MARGE LITCH

Or Thoughts on Property and Propriety…

Japanese pop music is not a genre with which I can claim to be terribly familiar, but the other day a record album on the back of a French fantasy art catalogue caught my eye.
Principally because the cover looked rather familiar…

Now, Turkish double bubble is one thing, but this was getting a bit too close to home, so after a quick phone call to the record company a few days later I had my very own CD of Marge Litch: Fantasien 1998.
While there’s not a lot to be done in cases like this except hammer out some kind of arrangement after the fact, it did get my train of thought shunting off the siding.

         

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In the category of blatant rip-offs:
http://search.stores.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sid=9062519&store=Chris+and+Helena%27s+Art+Store&colorid=1&fp=0&query=gandalf&srchdesc=y
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3544696500&category=20149
This one takes the first prize, for sure. Chris and Helena’s Art Store is happily marketing “Gandalf on the Path by Tolkien”  (BY Tolkien?) in the form of ceramic tiles, t-shirts and prints. They also have photographic prints of “Bastion”, which looks strangely familiar. I did notice the Gandalf ceramic tile a while back, but I had thought it was an isolated incident. Given the number of happy customer comments they seem to have, it looks like it is a thriving business.
I’ll keep you up to date on how it goes; the pages may already have come down by the time you read this. I did order a tile first this time, though.

(RE-EN)ACTING UP…

Or Back to the 70’S… the 1470’s that is…

What on earth can make an otherwise sane group of adults drive (collectively) several thousand miles, load, unload, re-load and unload yet again several tons of equipment,  survive two midnight thunderstorms, spend all day crowded in by visitors, and have the time of their lives?
Sounds like one of these televised survivor series but with no dream home or world cruise at the end…

At any rate, it was terribly hard work, but enormously satisfying being the living (and forging, pavise-making, pot-throwing, cannon-shooting, fencing, camping-and-cooking out, bow-shooting, armour-polishing, fletching, tempera-painting, tailoring, mail-riveting, sewing, singing, dancing, quarterstaving,  embroidering and scribing) extension of an exhibition for 10 days at the Bernese Historical Museum.

Anyway, you know me, it all goes two-penny philosophical pretty quickly: what are we supposed to do with the past? If we could learn from it, we’d probably have done so by now. As the saying goes, history never repeats itself, it just stutters…

Much of the past comes to us in the form of fragments of wood, cloth, metal, ceramic or leather and comes to us without the essential ingredient: those who lived it. And naturally, these same fragments are twisted, broken, rusted, usually incomplete and terribly precious, so the past is more often than not behind glass. Also, time and happenstance have arbitrarily selected what we may see.

Our contribution to all that is to try to put the human beings back in the picture. To re-create the costumes and the accessories, to use them and live in them, ultimately to try to present a plausible vignette, a small window on the past. It is also an eternal treasure hunt, as we discover new material, documents, archaeological finds. And it’s a Grail to chase after, as we can never hope to get it right.

We’ve learned a lot over the years, by necessity empirical, by definition particular rather than general, and I’ve had the honour and pleasure to make good friends and meet like minds throughout Europe. And besides, as a hobby, it’s no more expensive than golf…

As this isn’t exactly a living history forum, do wander by [url=http://www.companie-of-st-george.ch]http://www.companie-of-st-george.ch[/url] if you’d like to read more.

         

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TUTTI FRUTTI

I could not resist, just had to post these…

The other day, having gone to an oriental bazaar with the firm intention of tracking down a riveted mail shirt and some other old bits of rusty metal and junk, we paused in a shop to buy drinks. (It was 45 degrees Celsius in the shade, I thought I would surely cook on the hoof) And look what I found!

