My Dinner with Andre

My Dinner with Andre might be one of the most difficult movies for many viewers to watch. The artsy crowd would call it minimalist while the more lowbrow among us would say it’s boring! There’s just so little to it that there is a valid case for both. The story is simply a struggling young playwright, Wally agrees to meet an acquaintance, Andre, for dinner at a nice restaurant in decaying New York city and conversation ensues. The end. But like so many things in life, My Dinner with Andre gives you so much more if you really listen closely. I recently watched it again and I forgot just how great it is and how it continues to speak to us today.

It’s so stark and unapologetic about being without plot that it’s become the subject of many pop culture parodies. I know there is a Simpson’s reference to it but I most enjoyed the episode of Community that spoofs it. You may think that this comes from a place of common dislike for the movie but it’s actually the opposite. The parodies just prove how influential and beloved it is. Why? For me, the appeal is the conversation itself. It’s been celebrated for being a complete fiction that does a great job at coming across as a documentary but that’s just appreciation on a formal level. It’s not just that they had a conversation that’s important, it’s what they talk about that matters. The content of that discussion is so important, the writers and filmmaker felt it merited being the subject of a film without any distraction. To say that Louis Malle created My Dinner with Andre for the iconoclasm alone, misses the point.

The two men seated at dinner are artists/playwrights and catch up on the long period since they last encountered each other. They’re not really friends and Wally even debates cancelling the dinner before ultimately opting to go. He’s a working writer and artist making ends meet in New York City while Andre has had a long hiatus from creative life spent on travel and self examination. Wally confirms their community speculation that Andre has money that allows his adventures. Andre at first spends dominates the conversation with anecdotes about mutual acquaintances and talks about some of the retreats and workshops he’s attended recently. Andre has dropped out of the arts and has been on a personal quest to find himself after becoming disillusioned with his life.

In the time since they last spoke Andre describes a crisis in his creative life. He left the theater and traveled to Poland where he spent time with strangers in the woods creating experimental theater. He didn’t speak or understand Polish and they didn’t understand English but the time spent together was transformative. What began for him as creative exploration in the woods forced him to act as himself and in so doing he was forced to examine his life and how he acts when he plays himself:

So, you follow the same law of improvisation…which is that you do whatever your impulse, as the character, tells you to do…but in this case, you are the character.

So there's no imaginary situation to hide behind…and there's no other person to hide behind.

What you're doing, in fact, is you're asking those same questions…that Stanislavsky said the actor should constantly ask himself as a character:

Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from, and where am I going?

But instead of applying them to a role, you apply them to yourself.

Andre tells more stories of his spiritual and creative adventures. For him, his journey to this dinner has been full of magic, mystery, serendipity and travel to exotic locations including India and even a Saharan Oasis. The restaurant is quite nice but it is still remarkably banal compared to Andre’s monstrous hallucinations and descriptions of his process of personal exploration. It culminates in a description of being buried alive in Montauk, NY. From that point on, Andre becomes surprised by his own reactions to things in his life. He even begins to look at himself and the sort of person who would spend his time the way he has. People in his life who he called friends, repulse him. Figures on television appear to be objectively horrible people. He says,

And I suddenly had this feeling I was just as creepy as they were…and that my whole life had been a sham…

…

I mean, I really feel that I'm just washed up, wiped out. I feel I've just squandered my life.

Moments later he goes on to say,

Well, you know, I may be in a very emotional state right now, Wally.…but since I've come back home I've just been finding the world we're living in…more and more upsetting.

It’s as though Andre has a new perception of the world that is in stark contrast to his former self. He’s alone in this perspective until he sees a woman working in the theater who recognizes the trouble on his face. Where everyone else he encountered commented on how great he looked, this woman somehow knew by looking at him, the emotional state he was in. Because of this woman’s recent loss of her mother, she was able to see him clearly. Andre says,

She didn't know anything about what I'd been going through. But the other people, what they saw was this tan, or this shirt…or the fact that the shirt goes well with the tan.

So they said, " Gee, you look wonderful." Now, they're living in an insane dreamworld.

They're not looking.

