Interviewed by Tom Mangan
Mike Leung, artist, entrepreneur, former code warrior.
His Web site is here.
AUTHORS
Michael Fuchs
Elizabeth Hilts
Paul Riddell
Gary Rivlin
Jim Motavalli
Barbara Shafferman
Jules Siegel
Keith Snyder
ARTISTS/POETS/
PHILOSOPHERS
Jon C. Allen
Will Baker
Mike Leung
Jon Sarkin
COOL SITE KEEPERS
Mike Cash
Scott O'Neal Colf
Godfrey Daniels
Cliff Davis, DDS
Tammy Hocking
Wes Modes
Frank Rogan
DIARISTS
Ralph Becker
J. D. Bruns
Linda DeVault
Mike Reed
Moira Richardson
Jessamyn West
FILMMAKERS
JOURNALISTS
Bernie
Mary Cooley-Jones
Lindsay Crysler
Jamie Dupree
M.O.A.T.M.A.I.
David Moll
Robert Niles
John Orr
Steven Ovadia
Pierce Presley
Mack Reed
Rip Rense
Curtis Ross
Neal Ross
John Scalzi
Catherine Seipp
David Sheets
Dwight Silverman
Matt Welch
MOVIE MAVENS
HUMORISTS
Debbie Farmer
Mike Jasper
Madeleine Begun Kane
Patrick Keller
Bob Sassone
Valerie Sprague
Ken Swarmer
Ian Wolff
SOLDIERS
TEACHERS
TECHIES
Chris Adamson
Mike Gunderloy
Michael Ivey
Greg Knauss
Floyd Maxwell
Ellen McDonough
Mike Pingleton
Wayne Thume
John Worth
TEENS
UNDECLARED
WEBLOGGERS
Have to wonder: How does a School for the Arts grad avoid going insane in the rigid, authoritarian environment of the U.S. military?
As far as I know, I was the one reliably sane person there.
I relate the two experiences as my time in two religions. The former as my time in "The Religion Of Making You A One," and the latter as my time in "The Religion Of Making You A Zero." The former experience had grounded me internally, but left me unprepared to navigate the real world. The latter experience showed me how important it was for me to relate what was going on with me internally to the external world. The analogy I like to use (and you'll learn to hate if you catch me using it again) is the Superman/Bizarro relationship.
Superman and Bizarro are both characters like Rip Van Winkle. Rip Van Winkle spends a night in a fantasy world, and returns to the real world 20 years later. Swearing allegiance to the English Crown, he's condemned as a Tory by the American Revolutionaries.
Superman also comes from a fantasy world, Krypton, to arrive into the real world. Bizarro is a guy who goes around calling himself Superman, but in reality he just breaks things. The difference is that he doesn't know how to turn it off. The difference is no one needs to know that Clark Kent is Superman.
My art education made me a Bizarro, and my military training showed me, if nothing else, why I need to work on a mild-mannered alter ego.
You were a programmer in the Air Force. What kind of stuff did you write code for, and how critical was it to the nation's defense?
For me, you just asked about two dozen questions with one question.
In exchange for pledging to defend the Constitution for four years, Uncle Sam promised me computer program training. After six weeks basic training, and 12 weeks computer technical training, I was sent to Offutt Air Force Base, which is 10 miles south of Omaha, Nebraska.
I became one of the system administrators for GCCS, Global Command and Control System, a system to network JOPES databases, Joint Operations Planning and Execution System, where TPFDDS could be created and modified. Whenever I asked what a TPFDD was, people would just rattle off what the acronym stood for (Time-Phased Force and Deployment Data), which wasn't any more descriptive than "Joint Operations Planning and Execution System" was for JOPES. After about a year, I realized that a TPFDD was just fancy government-speak for "a record for big move" of either cargo or non-cargo (people). GCCS was just a bunch of database servers and clients for a handful of users who modified tables, networked globally.
As I showed up in Nebraska, they were just turning on all of the Sun servers and workstations GCCS would be running on. GCCS was being assembled to replace the old mainframe system, WWMCCS (World Wide Military Command and Control System). The users observed no advantage using the newer technology, and preferred using WWMCCS for editing their TPFDD's. So, when you ask what kind of stuff did I write code for, I really didn't do anything, until the very end when they turned WWMCCS off, except goof around a lot. For that first year, when I wasn't asking what a TPFDD was, I was asking what a system administrator was (this was still around 1995). My boss would just hand me the Sun Solaris System Admin guide.
As for how critical our mission was, I guess if some Colonel ordered some tanks or something, and his GCCS was down, or was otherwise experiencing technical difficulty, he would have to resort to arranging the move on the obsolete WWMCCS system.
I love your drawings and I'm wondering, what style would you say they are? Did any other artist inspire them or is it just something you came up with on your own?
Well, my understanding is that style is what you don't know, so unless my mastery exceeded the cumulative skill of every artist ever, my individual style would assert itself naturally (if I let it).
As far as I know, artists follow one of two North Stars. They either have something to say, and are trying to communicate something, or they are trying to advance their form, and are demonstrating new ways to display their medium. I think primarily in terms of the former, and my eyes are constantly searching for new ideas for me to display visually and with as few words as possible. What I'm trying to do isn't very far away from funny hieroglyphics. Craig Swanson of Perspicui-Tees has referred to my style as Minoan.
You're putting your drawings on T-shirts and selling them online. How are things going in the enterprise? Have you accounted for the possibility of being mentioned in the New York TImes or something and suddenly being flooded with 10,000 orders?
