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  • The Sugar Man

    Last night, we watched a documentary called Searching for Sugar Man, about “Rodriguez”, a folk-rock singer-songwriter, a sort of Latin American Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie who released two albums in the Seventies that critics loved but were a monumental flop commercially. After that, he drifted away. Some said he shot himself or set himself on fire after a particularly bad show, and that was the end of him.

    Or was it? Turns out he was a massive hit in South Africa, where his music of rebellion struck a chord with young people who were sick of apartheid and a conservative, unquestioning culture of oppression. Years later, a journalist and a record shop owner who were big fans of Rodriguez got together to try and figure out who he was, and what really happened to him. In their search, they get hints that he might even be alive…

    I won’t tell you the rest, because it’s really worth a watch, even if you’re not a music person.

    The documentary calls into question what fame is for, especially when faced with a mythic figure who wasn’t just overlooked by celebrity, but perhaps wasn’t even interested in it.

    What?! This on our telly, just hours after “The Voice”, a show where people young and old fall over themselves with nerves and hopes, desperate for acceptance by music stars and the hope of being delivered from their lives.

    But delivered to where? There’s nowhere other than life to go, nowhere other than our own company where we can be. Ramp up your means, your surroundings, and what are you left with? The moment. Yourself. The same moment that was always here.

    I’m reminded of that old saying “Many people long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a Sunday afternoon.”

    Case in point, here’s a Sunday afternoon, a big, sunny Easter Sunday. When I woke up this morning, the chatter was already running in my head, asking what I was going to produce today — would I get any drawings done for the art show?

    What do you have to say to anyone, anyway? the voices asked. That’s why you can’t write fiction or pick anything to draw: There’s nothing going on. Your experiences aren’t interesting enough. You don’t have any original insight or style.

    I had my breakfast and, rather than surf the internet (“I’m so tired of it; I don’t want that right now”), I took some thin volumes of poetry off the shelf and read through them. The gentle grace of some Classic Haiku; funny mental twists from John Hegley, who I’d not heard of before (how great that I’ve married into a library); and biting lines from Graeme Hawley, a poet I did a reading with in Edinburgh. I heard a gong-like resonance in each of them, as these individuals simply looked at their experience and wondered about it. With a step back, a thought, and some words, they sent me a moment, an “A-ha” or a smile across time.

    Then I turned to Cheri Huber, who writes self-help-y stuff from a Zen perspective. Her ideas are playful, but there’s a profundity to them that just stops the clock. “Oh my God, that really is what’s going on every second.” I read a bit she wrote about self-hate versus sub-personalities.

    The little characters I’ve drawn for the voices in my head are what she calls “sub-personalities”. Each of these springs up at some point in life as a coping strategy, a way of getting by in a world that tells us we’re essentially flawed and wrong and need to be fixed. (Hello, Easter sermons about sin.)

    “Self-hate”, though — that sounds too harsh. Really? Yet that’s the other bit of commentary that’s always going on, she says. The distinguishing feature about sub-personalities is that they can be quieted. They just need something — usually to be assured that they’re safe: I need order, I need inspiration, I need connection, I need freedom, all to be comforted and to know that I’m okay, I’m safe.

    But self-hate, says Huber, is that bit of us that insists on suffering, on making something constantly wrong so that — wait for it — we can exist. The socially conditioned ego needs to be constantly having somewhere to go, something about ourselves to fix, or it doesn’t know what to do. When you tune into this constant commentary, the never-ending insistence on duality, it’s a bit maddening. But, Huber asserts, by distinguishing it we can stop listening to it like it’s us, like it’s real or true, and learn to ignore it. It’s never going away and, unlike the sub-personalities, it can’t be satisfied; we were raised to think like this, that there’s somewhere to go, that this isn’t it, that we’re somehow not-right. But by “disidentifying” from the voice, we can choose to bring our attention back to the here and now.

