“Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.” ~ Russell Hoban – Fremder
It’s Russell Hoban’s 85th birthday today and I celebrated it by writing this quote on a piece of yellow paper and taping it to the side of the large white rock that my city was named after. All around the world, pieces of yellow paper with quotes from his books were left in other public places – cafe tables, bookshops, park benches, telephone booths, train stations or anywhere the birthday celebrant deemed appropriate. The SA4QE (Slickman A4 Quotation Event) website lists 350 quotes that have been left, on his birthday, in big cities and small towns in 14 countries since 2002. I am still the only Canadian representative listed on their site, but I know at least one other Canadian who leaves the yellow paper anonymously for the simple joy of having done so.
It was a beautiful morning in White Rock and a perfect day to celebrate the “moment under the moment” that Russell Hoban explores and illuminates in his wonderful books. He remains one of the most original writers of the twentieth century and one of my very favourites.
Just before New Years, I began writing an ‘end of the decade’ piece chronicling my frustration with the general lack of trustworthy sources of legitimate and reliable information in this digital age.
I researched carefully, in order to accurately present both sides of conflicting arguments championed by intelligent and convincing spokespersons. I sweated the details so that my dilemma would be clear. Both sides can not be right, and finding the truth of a thing seems to be growing harder and harder as more and more information becomes available.
I wrote the post using a beautiful and innovative new word processor that fills the computer screen with a peaceful white snowscape, eliminating all distractions. It truly seemed to help me focus exclusively on the writing. The essay grew long, but I was happy with the way it was coming along.
On New Years day, I opened the file to finish it up.
The serene white winter scene filled the screen, the program’s pleasantly unobtrusive music began to play quietly and my story appeared before me. In Chinese.
Or Mandarin. Or Chinese (Simplified) or Chinese (Traditional) – other options I learned about from Google Translator where I later vainly attempted to return my writing to my mother tongue.
The software’s website did have a reference to this problem. “If you get gibberish (oops)” they offered glibly, you could “try” their “workaround”. It didn’t work. I’ve contacted tech support but I am not hopeful.
My Dad, a brilliant sculptor, used to tell people that he simply carved away everything that didn’t look like what he’d set out to create. Watching him work, you’d swear he did just that – uncovering animals and people that had been waiting in the wood for his chisel to free them.
I joked with Monty on Saturday night that I was hoping to use Dad’s approach to finish my submission for this year’s Three-Minute Film Festival. My rough cut had timed in at over an hour. I simply needed to carve away all but three minutes of that.
Thanks, in part, to Twyla Tharp, who I hopefully will discuss in a later post.
Connor has posted two amazing new demos (“Be the One” – with his amazing new band, and “Brother’s and Sisters” – on his own in the studio) here at his MySpace page. He’s finishing up a third demo, “Give it a Name”, right now. I can hear him mixing it upstairs. I went to see him at the Media Club in Vancouver last night *playing drums!!* with his good buddy Dylan Hossack. Turns out he’s a great drummer too!
I have been trying to find a good reason to write here again, but after rustling through the dry and withered collection of used-up motivations, I have been unable to find or create even one new one.
The thrill of publishing online was effectively vaporized by the thrill of traditional analog publishing. The challenge of documenting the interesting bits of my life was also met when my book was completed. The ever-present call to creativity can be as easily answered off-line, and every intelligent bone in my body tells me if I do write something, it should rhyme.
The thing looked like a designer kitchen utensil – like half an egg-beater sporting additional mysterious appendages and missing a handle. Although clearly made of metal, glinting as it did in the afternoon sun, the circle of thin graceful flame-shaped blades at one end appeared to float in the polaroid blue sky – the tops seemingly too thin to otherwise successfully support themselves. It was beautiful in a streamlined yet asymmetrical way. It was both magical and clearly mechanical. The four star-like projections under the metal flames were supported by two sets of delicate bracing arms, suggesting that without them the craft might fold in on itself and fall from the sky. There were clear and detailed markings under the long flat body. One of the shots was a close up. Neatly centered and laid out like a copyright notice on a Henkel knife – the unreadable characters were accompanied by small crests. Or were they vents? The four photos were astonishingly clear but their subject was too baffling to allow interpretation of the finely captured details.
“Charlie”, who had sent the photos to a national radio show but wished to remain anonymous, said he just wanted to know what the craft was. He was worried that the humming noise it made – “like” he said, “when you’re near very large power lines” – was detrimental to the health of his wife and their unborn baby. He would only say that he lived in Northern California.
In ten minutes I’d found a perfect CGI video recreation of the craft, moving around on a makeshift background – ostensibly proving that fakery was probable. Five more minutes took me to a website where a collection of disparate photos of the “Dragonfly Drones”, as they were now calling them, had been assembled – all slightly or significantly different from one another and all from supposedly unrelated sources. One set of photos depicted a craft of such confusing complexity that I grinned with delight. Why would anyone, terrestrial or otherwise, create such a byzantine mass of tangled airborne technology and what possible purpose could it serve? I flipped from my browser to check my mail.
Of course, it didn’t need to serve any other purpose than the garnering and sustaining of attention. The whole idea of the dragonfly drones had held mine for over half an hour. I downloaded the mysterious “CARET documents” that appeared to tie-in with the under-body hieroglyphics. They were beautifully drafted and intelligently presented. The diagrams were high-tech art – marred only by two penciled question marks and a few roughly drawn circles and arrows. I opened Photoshop and removed anything that appeared to be of human origin. I printed the five pages and stood them up against the wall at the side of my desk and then wondered what I would do with them.
I started writing online in 1996. Those initial years helped to get my confidence up.
The next installment of my online adventure led me into the 2000’s and eventually attracted the interest of a real-world brick and mortar publisher who ultimately helped me create and release the book I’d often dreamed of but never for a moment expected.
What followed was an exciting but often overwhelming concentration of attention on me and my personal life that has only just lately died down. Marginally shaken, I have nonetheless continued writing online – but the spectre of an imagined second book appears to have squatted unceremoniously on my weakling creative impulse and choked its out-take valve.
A change is in order – but I don’t know what to do next. Evolution is important to me. If I work at this unselfconsciously I think it can become something of value, but I need to flail for a while in hopes that a clear path will reveal itself. Whatever I do should be different in some, as yet undefined, way.
So, valued readers, take this as a warning. And … wish me luck.
On Sunday, me, Connor and sound engineer extraordinaire Pat Glover settled into Whitewater Studio for an all day “Mic Shootout”. We set up a collection of some of the best and most highly regarded microphones in the audio world and compared them, one to the other. It was a day of spectacular audio geekdom. We had an excellent time.
ra mcguire dot com is mostly about music, culture, and minor celebrity in 21st century Canada. For more about me, this site, and my career in music and media, click here.
A powerful and personal book about God by one of Canada’s greatest writers. “I believe that all of us, even those who are atheists, seek God — or at the very least not one of us would be unhappy if God appeared and told us that the universe was actually His creation. Oh, we might put Him on trial for making it so hard, and get angry at Him, too, but we would be very happy that He is here. Well, He is.”
I have failed in my first attempt to read this much-acclaimed magnum opus. The same thing happened with Ulysses. I’ll try again one day, once I have steeled myself to not be so annoyed by it.
An important book about the food we eat and the difficult choices we face in a world suffering from what Pollan describes as a “national eating disorder”.
