Friday morning movie

Well, I better put up a new Oona movie or grandma's head will explode.

Also: in keeping with my Christmas mood, today's word is better.

Blood Meridian

The Kid; pen and ink on paper.

Blood Meridian (Or the Evening Redness in the West)

What a damnable, difficult book. It is violence and death and the Book of Daniel if it was about the Old West. If it was an animal it would be obviously, drunkenly, ferociously male, completely bereft of anything to redeem it to the female species save for a bloodied but impressive sense of fate (sorry, Nathan's girlfriend).

It is as western as No Country for Old Men and as doomed as The Road but it has none of their collected sense of impetus and danger. Instead it shows itself like a tintype held up to a campfire, this wondrous but foiling language that you have to squeeze away at with your thumb to only half understand the terrible picture underneath. Beware that this is a gifted author who is not above just making up words, full stop.

The story is about a character we know only as The Kid but he's more like a welcome vantage point than any creature that we could claim to know. He disappears for ages. In his place we get a host of murderers and proto-anarchists, people like Toadvine and the judge and Glanton and the ex-priest, men whose main business is redeeming scalps but who will rob and desecrate as suits them. They traverse a landscape between the Mexico and Texas borders that very quickly reveals itself as a contender for the tenth level of the Inferno.

The ending is a profane mystery with a fable on top. When I finished this book last night my reaction was to reach over and turn out the light.

Christmas ruins everything

Here's C, looking all Santa-is-magic. Which is fine and good and heartwarming (even if the inflatable reindeer is a bit sad). And this is what Christmas should be -- a kid's holiday, centred around the idea of giving. (And let's not even pretend with the whole Jesus thing because I don't know any kids who have the faintest idea who Jesus is. They don't even do the play anymore in school, do they?)

It's all the rest of it that makes me wish Christmas didn't exist. The relentless marketing, the endless heaps of crap in the stores, the tinned music, the forced cheer and obligatory social events. Who has not been late and crowded and half sick with cold or flu or stress on a plane, train or automobile at some point during the Christmas season and wished that they were dead?

There was a story on the radio this morning about a poll showing that Canadians intended to spend less this Christmas. What a load of horseshit. The same people will always go grinning into the gunfire of chintziness and debt and taking grandma out of the home for the day so we can all see her used kleenex collection and watch her talk to herself.

Someone just herd me out back with the other malcontents and shoot me now.

let the weeping begin

There was a time in my life when I grieved for all the stupid things I did in my youth. This is not to say that stupid things have left my life, or that I consider myself above or beyond their reach. But there is a particular kind of stupid thing -- a kind of stupid thing that can only be possible (I hope) in one's teens or twenties -- that still makes me wince from its memory. Like walking to school with wet hair in the dead of winter. Or making a joke about mamma's boys to the guy whose mother just died. Or shouting expletives at my friends when a gaggle of teachers was standing right behind me. And these are the examples that are fit for public consumption.

This morning -- this brisk November morning in Canada -- I walked by a teenage girl waiting at the edge of her front lawn for her ride to school, and quite suddenly this girl appeared to me like some kind of mixed-up medieval beast, the half-man-half-wolf kind of thing, because while I could make sense of her top half -- parka, earmuffs, gloves -- the bottom half made no sense at all, because she was wearing cut-off jean shorts with panty hose and high heels. Who *are* you kid, Daisy Duke? I'm sure you are cool and even super cool considering how tilted you are against the season but do you have no concept of ridiculousness or parody? I thought all these kids feasted on the ironic these days, that they were so irony-rich that they would never again be slaves to the ludicrous. Good for you, you crazy kids, wearing those toques, I thought. Sensible! But then they started they started wearing them in summer, and my grieving began again.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Welcome to a movie that is not a movie. Of course, there are many movies like this, these things on film more monument than story, but so often those feel like mistakes, like stories that never started, while this is a movie that doesn't try, that simply pulls back a heavy red curtain to reveal something endlessly charming and somewhat tired, in every noble sense of that word. Bill Murray at his weary, deadpan best; Willem Dafoe as the boyish German; Owen Wilson with that nose again; Anjelica Huston looking like Iggy Pop in drag; Cate Blanchett, Jeff Goldblum and Seu Jorge singing David Bowie in Portuguese. The sets alone are the stuff of little boy's dreams ... all sixties gadgetry and fantastical forts and all things miniature that fly and sail and slide underwater. What more do you want?

connectivity, part two

Yes, eeeek. Every artist has heard that reaction before. After awhile, you learn to face it. Even dig it. In fact, I had a friend in design school who was never sure of his work until he showed it to his wife; if she hated it, then he knew it was good.

