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for illustration friday ... {help}

Because she always does help, everytime I reach for her sad, gun-metal storm of a voice.

Rejection City looks a lot like Poopville

Not one but two rejections the last two days, one from the Sun (for a little story called I Am Here Now ) and one from the 'Lists' department at McSweeney's . Merry Christmas! Anyway, I offer up the second rejection (below) in the spirit of the season. OTHER 'IF I DID IT' BOOK PROJECTS THAT OJ MAY WANT TO CONSIDER by Darryl Berger If I Did It: Jing Ke's attempted assassination of Qin Shi Huang (first emperor of unified China, 221 BC Р210 BC) OJ notes РSee, an NFL running back knows how to handle pressure. So I would never have fucked that up. If I Did It: The Assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar, 44 BC OJ notes РThis is a gang thing. Not a Columbian drug-gang thing, but still: good team effort. If I Did It: The Assassination of Henry III of France, 1589 OJ notes РThis Jacques Cl̩ment? He was some kind of demented religious dude, got up close to the king by pretending to have a secret message. Me, I'd just fake left and go right. Shoot and scoot, mother

ship of fools, island of clowns

Watching Survivor: Cook Islands last night gave me a sudden ken for William Golding's Lord of the Flies : there he was, a real-life incarnation of Piggy, being abused by a whole gang of Jacks. And while Jonathan didn't receive the heavy-rock-to-the-skull treatment, the ritualized social equivalent was intended as no less hurtful when he was unanimously repudiated and cast out by his 'Aitutonga' tribe. What a spectacle it was, this tribe so glutted with vitriol and self-righteousness. And this in a game where everyone (save two of them) gets it in the end, usually by way of betrayal, usually square in the back. Yet even from this kind of Machiavellian environment there still has to be a 'villain'. Jonathan was a villain because he was told so, over and over again, by the players he had 'betrayed' when he flipped to the better-positioned faction. While there were a couple of adult-sounding but clichéd metaphor devices in use ('cancer' and 'rat

for illustration friday ... {might}

A certain someone advised me that using a king for the concept of 'might' would be a cliché ... of course, that same certain-someone once believed me when I told her about an episode of Grey's Anatomy (she had missed it) which saw the gruesome death of three of the main characters in a boiler-room explosion ... yeah, the major networks are always taking risks like that. And: oh yeah, I'm totally believable. Just check my record!

it's a red dog

A dog from way back, that I've used for a variety of things, and now he's red.

for illustration friday ... {invention}

What an awful, awful thing: invented truth for a quarter.

the dictator is dead

Death of a dictator: let the veiled grieving begin.

bedbugs: what's not to love?

This one's for you, Adrienne.

poker is about getting paid

A lot of people (read: wienies) couldn't make it for Leo's home game last Friday, just four around the table but it was good fun anyway. Mostly for me. I won a couple of hands. Maybe two or three. Or fifty or sixty. Hey, who has time to count when you're so busy stacking chips? So I cleaned everybody out; that's what Christmas is all about. Don't worry, I took enough abuse about it. Anyway, thanks for hosting, Leo!

reminds me of evil clowns ...

I entered this painting of Jon's in Penelope's Halloween contest ... great artwork, should have won, but the judges went for cutesy instead. So it goes.

I dream of Jeannie ... or winning at poker.

Since I already have this week's Illustration Friday topic covered ( smoke ), I thought I'd write a few words on last Thursday's poker game. It was fun. Improbably, I won. Poor Leo: he must have had a dozen times the stack I did, yet our heads-up confrontation saw him gutted in no time flat (it probably didn't help to have an I-want-to-go-home-now Adam jeering at him in the background). Of course I had to get lucky, but the main thing was that he wouldn't let me see any cards for cheap, so my decisions were extremely simplified (all-in or fold). Martini was (surprisingly) cautious, Alex was characteristically unpredictable (that Q-9 all-in will always be a personal favourite of mine) and Flo was not only suffering from incompetent dentistry but extremely uneven luck (isn't that how it always goes for the host?). Okay, while I'm tempted to wrap up with some jokes about cheating here, I'm told that's not very funny, so I'll just thank Flo for orga

for illustration friday ... {wind}

Although a certain Big Head would be perfect for this theme, I've put up a small work in scratchboard instead.

