August 14th, 2008

Cats in Canoes

Hey, everybody!

Well, I'm back from a few days out visiting with Mike White, my animator and cartoonist friend, on his marvelous lake front property. We got a fair bit of work done, (it's very nice working in the same space as another cartoonist; the more like-minds one is around, the easier it is to remain in high spirits with regard to one's own efforts.)

He has a little boat, a Zodiac, hard bottom with inflatable pontoons and a little outboard motor to shuck us about. He said, "Hey, Mark. Want to go for a boat ride around the lake?"

And I said, "Ugh. I fear water." (Always have. I'll do and try nearly anything happily enough, but I tend to halt at the shore line.)

He didn't let up and so off we went. It was a late afternoon and the sun was getting low on the horizon.

"You want to go around that outcrop on the coast there?" he asked. "I've never been on that part of the lake."

I nervously noted that the sun was maybe twenty minutes from going down and I lamely said something about not wanting to get stuck out on the water on a remote lake after dark. So we headed back, the noise of the engine numbing my ears. I thought wistfully, "You know, this would much more satisfying if we were paddling in a canoe during the daylight hours. This water stuff is actually very nice. . . If I were more out-going like some of the adventure people I know, I'd be on the phone the instant we docked looking up places to rent a canoe. . ." (I was specifically thinking of Ariell, the girl Ashelle in Stardrop is partly based on. Ariell is one of those people who makes things happen and has zero fear of anything.)

I mentioned this to Mike and he said, "What? I have a canoe!"

I lightened up immediately. "Really? Wow! It's been forever since I was in a canoe. You have a canoe? That's awesome! We should take it out tomorrow morning!"

So we did.

Wow. What a difference. A quiet lake and warm water. And a cat in the boat. --Mike, not one to leave anybody out, decided that it would be a good idea for Butternut, (named after the creature's golden coat), to experience the water from a canoe. I was a bit hesitant about this, but figured, "Hey, he's your cat. It'll be interesting to see how he takes to boating."

Now Butternut is a fairly remarkable animal. I've never in my life met a cat who was so. . , polite, I suppose is the word. Most cats think little of digging their claws into your leg or your lap or whatever when the mood strikes. Butternut has never done this. --And I spent a whole week sitting him when Mike was off in New York for one of the big comic shows. Butternut will even slide on his paws right off you and fall down rather than dig in for a better grip. Butternut is awesome.

However, even this animal's patience and reserve fell apart when Mike tried to carry him from the dock into the canoe. The cat scrambled across the boat and climbed up my face and over the top of my head, claws in the fully armed position, in a desperate (and successful) bid to get back on dry land. Sitting in a wobbly canoe and trying to quell my own natural distaste for pretending to be anything other than a land mammal, I didn't blame him. But we repeated the procedure three times, and I got my face climbed again before we got it right, with the result being that Butternut found himself in the middle of a rocking canoe far out from shore, flat down, fur bristling and none too pleased about it.

And so off we went. I was surprised to see that the cat quickly became comfortable with the arrangement and by the end of our little tour around the lake islands, he was leaning over the edge of the boat in fascination with the ripples. --To the point where we were actively pulling him back in. "No, dude. Don't try to walk along the edge like that. If you fall in, you're not going to be happy."

When we got back ashore, the Olympic opening ceremonies were entering their final hour, so feeling fresh from our relaxing little journey we settled in to watch them. --I don't take a great deal of interest in the games themselves, but I've always been a fan of the opening ceremonies and the lighting of the big torch. China put on a fine show, with that sky-runner doing his thing. --Though still my favorite were the Winter Games held right here in Canada out in Calgary back in 1988. Partly it was some of that national pride which I don't often partake in, where we did our own version of a giant relay run with a few hundred athletes in their red and white sweat suits across every province and territory in Canada. --And when the torch entered the stadium, the runner lit the end of an arrow and an archer shot the flame up and over the stadium. I remember thinking, "Yikes! I hope that guy doesn't miss! They've been running that torch all over the place for weeks now! What if. . . Oh boy! I hope he doesn't miss!" All the fun tension one feels while watching a close contest during any of the events was contained in that moment. He didn't miss, of course, (probably having practiced the shot a few hundred times beforehand), but when it struck true and the flame leapt up, it was. . . Well, I felt all giddy and proud and all of that silly nationalistic stuff I normally try to avoid. In a world where nationalism is so often used to ugly ends, the Olympic games are my little indulgence.

Anyway, I'm right now looking at a partly completed Stardrop episode, so I should get back to that, comics being what they are.

Cheers, and have a great day/evening!

-Mark

July 2, 2008

I've always been a sucker for a good radio drama. . . There have been a couple of really good productions I can think of; a handful of books-on-tape read by accomplished voice performers. So with this in mind, I decided that I might as well write some scripts and put together my own little radio drama series. . . Only to discover that such projects are rather more complex than one might imagine.

--Not impossible by any means, but I learned that it is very easy to do it poorly, and a poor radio drama is a shockingly disruptive thing to listen to. --If a voice actor cannot pull off an excellent performance then there's nothing, nothing at all to distract the listener. I was hoping to read for one of the parts, and realized that professional speaking is a big deal. --I'd lined up a number of willing voice actors, but I found myself unwilling to advance for fear of not getting it done right. (I know! It's a terrible reason for not trying, but it did make me stress somewhat.) Still, I learned quite a bit in the process and would like very much to make another attempt at some point when I am feeling more certain of myself.

