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Tag: Opinion

Feeling creatively blah…

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Haven’t done much of anything creative for myself in a while. I have been trying to game out some story plots and losing track mid way through. Haven’t painted or sculpted anything in several weeks either. Completed a few paid projects but beyond that haven’t felt compelled to do much of anything really.

I did start my corn hole game build, and picked up my allotment of cedar for a front porch bin for garbage can, green bin and recycling boxes. Damn raccoons get into everything. Still in the early planning stages for that particular house hold item. I made a step stool several weeks ago, which was fun and easy. But haven’t felt like doing anything with all of this pause time.

Mind you our house has two kids at home, whom are exhausting. Keeping two kids five and under occupied, entertained, exercised, and educated is proving to be a monumental task. Plus my wife is working from home, and I had paid work going on daily up until recently. Fatigue is a mother fucker, believe you me.

On the upside I have done a fair bit of reading. I read the third installment of John Scalzi’s The Last Emperox (Great, by the way). Marcus Heitz’s fifth Dwarf book in his series (a very pleasant read), a book about the New Horizons mission to flyby Pluto in 2015 (just incredible!). I have started a book about the Mars rover Curiosity, but I’m only a handful of pages in, so I can’t say much about it one way or another.

On a side note I managed to get my Brad nailer and pin nailer up and running, so I don’t have to use so many wood screws on everything anymore. That was exciting. Cleaned up the garage so that I can actually move around in there. Cleaned out the rain gutters after a huge downpour. Poor timing on my part, but in my defense when I put up our Christmas lights they were fairly clear, so I didn’t think they would be clogged. Good thing we didn’t flood because of it. Got up there and pulled several pounds of decayed leaves out of the downspouts, so checked that off the list.

Would like to paint the downstairs hall, and wash/sand/stain the back deck this summer. That is unless some events come back online with heightened pandemic health protocols in place, and I can get back to producing event audit marketing reports, instore signage and sales catalogs and sell sheets and other branding materials again.

That heatwave was rather unpleasant, but it’s been such a crazy year, the fact the weather is wonky doesn’t surprise me much at this point.

A toddler becoming a three-nager is a very real and frightening thing. She’s lovely, but good lord. Dealing with attitude from a five year old and a nearly three year old, is something else. The struggle is real y’all. Hod love’em, but they test my patience.

The USA is burning. Racism is alive and booming all around the world. That sucks, a lot. Don’t be a cunt to other humans. Work to bring around the change you want to see. Donate, volunteer, or take a moment of self reflection and introspection. Help those less fortunate than yourselves.

It’s chaos, be kind – Michelle Macnamara

The porch door opens with a gentle squeal…

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Masked in part by the large crowd of gathered children playing road hockey in the street right out front of the house. The shadows are slowly growing long along the front yard. Birds are chirping, and a subtle wind is rustling the leaves of the two large maple trees obscuring the view of the street from the porch. Stepping out of the house onto the wooden deck, she carries a glass of red wine, a cold beer in her manicured hands, and a box of crackers under one arm. Seated in a wicker chair, her husband is engrossed in the game going on with the children. “What’s the score?” She asks. “I have no idea, but you just missed an epic collision. More of a pile-on really. The girls are watching the ball and their sticks instead of where they are running. Going to have quite the knot on their heads tomorrow. Ha.” He says it nonchalantly, we’ve always given the girls the space to play, and ultimately hurt themselves with the pride of knowledge gained in the disaster. Reaching over his shoulder he takes the proffered beer. Sitting down gingerly, her glass held in her finger tips so as to not spill she pulls up the matching worn white wicker chair. The cushions are well weathered, and covered in maple keys and pollen. She’ll have to dust off her bum when she heads inside later. “Cracker? – no. Suit yourself.” The children are running about, it is semi organized chaos. Children strip the ball from teammates, kids run into one another. Tired kids fall over on the curb and wrestle on the manicured lawns. “So, can we talk about this now – or?” The question left to hang in the hot humid air between them. “Yeah, I guess so. Not like the girls will be able to hear us from here. Look at those muppets, it’s pure melee combat out there! Keep your head up! Look around you! See who’s open.” He shouts in a sudden lively burst. The girls, red faced, continue to battle it out on the street vying for the ball. The neighbourhood kids are all in a giant tangle of limbs and hockey sticks. “So, what’s the deal then. What do her teachers say?” He blurts out the question. Angst writ large across his creased forehead, his greying hair cut short at the temples, with a longer mop on top. “That’s just it, they love her. Say she’s just lovely, a real helper, a good listener, and she’s one of the better students academically.” She says it with a huge rush of outward breath, as though deflating with the sentiment. “Well – fuck. So we get the asshole at night, everyone else gets a lovely child. That’s just perfect.” He says it with a hint of a hysterical laugh underneath. “According to what I’ve read, it means they’re just really comfortable at home with us. They feel our unconditional love, and can drop the goody goody act and be more natural. Or so some child psychiatrists said. I don’t know.” Swishing her red wine around the glass, she looks down the front lawn to the two menacing, but beautiful daughters playing hockey, for keeps. “Good thing they’re cute. I could just strangle those two some times.” “Eh? You fucking think! You saw me, last summer trying to teach her her letters and numbers. Like pulling her god damned teeth out of her head. What a pain in the ass. Then she gets tired at night, cuddles up next me and says she loves me. I melt. Adorable. I love her so much, but what an asshole.” The last part is said in unison. A common refrain among the two parents. “Ok, girls. Ten minutes then you gotta come in to wash up for dinner, ok!” More of a statement than a question. The girls bark back in answer. “Was that a yes?” She asks. “Fuck if I know. They’re still growing, so we must be doing something right. It’s tacos tonight, so I don’t foresee a huge fight to get the youngest one to eat.” Standing up, he dusts off his beige cargo shorts, slips on his berks, and wanders down to the curb. His white plain t-shirt almost amber in the waning sun.The late afternoon sky is a lovely rich blue. Squirrels can be heard chattering in the large fir tree beside the driveway.