Tutti Frutti Lord of the Rings Bubble Gum with Super Toys! Complete with the film logo and an inspired selection of artwork, from Alan Lee’s depiction of Numenor through a lot of my work to film imagery, including the Gandalf in his cart I did for Peter Jackson.
Needless to say, I bought a whole bag (sudden, inexplicable craving for bubble gum, no doubt) and even tried to buy the display box, but alas it wasn’t for sale. It only had film photos on it, nothing of mine, or it would’ve been the most lucrative sale of the day for the shopkeeper.
Inside each package, there is a collectible sticker (from the film), a cardboard box (collect all 24 and win a prize!) and a toy. In Gandalf’s box there was a little pink and yellow plastic car (I mean, think of all those leagues he has to cover in Middle-Earth) and in Legolas’ box there was (what else?) a plastic hair clasp. Oh yes, there was some bubble gum too.
I have to say I’m very impressed too with the photoshop job done on the Mûmak image to fit those pesky peripheral hobbits in the picture. I must have a graphic artist fan somewhere in Turkey…

THERE AND BACK AGAIN (AND AGAIN…)

Spent the week before last running about in front of a film crew, entering stage left and exiting stage right, when it wasn’t the opposite or vice-versa. (The big problem of course being how the heck do you make in any way interesting a guy who spends all his time indoors crouched on a chair, hunched over a drawing…) So, I have been tramping about the area, scrambling down cliffs and up trees, falling in rivers, shivering in caves and lurking in cathedrals, all in the name of art…

As I have strictly nothing to say this week - I mean it’s still summer, the sun is shining, who wants to work, much less write copy - here’s something I committed a while ago, coming out in the 2004 Artist’s & Graphic Designer’s Market, in the bookshops in August. I have resisted the temptation to change anything, despite my utter dismay at finding that I used the word “things” three times in the first paragraph…

But first of all…

The Knights of Pythias, of all things:

I have a high-school friend whose Mom never threw anything out, and who e-mailed me this the other day. A Driving Safety contest no less. And I had to turn in the trophy after one year, what a thrifty abstemious lot those Knights of Pythias were, (whoever they are, and no I’m not going to do a web search to find out who took my cup back) I can’t even recall if I got to take the thing home, it probably never left the principal’s office…
I certainly wish I could remember what I drew… (and if I used ketchup like Calvin did in Calvin and Hobbes) not to mention what I blew my fortune in prize money on.

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A Big Hand for Gandalf:

More pictures from Oscar.

         

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The Castle of Gruyères:

Yes, that’s indeed where they make the eponymous cheese (unless of course that’s homonymous, it certainly is synonymous). And no, it DOESN’T have holes in it (that’s Emmental, but they don’t have a castle…).
Anyway, free on the 26th of September around 6:30 pm? Unless by now you’ve seen it already (like me), the Tolkien exhibition will be within the castle walls from September 27th to November 9th. I’ll be loitering around there a couple of afternoons during the show; all the information will be available as soon as I have it.
We’ll also be hanging a few pictures that are NOT in the show in its present form, so even if you’re sick and tired of it by now, there will be new images to see.
And of course, it’s in a castle… Gruyères is an absolutely wonderful region.
And don’t forget the cheese.

Click to see the poster in PDF (90 ko)

 

MEDITATIONS AND MEDIATIONS

Recently wrote a short text for the French edition of Meditations on Middle-Earth.

Mercifully, the editor was willing to accept my ramblings in English and translate them, thus I survived the ordeal with the certitude that some talented translator would make sense of it all.
As the English version will certainly never be published as is, here, thought I, is the ideal opportunity to get some extra mileage out of the thing and adroitly dodge the duty of writing a News installment.

MEDITATIONS ON MIDDLE-EARTH

Middle-Earth is an intensely visual world.

The urge to provide imagery for such a world is so strong that it even placed pen and brush in Tolkien’s hands, he who himself regarded any attempt to fix the imagery with great skepticism.

The images contained within his words are exceptional for their clarity. This is not to say that Tolkien provides a wealth of reference and detail, he provides much more than that. Far from being derivative, his imagery is outside our experience. Any references, whether historical or personal, archeological or oniric, fall short of those hinted at in his stories. His descriptions, sparse and partial as they may be, are archetypal and demand to be illustrated as such.

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The Lord of the Rings and Middle-Earth cannot be illustrated. Of course pictures can be drawn, paintings hung in galleries, books illustrated, films made, but none of these images can be definitive, they cannot define the world itself or sum it up or map it out for good. They are sketches, imperfectly glimpsed through shifting cloud and mist.  They are partial accomplishments only, as the necesary fixing on the page reduces reduces the vision to the pinned-down cousin of the butterfly we glimpse in the garden.