Anyway, I was also left holding some really nifty audio gear. --A very cute and effective digital sound recorder. By way of testing it, I brought it with me to Acadia University for a talk I was asked to give at one of their graduate English courses. Now, due to the fact that I was rather new to using the device, I wound up pointing it in the wrong direction, but you can still hear my voice clearly enough. Future items posted here will be much more clear. Please treat this as the experiment it is.

Cheers!

August 22nd, 2008,

There's a lot of excellent thinking emerging these days. Many threads of awareness which are spotted throughout the vast internet. I've done a lot of reading over the past decade, (both on paper and screen), into many areas, most of them the sorts of things few of the people around me found to be particularly interesting. Studying politics and history on one's own time isn't exactly a typical sport, but it is a source of fascination for me. (My upcoming book, The Seventh Expert, through Annick Press is an example of this fascination, specifically all things medieval.)

Anyway, over the past five or six years, I've noticed that a large number of documentarians have jumped into this same ocean of emerging thought and have grasped hold of some handful of the many threads. The threads are all woven into a whole cloth, but it is a cloth is so large that one finds it difficult to examine with care more than a few parts of it at a time. I have, (being me), tried to look at the whole thing, and so I've spent hundreds of hours reading and pondering, but this results by necessity in a generalist's view. Others, however, those whose energies drive them to make documentaries, are the sorts of people who are so fascinated by a small handful of aspects that they are able to create very precise images to share. --Yet a documentary, while it is a wonderful device, remains simple. A documentary can lay out powerful patterns and fill them with enough researched details to create a succinct picture of the film-maker's mind, but it is only one picture, and often it will contain bits of flawed logic in spots which are hard to catch because once you are visiting the mind of the film-maker, all views within are by nature, internally consistent. And so it is important upon emerging from the world of a documentary to double-check and compare the ideas which have been shared with you. This should be seen as a challenge rather than a problem; it's just the way stories all are. But the stories themselves remain valuable, because while there may be flaws, the larger patterns are often fairly complete or in need only of some adjustment or gaps filled in. They are tools through which one can start to build their own knowledge of the world, and the exploration into the huge realm of human history and the new ideas which have been growing of late is an adventure!

Anyway. . . Every now and again, I'll find a documentary which does a particularly efficient or inspired job of putting together its share of threads into a coherent story. I'd like to share a couple of the ones which stand out in my mind. --Of course, many of the readers who enjoy my work, I have found, tend to be very aware people, and so I recognize that I may be sharing old ideas with them, but still. . . It's not like I'm printing this stuff on expensive paper. The digital medium has wide and plentiful acreage. The following film is the third part of a series called, "Zeitgeist". Very cool stuff. I'll post the first part another time. (The middle part I didn't care for, but that's simply the result of my own explorations. You are of course invited to make your own.)

Cheers, and enjoy!

August 4th, 2008,

Well, here's something new! --Many of you have probably seen plenty of 9-11 stuff, and are also probably quite tired of it. This one is really neat, though. --A group of pilots requested the flight data recorder info for the various planes on that fateful day through the U.S. FIOA, and put it through their own comparative analysis, contrasting it with the findings of the official 9-11 Report. Their work is both very sharp and very revealing. --I've seen a lot of this kind of material and usually there are several mushy spots, so it's nice to see some clean thinking. I do have a couple of reservations with some of their conclusions, but they have nothing to do with the major points offered. See what you think.

For more information on this video and the group which made it, visit, pilotsfor911truth.org

July 15th, 2008,

This is one of my favorite (very) short little animations. Alan Watts is one of those modern day philosophers who I place in the same general category as Joseph Campbell and Ray Bradbury. Enjoy!

July 2nd, 2008

"Where do you get your ideas?"

I've been asked this many times, and while many writers find the question understandably peculiar, I find it peculiar in a way which I really enjoy tackling because the answer is never quite the same. It's sort of an exploration of one's own mind, and I've always found this a fascinating exercise, usually because there always seems to be something new and interesting going on up there. --Often it involves a series of questions I am trying to find answers for, and when not doing that, my mental energy is spent following up on all the other little items in the world which fascinate me. There has always been a great host of them, and when the internet came along, that great host expanded dramatically. While much of what my mind produces is cobbled together from many different areas and thus takes a fair bit of effort to share with the world, every now and then I come across a diamond in the rough which I can simply hold up and say, "Hey! Check it out! A diamond!"

Well, having spent so many years with a website which I felt was sorely under-exploited for all its potential to communicate, I promised myself that when I performed my next massive overhaul, I would find some way to make a platform for those various items which have little or nothing to do with my comics, but everything to do with what fascinates and intrigues me. (--Which I suppose is directly and inextricably linked to everything I do in comics.)

So to start off with, I thought the first post I'd make in this area should be something appropriate to the whole subject of communication. This little gem is all about using the media to its fullest extent for all the right reasons. Ladies and gentlemen, --the gallant Bill Moyers offers a rousing keynote address at the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform. . .