“There are – certain harsh truths one has to come up against…

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Before they can truly learn what it means to be an adult. Although, we may find some individuals who believe that they have this whole thing down pat. That just isn’t true. However, you know, ignorance is bliss. Sometimes not knowing what it is you don’t know can be sort of freeing. The truth is, we’re all floating together on a rock, specks of carbon in a vast, unyielding and uncaring universe. Fairness, equality, equity… these things are not real. Much like time – memory, or love at first sight. Constructs we built that we choose to live in. The sun does not care. Clouds do not care. No one knows how this thing called life plays out. Existential dread is just the human body coming to terms with how loose a collection of things, and stuff, our lives are made from. We have fooled ourselves into believing in order, and goodness, and the basic underlying tenets of a civil society. But you pull out one stitch, and more often than not the whole thing crumbles.” The sky in the park is vast, and open. The velvety blackness dotted with hundreds of thousands of stars. From their position, lying in the grass upon a gentle rolling hill, the slight breeze sends ripples through the tall grasses surrounding them. The evening is cool, but not cold. The soft call of crickets can be heard in the distance across the wide, and sprawling park. Fire flies have gathered in the low spots between the hill and the plateau where the soccer fields are. Puffs of smoke can be seen weaving lazy trails on the breeze above the teens heads. For the neighbours who back onto the park, the heavy sent of marijuana, and the carried sound of voices is common place. “You know what, Gina… I have to disagree with you on that. I… I think. Gah!” A hearty cough, harsh enough to bring tears to her eyes. “Oh man, I think I just swallowed a bug!” Coughing fit. Scurried fingers scraping at a tongue. “What – what were we even talking about again? I lost track.” Says the younger of the two prone girls, laying head first down the hill, while watching the stars between their feet. “Can you feel the world spinning right now. I think I can feel the world spinning right now. How awesome is that, eh?” “Dude, now that you say it, I kinda do.” “That’s, like… fucked up and shit.” From down the street, laughter can be heard. The lone street light in the park flickers, but never actually manages to come on. Clouds form to cover the moon low in the night sky.

I have a lot of respect for editors

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Now that I am face to face with nearly 30,000 words worth of short stories to review and correct. I do not have an exceptional grasp of high level grammar, syntax and the like. My writing style is pretty pulpy or plebeian. I did my university papers with the same layman’s appeal that I use today. I think I was accused of using purple prose once so I don’t try to get too flowery or “cerebral”. That’s not who I am. But I digress. Editing, and editors. You must have a fairly wide continuum in the quality of work you see. Although I couldn’t imagine there being too many commercially successful writers whom turn in work that requires too extensive a review. But I don’t know. I’m a graphic designer who also dabbles in sculpture, so my knowledge of the ins and outs of the world of paid writing is woefully underdeveloped. Looking at forty plus pages to go through a few times is more daunting to me than writing anything. Mind you, I write micro short stories, so if I keep it succinct I can probably write four hundred to one thousand words and be happier than a pig in shit. Creating something from nothing is simpler to me, than making sure what is written follows all the appropriate rules of the english language. Kudos to all you editors out there. And to any writer who takes on the task themselves. Brave souls, the lot of you.