“There came afresh a hundred thousand Orcs and a thousand Balrogs, and in the forefront came Glomund the Dragon, and Elves and Men withered before him.”
The Shaping of Middle-Earth, The Earliest Annals of Beleriand - Year 172
A THOUSAND Balrogs, a HUNDRED THOUSAND orcs, led by the greatest of dragons… One short sentence, but written with words as big as castles, as powerful as tempests. What kind of dragon ? No need for details ; « men withered before him », therefore he is the sum of our revulsion and horror, the paragon of all dragons, the archetype of the great worms of myth and myth history. Typical Tolkien, where every word is worth a thousand pictures.

Besides, it is not just fiction. All libraries should possess two copies of every book by Tolkien, one for the « Fantasy and Science Fiction : Alphabetical by Author » section and another to place on the same shelf as Beowulf, the Odyssey or the Mabinogion. I am sure illustrators would instinctively borrow the latter, as illustrating Tolkien requires that it be treated with the same respect we are taught to accord to history and mythology.

It is tempting to try to investigate, to ask enthusiasts and avid readers what it is they actually see. Alas, the images readers form in their minds are more oftne than not substractive images, more often defined by what they are not. How many times have I heard « Oh that’s not Tolkien ! » from the very people who cannot say what is. As if the mind cannot seize an image from Middle-Earth any more than we can transcribe our dreams, but can brush aside with certainty whatever does not match. Therefore illustrating such a book is a solitary journey, with none of the companionship such a trip might offer to those not burdened with brushes and paints.

The landscapes themselves are even farther beyond our experience ; their symbolical nature has refined them, stripped them of the haphazardous elements that intrude even on the most sublime of the landscapes we can hope to experience first-hand. There are no deserts on our Earth that can approach Mordor, no more than we can hope to stroll among groves of Mallorn trees. The Shire no longer exists, if indeed it ever existed,  beyond the Paradise Lost of the rural paintings of the 19th century. Barad-dur is higher than stone can stand on stone. Yet, these landscapes are so much a part of our cultural heritage that we can insert our personal experiences in them seamlessly until they become one and the same, intensely personal and shared by millions.

« Illustration », though, is an apt term to describe the painting of Middle-Earth. Providing light, the act of making lustrous or clear. To shed a little clarity here and there. To not be obliged to show too much, to avoid the urge to count commas, but to choose where the light and the shadow goes. To allow the intuitive to take precedence over the encyclopaedic.

But, when it’s all said and done, it is a world beyond images. All images fall short. I should know…  I’ve been doing them for 20 years.

 

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For French speakers, more information can be found at amazon.fr. at this page:
http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/2914370539

MORE COFFEE?

Or The Great Percolator in the Sky…

How many times have I absent-mindedly nodded my head when a waitress inquires “More coffee sir?” (usually while about halfway through pouring), eventually ending up drinking about 10 litres of the stuff and then spending the rest of the day on a caffeine cloud.

I never noticed before that the endless coffee cup is a typical North American invention. In most other countries (apologies to my home and native land, but in terms of torrefaction, Canada and the US are ground from the same bean) you get A coffee, and if you need an extra hit of caffeine, you get ANOTHER coffee.
In the US on the other hand, when you sit down in a diner, you get the endless cup, you are hooked up to the great intravenous percolator in the sky, the sacred spigot of infinity, the never-ending caffeine high…

So what?

Why all the excitement about a cup of coffee, be it bottomless.

Well, isn’t it a bad habit, this notion that we are always entitled to more? More this, more that, 20% MORE candy bar, soft drink, whatever (what does that MEAN anyway, so there’s 20% more in the same wrapper/box/cup, it’s not as if you’re not paying for it).
I dislike this notion of enforced abundance, that we are entitled to a lifetime subscription of something as our due. That our rights are infinite, that when we are momentarily sated, there is always more should we wish. I dislike it because it is an insidious notion, and it covers up something deeper and harder to define. While it is confined to a plastic cup on the table of a diner, it’s just weak coffee, but what about the air we fill with poison, the forests we raze, the water we sully… sometimes it seems we are like the compulsive eater who makes the midnight refigerator trips through lack of love and attention. Food fills the emptiness, and being replete with latent guilt is better than nothing.. Why can’t humanity just love itself a bit more rather than stuffing its face to compensate? It’s as if we’ve confused our senses and our souls somewhere along the way.