    So here I am. All that pressure that wanted to wreck my day, to cover it in storm clouds and high-pressure systems, is at bay, and I have the chance to experience some freedom.

    If you’re there, reading through all this navel-gazing stuff, thanks for persisting. I’m really just trying to articulate this for myself to see if I get it. Do you go through this? Does everyone?

    The creative life seems to make this a particular hazard, this constant feeling like there’s something I should be producing or doing or achieving. The conditioned message is that I’m accountable (to whom?) for doing something. There’s constant comparison with others, with a resulting judgment (seldom in my favour).

    I think that’s why this story of Rodriguez has struck such a timely, tuneful chord with so many people and got such acclaim, because the idea of this mysterious, monk-like musician is irresistible — a poet-wanderer who’s untouched by that insatiable hunger to advance, and instead draws his inspiration from within. How peaceful, the idea of attaining that state — which, of course, isn’t about attaining anything, but sustaining ourselves on what’s already here.

  • Deciding what is art

    Greedo [a minor Star Wars character] feels not only like something I shouldn’t draw — “Copying!” “”but like I shouldn’t even acknowledge that I know about him. [‘Cause that’s geeky and not cool? Too commercial? What?] But this is my culture, this is what I grew up on.

    I’m finding that since I took on this idea of doing an art show it’s hard to think of what to show — that classic thing, just like writer’s block, of getting stuck on what other people would think.

    The hardest thing is that there’s just room for four drawings. If I could bring twenty, then there wouldn’t be pressure about any one of them — I could have some serious ones, some funny ones — but since there’s just four, they have to count! I know I have to forget about this, and that I do have to make a decision about some point…

    A-ha! I need to just draw a bunch of stuff first, then decide later which I’m bringing to the show, rather than putting on all this pressure before even starting a picture.

    I wish I knew where I got this paper, ’cause it’s perfect for drawing on.

  • What I want, need, miss

    Finishing up the current sketchbook, and almost finished the 30-Day Drawing Challenge:

    21: Something you want. Alfred Hitchcock used a story device in his movies that he called a “MacGuffin”. It’s basically an unfilled variable that stands in for something incredibly valuable, so instead of showing you something that you might or might not think is worth all the trouble, he’d just show you a glowing box and let you project into it whatever you thought it might be, which would have far more resonance for you, the viewer.

    Tarantino has used this, and Avatar stumbled clumsily over it by directly using the screenwriters’ shorthand “unobtanium” for a precious material that the technical advisors are supposed to give a better name to later. Most recently, I’ve seen it employed in the surprisingly brilliant E4 teen drama “My Mad Fat Diary”, though in this case the glowing cupboard of forbidden treasure was clearly filled with chocolate bars and other sweeties.

    Anyway, what came to mind to me for this doodle was a glowing MacGuffin briefcase. I tipped my hand though and drew it filled with money: I would really like to have the means to take a year off, travel the world with Craig, write a book, and all that sort of stuff. Or take “forever” off, whichever. I really enjoy my work, but not working would still be better.

    Sure, I found that seven grand recently, which was pretty pleasantly MacGuffiny, but it’s still a reasonable enough amount that I felt compelled to do reasonable things with it: eliminate my credit card debt and stockpile that two months’ salary they tell us we’re supposed to have put aside in case of emergencies. I also paid for my trip to Canada this summer, but””sorry, Canadian dear ones””that ain’t really globetrotting.

    22: Something you miss. I didn’t like the premise of this one, ’cause it begged the question that something was missing from my life. When I sat with it a little longer, though, I did think that it’d be great to talk to my grandmother””my mum’s mum””about Scotland. She’d have really loved the fact that I live here.

    It’s a crap likeness, but I was drawing my memory of an old photo, so it ended up more like a stock “granny” from Central Casting.

    23: Something you need. Here I drew a flying, magical book to stand in for “Geez, I’d like to produce something substantial this year.” I’m constantly creating stuff, like the replacement sketchpad I made before dinner last night (I’m getting pretty quick at this), but I’d like to have a big work I can do things with. This year is for introverted creating, but it’d be great to have some reason to hit the streets next year.