This is the second part of an essay about online connectivity. In the first part I talked about the 'usefulness' of blogging (and social media in general) -- in terms of creating a presence and cultivating relationships -- and its specific contribution to my life as a writer. Today I'll talk about these things from my perspective as a visual artist.

The web is a highly visual experience, full stop. Suddenly, just about any image you can think of is available. Flickr, a popular Yahoo image-hosting site, just uploaded its four billionth photo. That's four billion photos of birthday parties and wild flowers and vintage motorcycles and artsy girls in their twenties running around the forest at night wearing nothing but a deer mask.

But if the web is awash in pictures, why step into the sea with your own gaudy imagery? Why even try to compete with Deer Mask Girl? Because you can. Because that's what you *do*. You create things and then present them to the world. And the only thing that matters is that thing in front of you, and a computer screen is only so big, and all those billions of images are whole oceans of fish, while most human beings can only catch one fish at a time, and why can't that fish be yours?

Still, you need to put out the right lures.

One of the first ways I found for leading people to my site was Illustration Friday. Each Friday this site declares a theme -- for example, this week it's 'unbalanced' -- and then artists from all over the world enter a link to an illustration on that subject. There are no rules, no judges.

Especially as I was just starting out, this was a means for me to give some kind of order to the backlog/archive of images I had ready to post, instead of just throwing them up willy-nilly. So if the theme that week was, say ... the sea, I suddenly had a reason to post one of my pirate paintings . And it brought traffic to my site.

More importantly, I found other artists whose work I enjoyed. I found my generous friend Susan this way, who liked my work enough to give me a show in her gallery. I found Kristal with her ballooning figures drifting criminal against the universe. I found Sheri and I found Elizabeth and I found Jeannette, who could do a portrait in one drink and then keep adventuring all the way to Japan.

I found these people and many, many more. And all these people found me (and often linked to me on their sites).

{Sadly, I eventually moved on from Illustration Friday, not only because I felt I didn't need to reach so hard for connections anymore but also because it became ruined by popularity, by its endlessly flattening democracy, where all the bottom-enders gathered under their tacky tribe emblems of cutesy bees and smiling flowers and kitty kats with umbrellas. And then there were the censorship issues. An alternative site called Illustration Friday Night was fun for awhile, but it soon collapsed under a similar lack of standards. Oh well. These are the kind of social experiments that make the web run.}

Another avenue I explored was Etsy, which is like eBay but made specifically for artisans. I think Etsy holds tremendous possibilities -- it seems like loads of people have turned their craft into lucrative and even full-time employment -- but unless you have a unique (yet popular) product and can meet the steep time demands required for promoting your goods on a quasi-commercial level ... well, you'll never make more than a few scattered sales. I found it much more useful for trades, which was another great way to meet other artists.

And then I came to flickr, she of the four billion pictures. Flickr has two great things going for it: it's robust and it's free. By robust I mean that the architecture is simple (a flickr site is simply a collection of pictures with descriptions, nothing more) and the site is stable (easy to upload, no crashes). And what do you do on flickr, after you've posted your own pictures? You go looking at other people's pictures. You make comments. You add people to your contact list. They do the same. The connections continue.

I have two flickr accounts, one for my artwork in general and one specifically for my cigar-tin stories. The cigar-tin stories site doubles as a catalogue for customers and as inventory for me to keep track of what is still available.

I also have a cigar-tin stories group page on Facebook, started by my friend Susan. Right now it has 116 members ... all of whom see every new cigar-tin story that I create. And I see these people in return and -- not knowing who half of them are -- go investigate what they're about. And if they're artists, I look at their work. And leave comments. And the connections continue.

Does all of this help me sell my work? In a word: yes. I've sent paintings and cigar-tins all over Canada and the United States, to Italy, Scotland, Singapore ...

And more than that, it's fun. As an artist, it's nice to get an email from the girl in Brooklyn who's thrilled by her purchase. It's a small thrill to see a sale lead to a story about you in the local paper. And it's just nice to know that your work is out there, and being enjoyed by people. Because that's why you're doing it in the first place.

More connections.

There's so much more I could say here but you get the idea: if you do things, then things will happen.

Good luck to everyone in Robin's class!

connectivity

Recently I was asked to talk about my experience with having a blog and my ideas about online connectivity. I thought I would make a better (and more appropriate) job of it by writing here.

For people on the outside looking in, these discussions always seems to boil down to one question: how is social media useful?

Yes, the 'useful' thing. This goes back to the bad old days of the web, where the whole thing seemed a bit like Alice's adventures in Wonderland: illusory and quixotic, this wandering adventure that you couldn't hold in your hands let alone understand what the point was. And then the tech bubble burst, and all those dot-coms went bust, and all the skeptical people on earth said I told you so.