More coffee anybody?  That last cup got cold before I could finish it…

DRAW WINKY

Or: A brilliant CAREER in Wallpaper…

Three things conspired the other day to take me unawares. (Well, four actually, the first being my general obliviousness…) The copy of National Geographic that I picked up in a used book store because it is the issue from the month I was born, an e-mail from a high school friend and an old box of comics in the attic, remnant of the days when I actually collected Marvel and DC (shudder)...
National Geographic brought back to me the world of my parents when they were about my age. And what a world it was, full cars with tail fins, cheery holiday cruises they could never have afforded, and all manner of shining appliances that now look like something out of a retro sci-fi movie.
Anyway, the National Geographic must’ve softened me up somewhat, because when I got the e-mail, I dug out the comics…

The old comics brought back Winky.

Nestled amongst all those wonderful ads about how not to be a wimp at the beach (WHY didn’t I write to Charles Atlas I wonder, I sure needed it… not that I spent a lot of time at the beach, mind you) sell Grit (catchy name for a newspaper if there ever was one) or buy a paquet of Sea Monkeys,  a pair of X-ray Specs or a Raquel Welch pillow (only $1.99!), there was always an invitation to DRAW WINKY. You could not only win a scholarship with a FAMOUS SCHOOL, you could be taking the first step towards a BRILLIANT CAREER. Isn’t that just TOO GOOD to be OVERLOOKED?
My aforementioned friend and I must have been bored out of our skulls in math class or something, so we drew a Winky each and posted them off. (In fact, we spent most of our time drawing and trading pictures in just about every class except art class; he still owes me a rendering of a space gun.)

To our amazement and consternation, we actually received a reply! And a proposal to meet Mr. Winky the sales rep in a dark and deserted parking lot (the kind with tumbleweeds rolling in and out of frame…) well, actually at the Keremeos Motor Inn. (Keremeos was the name of my home town in the Similkameen, but I lived in Olalla, a few miles out. Now doesn’t THAT sound like geography from a Robin Hobb novel?) So, on the fateful day, my Dad drove me down, picked up my friend and we went to catch a glimpse of our BRILLIANT CAREER futures. (I still can’t believe my Dad actually took us to see this potentail child kidnapper… Actually, he was probably waiting discretely outside the inn gently tapping a tire iron against one palm… my father was the unobtrusive no-nonsense type with biceps the girth of my waist.)
We sat in the café with that sinking feeling you get when some proselytic salesperson with reinforced toes to stop you from slamming the door on them has actually gotten inside, and listened to a lengthy pitch on how BIG ENTERPRISE was just CLAMOURING for designers, how MONEY would just FALL out of their pockets into OURS and had we ever thought that WALLPAPER was designed by TOP-CLASS designers who their ART for a FORTUNE. I can’t remember the rest, but it sure sounded BRILLIANT besides being NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED and ACCREDITED. And all this at OUR OWN DOORSTEPS through ONE-ON-ONE correspondance courses with DEDICATED PROFESSIONALS.
Buoyed up by the certitude that anybody over 20 was definitely a loser, we were immune to his promises as future wallpaper design icons, and swept our encounter away under the rug of youthful forgetfullness (an operation probably completed by the time we got back in my dad’s pick-up) ...until last week.

I wonder where Mr. Winky is today…

And I wonder if I could’ve MADE IT BIG in wallpaper design. Life seems to be a series of missed opportunities.

CHATTING WITH MR. RUSKIN

Or How To Draw Attention…

Oh would I love to be able to chat with John Ruskin.

Ruskin wanted EVERYONE to draw. Not because he wished to turn the entire population of England into artists, to have factories filled with easels, and sketchpads on bankers’ knees, but in order to teach them to SEE. In his words: “The art of drawing, which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing and should be taught to every child just as writing is, has been so neglected and abused, that there is not one man in a thousand, even of its professed teachers, who knows its first principles.” In Ruskin’s eyes, drawing was the most perceptive of ways for us to know and initmately understand our surroundings.

The other benefit is of course exploring why something attracts us visually. The time your pencil takes to circumnavigate an object or a landscape allows your mind the time to explore the reasons and constituent parts that drew you to it in the first place.

