Frightened cat and female newscaster

Okay, go look at cute kittens now: www.cutelittlekittens.com.

La Ronde is Still Open?

At least the ferris wheel was still moving. I pedalled across the Jacques Cartier Bridge to Parc Jean Drapeau (don't know if it's still called Ile Saint Helene. Guess I should check a recent map). The way across the bridge is at least not the narrow channel of terror it used to be a few years ago, with girders at your elbow waiting to tear your skin off. Renovated, it's at least wide enough that pedestrians and cyclists can co-exist, as long as they yell warnings to each other.

However, it has these bars which are set up over the railing, and curve up and over you, exactly like the bear enclosure in an old zoo (thinking of the Riverdale Zoo in Toronto). It's to prevent suicides from jumping off the bridge, but quite depressing in its own right. It also gives you a distracting strobe effect in the eyes, when you are riding through the shadows of the bars.

Anyhow, I made it to Jean Drapeau Park, site of Expo 67, and sat on the shore of the Saint Laurence River. Read Yellow Dog by Martin Amis on the shore, and drew some pictures., below:





Top is a watercolour of the opposite shore, looking downtown. Found out totally by accident that sticking your pinky into the still-wet paint makes a neat wave effect.

Below is a sketch of some rocks soaked by the waves at the shore by my feet, where I saw a crawfish hiding himself in the weeds. He's about in the centre of the picture. Hadn't seen a crawfish in the wild for years, not since I was a kid, and we hunted them on a vacation at a farm in Ontario. Glad they're surviving in the Saint Laurence by downtwon Montreal. They must be food for the herons, when unlucky.

La Ronde is Closed

Haven't been giving good blog lately. For those who have been following, apologies. Busy, of course, distracted, and strange computer problems are to blame. Not my lack of motivation, not that at all. Still trying to figure out some issues with regards to posting images here. If I really applied myself, I could work it out.



It's autumn in Montreal, and the colours are turning gorgeous. You can't see that in this picture of La Ronde (should go back to watercolours). But here I like the multiple layers the scene afforded. Starting with the framing of the dark trees in the foreground, and the pattern of the railing. Beyond that are train cars, on a track just beyind the railing (trains only lightly indicated), then the river, which is hard to see at all in this picture. Then the opposite shore of St. Helen's island, upon which La Ronde rests, if I've got my geography right.

The greenery here was getting more depth and variety, thanks to the leaves changing. You can't see much of that. But you can see the ferris wheel rising above it all, ghostly and white, but with black gondolas (seats?) and rim.

Making a good drawing, I'm finding, is a matter of contrasts. Too many of my sketches get overworked, so they devolve into this grey gas of cross-hatching. Well, practice is what makes it better. I do have a watercolour drawing of this subject, somewhere in my sketchbooks, of which I have a lot. I can see from the older ones that my drawing skills are always getting better over the years, which is heartening. However, I don't really want to show off those old drawings, even though they are part of the process.

De Lorimier and Ontario Streets

Had to get out, so I went a little east, and ended up in this brand new park which is still being set up, at the foot of the Jacques Cartier Bridge, by the streets I indicated in the title. The sod was just freshly laid, and very soft. The middle is kind of a depression, like a natural ampitheatre. The church is on the other side of Ontario street. Those are supposed to be cars passing in front of it, and construction materials. A group of kids was playing Frisbee football while I was there. Later, one of them came up to me to see what I was drawing. He had glasses and straight bangs, like a little Harry Potter, but darker in tone. He asked me whether I spoke English or French, and I replied "Mostly English." I asked him what languages he spoke, and he said French, English, and Tamil.

He asked if I could do a drawing of him and his friend. I said maybe another time. I've given kids drawings before: it's a nice thing to do. But I never know what happens to them. I assume they get smunched up during playing. Or maybe they're treasured.

I like talking to people while I'm drawing. It seems to be a way to bring people in, and few are ever afraid. A little girl once dropped two handfuls of dirt on a watercolour I was doing. Didn't harm it, but I wonder why she did that.

The writing on the bottom says "By the Jacques Cartier Bridge. Phase 1, $16,000,000." I copied this from a sign identifying the project.