And those same people look at things like Blogger and Twitter and Facebook and say It seems like a waste of time.

And for many people it is. I mean, online landscapes are fun to roam around in but like any tourist (or Alice) you'll eventually just want to go home to the 'real' world.

And creating your own place to go to -- starting your own blog, your own Facebook group, etcetera -- is thrilling until you realize that the ground you've chosen is a wilderness, with no pre-existing roads leading in or out, and you're really just shouting into the wind. From there the story usually goes like this: I made a blog. No one visited it. I got discouraged and gave up.

Chasing visitors and comments is the fastest way to adding yet another abandoned website to the scrapheap of millions already out there.

If you build it, they might not come. So what? I think you need to have something to say or share regardless of its value to anyone else. And you need to look at whatever social media you're using as a reference point for that commitment. Once you've accepted that, *then* the roads to your Rome might start to appear.

My online experience revolves around writing and visual art. Let me talk about my writing first.

Whenever I send a manuscript to an editor, the cover letter always includes my blog address. Aside from whatever qualifications I've chosen to trumpet in that cover letter (and you do have to be selective for brevity's sake), that editor can always go to my website and look up my entire publication history (it's right under my profile badge, just look to the right and click the link called 'writing credits'). In other words, this editor can see what I'm about. Hopefully, that editor will see that I'm a serious writer, someone who's been cracking away at this for a long time.

All of which is good.

What this editor can also see is that I'm an artist and illustrator. And many of these editors have come back to me with a request for artwork for their magazine.

On top of that they just get a general sense of who I am. Suddenly I'm not just another manuscript in some slush pile. I'm a real person who writes and paints and draws and posts little essays about his walk home from work and has a new baby and likes to make fun of his wife. Because she's crazy lovely.

If that editor likes my manuscript (or just feels sorry for me because of my wife) and publishes my work, then suddenly I have something nice to post about (the web is weirdly geared to posting hurrahs, don't ask me why), and hopefully that post will stick in someone's head the next time they're in a bookstore, and they'll actually pick up the magazine with my story. And the magazine (especially a small literary journal) is thrilled to have any help it can get.

But who sees the post?

Well, the dedicated audience would be people who subscribe. As you can see on the right, at the moment I have 33 subscribers. These people will see any new post of mine the next time they log into Blogger. But most people (I'd say 95%) can't be bothered to sign up and subscribe through Blogger. Just like most people can't be bothered to leave comments.

So the much greater part of an online audience is casual and invisible (unless you put in a counter, which I consider tacky). But over time you'll get a better sense of it. People will mention posts in conversations, emails, etc.

One direct extension of my blog posts is the NetworkedBlogs application on Facebook, which feeds posts to anyone who signs up for it. Since it's just another Facebook application -- and therefore much easier to subscribe to -- I have more than twice as many followers through that. Right now I have 76. At least half the people in the list are complete strangers to me.

This is good. These are people who are only coming by for the content.

Many people have re-posted things of mine on their own Facebook pages. In these instances you can't be too uptight about life (read: the kind of person who puts "COPYRIGHT BY ..." on everything). If you wrote/made it, it's yours. Relax. People share things they like. The world is awash with words and images. And so on.

(This subject always brings to mind the kind of people who won't put pictures of their kids online because they're worried about pedophiles, which is a bit like never playing baseball because you're worried about lightning.)

When I do post actual stories on my site, it's almost always ones that have already been published, so there's no worry about copyright anyway.

Conversely, when I do have a story published, I always include my site address as part of the author bio (usually in the back of the magazine). Are you getting the picture here? It's about watering and pollinating and cross-pollinating however you can.

I always reference back to my site. On business cards, in letters, in emails ... even on the back of my handmade Christmas cards. Or the mini fridge calendars I give out for the new year.

And then things come up. Participating in the writers festival in Kingston this summer, my bio on the Writersfest website gave my blog a nice highlight (and hey, my name was just under Margaret Atwood's in the author's roll ... nice). And when I blogged about the festival, I posted a link to that on the Writersfest Facebook group page. Get it? Back and forth.

I'm looking forward to seeing how I well I can use my blog and other social media to promote a short-story collection I have coming out next fall. Authors are in a constant struggle with this kind of thing now, as publishing houses devote fewer and fewer resources to pushing books out into the world. (Any ideas on this subject are welcome, btw.)

Some things I wish I did better? I wish I had more time to visit literary and writing sites, for one. I wish I had more time to leave comments and encouragement on the sites of other writers. I wish I was a better compiler of resources. I wish my writing calendar was more tightly organized.