    [EDIT] Here’s that new sketchbook:

  • New sketchbook

    While waiting for my folks to come online yesterday for our weekly chat, I finished the new sketchbook I’ve been working on:

    For the first time, I used book cloth I made myself! I’d always had to buy it when I was in Canada or elsewhere, and since it comes in a roll and has crinkle-able paper backing, it usually got a little wrecked in transit. But plain cloth doesn’t work (I discovered) because if you try to fix plain cloth to a book block, the glue oozes through (which looks gross) and doesn’t bind strongly enough with itself to hold on.

    I recently found this video, which shows how to give any cloth a paper backing using an iron-on fixative called Heat’n’Bond. So I ordered some on eBay (the local sewing shop hadn’t heard of it), tried it out yesterday, and it worked!

    I used some light paper””almost crêpe paper””that a gift came wrapped in, which was the right weight, except it was a bit too wrinkly (and stayed so when it came in contact with the glue, despite being ironed). The fabric could be lighter, too, but at least it’ll be durable!

    Now I just hope the paper inside will be good to draw on. I rescued it from a sketchbook I found in my junk boxes under my parents’ eaves, so it must be about twenty years old. Craig liked the end result and said I should sell it, but this year I’m more interested in creating than selling.

    EDIT: Drat! The paper in this book feels lush, but I tested out my pens on a spare sheet and it’s just not right for the drawing work I want to do in my sketchbook.

    image

    Oh well, I found another drawing pad, and this time I tested the paper first, so here’s my excuse for binding another book. Perhaps I’ll sell the other one after all…

  • TV Gold and imaginary friends

    Craig has this phrase, “TV Gold”, for television segments in which people cry. Since he introduced me to it, I can see it all over the place, especially whenever old people are interviewed. War veteran recounting his experiences, has to stop because he’s choked up? TV Gold!

    Sometimes, though, it works in reverse: we cry. TV Gold is cheap and bad when it’s manipulative, but sometimes your heartstrings can’t help but vibrate in sympathy with a truly genuine human moment.

    Or not human, as in the case of last night’s final episode of Africa. In the closing scenes, David Attenborough is down on the ground with a blind baby rhino that wildlife conservationists are trying to help so it can return to the wild. It seems that moment sent golden ripples as far as the BBC’s broadcast waves could reach.

    ~

    I’m hating the paper in this sketchbook, but it’s almost finished. (The innards of the next one are already sewn and glued.) For the longest time I’ve wanted to have an “artist’s journal” full of my work, but it always seemed such a huge amount of effort to fill a book with words and images for no purpose””can’t sell it or use it””which, I suppose, makes it an artist’s journal, both in the sense that it’s art (i.e. not for a commercial purpose) and a journal (for development and exploration).

    Now I’ve done one, I’m really happy with it, and I can see the value in the process””and in having someplace to record ideas and images. What’s it for? Well, that’s a good question, which brings me around to another bit of this morning’s thinking and journalling.

    I think I’ve mentioned here that I’ve got this cast of characters that I’ve doodled and carry around in a wee box who represent aspects of myself. So, essentially, I’ve drawn the voices in my head. (We all have ’em, yet we’re frightened by talk of other people’s!)

    This morning I talked to “Old Walt”, who represents””I’ve not really articulated this, but I guess it’s “writing for the right reasons.” Deep, soulful writing. So I had a chat with him. Crazy, perhaps, but it was really useful.

    Every time I do this I get exactly the direction I need. I highly recommend it!

  • Twitter tantra

    More entries for the 30-Day Drawing Challenge:


    Eighteen: Just a doodle. I could have just scribbled and got away with it, but I thought “Nah, this is supposed to be practice.” So I drew a secretary squid (most rare). I guess it’s actually an octopus, though the distinction is lost on me (cf: clowns and mimes).