The drawing itself is of no importance, it is all about learning to notice rather than just look.
John Ruskin defended Turner’s paintings againt the establishment’s stuffed shirts, and deployed his eloquence in defence of the image (“word painting” as he called his writing). and his conviction that everyone is born an artist, that art should some way be as natural as breathing, and certainly not a walled kingdom in the hands of an elite.

Valuable advice indeed.

So why do the loose flocks of art students that spring and clement weather lure from their classrooms to scatter through the parks and streets of town all look so miserable, hunched over their sketchpads, grimacing and squinting at the view? Worrying about the marks they’ll get, no doubt. I always feel like squatting down on the grass and trying to cheer them up, to talk about letting the pencil do the drawing, maybe suggest they hold it less like a scalpel to dissect the landscape and more like a divining rod. That who cares about a nine out of ten, or a two, for that matter, that what they can really learn cannot be assigned a grade anyway,  but the hawk-like gaze of the hovering professors is enough to make me flee like some timorous sparrow seeking shelter from an approaching storm.

How cowardly. Ruskin’s ghost would NOT approve….

John Ruskin was born in 1819. A champion of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, he wrote and lectured extensively, and painted exquisite watercolours on his travels. I’d suggest: “Unto This Last: And Other Writings” as a good place to start. It’s available from Penguin, edited by Clive Wilmer.

STEPPING RIGHT OFF THE PAGE

Or Where I’m Allowed One Wish…

It seems like ages ago that the original of Gandalf the Grey was stolen from an exhibition.
http://www.john-howe.com/forum/yabbse/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=399
I’ve often been asked if I could paint it again, but you can only go once to places like that.
However, Gandalf is on his way back.
I’ve put in an order.
One Gandalf, please.
(And hold the onions.)

Let me start again; several months ago I saw a most exquisite one-third scale figure of a pirate who looked like he had just boarded an enemy ship and was really looking forward to business at hand. Not only was the detailing astounding, but the movement and personality were incredibly well captured.
Amazing, I thought, but I’m not THAT fond of pirates…
Luckily for me though, the artist sculptor Oscar Nilsson does accept crazy commissions, so while I may never get the Gandalf painting back, I’ll have something perhaps even better.
Oscar lives in Stockholm, and has been sculpting professionally for museums and collectors for over a decade. He habitually works in one-quarter or one-third scale as well as full size. I won’t pile on the compliments ad infinitum, his work speaks very persuasively for itself. He has a new web site under construction, but you can visit the present one at [url=http://www.odnilsson.com]http://www.odnilsson.com[/url]
Best of all, he has granted me permission to post images of the Gandalf-in-progress and has promised to keep me well supplied in jpegs. If all goes well, they will also be published in a book on model-making, but more on that later.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been practicing holding my breath lately. Can’t wait.
More next time.

         

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Top left and centre: Rough sculpts of Gandalf’s face. The face, from occiput to chin, (not including the beard) is about 7.5 cm.
Top right: Stick Gandalf (I’m pretty sure it’s not finished yet…)
Bottom left: Pirate, one-third scale (photo: Lars Heydecke)
Bottom right: A 17th century gentleman (photo: Lars Heydecke)
All images © Oscar Nilsson

WHERE I HAVE A MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE…

Or: Adventures In The Aisles of Plenty

Most people make their personal connections to the universe in the hinterlands of the sublime - the far plutonian shore, the precipitous precipice, the wind-swept wilderness, in those blessèd realms where you can feel small without feeling put down (being made to feel insignificant by a waterfall is NOT the same as being made to feel insignificant by a waiter…). Well, I’m no exception.

I recently had mine… at Costco.

It’s not that I wanted to buy anything, but I’d never set foot in a Costco, and determined to fill this gap in my biography, I bravely set off to set this right.
(You’ll have to bear with me, I’m somewhat of a misfit. North America is my cultural birthplace but I’ve lived in Europe for the second half of my life. Thus, both America and Europe enchant and dismay me on a permanent basis. The unexpected dons the garb of familiarity and the double-take is my lot in life.)