Technical Documentation

Worked hard yesterday, and will have to work again today. Interesting work: Yesterday writing a paragraph for a title that will introduce a TV program. Today, trying to finish a comic page. Very finicky lettering and drawing of panel border lines to do today, which I think I have figured out how to do with a Speedball pen (a kind of dip pen nobody seems to use any more), but it's very easy to screw up, or drip big drops of ink on the page.

This stuff is all easier to do on a computer, but I haven't quie faced up to that, yet, preferring the hand-done approach, no matter how hazardous it might be.

This is a link to a collection of strange technical documentation I found funny. The guy who keeps it, Darren Barefoot, also has a not bad blog, a link to which I have put on the side.

Maybe put up a drawing later, when my mood improves.

Late Summer in Montreal

It's a beautiful day, and I've got lots of pleasant, fun commissions. Life is good, what can I say? That somehow contradicts the standard line of complaining that usually prevails in journals of this sort.

At the side here is another walking man, drawn from my second floor balcony in South Central Montreal.

The girl living in the corner apartment downstairs has accused me of being "in love with her," and hey, it's not true in that particular case. But in general, I love all the crazy, individualistic people I can see strolling by my perch here on a fine afternoon.

Below is what I drew when having lunch in the park up the hill from here. This is only some of the fauna one can find there (there are also sparrows, pigeons, seagulls, and many breeds of dog.) The sad woman in the picture was the squirrels' friend.

Lord of the The Rings Symphony

Well, the Lord of the Rings Symphony program was broadcast last night on ARTV in Quebec (It still might be airing around the schedule, because that's how cable is),already having run last week on Bravo, the Canadian English Language channel. It got some nice reactions, admittedly from friends. The best was one who thought that Howard Shore's remarks were off the cuff. Actually they were carefully scripted: 13 different topics chosen and developed by Yours Truly, and then adapted by Howard and his assistant to his own voice.

Haven't seen the finished program yet. Wish it could have given the full two-hour symphony, instead of just the 45 minutes it was cut down to (plus 13 minutes of documentary mingled within it). Anyhow, everyone who cares will get a chance to see it when it's released as a DVD along with the Lord of the Rings Return of the King Extended edition set.

It was exciting working on this, especially as it was my introduction to the post-production aspects of a video production. It wasn't easy, for many reasons. Mainly because our subject was touring around the world at the time (and still is) with his Symphony, but things seemed to work out. I'm looking forward to the next show, whatever that is going to be!

This image is a face I saw in a half-waking nightmare while I was working on the project. (I worked hard on it, and the deadlines were short!) It was a gollum-like creature who broke through the wall above my bed and told me I had no right to be working on this. It happened so suddenly in the dream, it startled me awake. In this case, though, he was wrong, at least!

Also, all through the project, themes from the symphony invaded my head. My favourite, I suppose was "Gondor." I was a bigger Lord of the Rings fan when I was 14, but I suppose I can say the release of the trilogy, and my involvement (however minor) has made me one again. The films were well-done, but I thought concentrated more on the fighting than the story I remember.

Chester Brown Day

I've emerged from a funk compounded by computer problems (what are these cascading failures about, and why do I seem to have have less memory available? A virus scanner from F-Prot said the machine was clean. Then it proceeeded to lock the computer up completely, though I got it uninstalled. Next, I have to find a spyware detector. Not too happy about it all.) Anyhow, lots of interesting work coming my way. You can never turn down work, but I hope I can find time for it all without blowing a fuse.

Sketchbook today, maybe too sharply reduced, because each drawing filled an entire page. Back-to-School is the best time to buy new art supplies, so I stocked up.



But what I wanted to do today was give you a link to Chester Brown. There's an interview from him, which isn't that useful if you haven't read his work, but at the bottom there's also a link to a strip of his, about schizophrenia. It's an excellent example of "documentary comics." [link]

I haven't read his latest, Louis Riel, but last night paged through a copy of Ed the Happy Clown, published by Vortex Books, now out of print. He has these gentle characters persecuted by a hostile society and random chance. You want to yell "unfair!" but who do you yell to? God? Fate? You can yell a little bit at his other characters, such as the scientists and doctors who perform terrible acts without thinking anything is amiss. Generally, society, even the universe itself, is set up to harm his innocent protagonists.