That seems very strange to me. Right, because they just didn'ts ee anything, somehow.…except, uh, the few little things that they wanted to see.

All of this has resonated with me very personally. I similarly feel as though my perspective on the world has shifted and it has made me incompatible with things as they are and people who aren’t looking. It’s as though my prior life was a dream, honestly. When I think of how I thought about the world and other people for most of my life, I also hate that prior self. I agree with Andre that that earlier version of myself inhabited an insane dreamworld. Andre describes it using the example of his dying mother. Although she was terminally ill and appeared only minutes away from death, the specialist was beaming at all the progress she was making. For this doctor, he had so narrowed his goals/perception to her arm that any healing on that front was cause for celebration. Insane.

I mean, we're just walking around in some kind of fog. I think we're all in a trance. We're walking around like zombies. I don't…I don't think we're even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things.

We…We're just going around all day like unconscious machines…and meanwhile there's all of this rage and worry and uneasiness…just building up and building up inside us.

And later, Andre continues to describe this state of mind:

Isn't it amazing how often a doctor…will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? When you see a terrorist on television, he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers…or single people, or artists…are all trying to live up to someone's fantasy…of how a father, or a single person,or an artist should look and behave.

They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves…at every single moment…and they all seem totally self-confident.

For two men involved in theater, they are approaching the idea that who we fashion ourselves to be, is selected from clearly defined character behaviors and appearance. For an actor, it must be disturbing for there to be no leap between the actor and the character. Why is it that someone who adopts the role of artist in real life, chooses to look like what we expect? As average people in our world, we’re acting our roles as they have been defined for us by someone else. This should be alarming to everyone and not just Andre and Wally.

I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality. I mean, on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now.…on our so-called careers…automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority…because if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career…well, it just doesn't matter what you perceive or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way. You can sort of turn on the automatic pilot.

How many of us are doing this right now? I did it for many years, always overlooking the here and now for some future reward that all of it was building towards. I also think if your focus is on a career, it’s less on the experience and wisdom needed to fully embody that role. This is why this is such a great film. It may not wow you with realistic explosions but it challenges you to question your view on your life and your world. You shouldn’t be content with the way things are. If you are, you are part of a very fortunate few and you may be overlooking much of the world to do so.

people's concentration is on their goals.…in their life they just live each moment by habit.

…

And if you're just operating by habit…then you're not really living. I mean, you know, in Sanskrit, the root of the verb " to be".…is the same as " to grow" or " to make grow. "

This is something I think about a lot. I live as a cartoonist dedicated to writing and drawing and designing and promoting and tweeting and posting and editing etc. in a driving need to produce, produce, produce. Am I really living? I don’t think so. It’s okay to admit it. This wasn’t a world of my creation but if I’m alive and active in it, I can change it. This film gave me a way to understand the things that I’ve gone through over the last few years. Without art, I wouldn’t have evidence that others have been where I stand. I feel less alone and more hopeful.

Wally talks about the need for escapism and comfort from art against the harsh reality of every day life. The choice is to create art that is comforting but for all its warmth, fails to acknowledge reality and might contribute to a collective disengaging with reality and most importantly, each other.

…we're starving because we're so cut off from contact with reality…that we're not getting any real sustenance,'cause we don't see the world. We don't see ourselves. We don't see how our actions affect other people.

This is heady stuff, for sure. All of this is to get us thinking about the nature of our lives and really see the things we’ve chosen for ourselves. To truly be free is to be able to think outside the characters and roles defined for us…even the ones we think we chose but didn’t create. Only by looking at ourselves honestly and as objectively as possible can we see how far from our own humanity we have come. Andre went through a personal crisis in which he went through a dramatization of his own death and rebirth. The fresh eyes this has given him as illuminated a very dark reality. There are no fancy distractions in this film because it is a battle cry for humanity’s future. Under the guise of a polite conversation about things most average people would discount as having no bearing on reality is actually about a fundamental reality that has changed without our conscious consent. His advise:

Get out of here.