The shopping carts are amazing, they are the size of boxcars or 18-wheelers (certainly calculated to equal in width the hips of those who wield them). And they reach the checkout crammed and overflowing, jostling like bumblebees at the entrance to a hive.
The total lack of product hierarchy was astonishing. You could fill your cart and your fancy with crystal goblets or 3 months worth of tacos with the same nonchalance and ease. Books or vegetables, diamond watches or frozen peas, all one and the same. An Earthly Paradise of Calories, the Home Appliance Avalon. All stops pulled, any inhibitions gone, full consumer empowerment. (Why is it that the verb “to consume” has such negative connotations - fire consumes, locusts consume - except when applied to serious retail therapy?) 

HORIZON LINES AND VANISHING POINTS

Or Wondering Where to Stand On Things…

We are forever putting things in perspective… remember back in school, when it was patiently explained to us how the murky shadows of the obscure, crepuscular and otherwise dark Middle Ages were at last pierced by the blinding light of the Renaissance? (Think of all those poor medieval families “Are we in the Renaissance yet mom? Are we, are we?” “Shut up and fasten your seat belt, we’ll be there any minute.” )
Accompanying this helpful information were always images - medieval ones with big people standing BEHIND smaller people and later pictures with omnipresent vanishing points. The former done by “medieval” artists who got it all “wrong”(who, by the way, were also commonly said to be too unsophisticated to have invented left and right shoes… guess they were too busy building cathedrals.) and the latter by the “humanist” geniuses who miraculously “discovered” that things look smaller the farther away they are. (Man, if I get the bit in my teeth on THIS subject, it’s galloping hooves and eat my dust…woahhh, calm down…)

All this was intended to show us how humanity had at last placed Man in the centre of the Universe, no longer in darkness, he now assumed his rightful place - number one. (Never mind that the Italy of the Renaissance had the highest percentage of slaves prior to Gone With the Wind, they were humanists all. And never mind either that nine tenths of the rest of humanity was blithely pursuing happiness without these benefits - they wouldn’t have long to wait… “Is that them mom? Are we going to be discovered, are we, are we?” “Shut up and keep your head down.”) From penitent to paragon in one easy lesson.

But the perspective is the important issue. The artistic world traded a pictural system that obeyed several sets of rules for an alternate hierarchy, that of the omnipotent Vanishing Point. In the Quattrocento lie the foundations of a scientific and rationalised system. Symbolic perspective left the scene for the mechanical, and a pictorial legibility easier to read for our modern eyes. (That it would take the art world centuries to throw off this yoke and once again discard mandatory perspective a century or so ago is another story.)
Where the devil is all this going? Well, it depends how you look at it, of course. Humanity (or at least me) labours with situations inherited from the future by defining them with reflexes, reasoning and a vocabulary anchored staunchly in the past.

TRAVELLING WITH JOHN MANDEVILLE

Or Braking For Unicorns…

Not so long ago, I drove past the Walt Disney building in Burbank. Imagine St Peter’s meets Bedrock with a hint of Stonehenge, but constructed by a pastry cook and you’ll have a pretty clear idea. With the seven dwarfs (well, six; Stupid or whatever his name is, is tucked up under the apex) shouldering the entablement of an ersatz Greek temple. Ungainly atlantes (I did my homework, caryatids are the female ones) on an unexpected structure, even for Hollywood. Of course, it didn’t take long to imagine it being excavated millenia hence by a team of archeologists from another planet. What on earth would be their definition of our religious beliefs… but then again they might not be that far off after all.

Admittedly, that is very silly, but leaps of the imagination are like that, into empty space, eyes closed tight, not knowing where you’ll land. That’s why I like to travel like the (most probably) legendary Mandeville: to meet a rhinocerous and see a unicorn. That’s why I drive slowly, you never know what’ll turn up.

Wherever I am, whenever and however, everything puzzles, dismays or delights me. Hopefully, I will not grow out of it. I’m far past the age where I can hope to grow up.

I have a love for maps and foreign lands, but never together. Which means I spend hours poring over the intricacies of old maps and the rest of my time getting lost… story of my life.