for illustration friday ... {ghost}

These ghosts (ghost kings? kingly ghosts? ghostly kings?) were done a few years ago as an editorial illustration for Subterrain magazine ... now I can't decide if they work better cropped ...

drawing Halloween ...

I have this piece in Penelope's Halloween contest , a simple acrylic on canvas, as clear and direct as a death rattle. The rest of the field is all over the place, from the professional to the amateurish (my favourites tending towards that latter downward slope, like the child's drawing of a two-headed, orange dragon further scorching an already blackened skeleton). Anyway, it's all just fun.

for illustration friday ... {smitten}

I originally posted this as a sketch ... but then felt compelled to have another go at it on canvas ... although the phone now issues smoke instead of notes, the first caption can more or less stand ... My acolyte at the telephone ... she might be more enraptured or entranced, but smitten is just an adolescent version of that time when words become music.

for illustration friday ... {more trouble}

Double trouble: this bad Buddha's name is Martin, and he's a full year's worth of involution and mayhem.

for illustration friday ... {trouble}

The most obvious kind of trouble ... I took my pistol and a hundred-dollar bill, I had everything I need to get me killed ... from a Steve Earle song called South Nashville Blues .

pass me the make-up gun

Exhausted and ruined, with holes where my insides should be, dreaming about trains and money ... otherwise known as back from two weeks' holidays ... amazingly, it turns out you can have a vacation in Saskatchewan (and it can even be based on seeing your family) ... It was all good: seeing mom (in time for her 65th birthday!), all my brothers (Jaime, Colin, Jon and Kevin) and my sister Mary Ann, meeting my nephew Shawn (the newest baby) for the first time, torturing the mentalists (Ryer and Landon) as much as possible (and even teasing their mother a little bit), eating cake with my friend Stephanie, and spending as much time as possible with Adrienne, who is so lovely with her orange bangs that I gave her this little painting ...

fifty-five words ...

55 Words is a wee site about wee stories ... stories 55 words long, to be exact. Flash fiction is tough enough, but this is like making a face out of six inches of string. Anyway, you can see my attempt at it here .

for illustration friday ... {change}

Sometimes, change is hard. This crying face belongs to a seed named Lillian, who doesn't understand why she's been abandoned in the cold, dark earth. So Mother Earth comes along, to tell Lillian about the changes in store for her, and, in that Mother-Earthy way, what fucking time it is, and suddenly everything's wonderful again. Right. Anyway, these two plates are from the drawings I did for Keitha's (failed) book.

Sebastien has two brains.

Well, Sebastien's poker brain was blanging away at full tilt last night; when I left he had an enormous chip lead, probably four times the size of everyone else's stack combined, and I'm sure he killed the table in short order. Like I said at the time, he was due. A fun but frustrating night: I blew all my luck on one spectacular hand. An ironic God gave me four Aces when I really only need one, and after that said I was done, nothing but 10-4, 8-3, 9-5 ... I folded more hands in the course of one game then I ever have in my entire life. Usually -- as Leo likes to point out -- I am an automatic calling machine. Finally I saw two cards with smirking faces on them, a Jack and a Queen, and pushed all-in. Of course Tracey had a stupid Ace. Oh well, she's happier when she's winning. Anyway, I haven't won a damn thing in three games straight now. Thanks, Seb, for the hospitality once again. I'm (hopefully) moving on up to a bigger place in January so I can reliev

for illustration friday ... {farm}

Actually, Animal Farm : it's 1984 with charming animals, and of course it's the tricksy pigs who slowly but surely betray the revolution. A dystopia by any other name, especially when one remembers poor Boxer.