…

the 1960s.…represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished…and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future, now…and that from now on there'll simply be all these robots walking around…feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there'll be nobody left almost to remind them.…that there once was a species called a human being…with feelings and thoughts…and that history and memory are right now being erased…and soon nobody will really remember.…that life existed on the planet.

Black Socialists in America On Creativity in Late Capitalism

Does anyone even know why I write this blog!? I’m not writing to signal boost my fandom of ANYTHING. I’m not a fan first, but an artist, and I’ve been spending my whole life creating art through various media. What was consistent throughout all those years and projects was that I felt I had to say something. The whole point of it was to communicate. If you see changes in our world that signal deterioration, do you (as a creative) do everything within your power to adapt to these conditions, or do you use your powerful means of communication to expose the rot? If they lack the courage to buck trends in their art, what kinds of heroism do you think they’ll describe in their stories? Too many ‘creative’ people embrace these conditions in exchange for the material benefits of money. That is why the people that rise in this system are usually emblematic of the system’s failings.

This morning I had the good fortune of encountering this tweet by The Black Socialists In America.

How many of you artists/creatives out there have been wondering how/why it seems as though the quality of art and design with money behind it (in the mainstream) has lessened considerably over the years (saturation aside)?

Ever hear of Marx’s “base and superstructure” theory? 😏 pic.twitter.com/uOfMSFAyUV

— Black Socialists in America (@BlackSocialists) January 31, 2019

If you read through the entire thread, you’ll find a very thorough and concise description how the corporate golden umbilical cord for culture only creates stillborn ‘art’. The corporate patron is too risk-averse to allow any uncomfortable or challenging thought to enter into anything they are paying for. It’s not unusual that a patron of the arts has a say in what it is they are patronizing…in fact it’s normal. But when that patron is part of a larger corporate cultural complex that is inherently oppositioned to freedom and community building, they can limit the sorts of messaging that gets into the culture. The art coming out of this corporate system is always going to have messaging within it that actually does the opposite of what it purports.

Real art brings people together by showing that the concerns affecting them are felt by many; that we have more in common with each other than we don’t. Because corporations benefit from a divided and atomized society (better consumers, lower wages), the messaging within corporate-sponsored ‘art’ is actually delivering the message that you are above society/humanity. The best intentions of average folks towards each other get misdirected into Cancel Culture and Identity Politics that only increase the divide, and are fascistic in their dogmatic approach to people. When artists consume the culture produced from this system and draw inspiration only from it, they subtly learn the sorts of things that will exclude them from a book deal or gallery show. Those things just don’t get tackled in their ‘art’. The thing our soul craves from Art is absent. This probably explains how publishers are unable to sustain new comics series much beyond 5 issues. The people are not being given what they need.

To be an artist isn’t just to have some technical ability. If you are going to be a communicator under the umbrella of Art, you need to accept the responsibility that goes along with that. The true artist strives to be true to themself and listen to what their humanity needs in this world now. Once the artist understands the needs of their consciousness, they can then make Art to heal those needs in others unable to make art across the globe. It brings people together and makes anyone who shares this culture feel closer to their humanity and each other.

This is why I rant about Alan Moore, Frank Miller and others about their creative process: because their ‘formula’ for creating art is the only way through this. If people continue to live in a world devoid of empowering messaging, what kind of world do you think we are creating? Are you happy with the world as it is? No? Our silence and neglect of one of humanity’s greatest impulses has allowed our culture to be divorced from real human nature. What’s going to help the future understand their world? More Ghostbusters reboots? The art or comics that we are still celebrating 40 years after their creation are the product of real artists talking about their reality then. They are from a time when corporations saw commercial benefits of these stories outweigh the risk of including the messaging people needed. Now they often try to sell us on nostalgia but this time without the original context of the socio-economic conditions that inspired Ghostbusters. Meaningless ensues.

As a reader, if you find yourself dissatisfied or uninterested after 5 issues, it’s probably because whatever you are reading isn’t giving you what you bought it for; something that makes you feel less alone and less empowered to face reality. Something new that speaks to NOW. We all get so easily seduced by the promise of each new story’s novel premise but we realize it’s just trying to recreate the commercial success of something else, after we naturally lose interest. This is the deadening effect of editors and publishers unable/unwilling to take the risks needed to find something that really connects with people. Instead they prefer short-term profits and books whose shelf and mental life is no more than 2 weeks. How else are they going to keep you buying this shit?