Searching with my good eye closed…For Inspiration in Design.

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Some days this ingenious song lyric (Chris Cornell via Soundgarden) is how I feel about finding inspiration for new projects. As I have mentioned in previous posts, my day job, and one of my hobby’s is graphic design.

Now that’s a pretty big umbrella statement, as (GD) has a multitude of facets, and I am hardly a guru in all of them. Like they say, a jack of all trades is a master of none, so I’ve had to pull back on my desire to learn something useful about every single facet of graphic design and focus instead on a core group of skills that are near and dear to me. But at its heart, (GD) is still about producing artwork, perhaps not “Art” but commercial art nonetheless. No matter how hard I try I don’t ever feel like an artiste. Even though I make 100% of my living off of producing quality images, logos, compositions, type set pages etc etc… To me I don’t feel like an artist. I may well be more artistic than the average bear, but I don’t dress all in black, nor do I walk about covered in paint/ink/chalk, nor do I wear a beret or act particularly bohemian. (I know that is a fairly stereotypical account of what an artiste is, but it’s a hard image to break inside my own head). I’m also a pretty shallow person (in mind set) I’m not all that concerned with symbolism, reading between the lines, undertones or subtext. I’m… for lack of a better turn of phrase; blunt. Like a grey cinderblock. Perhaps because I have eschewed the preposterousness of pretension I feel like I’m not an artist. I also have very little creative control over the substance of what I produce, except for where the item(s) are for myself. Artistic integrity is a luxury I can’t afford at this stage. Not to say that some things don’t rankle my bones, and make me spitting mad, but my job is to produce what others have asked for, in the format they have asked for it. Perhaps those high level agency types know what it is like to be able to walk away from a project over “creative differences” or “artistic integrity”. I don’t quite have the weight to throw around like that just yet.

Back to my main point, which is, searching for and finding inspiration. A real creative spark. I personally have no formula to follow, no checklist to run down in order to find that spark of life which will turn an average idea into something that really gets people talking, or creates a very visceral response. I am not even all that superstitious, so I don’t have the luck to believe that wearing the same socks, or hat or sitting in the same chair will bring that feeling back. So some times that fabulous little spark finds me, and some times I do what I can without it.

So then, what does searching with your good eye closed mean? I don’t actually try to look at stuff with my eyes closed, that’s preposterous… well unless it was a tactile object meant to be experienced, touched, interacted with, rather than just observed… but you hardly close your eyes and touch a poster (scratch & sniff excepted here). It is a whole lot like reading a page while not paying attention to it. Your brain is reading the items, but the words flow in one eye and out the other (I almost said in one eye and out your mother, but that’s another Soundgarden inside joke). You sort of know you read the words but you didn’t take in all in, you just weren’t all that present while you read it. You were on a sort of distracted auto-pilot. Then you have to go back and actually re-read it again (This idea isn’t new, by any means. Any sociology text book or phycology text will have a far better explanation of this than I will ever put down in words.) But what I mean is, there are a whole lot of times when I am searching for inspiration under time constraints, and rather than soak up the nuances of the research materials I’ve gathered for a project, I’m glossing over them and missing that … that, I don’t know, just that “THING” that jumps out at you, akin to a mental domino in your brain that falls against something else and begins to snowball and before you know it your synapses are firing like mad and a picture is forming in your head, and you just start pouring work out onto the page. That excited rush of ideas crashing over you in waves, some of them so fast and furious you don’t even have the time to get them out onto the page before they have slipped out of reach again, but you have flashes of them still, which you cling to and work off of. If I’m lucky a few of those little snippets are enough to bring the idea back into my conscience thought  as a whole idea and I can take it even further. Other times I’m left with parts of a good idea, but have to really work to unify them, or pull them apart and use them piece-meal elsewhere.

In order to be (oh god, I am going to say this, Ugh) “open” to finding inspiration, I need to really take the time to look, and see what is in front of me. Not just view it absently, but really take the precious time to not watch the clock, not be consumed by the deadline, and just look, think and brainstorm. Sounds really hokey, and wishy-washy I’m sure.  But it happens to me, I get so tied up in the technical details that I don’t take the much needed time to really look and see. I have to just keep reminding myself to come back to it with fresh eyes, and positive outlook.

But, you say, even when I have the time and am really aware of myself and my subject matter, there is no guarantee that I will find the inspiration I seek. Yes, sadly that is true. I have no real insight into helping anyone else with this same issue. But perhaps you are taking a breather right now while reading this. That might be all the help you need.

I always feel just a little bit better after putting things down on paper.

-M

Collections: What’s the lure?

