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Showing posts from March, 2010

Burning Houses

cigar-tin story #63 The minute a manager comes into my office and says the words, "Excel spreadsheet," I know I am in trouble. Psychic tears will be shed, clotted blood will not flow. There will be no happy ending. In its place will be some hoo-ha about how he or she (let's just say "she" to give the sisters a win) wants to talk about "work flow," as if work was some magical river that I only occasionally tried to cross, and her efforts were like a bridge, decorated with banners, with an ice-cream stand on the other side. Bring out the hammers. Bring out the 80K salary, and the online masters degree in project management, and the claw-fisted attempts to *manage*. Meanwhile, you've been wandering in a sort of workplace wilderness for years. No promotions or courses or professional development for you. Hell, you've even had to bring in your own office supplies. And the work you've been doing has been like this angry, retarded dog, who needs

finals

Last week I found out that I'm a finalist for The Malahat Review's 2010 Novella Prize , for my illustrated story Broken Hill . The list of finalists are: Darryl Berger, "Broken Hill (an illustrated story)" Kim Clark, "Solitaire" Cary Fagan, "The Hebrew Sorcerer" Don McKay, "Gambari" Tony Tulathimutte, "Brains" D. W. Wilson, "Valley Echo" Broken Hill is an anti-war book and a lonely-hearts story: a correspondence between a cavalry officer and a psychiatric nurse, set in a dystopian universe. Really, it's about lies -- the kind we tell and the kind we carry. I don't normally enter contests but I thought this might be a good way to promote my short story collection ( Punishing Ugly Children ) coming out in the fall. People often need some kind of endorsement -- whether by way of a blurb from a well-known author, a good review or the writer being an award winner -- before they'll take a chance on a book. I rea

first night

C and I went out to see Henry Rollins last night; it was our first night out together since Chicken Licken was born. Almost six months. Henry has mellowed a bit. He's older, somehow smaller. The bad language has been almost completely excised. It's a spoken word tour, and what he speaks about is travel and politics. The bad-dream stories about growing up, the death-legion stuff of his Black Flag days is gone now. He's doing travel writing in front of a microphone, with liberal doses of apology and hope (for America, for the future, etc). The one aspect of former Henry which still comes through -- in spades -- is his relentlessness. He walked out on stage, assumed a pose in front of the microphone, and then started talking, with force, with energy, for three hours . He did not pause, he did not pace, he did not get a glass of water. And my ass *melted* into that church pew. Of course, his best piece was about commitment: about being the most creative force that you can be, a

super spastic idiomatic fantastic

I have a fairly hysterical friend who is always getting fairly hysterical about whatever latest politically incorrect (according to her) remark I've just made. Yesterday she was on me for using the phrase " Chinese Auction " to describe the type of prize lottery they have at wedding socials. She had no idea what the term meant, or how a Chinese auction works , but she knew -- she just knew, in her heart of hearts -- that it was racist. "Well, I guess I won't tell you about the Italian sausage we're having for supper," I said. When we go for walks around campus, she gets wildly upset when I want to take shortcuts through a playing field instead of sticking to the sidewalk. "It just feels disrespectful," she says. "You mean the same field they play rugby on?" I ask. Her head would literally pop off if she saw me walk through the Memorial Arch each morning on my way to work. The point I always make to her is that she's free to make

it's the work, stupid

Henri Matisse, "Studio under the Eaves" Big wet snow and that tinking, crinkling noise from the tin rain gutters outside my studio window. It's been feeling like winter all weekend. Of course last week was all soft gusts of wind and wan sun, and downtown was filthy with Queens students in knee-length shorts, rifling through milk crates full of used LP's or tilting around in glitter and giggles and heels the length of lightning. Too much money and the brain power of fluorescent bulbs, and so much disappointment to follow, not least with the weather. Speaking of disappointment: no free wireless at the studio this Sunday. Either it's disappeared or someone's smartened up and added a password. But sometimes these things are a blessing, because I didn't spend x amount of time mining my email for all the things I need to do, and people I need to get back to (people: an ongoing pain in the ass), and making my usual lists and mind maps and Venn diagrams and remin