    There’s a BBC series on right now about Africa, called””appropriately enough””Africa. They had a segment on octopi. Gosh, they’re a strange kind of creature, and far too intelligent to be battered, fried, and served in pubs.


    Nineteen: Something new. Er, okay.


    Twenty: Something orange. You can see the deep thought that went into this one:

    I suppose I could have tried harder, but I’m feeling the pressure to get a lot done today (so I guess this is a good demonstration of how increased pressure leads to lesser results: I like the first drawing, but the other two were throwaways). I’m also trying to muster my creative gumption.

    I’ve found lots of inspiration lately, but there’s a point where being inspired by other people’s work doesn’t get me any closer to doing my own. I either think “Gosh, they’re great,” and feel intimidated or set back (the Sufis say “Comparison is from the Devil”), or I get so caught up in researching and gathering that this activity replaces working.

    There’s also a twitch-reflex that Twitter-use inspires, the constant spinning around from life to go say something snappy about it in 140 characters or fewer. I like to make people laugh, but there’s no laughter there. Sometimes there’s a retweet, but… I dunno. It’s feeling like all that effort spent in trying to appear clever is diffusing my creative energy in not particularly productive ways.

    “Yes, but you get followers!” My experience is that followers seldom convert into readers or buyers, and those 1,300 strangers who tag along one by one don’t even say anything to me, so it’s not exactly a conversation, either. It’s a giant cocktail party where no one’s looking me in the eye except the friends I went in with.

    So I’ve signed off Twitter for a few weeks to move away from the endless searching, or becoming an idle fan of the work that others show off. And there is a lot of showing off to Twitter. I find myself feeling beholden to people there, like I need to justify their following me by producing””what? Things to inspire them?

    That leads to lots of little bursts of short-term work, things I know I can turn around quickly and add to my Twitter puppet show. I’ve been tiptoeing back into Lake Novel, filling out scene cards, consolidating my work, and reshaping the opening; that’s where I want to spend my time and energy””on projects like that.

    (I’ve cut a bunch of “gradually getting them into it” scenes for two secondary characters, which I realised were going to bog the book down for the reader””and for me! Nobody likes “We have to do this first before start” chapters.)

    My legs are still wobbly, though, and sometimes a stray thought sends the whole thing flying out the window. Cutting out some distractions and channeling my focus, though, is freeing up a lot of time and energy to do this work. It’s rewarding to do my own thing, yet it’s so easy to not risk it, to avoid it. What a weird principle of life.

    Now it’s time to write an e-mail newsletter article. I know I can do that. That’s about practice: I do this all the time. So there’s another lesson for me about practice.

    P.S. Yesterday I drove backwards. It was no biggie, just something I need to develop some more finesse at. It’s something you do slowly, versus all the high-speed dodge-’em forward driving stuff””though I did some of that, too, driving straight through town, across the roundabout and the busiest junction in town.

    I recognise that these tasks would be laughable to any experienced driver, but they were nightmarishly intimidating to me before, and now they’re just something to do. I get nervous, and I’m wiped out after a lesson or practice, but I can do them.

    P.P.S. Today is Craig’s birthday. I made him a couple of little things and I’m taking him out to dinner tonight. I wrestle with this feeling of what’s “enough”, but I tried to resist it, and when I did give in to the temptation to do more and give more, I made him things instead of buying things, except for his one ‘main’ gift: The one present he really wanted was a £5 lamp!

    P.P.P.S. [EDIT] Busted: One of the books I’m reading is Eric Maisel’s Coaching the Artist Within, in which, over lunch, I just read this line which rather nails what I’ve just done here: “…virtually any aspect of existence can be turned into a pair of (real or seemingly real) polar opposites. Sometimes we should be silent; sometimes we should speak; if we are not careful we can make one or the other into some kind of special virtue, simply because we want justification for keeping silent or for speaking up. We turn two aspects of existence into a duality and then call one nobler than the other to justify and excuse our behavior.”