I’ll pass on this. I’m holding out for “Action Hero”

The stagnating sales of comics is the message to corporate publishers that the stories are dead on arrival. Your hard earned dollars are worth too much to throw away on corporate comics/art that will never give you what you need.

Frank Miller on Creating The Dark Knight

Comic Book Confidential was a mainstay of my childhood that I watched countless times. I think growing up in Canada helped because when I saw that The Silver Snail, my local comic shop in Hamilton, Ontario was in the credits for the documentary, it made comics (and the people who made them) feel accessible. It was probably played regularly on the Canadian television airwaves to satisfy Canadian Content guidelines, but that did nothing to diminish its impact on me. Of all the many artistic adventures I’ve taken, creating comics feels closest to my heart and Comic Book Confidential was essential to cementing that association. Comics helped me explore not only to the furthest reaches of the imagination but it made me connect comics with my home and origins in Canada (talk about the sublime to the ridiculous!)

Recently my wife saw Comic Book Confidential pop up on one of our streaming services and we decided to take a trip down comic book memory lane. I already rant a lot about the roots of inspiration and the nature of art as a lost ‘alchemical formula’, so it was nice to see Frank Miller say something very similar. When talking about his inspiration for The Dark Knight, he has this to say:

What I’ve been trying to do recently, um, is to take the stuff of the old (Batman) comics and do it in a way that’s worth reading for me.

Whatever stories I write have to do with my reactions to what’s going on around me, with the world that I live in right now, with 1980s America which is a very frightening, uh, silly, um, place and it’s often silly and frightening at the same time and I hope Dark Knight is also frightening and silly at the same time.

In today’s world, we often mistake criticism as being unsupportive or even contrary to progress. It couldn’t be further from the truth and The Dark Knight is a good example of this. In the clip below, Frank Miller describes how over its 50-year history the character of Batman had been reduced to a silly, colourful costumed hero; very far from its dark and violent roots. If we are to follow the prevailing logic of today, to radically revise a character as a critique of its previous self would be unheard of. If Dark Knight is a good example, then a bad example is when costumed characters are re-imagined to try and cash in on some perceived trend in the larger culture. “Heavy Metal Batman” is a great example of this garbage, where corporate synergy tries to pass for relevance. I may be wrong, but it feels like the work of comics writers now are more about upholding the established way of doing things (because they are fans first) rather than indulging any iconoclastic impulse (and a true artist in distant second).

Why am I going on about this formula for creation? Because the best and most memorable stories came out of taking the world, transforming it through the insights of the artists, and translating them into something new. Star Wars, Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings and so many more come out of this tradition because it yields the most meaningful stories that speak to people’s souls about what it is to be alive. If an artist can speak to the ways people are feeling/suffering/living and loving, then the audience will listen because they are being given something that speaks to their truest self. Making a connection between artist and audience requires that one individual experiences life and shares those experiences across vast expanses of space and time with another individual; it’s all part of a vast cultural exchange that uses our commonality as its point of departure.

When Frank Miller looked around him and thought about the world and what it meant to be alive in ‘80s America, he used Batman to illuminate and dramatize those ideas. He probably saw that the brightly coloured version in the comics didn’t reflect the difficulties people experienced in their lives. The villains in the lives of working people in the ‘80s were not garishly attired and ridiculous; they inspired fear and brought suffering felt by many. I bet a lot of people felt a deep sense of unease in the ‘80s, and many probably felt the same way as Frank Miller did; that it was all so terrifying and silly. To feel this anxiety is to be alive; to create something that dramatizes the same anxieties (in the ‘safe’ context of art) is to say we are never alone.