dress up

cigar-tin story #62 ; see all of them here . There was a white dress shirt in the middle of the street this morning. It had spray paint on the cuffs. I stepped around it like I would a dead animal and thought, Well, that's perfect. When we were kids, we always had the same Halloween costume: a white dress shirt with the sleeves and tails stylishly shredded, decorated with pumpkins and tombstones and smiling ghosties, all drawn by hand in black marker (in fact, my mom was quite the marker artist ... she even did a Charlie Brown mural along the basement wall). Add some face paint and there you go. It was, I guess, a coping strategy; there were seven of us, eventually, after all. Besides, there just wasn't that many choices; there certainly wasn't the plastic extravaganza that you see in stores now, where any kid can be just about anything he or she wants for $19.99, with about zero imagination involved. And our big shirts nicely accommodated a parka underneath, and mittens,

this little light

You may have noticed that I've been a bit down lately, as in knocked down , at the hands of two twists I affectionately refer to as Greedy and Stupid. Greedy, of course, tends to come at you with sneak attacks and wild rushes, and score his licks in bunches. He's a pouncer, like Cato in the Pink Panther. He'll say, Oh, I just need a couple of minor changes on that brochure, and then he'll smash a vase over your head by telling you that you still need to add the entire French translation. Just squeeze it in. He's a thief, a burglar, a shakedown artist. It's Stupid who you need to worry about. He's got all sorts of ungodly shit done up in Excel or PowerPoint or fucking Word, so in his mind it's pretty much done, and he can't understand why it can't just be sent off to the printer's, once you've scanned it or waved your wand over it or whatever it is you graphic design guys do. He's a blunt instrument, an unstoppable force, like a bear

and now for something appallingly stupid

If you ever have a child that comes up to you and says, Golly, I'd sure like to become a graphic designer someday! , then it is an absolute duty -- if there is any decent bone in your being, and any hope for your eventual salvation -- in your role as Parent or Responsible Adult or Only Available Agent of Reason and Anti-Mentalism, to throw yourself to the floor and weep and wail and pull your hair and gnash your teeth until that child promises, through quivering lip and a thundercloud of tears, to never, ever talk that kind of shit again. Ever. What a grotesquely stupid way to make a living. You take a conceit -- imagination, artistic ability, aesthetic experience -- and put it in the service of the kind of clients who divide their wall space between Anne Geddes and Robert Bateman (that's *prints*, not actual paintings ... with Celine Dion and Loreenna McKennitt as a soundtrack). Because creative endeavours *never* get twisted into the ground by money. Could you centre tha

thoughts on sunday

untitled ; pen and ink on a page from an old math text book; for an illustrated novella. Wind and rain, rain and wind: it's Sunday morning, after all. Our tin roof pinging and clicking and racketing all night, until the first light of morning, which was just in time to take a squirming Oona downstairs, and already an hour late thanks to some gentleman's agreement made by some old white guys about a million years ago. Spring forward, young man! This was my second trip down the stairs in near darkness, the first one made to throw out a belligerently stupid cat who was crying at the bedroom door. He then spent the next few hours in the rain, crying at the back door. In blackjack, they call this a push. This was the fat one, of course. The skinny one (or scared one) was hiding somewhere in the living room, wishing he was dead, or that at least his fur would burst into fire. So: wind and rain. The fat one came tearing in as I left the house for the studio. Sky like wet sand, streets

too diffused

charger ; pen and ink on a page from an old math textbook; drawing for an illustrated novella. I was just telling someone how I've tried to reconcile myself to seeing my efforts as more *diffused* lately ... which makes my life sound like a garden, and my efforts as some kind of sputtering watering can, with a little here and a little there, and many hopes that I'm making progress. The only trouble is, there's always a plant or two that gets screwed, and then there they are, their forgotten corpses unwound before you. Looking for a certain painting this week, I came across a whole whack of smaller paintings that I somehow never uploaded to my flickr site. Or maybe I did upload them, and grouped them somehow, and then deleted that group. Who the hell knows? I certainly don't. Which wouldn't matter, only I count on my flickr site as a kind of record, or inventory. It's where you can go to see just artwork (meaning: all of it), without any of the narrating or ot

sparrow hair

Mixed media on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, the string series continues. This is the third painting in a series of three that I dropped off at Studio 330 last night. Each painting has a story, and each story is linked. Also, each painting is meant to be seen in tenebrous light, against the endless black walls they have in there. Until the end of March.