But all you can do is work on these things. And again: use your site as a starting and reference point.

Okay, that's enough about writing. In the next part I'll talk about visual art and all the connections that come from that.

the day off

> Hey dad, I heard you have the day off tomorrow.
>> Yes I do, you gorgeous little cupcake.

>But dad, you *do* realize ...

>... that you won't *really* have the day off. FYI, I like my bottle just above room temperature. Oh, and mommy would really appreciate something in the oven for when she comes home from the bar. Now tickle my feet and sing to me, you big bozo!

at last

Finally: the topic that just won't go away. I wonder how we'll feel when it finally *does* go away?

* * * * *

And while we're flirting with the subject of end-times, I can tell you that I just started reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Just started. Already it's so much denser and knotted than either No Country for Old Men or The Road. Already there's been beatings, stabbings, shootings and malicious fires, thieving and privation and flight across a nightmare landscape. Just like H1N1!

now *that's* how you write a card

Dug out of a box from all my recent re-shiftings. The author is a mental patient. I don't remember taking her to Wally's Foodbasket. What I do remember is taking her by the arm and walking her up and down the hallway while her giggled breathing spilled out of control. It was a just-before-bed kind of thing. She called it "her exercises". She also called me Bernie a lot of the time.

things carried

Things in my extra carry bag (stenciled "Eat From Kingston's Countryside") this morning: one thermos cup of coffee with lid tightly secured, one peanut butter sandwich in a sandwich bag, one single-serving yoghurt, two overripe bananas (C won't eat them), one metal pencil holder, one cereal bar (sweet & salty), one old copy of Communication Arts (Illustration Annual 42), one copy of Surrealist Painting (soft cover, Phaidon).

* * * * *

Things I've overheard this week, walking home from work:

Shaggy, snaggle-toothed man >> You like her. She's your buddy.

Middle-aged woman wearing a hoodie over a nightgown >> She's lucky I don't punch her in the neck.*

* I have to say, the phrase "punch in the neck" has gained considerably more currency in the last couple of years.

* * * * *

Fell asleep on the couch last night with Oona on my chest. Total heat-seeking suckyfest. I think that was around 8:30. C says she came and 'rescued' her around 10:30. Then she had to come back for me around 12:30. All I remember is the suddenly strong smell of alcohol (bourbon? gin?). Repress, my friend. Repress.

an open letter to my studio

An Open Letter To My Painting Studio

Well, *former* studio.

I know, you hate to hear that. And yes, it was rough, seeing me move out the way I did -- little by little over the last month, stealing away a canvas here, a pile of books there, until that last awful day found me moving boxes in the rain, looking distracted and wild and utterly tired, tramping around in muddy shoes, up and down those stairs, over and over, disappearing with a bang, and then coming back at night, almost slumped over, just tearing down what remained and throwing it in plastic bins, like I didn't even care, like I just wanted to be done with you.

Well, you saw correctly.

Don't get me wrong, you have loads to offer to the right guy. For starters, your location is marvellous. I mean, you're pretty much exactly halfway between home and work. And for a guy who walks, that's pretty seductive. I loved being downtown, loved being able to pop around the corner for a coffee or across the street for a meal. There's an art store just up the street, for Christ's sake. And just having you so available -- my own space for my own stuff, this messy art stuff that has no other place -- was tremendous. And don't ever underestimate the simple value of a door.

If only you'd had better roommates.

I mean, the *shared* aspects of the space were a bit of a problem, weren't they? That ugly hallway with its buzzing lights and industrial rug. That depressing cave of an empty studio, the biggest one in the place, the one the leasing company insisted we keep barren (read: *not* use as a communal workspace) as some kind of ghostly monument to darkness and failure. Empty for how many years now? That crowded and useless kitchen, so many lectures about blocking up the sink (it was *supposed* to be an artist's sink, for washing up paints, wasn't it?). Those awful bathrooms, with those fans like second-rate kamikazes.

And no, I didn't like my paintings moved whenever someone else decided that they were hanging in the wrong place in the hall. I didn't like the old-lady fussiness of that. Or when I'd put out a wee table with a few things, or hang some string lights, and hear complaints about that as well. It was always something.

Meanwhile, the guy down the hall seemed to be living a real-life version of Teenage Head's Endless Party.

No, I didn't like coming in some mornings to find *kids* (yes, I'm calling young twenty-somethings kids now) asleep on the couch or emerging half-dressed from the bathroom. Especially when I didn't know who they were. And I really didn't enjoy the copious amounts of dope smoke that wound its way through the ventilation system to my windowless room.