    Okay, so I did that, and it’s something I do often, talk in absolutes when it’s probably more realistic and gentle to say “This is something I’m doing for now.” I’ll be back on Twitter ’cause I like inspiration and community, even if they’re not always as real as they seem. But for now I need to strengthen my ability to do my own thing.

  • More ticks off the doodle list


    Fourteen: Favourite fairy-tale. What use are fairy-tales to me? I don’t have a favourite, so I drew the first thing that came to mind: the wolf from “Little Red Riding-Hood”. I guess he appeals to me because he seems like the most interesting character in the story. Like the coyote in the Warner Brothers cartoons, I always wanted him to win over the others, who seemed awfully smug.


    Fifteen: Family picture. No mean feat, as I’ve always put myself in the “cartoonist” rather than “caricaturist” category. It’s like clowns and mimes: one of those distinctions that doesn’t mean anything to people outside the craft, but is very important for the practitioners.

    In this case, though, I’m satisfied that I captured something about each of the people in my immediate family. I stopped at the pencil stage, though, because I drew the picture very small and this paper is quite bleedy. The lines, no matter how fine, were sure to grow tendrils that would wreck the initial sketch. (This would be a good opportunity to use a lightbox, but this is just practice so I cannae be arsed””and I don’t have my lightbox at the pub, go figure.)

    Groups of people and scenes have never been my strong point, either. I’ve always tended to draw one lone character doing something. If I were ever to take drawing up in a more serious way, this is something I’d need to get better at.

    In the short term, though, I have gone back to that thing they always said to do in the books I read as a child: draw basic shapes and sketch out the anatomy first. The flaw with this was that at some stage actual talent had to come into the picture, and the instructions would skip over that part. Here’s an old graphic that’s been kicking around which illustrates this beautifully:


    Sixteen: Inspiration. Seriously? That’s a prompt? Make me do all the heavy lifting, why don’t you? I drew the stupid, endless drawing challenge list.


    Seventeen: Favourite plant. People have favourite plants? I had a nice orange-red flower in my office, a gerbera, but Craig forgot it was there over the holidays and didn’t water it. When I got home it was crispy and almost white.

    I drew our money-plant instead. It’s actually doing well.

    In related news, I found £7,000 the other day: I’d regularly socked a bunch of money away in ISA savings five and six years ago and then forgot about it. I know, eh?, how does that happen? I guess it’s not really lucky, since I set this up in the first place””but I’m awfully grateful to past-me for doing it!

  • Morning doodlage

    This morning I’m easing into work by doing some drawing, since I’m getting to do more and more of it for work and want to step up my abilities. I’m not finding “The 30-Day Drawing Challenge” list to be quite right for me, as it’s not especially evocative of things that chime with my imagination, but I’ve started it and I’m just that bloody-minded that I’m going to finish it!

    So here are numbers 11, 12, and 13.

    Eleven: “A turning point in your life.”

    That would have to be auditioning for theatre school. But before you get any images of ‘Rachel’ from “Glee” belting out a Streisand show-stopper for a full auditorium, let me paint this picture instead: An impossibly nervous and gangly 17-year-old singing without accompaniment in a tiny closet of a room tucked away in a far corner of Dalhousie University for a solitary, squat figure hunched in a chair with a slight reek of booze emanating from him.

    I sang the Maurice Chevalier song “Louise”, which, now that I look back, seems incredibly hokey and passionless, but I was going on the advice of the vocal coach back home””a quaint little church lady.

    My monologues were””oh God””the balcony speech from Romeo and Juliet, because I had something unique to add to that which 300 years of actors had missed. Then there was a modern piece from some non-descript, unheard-of play, which was at least somewhat age-appropriate, if, again, emotionally flat. I’d had coaching on these from a local theatre director, Ron Irving, who later ended up hiring me for a succession of professional jobs, and has contributed a lot to the theatre scene in Charlottetown over the years.