for illustration friday ... {safe}

A hero to keep us safe: might as well look inside. A small tragedy on canvas, which I gave to my friend Stephanie, who I really need to call, soon, just to see if she's okay.

for illustration friday ... {run}

Pizarro -- like all the conquistadors -- arrived like a disaster. His little army of less than two hundred adventurers plundered an Inca empire of over five million. Those who didn't run (the Inca king Atahuallpa was captured and imprisoned, tried to buy his freedom with rooms filled with gold; in the end the Spaniards strangled him) died in heaps from a smallpox epidemic. When I look at Pizarro's picture, all I can think is: danger .

Victory is mine!

Jean-Paul Sartre, the original Mr.Happy, said: Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat. I guess he was talking about all the blood and the horror and the heyheyhey, after which nobody gets a good night's sleep. Still, I'll take my chances with the side doing the celebratory looting. With that in mind, I'm happy to report that my own one-man, one-sided war with McSweeney's (see my first few cracks at it , and then this and this and this and even this for the proper background in this most righteous of fights) is finally over, their surrender coming in the form of publishing one of my lists . You can see it ... here . ;}

for illustration friday ... {play}

I went to see my niece Stella in Montreal this weekend, where we tried our best to fly a kite. I bought this particular kite because it had princesses on it (Disney pimps them out together like some kind of all-star act) but it seemed too small, while the wind was too gusty and wild and uncivilized. Still, she had great fun running up and down the field, kite bouncing along behind.

a do-over ... {capture} again

I wasn't happy with this (my latest contribution to Illustration Friday , entry below) so I worked it over. I can be fearless when something is fucked. 5x7 inches, canvas, about a dozen layers of paint. It's done now, beaten just enough, I hope.

for illustration friday ... {capture}

The caption/poem, which runs along the side of our heroine's pink dress, goes like this: to wear your wings like broken things and put my heart in a cage.

for illustration friday: {clean}

Is it clean? she asked. Not very, he said. But he wasn't looking, not really. You couldn't wash a heart with just a bucket. Anyway they needed more water, and the clouds were coming in.

a note for sugarbones

Still trying, in my intermittent way, to put up bits of writing, here and there. This poem appeared in the Volume 19 Number 2, Spring 1999 edition of the Pottersfield Portfolio , out of Sydney, Nova Scotia. a note for sugarbones I took down the Arbus clipping from the fridge. I used to press my palm to it in a drunken Saturday night prayer but now it just leers and I want it out of my mornings. Saturday night can stay where it is it's consumption made all the more conspicuous now that the furnace is cold filled with old letters and the resentment of discarded guests the boxes of guilty presents and bundles of cunning hope it all made beautiful blue flames for ahile but now the wires are burned black and none of that works anymore I want to walk through my week like a gentleman, enlightened by the grace of your trembling lips your sweetness your taste.

for illustration friday ... {more opposites}

Conscience, follow lion. Everyone carries a head. Reactions will vary; mostly they're opposed.

for illustration friday ... {opposites}

Kings of opposite, with opposite reactions to opposite things. {Note: I re-did this, the first one being too sketchy.}

for illustration friday: sacrifice

If you're going to sacrifice anything, why not an eye?

for illustration friday: sticky {again}

How old is this one? Yes, that old, as old as the {sticky} idea.

for illustration friday: sticky

A toxic cloud of sticky soldiers.

pinch me

I have a story in the second issue of this wee, start-up literary magazine called Zeugma , out of Newfoundland. A bit about the launch is here . Pinch Me It is morning and they are moving. Still moving. He opens his eyes to windshield-flattened light, to Saskatchewan in spring, on the horizon all around is a colossus of sky, pressing down, seconds awake and he already feels it, hates it, this Biblical immensity without a puff of cloud, where trees stand strangled, twisted into the ground and telephone poles lean guilty like crosses in the ditches. His wife, Rachel, is driving. It makes him sore to think that thought, to see the words in his head. Sore and suddenly sharpened. “Do you know where you’re going?” he asks, looking out on the highway, to its diminishing point of oblivion. On the seat between them is a hand-drawn map, a crooked red star marked Auntie Della’s. “And good morning to you,” she sings back. Most unconvincingly. Trying to bluff him out, he knows her in an instant. St

for illustration friday: rain

And it is raining today, off and on, another damp grey day in Kingston.