I've met Brown a couple of times in Montreal. Once, during what was called a "Novacon," a get-together sponsored by a long-vanished comic shop called "Nova" at 472 Ste. Catherine Street. It was a very intimate meeting in a spacious, loft-style comic store with Brown and Julie Doucet, and other, more mainstream comic artists. Montreal is a relatively easy place to be an artist: lots of studio space, and until lately, cheap rents). When the event finished, we went out to the Deer Garden restaurant on Saint Laurent Blvd., just above Boul. Rene Levesque, which I've found is a reliable place to bring a crowd to at short notice.

The second time, I saw him in Cole's Bookstore (which later became Chapters, this was all in the early '90s). a glossy magazine had just come out with my latest comic page, which I was excited to find (there are some of these on my site, which I am updating, I guarantee). I wanted to show him the page, but I must have come off like a demon fanboy, because he would have nothing to do with me. I'm friighted of turning up in a comic or novel as one of these scary characters, menacing the protagonist.

Comics have been called the "poor man's cinema" (got to find a more PC way of saying that), and it's true. I spent $20.00 today on a sketchbook, drawing instrument (No. 3 brush), and budget ink. Outside of a pencil, that's all a comics artist really needs. Computers help a lot, though, but only when they're working.

Linked!

Saw that this blog was called "unique" and linked to by Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin, a comics-oriented weblog. I don't know how many hits he gets, but it seems popular. Maybe I'd better tighten up my act! Or get a hit counter. Well, won't worry about it at the moment.

Reading Symptomatic by Danzy Senna. More about that later, when I finish the book.

Later man. Work is going slowly, and I'm distracted by this computer, checking e-mail, which is of course, a part of work. Realised that the reason for "unique" was alliteration with "Utopia."

Actually, the name is fairly meaningless, but I thought it sounded cool. One of those things that comes to you out of nowhere as a good title, but you have not yet found a use for it. I think it's about moments in time when something seems possible, but the moment passes. But still there is the feeling you remember.

Reading someone else's blog, (which I haven't recorded), he was proud that there was none of this self-indulgent diary stuff. I say, hey, why not? I probably should have more of a focus: sketches, or reviews, or links. Or even self-indulgent journaling. But instead it's all over the place. That's appropriate, because that's what I'm like.

Okay, here's a link to a short story I wrote. Trying to do more of these. The illustration accompanying it was sort of an inspiration for the story, but I had it in my mind for a long while, and didn't know whether to make it a comic strip or a literary story. Darned comics are still very time-consuming to draw, while written stories conjure up all the complicated pictures ready to go, in your mind.

Dancing Fool

Spent the morning as an extra on Le Negotiateur. Didn't take it very seriously, because it was just filming down the street where I live, and I left the house at 6:40 am, just five minutes to when I was supposed to show up.

Wish I'd been a bit more inspired, drawing-wise, but aside from the very tall hairdoes on the women, nothing too outrageous in the way of costumes. Below are my graphic impressions, not great art. It should really have been in colour to do justice to the patterns on the dress.


On the guys, the hairdresser at top glued fake sideburns, constructed with spirit gum, and individual hairs glued on, which he had with him in the different colours he would need, ready in ziploc bags.

There was also an airbrush effects man to put tattoos on the bikers. The film was a police TV show set in Quebec in the early 1970s. Our job was to populate a disco where some scenes would take place.

I didn't get a lot of makeup or hair. My wardrobe was simple: bell-bottom jeans and a loud polyester shirt. They parted my hair on the side, but I got to keep my beard.

Extra (or "background performer") work is actually pretty demeaning. You get ordered around a lot ("human furniture," some call it). I'm really bad at remembering and following instructions, so I'm not that great an extra, but it's an easy way to make casual money, if your schedule is flexible. Most of the time you're just walking from point A to point B in the background. Here I stood around and bopped to the music in the fictional club. Strange how my movie life paralleled my real life when I went around in clubs. I was often the guy by myself, watching others have fun. The couple beside me was having a great time, flirting and teasing. At least the waitresses paid me a lot of attention, giving me shooters which were water, and piling up bottles of beer (old-fashioned Molson "Stubbies"), even though I already had a glass full, which was .5 percent and pretty nasty, especially after the stage smoke has had time to settle on it.