    Still, I got in, and that set the stage, if you will, for everything that came after.

    Twelve: Most recent accomplishment.

    I saw an audiologist at the hospital last week, who tested my hearing again The results were not great, but not that bad, so she gave me a present to use in the meantime: a machine that plays sounds to mask out tinnitus so you can sleep, along with two wee speakers to slip under my pillow.

    It does actually help a lot to have something outside my head to pay attention to””both to alleviate the annoyance of the tinnitus, but also because I think too much when I should be resting. The only problem with the speakers, though, is that they slipped around as I moved my pillow (which I hug and adjust and wrestle with in my sleep). It’s like putting a bolo under your head and hoping it doesn’t wind up around your neck.

    So I got an idea: Sew a sleeve with little elastics to hold the speakers, a cover for the speakers and wire held shut with velcro, and non-slip placemat material on the back to keep it all in place on the bed.

    Like all my sewing projects so far, it’s not the prettiest thing (despite being made from the nice owl fabric Craig gave me for our cotton anniversary), but it worked last night. Plus it’s yet another bit of DIY in my world, which just makes me feel great. I get immense pleasure from interacting day-to-day with things I’ve made.

    Thirteen: A comic.

    Now, I’m assuming here they mean a comic strip, but, despite having doodled all my life, I’ve never been a comic strip or graphic novel reader. So the first thing that popped into my mind was Roy “Chubby” Brown, a so-called comedian who’s coming to Wick soon.

    It saddens me that he still gets bookings and has fans, because he’s an odious personality whose “comedy”, as much as I’ve seen it, is a bin-bag of racism, misogyny, and other bits of toxic waste. His die-hard fans seem to be those who read the red-top tabloids and complain that “It’s PC gone mad” whenever someone pulls them up for delivering hate speech in a joke’s clothing.

    So there we are. It’s time to get another coffee and start working on a vector graphic for my client’s blog. It’s a beautiful, sunny morning, which is a nice break from the battering of sea-winds and pelting of rain we’ve been getting. I can’t complain, since most of the people I’m in touch with are buried under snow, but this is still a nice change.

    Crossing over the harbour bridge this morning (I’ve driven ’round the roundabout there several times!), I saw two men down on the riverbank, mortoring up the wall. Apparently there was lots of damage and some flooding here while I was away.

    Right, I’m talking about the weather. Time to move along. Regards to you.

  • DIY Book, Episode 27

    Finale, The Power of Completion

  • What the clutch?

    Saturday’s driving practice was mostly good, with just one rather scary moment: I turned into a street, heading uphill, but had to pull behind a parked car because the little streets in Wick were made for horses and everyone parks on either side of the road, which makes the whole experience feel an awful lot like this:

    My beloved tried to say helpful things, but his tension prompted me to freak out and stall, and even though I managed to get out of the situation, I wound up feeling shaken, scared, and like I really wanted to quit driving.

    Nevertheless, I had a lesson scheduled for late this afternoon and was ready for it. I thought it might be cancelled, because we scheduled it for a different time and the sky was growing dark (surely night-time driving would be a whole other set of lessons). But no, we went ahead as planned.

    Somehow, under my instructor’s patient direction, I was shifting up and down and turning corners, and everything started going smoothly again. It was even kind of fun””though my heart was still racing. Evidently I seemed fine to my instructor, because we stopped and reviewed roundabouts for a bit, then he had me drive through every one of them in town””from several directions! (Okay, there are two of them, and they’re “mini-roundabouts”, but the people of this town use them like particle accelerators.)

    It’s just this clutch business: it’s so very Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang to be that involved with the workings of a machine in 2013. If I can get this, though, I can get anything. I’m just not used to doing frightening things that I’m no good at. I can’t wait until shifting becomes so natural that I can move up the Maslovian pyramid of responsibilities and start paying proper attention to all the other things my instructor keeps stressing, like people and stuff.