’ve been smoking?” But it all happened.

I had no road map for the journey. I just booted up the computer and lit out for the country.

But first, I had to slam into a wall. For a creative person that's as good a start as any. As Rollo May observed, creativity is actually driven by limits. If you have no problems, you need no solutions. Luckily for me, I had problems aplenty.

Discomfort in a literal sense began to hedge me in. Repetitive strain problems that I have no doubt were Parkinson's driven arrived at the point where my resourceful and bright ergonomics doctor ran out of ideas that would keep me drawing.

This was a double blow, first because drawing has been a large part of my self identity since I was a second-grader. And second, it has always been my living. I wasn't ready to give it up to Parkinson's Disease.

I knew that there were electronic drawing pads that would enable me to approximate the correct posture of a typist while I was drawing. Using the pad, I can keep my elbows in a natural comfortable angle while holding my head level to look a computer screen, where drawings unfold in a way that is magical.

When I pitched this idea to my doctor, a look of relief crossed his face. He smiled, and replied that it would work. And so far, it does. And it did far more. It was almost like a time machine that transported me from the 19th Century into the 21st. Although it took me a while to realize that I should make the trip.

At the News I was producing cartoons in the same way that Thomas Nast did back in the days of the Civil War. Pen and ink. The lyric vitality of a spontaneously drawn line and its power to describe and suggest was what attracted me to drawing in the first place. I set about recreating that look with the electronic pad and stylus.

Drawing while watching the screen instead of your hands is no big trick. Art students are taught to draw while looking elsewhere. Mastering the program that allows you to draw on the screen (I use Photoshop) was a different story. But that is where I really got lucky. My wife is not only a Photoshop ace, she is also a patient teacher.

Whenever I got stuck, bewildered, frustrated or exhausted, Pam would sort things out.
Eventually I arrived at my goal of being able to produce work on the computer that was
indistinguishable from my pre-computer cartoons.

If you look closely at one of my old cartoons you will see that the gray tones are made up of fine lines. This is a technique that is called “hatching”. It is popular among newspaper cartoonists because the presses we have reproduce it well.
That was the look I worked to recapture on the computer. After much floundering, I finally nailed it.

When I arrived at that lofty peak, that desperately sought grail, that ultimate moment...(By the way, if some of you would start humming the theme from “Chariots of Fire here it will add greatly to the impact.)... that ultimate moment dearly bought with toil and frustration, that apex of mastery when I finally was able to reproduce the old style, I was rewarded with a moment of clarity.

I realized that recreating my old look was a stupid idea.

Take a two thousand dollar machine, equip it with some of the most sophisticated software available, and turn it into a fifty cent pen. Brilliant, wouldn't you agree? That's when I decided it was time I left the 19th Century.

Since then I have been on a full-scale creative bender, exploiting the color, texture and effects at the computer makes possible. I began exploring and picking up steam, incorporating graded tones, trying to work them in with my old style.

Progressing to a full marriage of old and new

Where to go from there? With my cartoons now appearing on the Web, it was on to color.

Meanwhile I was kicking around the idea of animations. The Mac comes loaded with a
movie program (iMovie, old version) that I realized I could turn into a primitive animation application, essentially by speeding up slide shows.

This led to a grandiose plan to webcast a weekly political satire program, only parts of which got off the ground.

Eventually the limitations of iMovie as an animation program pushed me to learning Flash. Flash can be daunting. It's like one of those amazing pipe organs with multiple sets of pipes, keyboards and pedals. The buzz among my fellow Civil War-era cartoonists was about how complex and difficult to master it is. When I sat down with the first tutorial in which the object is to make a simple ball shape roll across the screen the ball just squatted immobile, passive aggressive to the max.

But by now I had a grounding that made the prospect of tangling with flash less daunting. First, my experience with Photoshop convinced me I could learn this stuff. And by the way if I can, you can. Second I was building a critical mass of familiarity with approaches and techniques that seem to recur in these programs, stuff like time lines and layers begins to look familiar, and in the case of flash and Photoshop, both are made by the same company and share many common features. Third, and most important, what those cartoonists who had taken on flash already didn't mention was...( and if you're taking notes, write this down in all caps and highlight it with your boldest color...)

it is a blast.

Flash puts more potential and control over more facets of your creativity than anything I can think of. You can make up your own stories, import your own music, draw your own
images and bundle them all together.

And they come alive! (maniacal, sinister laughter here)

After some practice and some time studying a few books, I learned enough of my little
corner of that massive organ to play tunes I couldn't even have imagined without this
instrument.

I believe that one of the important jobs of a news organization is fostering a sense of
place. And when appropriate, celebrating it. Especially when that place is as vivid
and unique as Alaska.

This was what led me to this next piece for the paper’s Web site. It’s called “Susitna Story” The script is reincarnated from a We Alaskans project, think Charlie Daniels meets Robert Service in the Mat-Su area.

What liberated this eruption of creativity? I believe it was a combination of things. A feeling of exhilaration as my medications finally restored my old abilities, which the disease had been subtly and significantly stifling over a period of years. Along with that came a sense of urgency driven by my own circumstances and the crisis that was rapidly overtaking the media world. I was also intoxicated with the amazing potential that was now opened by the suite of programs that I had begun to use.

And did I mention fun?

Finally, there was the support of editors and the tradition of experimentation at the Daily News that goes back at least to the early 70’s when Publishers Kay and Larry Fanning set the swashbuckling tone that I found when I arrived at the paper in 1982.

Unfortunately, the reality of my progressing disease and the regressing newspaper
industry forced me to bail out.

But not to stop. On leaving the Daily News, I started my blog “Frozen Grin” where this
next piece appeared.

So what is the moral of this story? I was forced by circumstance out of my comfort zone. But I'll trade a certain of comfort for passion and excitement. Giving up the 19th Century to embrace the potential of the 21st made it possible to redefine myself from cartoonist to cartoonist/writer/musician/animator at a time when Parkinson’s Disease has been trying to define me as "disabled".

Imagine what it can do for you.