They would play a bit of music, so that we could start dancing, or tapping our hands, or whatever we were doing, and then bring it down for the "take" when the real dialogue was happening. The heroine, who was a biker chick, was complaining she had been brought the wrong drink. Guys, who I think were plainclothes policemen were buying her the drinks.

Then we did a lot of frantic dancing on the dance floor (this set was in a storefront on Ontario street in Montreal East which I think had been a real tavern, not too long ago). We did a conga line, which was fun, especially since there was a girl in a white dress I had more or less paired up with, and then we did some more dancing. I made a fool of myself by trying some move that worked when I was a teenager, and ended up on my butt on the dancefloor, having committed my "social suicide," in the words of Frank Zappa.

Left around noon, smelling of hairspray, and sixty dollars to the good.

Why I love the internet

Here are a couple of links that remind of what the internet felt like when I first encountered it. First, there's something called Drew Curtis' Fark, which collects a lot of the strange stuff on the net. From there, we go to a page investigating the toys found in vending machines. Would like to find, but don't have (now I do), the Bible as illustrated in Lego. What would we do without obsessive nerds?

Grey Clouds

Feeling better today. I had been in a mood because a lot of the work I was trying to do was not happening. Getting distracted, worried. It's part of the problem of working alone at home. It's hard to retreat.

But I went out, and found that my mind was working on the problem even when I was on the road. I had a lot of ideas, and could hardly wait to get home to write them all down. That's good. I'm trying to propose documentary film ideas to this company with which I did the Lord of the Rings Symphony program. Which, by the way, aired last Sunday, and people enjoyed it. The company is trying to branch out with documentaries in areas other than music and concert films, and are looking for ideas from Yours Truly. Or so they say. It's pitching, which freelancers know a lot about.

Tomorrow I'm being an extra in a movie that's shooting not far from my place. It's a Quebec film, called Le Negotiateur (you can probably guess the translation) and is set in the 60s. Lots of groovy girls in miniskirts and high boots. I'm in bell-bottom jeans, which need to be lengthened (they promised to do that), and a loud shirt. The wardrobe girls thought my accent when I spoke French was cute.

More drawings to do. I actually got a commission from a neighbour to design a dragon tattoo going the length of his arm. More on this as it develops. Today, sort of a cloudy sketch, one of these group things I like to do, filling up a page over time. The Asian-looking lady is supposed to be actress Sandra Oh, from the movie Big Fat Liar, about which the less said, the better.

The title of today's entry is not about mood. It refers more to the weather today, and the greyness of this sketch.

Dejection.

Feeling dejected today, I drew one of the dejected men who walked by my place today.

I often sit on my front step of my second-floor apartment and draw people going by. There was first one man, and then the other. Walking slouched, head bowed down, but bobbing with the rhythm of the walk like a tired horse. Arms bent at elbows, moving with more energy than needed, as if there was anger inside that had to be let out.

As I said, the first one walked by, and I remarked to myself, "Darn, he'd make a good drawing." Then the second one came, and I was ready. The dog is fictional, put in just for emphasis. One leg is slightly too short (I did this in ink), but I don't think it matters.

Merlin's List of Five Things.

I wasted a part of my day looking at this.

Tricks of the Trade

This has probably been all through the Blogosphere (that's the world of blogs, as if anyone who would happen to be reading this would not know. I'm just finding out about these things.) But it's fun.

It's "Tricks of the Trade," -- secrets supposedly used in different occupations. [Link]

Well, I spoke too soon, or was psychic or something. It has taken off in the internet, enough that the author has made a site to host "tricks," right here: [link]

Pico, Pico

Cleaning out my knapsack (something which happens once a year, whether it needs it or not), and found this from this year's "Blue Metroplis" literary salon in Montreal. I thought the ticket people were making some sort of comment or joke on Travel Writer Pico Iyer.