Thinking about Alan Moore…

Alan Moore seems to possess an integrity that is not understood by creators and fans alike. He has consistently disavowed the translation of his work into other media and has forsaken the fame and monetary rewards that we all know go along with that. The creation of comics as a pitching tool to television and film has become such conventional logic, that Alan Moore’s denials of the fruits of that success are an affront. Renouncing that money means that it was never done for the up-sell to television or film but something else. That is why most contemporary writers don’t show Mr. Moore the respect he deserves; because what he discards as inessential is their entire reason for creating comics. To them, the money and validation not possible in comics except through film and television are the very definition of success. Why would anyone throw that all away? What motivates Alan Moore if not material success and fame? For too many, there would be no point.

I think what’s lost on most contemporary comics creators is the acceptance that they’re creating Art. Even the most stupid infantile comic strip would be made better and more powerful to audience members if it was created with some artistic guiding principles in mind. The biggest of those is having something to say. Comics writers are correct in saying how difficult it is to come up with new material to capture people’s imaginations (and wallets). That’s because they’ve hollowed out their venture into trying to come up with a remixing of a small pool of ideas into a ‘new’ form while always preserving the nostalgic thrill of their sources. It sounds incredibly difficult to try and capture the feeling of things we’ve already loved numerous times with a veneer of the new and fresh. You can see that the approach is engineered to cash in on the thrills from an already existing audience while offering them the illusion of novelty. Sell them something they’ve already bought in the guise of something different.

When you listen in on creator conversations at conventions or studios, you may notice that the craft of making this stuff almost never comes up. Instead, they tend to lean on the business side of things like editors, page rates, publishers, press etc. Most writers of comics would be very happy to have Mr. Moore’s career and would salivate at the royalties he’s tossed off. In fact, the path of making comics for film and television was largely carved out by Alan Moore so even their career path owes a debt to him. Why, if commercial success is the goal, aren’t the more cynical and craven trying to reverse engineer the gold in those stories? That I know only leads to places that they are afraid to examine. Alan Moore has not made it any secret what’s informs his writing so there’s no logical answer. The validation of proving you can do what’s already been done must be good enough.

What has Alan Moore said about his approach/philosophy to writing? In the documentary, The Mindscape of Alan Moore there are two very revealing ideas. Here is the first major point about getting in tune with the Self.

The search for the Self with a capital S is understood to be the great work, as being the gold of the alchemists, thought as being the will, the soul, the thing that we have inside us that is behind the intellect, the body, the dreams, the inner dynamo of us, if you like. Now, this is the single most important thing that we can ever attain, the knowledge of our own self and yet there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge not just to ignore the self but actually seem to have the urge to obliterate themselves. This is horrific but you can almost understand the desire simply to wipe out that awareness because it’s too much of a responsibility to actually possess such a thing as a soul–such a precious thing. What if you break it? What if you lose it? Mightn’t it be better to anesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it to not have to live with the pain of struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure. I think that the way that people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher self and then having to maintain it.

As far as writing advice goes, this a long way from Story by Robert McKee isn’t it? He seems to be talking almost in spiritual terms of getting in touch with something deep within ourselves; something that the common culture denies and supplants with meaninglessness. Rather than providing the kinds of distractions from that higher investigation, Alan Moore is suggesting we do exactly the opposite of what our society encourages; seek the universal within yourself and recognize it in each other. If we’re to bring it back to writing this quest for the higher self is very much like the hero’s myth. The hero must leave the comforts of normal society to brave dangers in search of a greater understanding/reality. When that has been achieved by the hero through great sacrifice and struggle, he goes on to sell that idea for as much money as possible to Hollywood, right? No, the hero takes that higher understanding and brings it back to to collective to transform consciousness and society.

What the writer has learned from knowledge of the Self is transformed into art that can communicate that message to others. The writer/artist communicates to others their insights from their own journey to better understand themselves and reality. Doesn’t that sound like a working definition of Art? To take experience and share it for growth of all.

In latter times I think the artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They are not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being, that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment, things with which we can fill twenty minutes, half an hour while we’re waiting to die.