I've made enough sales to know that their is an appetite for my art, but can conclude nothing else as of yet. Getting people to accept something new involves convincing people to change, so most of my research has involved the diffusion of innovations (like the Everett Rogers book of the same name). There are primarily two paths to releasing new ideas into the mainstream. You can either put your efforts into persuading people to accept the change you propose, or you can try and reach the people who are most likely to already be thinking along the lines of accepting what you present, that no one else is presenting. What I do is very far away from how most people think, so my efforts at presenting my art over the last year have been at trying to reach the people who are predisposed to liking what I do.
I've tried classified ads in various arenas, and, unfortunately, made progress in the venue where it was most expensive for me to advertise: Rolling Stone magazine. I've just sent them a check covering most of my savings to begin picture display ads beginning at the end of February. As for accounting for the possibility of being mentioned in something like the New York Times or suddenly being flooded with 10,000 orders, well, I figure there are good problems, and there are problems to be avoided, like getting 300 orders instead of 3000. To me it looks like minimizing the bad problems comes before controlling the good problems. Maybe the secret to life is to set yourself up for the good problems. I may know definitively this April.
What was the hardest thing to get used to when you moved to San Francisco?
Well, immediately after leaving the military, I experienced a sharp contrast in the amount of certainty in my life. When I started art school after leaving high school, I engaged some uncertainty, but I was commuting to school, and would go home every night to Mom and Dad. Also, I was working part time as a cashier, and being a wage-slave, being part of a union, having your health coverage, it meant I could do badly in art school and not suffer any great change in my life as I knew it then.
My time in the military was much like that. The government houses and feeds you while you learn how to type things into the computer. If I do badly today, I can always start again tomorrow. After my enlistment, my friend Catherine set me up with a really great place in Minneapolis, but looking for work in a new town turned me into a monster, putting a strain on our relationship. She decided to patch things up with her boyfriend and go to grad school in Seattle, leaving me friendless in Minneapolis.
I mention that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, to give people an idea where I live, but I actually live in Walnut Creek. Intellectually I had always accepted that my life was uncertain, but now I've spent over a year living with uncertainty as a constant sensation. The business and technical landscape here is constantly changing, having two jobs disappear from me since my move here last spring. The hardest thing to get used to is that I'm not very good at what amounts to daily life to most people. So now I'm cornered into pursuing what I enjoy doing.
It's been my experience that the restaurants in San Francisco are wonderful as long as you don't mind shelling out a day's pay for a single meal. Can you recommend any really good places in Fog City that have great food at less stratospheric prices?
Except for sushi, I have very lowbrow tastes. I eat the same meals everyday when I'm at home: cold-cut sandwiches for protein, pasta for dinner, a serving of spinach for added potassium, and three cups of calcium-spiked orange juice. I treat myself to two cinnamon frosted pop tarts everyday, and coke slurpies twice a week, and I may be cutting even that out in the future.
In the city, I always recommend a 24 hour diner called Cafe Mason, on Mason Street running north of Market. For the $5.50 minimum, you can get pancakes, French toast, and eggs anytime. My brother Vitus visited for a work-related conference a few weeks ago. I recommended the Cafe Mason, but our brother Peter is a health inspector, and discourages anyone from going to a 24-hour place, because they never close for cleaning. So Vitus found a fancy-schmancy place called, I think, Crustaceans. For $13, I got 6 shrimp cooked as ravioli in a cream sauce, and not even a salt shaker on the table. It's experiences like that that reaffirms my taste in things lowbrow.
What do you wonder most often about the people who read your online journal?
Mostly I wonder what people are making of what I present.
Most journaler readers don't know what to make of my journal, because most journalers are in it to connect with people and to socialize with each other. For example, anyone who keeps half a dozen or more OLJ's bookmarked, and visit them regularly, may be aware that Jim Valvis, in his OLJ , recently posted an entry that was very discouraging of anyone spending any time maintaining an online journal. He got a very strong negative reaction to his opinion, but very few people seemed interested in addressing his reasoning.
Most criticism to Jim's opinion took the form of personal attacks and insults. Most people disagreed with Jim, but very few were interested in examining the truth of his and our actions. One journaler, who gave a very vicious and unfair (and very funny) attack on Jim's entry immediately inspired a forum for women to propose marriage to the attacker, Stee. (Hell, it was so funny, I was half-ready to propose to Stee myself.) For a few weeks in January of 2000, in the online journal community, people knew who you were by how strongly you humiliated Jim Valvis.
I think we see something similar happening in the fight over abortion rights. The true underlying question in this fight is, "At what point does an organism become an individual human being?" But no one, to me, seems very interested in answering this question. One side says at the moment of conception, because that's the idiot-proof answer to avoid God's wrath. Another side says that, between Mom and whatever lives off of Mom, Mom's word is law. It's a huge political issue, I don't see any protesters or political leaders interested in addressing the underlying question, "At what point does an organism become an individual human being?" I wouldn't be very shocked if someone was to demonstrate that all forms of warfare and ethnic cleansing were just people's attempt at connecting with "their team" taken too far.
I don't primarily maintain a journal to connect and socialize with other people. There is that aspect of it, but I'm not very good at it. Mostly I maintain my journal to wipe the slate of my mind clean, sort of like how ants will annihilate everything in the territory around their anthill (often taking my readers through a gauntlet of wild, ungraceful, abstract leaps, like this deviating answer to your seventh question).
(I'm actually very grateful to Jim, because as far as I know, I'm not very far away from eliciting such a reaction from something I may say, and now have an idea what it will look like should I cross that line of public opinion.)
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