for illustration friday: dance

This polite young man was drawn to announce a wedding social: an event distinctive to Manitoba, where the happy couple put on a dance to raise money for their future.

for illustration friday: jungle

Who lives in the jungle? Godzilla (first known as Gojira), that's who. I sent this card to my nephew for his birthday.

yet another rejected list

Yet another rejection from McSweeney's, just in case you'd thought I'd lost the faith. Funny how the name signed doesn't match the name of the sender (assistants do all the dirty work). ----------------- Date: April 18, 2006 1:47:52 PM EDT (CA) To: lists@mcsweeneys.net Subject: lists / BOXING NICKNAMES THAT FAILED TO CATCH ON BOXING NICKNAMES THAT FAILED TO CATCH ON 'Gentle Man-child' Jim Corbett 'Smokin' Cigarettes' Joe Frazier 'Princeton's' Naseem Hamed 'Powdered Sugar' Ray Leonard Ray 'Steam Room' Mancini Benny 'The Tiny Little Kitty' Paret 'Ironic' Mike Tyson Evander 'Value Meal' Holyfield Thomas 'Hit Me' Hearns Hector 'Nacho Man' Camacho Raging Bullshit Gaseous Clay ----------------- From: Jordan Bass Date: June 15, 2006 7:56:51 PM EDT (CA) Subject: RE: lists / BOXING NICKNAMES THAT FAILED TO CATCH ON Hi Darryl, Thanks for sending this in. I think we're gonna pass on it, bu

for illustration friday: (one last) portrait

A portrait of another fictional character: her name is Chixi-Shin, from a story called How to Read Cards .

for illustration friday: portrait

If you look (you have to look), there's a bride in there, and a rather demure at that, if only she wasn't wearing so much red ink.

for illustration friday: portrait

I just uploaded this portrait of Daniel Negreanu at The Art Blog Challenge .

for illustration friday: portrait

This is a portrait of a fictional character named Victory Girl, from a short story I wrote for Anna Camilleri's Red Light anthology from arsenal pulp.

peer pressure

MB recently told me to put more writing on my site. Okay MB; who am I to resist peer pressure? This one's from the beginning: the very first piece I had published, in a literary journal from Newfoundland called the Fiddlehead , way back in the autumn of 1998. (It's also the very first thing I ever submitted, anywhere, which set a rather bad precedent in terms of future expectations.) -------------- The Seven of Cups I've got some real thematic power in my hands today. Here we have Boudica crawling on her big, red belly while the Romans execute a lesson in sword-hard discipline to wild-eyed savages flailing in the mud. (They look just like us.) And here. Machiavelli becomes an adjective for the cunning and diabolical by simply telling the blue-bloods the truth about the most effective ways and means of spilling the red. And look at this: Napoleon teaches the whole wide world about monuments to posterity; a colossus of ego made diminutive on a tiny island. Real iron-fisted st

for illustration friday: cake

Actually, it's the dark dream of cake.

for illustration friday: sorry

And he certainly is sorry, this tragic fellow from quite a few years ago ... to the point of quoting Saint-Exupery.

for illustration friday: devil classic

The first of the worst, supposedly, while he considered himself absolutely divine ... anyway, despite drawing him a very long time ago, I do remember giving him a mirror to illustrate 'pride'.

for illustration friday: it's angels and devils

These are red, simplified versions of some flawed angels I painted at Christmas.