For whatever reason, this guy got a pass. Good for him. But if I even so much as put the wrong sort of trash can in the bathroom ... whammo.

Still, the thing that broke us up, dear studio, was that old chestnut called irreconcilable differences. This group you belonged to wanted you as part of a boutique space, a retail space, where they could fill the halls with artwork and set open hours and then just sit back and wait for people to come in and write cheques. Trouble is, even if people did come in, once they'd seen the artwork ... they'd seen it. So ... the coming back ... not so much. If you build it, people will indeed come, but only once.

I wanted to have events. I wanted to have shows. Trouble is, I was the only one. And when I tried to do it on my own, I got about as much support as Prince Charles at an IRA meeting.

And then the karma was just bad, you know? I didn't want to be around. We grew distant.

Hey, that's the way it goes, you've seen it all before, right? Tenants come and tenants go, leaving you a bit more older, a bit more marked up every time. Yes, I saw the insulation poking out of the baseboards, the industrial staples in the floor, the nail holes, the pockmarks. I couldn't miss those old lights strung out across the room. But I didn't care. You were what you were, and I appreciated your rough charm. I splashed some red paint on the walls and got to work.

I'll miss the smell of coffee from the Second Cup downstairs. I'll miss those hours of Sunday-morning radio, the books on tape, the cd's I made specifically as painting music. I'll miss having friends come by for a chat and to look at my work. More than anything I'll miss your lovely quiet, just the building mumbling around me, and those beautiful white spaces of concentration you allowed me.

Thanks for everything (and try not to inhale too much second-hand dope),
DJB

uh oh

What do you mean mommy is getting tired of breast-feeding already? It's only been three weeks! Where is she anyway? What do you mean "unsupervised"? What happened to all of daddy's beer, anyway? What do you mean it's safe to drink and breast-feed? What do you mean I have blackouts? What are blackouts? What do you mean it doesn't matter? What do you mean by "magic formula"? What do you mean by disambiguation? Who left the back door open anyway?

the new CBC news

Accidentally, bewilderingly, I watched CBC's The National the other night.

I see they're making Peter Mansbridge stand up now. No more sitting down on the job for you, Peter. CBC is getting serious about selling the news! How making Peter Mansbridge stand around, looking sheepish, will accomplish this, I don't know. Maybe it makes him seem more dynamic. Certainly it makes him less anchored behind the news desk. You know: like a news anchor. Now he looks like he's in line for something. Now it's like the coffee counter at Starbucks. Or the line-up for some H1N1 vaccine.

They have snappy music, too. Crystalline new-media-type music, the kind that even *sounds* shiny. The new set is vast, expansive ... so much so that I thought the weather guy -- just within shouting distance of Peter -- might get sucked into the whirling-cloud vortex of his own map.

Why does CBC do this? If they want to more people to watch the news, all they have to do is tell richer stories. I don't want news in gleaming bits, offered up by grinning Peters. I want deep stories, in many parts. I want complex, investigative journalism. I want some people (sitting) at a table, talking at length about issues, or history, or culture. I do. I'll even take the time to download it. In fact I do it all the time, from the BBC.

I guess I just like to hear smart people taking the time to say interesting things.

Never is the CBC more embarrassing than when it tries to be flash. The 'hip' stuff it does have comes in long, relaxed formats -- Definitely Not the Opera, Q -- where it has the time and space to stay low-key and keep the self-awareness to a minimum. But when it tries to *announce* its coolness, its now-ness -- and here there is no more egregious example than the embarrassing audio spectacle called GO! -- then Mother Corp starts to look like an old drag queen out way past her bedtime.

The slogan for the 'new' news is "At the end of the day, it's what you know that matters." Well, the CBC is over seventy years old now. That's old enough to know who it is: too old to care about being trendy, and certainly old enough to be offered a comfortable chair.

and now for something inappropriate

Possibly Inappropriate Responses to "How's the new baby?"

What new baby?

Oh no, we couldn't afford a new baby. This one's previously-enjoyed.

Not really fitting in, I'm afraid.

Let's just say that some people aren't always who they say they are.

Let's just say that sometimes evil things come in small packages. And diapers.

Never attends team meetings.

You know, that pilot license of hers is only good if she uses it.

Really, really lazy.

Fine, thanks. We visit her at least twice a week.

Hangin' out, trying to make it happen. Crunch, crunch.

Honestly? She's kiiiiiiiiiind .... of a weirdo.

The kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth upon the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

Last night we had a long talk. A long talk.

So far, so good: we've been able to maintain her birth weight.

I don't know. You tell me.

Stinky.