It is not the job of artists to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience, they would be the artists. It’s the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

I see the role of artist as mere entertainer to be a dead end and a product of the sort of diminishing returns inevitable when trying to pass off tired fictions as something new. I’ve illustrated enough series to see this logic at work and how it fails to pass on a meaningful spark of inspiration. It’s as though the creators of contemporary comics keep forcing their formulations for commercial success but fail to adjust them when they dry up. By looking within yourself, you understand that what stirs your soul is not that different than what stirs the souls of your audience. The art you make to help your Self’s journey can help others and that’s the REAL role of art; to contribute to the overall evolution of consciousness.

To Borrow or To Steal?

In doing a little research for this post, the origin of the quote I wanted to start with is in question. It’s often attributed to Pablo Picasso but similar versions were apparently uttered by Igor Stravinsky and maybe even Steve Jobs. It goes like this and you’ve probably already heard a version of it:

Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal.

I’m going to try and explain my interpretation because I think it’s worth sorting out. As a borrower of anything, there’s an implied return of the borrowed back to the owner and is never actually owned by the borrower. Stealing on the other hand, is the taking of something from someone else and claiming that it is now theirs.

How does one borrow or steal as an artist? I’ve spent my whole life creating in a number of disciplines and there’s a somewhat universal development to all of them. When I look back at my childhood and adolescence obsessing over comics I know I spent a great deal of time trying to draw like whatever artist I was fawning over at the time. Sometimes I’d come close to making a drawing that passed muster to my uneducated eye and I could convince myself that I came close. It’s really thrilling after lots of sketching, drawing, stumbling and falling on your face to hit gold and make something that validates your efforts and looks like your artistic heroes. To see what you admire and love in other artists reflected back to you in your own creation is a big moment in any artist’s development. You made it…but did you really make it? If your work immediately recalls another artists work, have you created an original of your own or have you borrowed the look of another?

Art is ultimately an intellectual endeavor even when it’s in a purely visual medium. The art that you create and proclaim a masteriece is the accumulation of a series of decisons/reactions to steps in its creation. If you leave a pencil line with the hope that after enough of them, you’ll have Conan, then it is in your mind where you decide whether or not that line fits in your plan. Do I keep it or do I erase? The drawing you end up with is the result of deciding there’s no more to be done. Eventually everybody consistently matches the look of another artist’s style and the blush of matching your master starts to wear thin. At least it should.

This is the crossroads. Are you going to be satisfied standing in the shadow of another artist? Does the work of the master validate the work of the junior artist, or pull attention away? In my history of drawing, I’ve gone through this dilemma many times. Probably any time you’re exposed to the work of an artist that changes your assumptions, it’s normal to grapple with it creatively. That’s the process of influence.

Eventually, however, paying attention to the decisions you make creating art over and over, will teach you about yourself. The decisions you make in your art reflect your unique perspective and experiences. Your job as an artist is to be true to that. The artists you emulate, you’ll soon realize, have undergone similar transformations of processing influence not into perfect recreations of past work but into something new. If they had emulated their creators, you’d not be mimicking them, you’d be drawing from the work of their original. So that’s the difficult responsibility of theft it’s that you have to take it and make it speak in your voice. Hide the theft of those older ideas by transforming them into something new!

It’s a responsibility of the artist to have the courage to stand on your own out from the shadow of another. If you’re repeating what’s already been said, you’re saying NOTHING.

The More It Works

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I work with music playing like everyone else. Sometimes it’s a pleasant diversion, a mood or a serendipitous soundtrack to what I’m drawing and very rarely it’s a voice out of your own past speaking to you. Yeah, okay so it isn’t that exactly, but hearing, Parquet Courts’ The More You Use It today, struck me because I seem to be yelling some variation of its lyrics almost every day. My versions are never nearly as catchy or as hooky as theirs. Here’s a sampling of the lyrics from that song:

Express yourself without the tools that they give you
Want something they didn't tell you to want
Say something without the words that they fed you
Find something they didn't tell you to hunt for

Because the more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works

Be yourself and not the figure they mold
Look for something they've been trying to hide
Do something you were never told to
Don't keep it to yourself, don't keep it inside

Later on…

Yeah, listen up, listen up everybody
What could I even mean?
Could it be your teeth? Could it be your eyes?
Could it be your mouth? Could it be your spleen?