THE FIFTEENTH HIPPOPOTAMUS

Or Where My Mind Does Some Serious Wandering…

Five nights back, in the early hours of the morning, I was making my way south through the north of France, stopping at every signpost and peering myopically at my map in the hope of actually finding my way through the Ardennes - a bewildering nocturnal land of wooded ridges, enormous cemeteries and rotten radio reception -  when I suddenly throught of the handwriting personality test I did a while back..
What’s the connection, you legitimately ask? None of course. I don’t know about you, but my mind works like that, an errant bark skipping from isle to fabled isle in the Archipeligo of Serendipity. Perhaps it was the purposeful aimlessness of that particular leg of the trip, the absurdity of not knowing exactly where I was, an out-of-date map, driving in the dark… an accumulation of apt metaphores to be sure…

After all, it was only 10 bucks, how could I decline to meet my inner self at such a bargain?

It turns out that I am a stubborn obstinate considerate critical goodnatured ambitious aggressive skeptical deliberate decisive impatient easygoing businesslike honest conscientious straightforward talkative kind of fellow who is not easily fooled, dares to do what he thinks is right, is accustomed to finishing what he starts, with natural executive ability commercial instincts and a promotional mind. I like music too, and could consider self-employment in a pinch.
Wow, ALL that? Amazing what you can learn about yourself for such a modest investment.
Artistic talent? Nothing but empty boxes in that area.
Damn. (No sense of humour either.)

So it’s decided, I’ve ordered a carload of encyclopediae and vacuum cleaners and I’m ready to hit the road, especially as I’ve now learned to read road maps properly. The time to check out my chinese horoscope, my celtic calendar, my manual on feng shui, my biorhythm and sky chart, make a quick call to my gyspy palm reader and I’m off!

EXCUSE ME, MISTER ALAN LEE?

or Where I Am Faced With Serious Identity Issues…

About two or three times a month I am accosted in the street by people who invariably say “Excuse me, Mister Alan Lee?”  Generally I reply “No, I’m the other guy.” or something equally intelligent and otherwise eloquent, but I’m beginning to seriously wonder.
I mean, we look nothing alike - Alan’s beard is shorter, my hair longer, I dress like a slob, Alan is dapper and chipper and all that, he positively radiates a rare benevolence and magnaminity, I scowl and slouch and frown. Alan’s gaze is dreamy and I squint and knit my brows. Alan ambles, I speedwalk. How is it possible?
Anyway, I’ve decided to react. Either Alan dyes his hair blue or red and puts on 50 lbs, or I’ll reply “Yes, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” and do a positively lamentable sketch and sign “With love, Alan” on the spot…

SHOW AND TELL…

Since I’ve been working on the map of Numenor, it occured to me how much maps shape our lives.

I remember in elementary school there was a huge map of The World on the classroom wall. Like all the maps in North America, the big bad Soviet Union was judiciously chopped in half somewhere east of the Urals and stuck on each edge of the map, with the Americas squarely in the middle. Besides that, Canada being part of the Commonwealth (Now THERE’S a term that would merit thorough examination - “common wealth”, riches for all… ), not only did I grow up in the very centre of the world, but safely ensconced in a global patchwork of benign sister nations. In PINK too! And to top it all off, given that there is basically no optimum way to flatten out the skin of a peeled orange, the maps favoured in Canuck elementary schools were Mercator projection, where the longitudes are parallel, thus making my Home and Native Land (Ad Mare Usque Ad Mare) thrice the size of our puny and otherwise pusillanimous neighbour to the south, despite the uncomfy adjunction of a bloated Alaska with that pesky panhandle.
Isn’t that great? Boy, what a world to grow up in!

I have a huge collection of books on the history of maps, and how the world evolved under the rules and compasses of the mapmakers. North has only been “up” on maps since the so-called Age of Exploration. Prior to that, Ultima Thule was more than likely to be at the bottom, with with Jerusalem in the middle.  The “Tabernacle” world as depicted by Cosmas Indicopleustes was basically the 6th-century biblically correct version of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, albeit without A’Tuin, the elephants or Rincewind…  Maps drafted in the Orient traditionally had east at the top. Ptolomey was only one-third out when he calculated the circumference of the earth,  just enough to let Columbus, 1500 years later, step ashore in the Caribbean the SAME day he had planned on reaching Xipangu, only to have America named after someone else because an obscure mapmaker in the Vosges made an executive decision…
Think about it next time you can’t re-fold that ****ed road map the right way…

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