all my magicks

Mixed media on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, the string series continues. This is the second painting in a series of three that I'm hanging in Studio 330 for the rest of March. Each painting has a story, and each story is linked. Also, each painting is meant to be seen in dim (subdued) light. One last thing: someone spilled a bag of Twizzlers halfway up our street; if they're yours, please come and eat them (I'm sure they're still good).

skeleton lamp

skeleton lamp ; mixed media on canvas, 14 x 14 inches, the string series continues. This is the first (actually, middle) painting in a series of three that I'm hanging in Studio 330 for the rest of March. They have a big, gorgeous black wall in there, with much moody and subdued lighting, so I've tried to make paintings which take advantage of that particular kind of warm dimness. The title of this image comes from its model (third image, bottom) and the lighting. I'll be writing a wee story for this (and the others as well). Now, please, take a look at Death Bear .

the menace of mentalism

The tenets of mentalism are many and varied. Obviously I can't go into the entire ideology here, but I can at least bring your attention to some of its more pernicious characteristics (we owe the world that much, I think). The principles of mentalism include ... ... laughing in the face of nap time; ... receiving secret radio instructions from the ceiling fan; ... talking to ghosts; ... farting for the proletariate; ... staring contests and, most egregious of all ... ... making light of your hopes, dreams and simple plans for bedtime.

tgif

A wee drawing for our new thank-you cards. Between what people have given to Oona, and all the people who've helped me so far on my book, we have a steady and evolving demand for this kind of stationery. Thank God it's Friday, eh? All this business of getting a ton done can be rather tiring. But we all know that *summer* is lurking right around the corner, whereupon all of us just completely lose our minds. Now, who wants ice-cream?

marching

Much *dust* these days, and little tsunamis of garbage as well, giving the whole place some kind of end-of-the-earth feel. Mad Max would have a ball. Meanwhile, the rest of us pull up our hoods and turn our backs when the big trucks go thundering by. They've put the Lasalle Causeway inside some kind of industrial blanket of tarp, and plenty of guys in hazmat-type suits are about, standing there with their arms hanging by their sides, and when you go through the improvised walkway there is often that heavy chemical smell, from something undoubtedly with an "x" in its name, right in the middle, and you look down at the water and feel like you're standing at the edge of an immense vat of glue. I've spent the entire winter walking. It's 3.3 kilometres each way, 6.6 kms per day. Often I run errands on the way home though, so let's just say 7 kms. Since November 1st, that's over 500 kms. I wore sneakers the whole time and, just to give you an idea how dry it

Janet, 4:30

I love finding notes like this. It's probably perfectly innocent but ... then again, we don't know Janet, do we? She could be a tigress. She could be a monster of seduction. She might have slapped this note on her lover's forehead as she turned her back on him and walked out the door. And 4:30 could be the highlight of his day, his week, his entire year . When I was a little kid I had a babysitter named Janet. Of course I had a horrible crush on her. But then she'd take us to the park so she could hang out with her friends with the beaded flare jeans, and I'd sit there stewing on the swings, thinking: Stupid hippies.

tarzan, tintin

I had no idea that Tarzan was a Nazi. None . Okay, yes, putting himself at the top of the local species pyramid, that was a clue. And yes, the whole blonde, blue-eyed thing. Brutal minded, violent, contemptuous of civilization. I mean, who names their kid Korak (meaning, the Killer)? Oh well: I guess I can always go back to the innocent antics of Tintin. You know, that fifteen year-old French kid with the cowlick, who runs around with his toy dog and grown sailors , always going off to sea and having adventures ? Run, Tintin. Do not get on that ship. Run.