for illustration friday: it's angels and devils

This is another of Jon's illustrations, and here the devil is in plain sight, misshapen and monstrous, with no veneer at all.

for illustration friday: it's angels and devils

This is my brother Jon's work, which is always rather churning and tortured. It's from a series of drawings he did as a favour to me ... "filler" artwork for a re-design of a fledgling litzine ... until the editors got cold feet and pulled the plug (boo!).

list number 2; rejected

Hmmmmm ... another rejection from McSweeney's, but the surprising thing about this one is that it's worded differently from the last (see 'list; rejected') ... I'm probably reading too much into it, however, and this editor just has the good grace or creativity to alternate between electronic rejection slips ... ----------------- Date: April 18, 2006 1:47:52 PM EDT (CA) To: lists@mcsweeneys.net Subject: lists / SHOPPING LIST FOR MY PITY PARTY SHOPPING LIST FOR MY PITY PARTY * party streamers, wet * party hats, half-singed, extra-small * one marble cake, footprint in icing * paper plates, extra flimsy * one stripper, extra Polish * one cup heavy whipping cream * one jar no-name maraschino cherries * one cd, slightly scratched * one soul, lightly beaten * one teaspoon salt, for wounds ----------------- From: lists@mcsweeneys.net Date: April 24, 2006 4:16:37 PM EDT (CA) Subject: RE: lists / SHOPPING LIST FOR MY PITY PARTY Darryl, I'm passing on this. Thanks for th

for illustration friday: the theme is 'robot'

This robot – actually he just has some robotic tendencies, and the rest is erringly human – comes from an old attempt at science fiction, which was all the usual stuff about a demented Queen and the end of the world. Thankfully, it didn't go anywhere.

for illustration friday: the theme is 'spotted'

I gave this painted pooch to my friend Nicole (I think), who can be excused for losing it (I bet) during her recent wanderings.

list; rejected

Well, while my blood feud with McSweeney's continues, I've decided to give the automatic-rejection generator from their Open Letters department a much-needed rest, and instead go after another close cousin. Here's a recent submission to their 'Lists' category. -------------------- Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 11:26:01 -0400 To: lists@mcsweeneys.net Subject: lists / IF MY MORNINGS WERE NAMED LIKE BAD BREAKFAST SPECIALS IF MY MORNINGS WERE NAMED LIKE BAD BREAKFAST SPECIALS Last-Minute Scrambler, Again Five-Alarm Mishmash Two Eggs with Sausage Over-Easy, Hurry Up Pork and Beans Not So Sunny Side Up Guck Surprise My Bagel, Lightly-Toasted -------------------- From: lists@mcsweeneys.net Date: April 15, 2006 8:47:42 PM EDT (CA) Subject: RE: lists / IF MY MORNINGS WERE NAMED LIKE BAD BREAKFAST SPECIALS Darryl, We won't be able to use this at the site, but I appreciated having the chance to see it. Regards, Benjamin Cohen

for illustration friday; the theme is speed

Trouble is always in a hurry, isn't it? It's a pilot with speed and fire and gravity gone bad.

the indisputable weight of the ocean

People are always telling me that my work is too dark. So I've put up this sunnier story, but even it has a shadow, as its original publisher – a fine Atlantic Canadian literary magazine called the Gaspereau Review – is no longer in business. ---------------- It was a simple enough thing and that thing was simply this: Edmund Kelley was a gentleman. Of course his mom called him her 'little gentleman', as in 'Oh Edmund, you are my perfect little gentleman,' which did seem to hold to a certain logic that these type of things often follow, considering her affection for him and the fact that he was, after all, only ten years old. Still, Edmund himself was not particularly fond of the diminutive aspect of that title. Gentleman was enough; gentleman summed up the whole thing rather nicely, thank you. He was definitely a more refined version of your average child. He lived in a state of perpetual Sunday m

for illustration friday: the theme is 'spring'

Another plate from Keitha's failed book; in this one, Mother Earth speaks gently to a very nervous seed.