by Feed your head with a play by Pamela Olson

Created on: March 06, 2009

"Rosie O'Donnell has a magazine, Rachel Ray has a magazine . . .why not Tom Cruise?"

"I had to go to work for the man," is how local Reno artist Brian Krueger describes how he got to Reno. "The man" was a large Reno corporation that had hired Krueger as a graphics designer. Krueger spent his time skewering the mindless corporate stodgies that surrounded him by committing them to posterity in scathing pen-and-ink drawing. 116 of those drawing are in his just published Make Time for Tom, Ruminations on Corporate Damnation where they eloquently and viscerally express, "Everything's derivative . . . it's a culture of mimicry." The prose is Brian Krueger's meticulous obsession with just exactly how much he hated that tortuous job, the sanctimonious people there, the immoral corporations, and the horrifying lifeless corporate mentality. Like the highly skilled and deeply dedicated surgeons in MASH that adopted a lunatic lifestyle as an antidote to the tragedies brought on by the mindless and heartless bureaucracies around them, so also did Brian Krueger.

With echoes of the book and film MASH, and American comic book undergrounder R. Crumb, Brian Krueger's Make Room for Tom, Ruminations on Corporate Damnation is also an incensed ridicule of celebrity's magazine. "Rosie O'Donnell has a magazine, Rachel Ray has a magazine . . .why not Tom Cruise?" Krueger bitingly comments about the gruesome cover of his book. It is one of Brian Krueger's drawings. The cover is four obese and grossly naked men being crucified. Three are screaming in agony as their hands are nailed to each cross. Not the fourth. He's smiling, eyes blank, oblivious, as one of his hands is nailed to his cross while his other hand still confidently clutches a magazine titled Tom. He's still lost in its comforting vacuous corporate distractions to all life and creativity's sacrifices. That is Brian Krueger's sarcastic indictment of how truly useless a corporate "lifestyle" magazine based on the cult of some celebrity's personality is. "Every time someone would tell a joke, it would be a quote from a sitcom."

Krueger says about corporations, "just so left-brained." He says that the early 20th century German Dada artist and social critic, George Grosz, was a primary inspiration for Make Room for Tom. Krueger describes the corporate mentality, devoid of original thought, as "CTD a corporately transmitted disease. It's so creepy, and it happens so slowly, you can't yell and scream."

Because his corporate job was such "a scary, creepy and assiduous existence," Brian Krueger now works as an Art Instructor at Davidson Academy. Davidson Academy is a free public day school for profoundly gifted learners. The Davidson Academy of Nevada is a division of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a national nonprofit organization.

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