Old Port Pencil

Busy today. Here's a sketch from earlier this summer. Making it miniature, until I figure out how not to make it run into the edges.

Charles Bukowski and Barfly

Article by Roger Ebert about Charles Bukowski and the Film Barfly. Bukowski wrote a book about the film, too, called "Hollywood," which has Ebert as a character. [link]

Today's sketchbook

Cute animals I drew in a restaurant while my internet friend Laurie was visiting from Burnaby B.C. last week. Coloured at leisure. The one at the bottom is "Rosie" the bookstore cat at S.W. Welch booksellers, where I used to work.

Check, Check, (tap, tap, tap)

Feeling a lack of focus. I started this blog because I enjoyed reading others. There are a hell of a lot of blogs out there. For a while, it was daunting, because who has time to read it all, or wants to add to the clamour?

The blogs I liked reading had lots of links and pictures. I've been reading about alternative comics, and cheesy entertainment fandom. I open up two browers: one, Mozilla Firefox, because it's more compatible with the posting system here, and lets you do more, and the other, Opera, because I have a lot of bookmarks there. I write this in the box in firefox, and cut and paste links from opera, doing little appropriate HTML operations as I go.

Anyhow, one thing professionals who blog do (and which annoys me) is talk about all the cool projects they are doing. I'm annoyed because I haven't reached that level of productivity. Still, there are a lot of things happening for, but on the usual low level. Nothing done for free, but not making a ton a money, the way the Lord of the Rings thing was supposed to, but didn't.

So, at the moment I'm:

• writing up pitches for new documentary projects (way behind on this)
• doing cute animal drawings for a neighbour who wants to produce a board game (haven't even started this)
• Doing an illustration drawing for The McGill Reporter (nice this is happening again, though they take a long time to process their cheques)
• Being an extra for a film again (I thought I could leave this kind of work behind when I became a big deal film writer! But the quick money is too tempting.)
• not painting my apartment, as I promised (feel guilty about this)
• futzing with the new website, trying to animate the tail of a cat who will sit on top of a fridge (this will look great whenever I get it done)

Wow, that looks like a lot. And here I am, typing this. Have I just annoyed anyone like me, who might be reading this? As I said, not the stuff I find interesting, or was intending to do, but there it is. I thought it was going to be more about comics and kstches. But so far, sort of an art critique, and a book review. And now my to-do list, which I should be doing, instead of typing here.

I had intended to talk about the writer WG Sebald, whose books I've been enchanted by all summer, but for now, I'll just leave a link, where a lot of other people talk about him, and say most of what I wanted to say, anyhow. [Sebald Symposium]

Satirists Stay Funny, Please!

Unless I know some fancy CSS trick... if my drawings are too wide, they interfere with the links list at the side. Here I go, typing a little to push the drawing down. Links are important in generating traffic.



Read Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe (do I put up the Amazon link?). Very shrill, and whiny-conservative. Your children are having sex like rutting animals, all the fault of our permissive society. Of course Wolfe has always written this way (Mau-Mauing the Flack-Catchers), but earlier it had a sense of humour.

I suppose I should find writers more of my political bent, but none of them have a sense of humour, either. Martin Amis comes closest, I suppose, but he fell off with "The Information." Those anti-nuclear-war stories in "Einstein's Monsters" were pretty dire, as well. Wolfe in his earlier work (Tangerine Streamline Baby - I suppose I'll have to do a search on it -- wait, here it is in the "also by" column "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) was funny, and racy, but that was back in 1964.

Not the greatest book criticism here. More along the lines of "this sucks," but my point is satire should be funny. You can get away with a lot more nastiness that way.

I don't know if Orwell or Wyndham Lewis were funny (there's a odd couple, politically!), but "Five Minutes Hate" was absurd (but true) enough, it had me chuckling. [off by three minutes]

Satirists seems to lose a lot when they get too serious. Thinking of Al Capp in his later years, confronting John Lennon in his hotel room in Montreal. [link here]

Hmm. All those nice links are a lot of work! This could also use some editing, but I'll let it go until I devise some sort of system for writing these off-line.