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I have a confession to make, and it isn’t one that I make lightly. But here goes:

I have a knack for collecting things, or perhaps it’s just a weakness of mine. I have collected all sorts of items over my lifetime (well, at least since I’ve had a job anyway, which means I started at about age 12). I have collections of; books, music books, comic books, toys, movies, music, video games and a small number of musical instruments). I’m pretty lucky as my wife shares at least some of my interests at heart, mainly books, movies and some video games (yeah she’s pretty awesome that way).

What I’m getting at is that I can never seem to want just one of anything (well my wife excluded, I’m not from Utah, a Mormon, nor do I have an interest in being polyamorous). So I have a huge array of Spawn Toys, and some polystone statues, the newest of which showed up at the house this week from a great place called Side Show Collectibles [this is what really got me to thinking about just how much of my life has been spent collecting]. So here we are at the heart of the matter, as I said previously I can’t seem to ever own just one of anything, and now I have the “bugg” again. I spelled that with two g’s because it isn’t a disease for me (I can stop at will & I do for long periods of time), nor is it a stomach virus I am speaking about. I wish I could say that I am in-thrall of pop culture items, or that I have a need to archive and curate such oddities, but the truth is, I get this weird internal desire to just “have” stuff. Mind you this stuff looks awesome, and has incredible detailing, paint jobs, clothes, weapons etc etc… but I digress.

So this is how the story plays out for me, perhaps it is the same for you. You stumble across something in a store/catalogue/on-line/at a friends house or at a convention (whatever!!) and you have some room in your budget to pick up an item that really gets you excited. Then you see what other companies have to offer, and pretty soon, you’re weighing one item against another, planning for more purchases, rationalizing with yourself over possible purchases, and then either you go a little crazy and later suffer some buyers remorse, or you snap a lid on that “bugg” real friggin’ quick and move on. I’m getting better at snapping a lid on it and moving on, after all I’m not made of money, and I have a crazy ass dog; who likes to sink his teeth into things that we love, hell even the way he chews his own hind legs gets pretty ghastly if he has an itch he just can’t quite scratch.

The thing I wished I’d had available when I was younger was Youtube, yup it has come in handy when squelching your need to own everything in sight. I’m pretty fond of “Hot Chix Cool Toys” 1/6 scale toy reviews, as a means to seeing neat items up close and personal, hearing all about it, but not having to pay $200-300 bucks for that un-boxing rush of new item coolness.

The items I do have are pretty cool, and I have every intention of displaying them in my home when the time is right. As it stands now I wouldn’t bother displaying every single piece, some of the items have lost limbs and accessories or been damaged over the years. Every so often I find an item that catches my eye and I just start to assemble large volumes of it, I have a small collection of War Hammer 40K items, which I spent many hours painting, but have never played a single game with (I probably don’t even have an army to skirmish with, as I bought the cool alien species, Orks, Tyranids, Cadian forces blah blah blah…) I’d be more interested in building a detailed diorama and setting them up on it, rather than rolling dice and going to WAAAAAAGH with them anyway.

Not to mention that I also have a large collection of paintings which I have done, and now that I spend so much more time working on a computer in my particular field of expertise, namely graphic design, I have a substantial collection of personal Photoshop Composites building up on my hard drive[s] (yes plural). On the downside I don’t paint with acrylic’s at all any more. I have a few canvas’ left, but I have just become so enamored with HDR style Photoshop compositing. To be honest, I can’t even really remember the last time I stayed up all night, or even into the evening to draw some comic book pages, or pin-up art. No, scratch that, I was taking life drawing classes again at the end of last year and it was taking a real long time for me to remember any tips & tricks I had learned as an avid comic book artist from my teenage years. (Crohn’s Disease did a real good job of keeping me in my room/house for days & weeks on end as a pre-teen, so drawing was a great way to escape & explore beyond my bedroom walls). But that was life drawing of human nude models and not anything comic book related.

Some of you might think I have collectors ADHD, and that is probably true. I can get bored with stuff fairly quickly. Although now I am getting more comfortable saying that collecting is my hobby and not a habit.

But, whatever, I like to collect stuff.

MH Snowboards available through Amazon

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Here’s something neat that I didn’t expect to see. Some of the Western Market snowboards I designed with Don Burns are up for sale on Amazon.com. I guess that’s a good sign if people are willing to pay $200 – $300 bucks for some of my handiwork. Some elements from the design came from Russell Branding & John.St as well.

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PS. I’m also getting ready for the GFN’s show in Guelph Ontario tonight. It’s going to be a blast so come out if you can. Bands go on at 9:30pm inside Van Gogh’s Ear, on Wyndham St (South End).

-M