It's kind of like all those things
It's kind of wrapped into one
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works

Yeah, define yourself, not in title
Embrace a concept not taught in school
The more you use it, the more it works
If you waste it, you're a fool

When I lived in Brooklyn, I listened to music on commutes to and from the studio like everyone else. In 2014 or 2015 things were very hard but I still look back a little longingly at those times. The Parquet Courts had released Human Performance, their third LP in a row and its more somber tenor was good but I always preferred their jauntier, angsty punk more. So to hear The More You Use It today was loaded with nostalgia, melancholy and passion. What does it make you fee?

Just food for thought. Use it.

What is Art?

It’s always really impressive when one starts something with a quote from another, probably smarter, person, right? In this case, I’ll start with a quote from Norbert Weiner, who I think is giving us the plain facts about the Meaning of Life. Yeah, he figured it out. He writes in The Human Use of Human Beings:

…to be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on 
the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage. In the figurative sense, to be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its unhampered exchange. 

We’re all taking in influences through various sensory experiences and in many ways these change who we are and thereby inform what we put out into the world. Our life is a constant feedback loop of experiences coming in from reality and then our reactions (informed consciously and subconsciously by experience) outward to reality. When they say “Life is Art” (whoever ‘they’ are), they’re right. The making of art is not about the destination but rather this process of taking in new information and manipulating reality back in response. The artist, is the process of evolution and you can do it, too. The artwork itself can be anything really but whatever it is, it should represent who you were at the time of creation.

Whatever influenced the artist, existed before them but what they create should not…or there is no evolution. In other words, as a very simple example, If someone says in your ear, “speak into an ear” and you turn and repeat the message, “speak into an ear” onto the next person, have you contributed anything new to that message? You moved someone else’s message forward but none of it was yours before entering your ear or leaving your lips. Did it need to be you that moved that message along? Probably not, right? So your influence, should you simply repeat what you are told, is not recorded and moved forward. Being beholden to the original erases anything unique to you and nullify’s your existence as if it had nothing to add to the dialog.

What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen. Moreover, I protest, not only as I have already done against the cutting off of intellectual originality by the difficulties of the means of communication in the modern world, but even more against the ax which has been put to the root of originality because the people who have elected communication as a career so often have nothing more to communicate. 

This quote is also from Norbert Weiner’s The Human Use of Human Beings and I agree that the reduction of the individual to part of the machinery of reproduction of another message is death. So many of us spend so much of our day moving others’ agenda forward without much in exhcange. And too many prefer the comfort of others’ ideas rather than listening to their own internal voice. It’s as though it’s preferable to creatively huddle around an accepted idea than break out and do something outside the herd. It certainly isn’t life if at the end of it, you’ve left everything completely unchanged.

Before and After by Andy Warhol. Casein and pencil on canvas.

In Andy Warhol’s Before and After, he appears to be commenting on this process of transformation. Taking a small, cheap newspaper ad and creating a large scale painting on canvas seems to be all that Warhol is doing without much change, right? Is there enough transformation of the message in Andy Warhol’s painting? I think so. The painting itself depicts an image demonstrating a before and after profile of a woman after plastic surgery and I think Warhol is commenting on his own process of elevating crass advertising into lofty art without really prettying it up. The painting is having some fun as it rubs our noses in the fact that he’s only really changed the size and medium of the image without any aesthetic improvement…and yet now it is art. Rather than reject this, we should embrace it because what Warhol is effectively saying is that the decision to see something of value in the rejected and discarded is the process of art. Anything can be art with your participation…so do it!

You can’t say that you don’t have the time or ideas to make art because what’s being said with Before and After is that the art ante is low but the change it sparks can be widely felt. Warhol happened to make visual art in many forms but the broad definition of art/life that he used applies to anything. Whatever it is that brings you joy and sparks your creativity, qualifies as your art. Even your relationships with friends is a collaborative art that you create together. Just put some of yourself into it and help it grow. Growth and having something larger to work towards are keys to a meaningful and happy life so I encourage all of you to do what you need to, to elevate yourself and the ones you love. Art is simply a distillation of the process of living in the world and contributing to its growth. You might be surprised how far the effects of even the smallest work of art go to improving reality. We don’t have to go so far as a nose job to improve people’s lives…sometimes a smile is all it takes.

Go make some beautiful art! Be your fullest self! Go change the world!

Juan DonJuan's Mind Control Menagerie

Over the long period of blogging silence, I’ve undergone a bit of a transformation. The long and the short of it is that my ideas and goals for my comics are likely to be very different from the aims of any professional writers and so I will no longer be collaborating on comics. The way the comics industry is structured, it tends to give importance to the writer as they are the only one that will carry any project to the television or film development stage. There are many other factors but I suspect a big one is that many independent comics publishers rely on intellectual property rights to stay afloat. It’s just too bad that in this system, the individual spent doing all of the character design, acting, set design, action choreography, cinematography etc. is almost an afterthought as a project moves to another visual medium.

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Keep your eyes on the Television game show prize.

As an artist working in comics, I’ve focused on only creator-owned projects because I felt that this was the sandbox where we could explore more idiosyncratic and unique ideas. It’s supposed to be an arrangement where the creators are just that…investing their creativity to a project. That’s my favorite place to be and for much of the time I worked with Joshua Hale Fialkov on the BUNKER, it felt like that. I don’t think I knew just how rare it is for an artist to have some input on the story. Too often we’re sequestered away to an inbox in which scripts are dropped into and send back various stages of realization/embellishment. That doesn’t feel as much like a creative situation when you have no say in what you’re drawing panel after panel, issue after issue.

Now I write comics and I illustrate my own writing. I’m not going to be writing for television. In my experience that places too much emphasis on the dialog (on the phone, in cars and in bars) to move the story forward rather than in the many inventive ways real comics affords. A drawing is not limited like a photograph and yet, that’s what many are doing to better help visualize their comics for tv. This thinking is a disease. In other words, it tends to limit the art to static stills similar to storyboards. I will not treat comics like a marginal medium to be used for some other medium’s goals. Instead I’m going to explore what comics can do better than anything else and follow where my imagination takes me.

Because I won’t be limiting myself to what can be expected to sell as a television show, I can grant myself the license to say what I want. I no longer have to appeal to the broadest consensus which I’ve found usually results in various forms of pandering (appealing to the most usually means going the lowest). Ultimately my goal is to raise people up with the stories I tell rather than trying to satisfy genre expectations, gratify misdirected ids and violent power fantasies. The goal is to bring people together by acknowledging that we all have more in common than we think and together we have very real power. That’s going to mean exploring a lot of the stresses we all share but don’t talk about; like economics, the validity of the myths we hold dear, our ideas of what it is to be a hero and more.

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Fresh start! Let’s call it…Future Proof! SMH.

Earlier this year I turned around a ten page short story in quick time to fill a last minute opening in an anthology. That story was based on an idea I had simmering for some time and eventually became, Future Proof. I’m quite happy with it and I think it’s artists responsibility to NOT rubber stamp reality but to comment on it and stake a claim for a better one. Not in the most broad and generalized uplifting platitude filled morality yarn but in stories that are critical of the ways we fall short in focused and specific ways. You can’t be so in love with the status quo and be a true artist.

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Ron DonJuan and Juan DonJuan break down the ‘news’.

That brings me to my most recent short, Juan DonJuan’s Mind Control Menagerie. It’s a caustic satire of the morality at play in our leadership class as surveillance freelancers chop it up over all the ways they keep the rest of us confused, disenfranchised and distracted by juvenile and puerile movies, television, news and more (some preview panels to the right).

In writing it’s very difficult to see your own story with the same eyes as your reader. It’s what makes editors so essential to the process. This morning after completing Juan DonJuan, I read it. I can never see it completely fresh but I think it’s good because it’s challenging and emotional, funny and acidic at various turns and sometimes all at once. It made me feel something no other story did and I hope you’ll feel the same.

Juan DonJuan’s Mind Control Menagerie will be available in print later this year in RAID.3!