breathe dearheart, breathe

Category: Creativity (page 4 of 5)

You are allowed to read comics, y’know

Jonathan Ross: Comic book hero ———————————-> Inner Wild poster boy

It’s a beautiful thing when an adult continues to adore, honor and promote an activity they’ve loved since childhood.

When they’re not too shy to admit to the whole world that they still compulsively love – let’s see – comics – for example. Indeed, they feel so ‘obsessive’ about comics that they decide to write and produce a comic book themselves, nearly forty years after falling in true love with comics aged 11.

All bow down to darling comics poster boy, maestro liberator of Inner Wildness in both himself, his talk show guests, and no doubt everyone who meets him, devoted family man and dog-hero, Mr Jonathan Ross.

Mr Ross has teamed up with famous comics illustrator, Tommy Lee Edwards, to create TURF, an all-new four-issue miniseries. ‘Set in 1920s New York, TURF offers a twist on the hard boiled crime thriller, adding vampires and aliens to the traditional mix of booze, broads and bullets’.

What struck me endearingly in my solar plexus while reading the Guardian’s interview with Mr Ross the other day was when Mr Ross talked about his desire to fulfill one of the dreams he had as a little boy and manifest something tangible:

“In a way,” Ross jokes, “this is my mid-life crisis. But rather than buy some tighter jeans and a motorcycle, I’ve said to myself, finally do some of the things you’ve always wanted to do. Because even though I’ve done hundreds of hours of TV and radio …

” …what I’m aware of always, and it’s grown to slightly trouble me as I’ve got older, is that all the shows I do are somewhat parasitical, in that I’m feeding off others. If you do a movie review show or an interview show, you’re talking to other people about work they’ve done.

“… Even though we’re creating something in the moment that doesn’t exist anywhere else, without them [my guests] I haven’t got anything.

“And so I thought I really want to make something of mine.”

Ah! I love that. What a great guy. And listen up – if you’re reading this and feeling like re-awakening your love of comics, call this your permission slip. And you might want to give Mr Ross’ TURF’ a go. You’ll find a fab interview about it with Comics Alliance here.

If anyone titters at you while reading your favorite childhood or new-found comic just smile with contentment as you remember that when talking comics, Mr Ross is able to involve intellectual debate and big concepts like ‘cultural zeigeists, textual juxtaposition, Proustian connections and narrative arcs’ Woo-hoo!

[Meanwhile, may I just say that I loved Oor Willie, The Broons, Dandy, Twinkle, Jackie et al and yes, I admit I did have a weird, insatiable appetite for Commando comics when my tomboy phase peaked during a rain-soaked holiday on a Scottish island, plus I was a teenager when Viz, but I don’t think I’m a comic person at heart. I keep involuntarily skipping the pictures which defeats the whole purpose. I have tried with Neil Gaiman‘s graphic novels, but I did the same with them … BUT I am loving reading vintage 1950’s Bunty annuals to my daughter! What-ho!]

Zen and the Art of ahem, Doodling

Doodling. What’s that about? Do you doodle?

If you’re a doodler, I applaud you. No, really. You have mastered the art of letting go. You know how to let your mental hand-brake off, flow in harmony and draw without aim. You are a Zen guru.

If you’re like me and don’t doodle, let’s start so we can groove to some Zen. Let’s give ourselves permission to doodle.

I think I’ve been too uptight to doodle. I must allow myself to doodle more and not be hung-up by my ridiculous notion that some invisible person is judging my subconscious by my tunnel and train, lit candles and rocket and cloud doodles. (Joking!) Side-note: Actually, maybe I’m not joking. I had a traumatic doodle experience years ago at a fancy-pants international advertising seminar. I happily doodled while the presenter spoke. Lovely. A whole page of doodles. Then the person next to me smiled lasciviously at me, nodding at my scribbles. I looked at my doodles – all phallic, I mean the whole page was full of penises, most with scrotums! WTF?

Now I’ve processed that particular professional embarrassment, let me get back to what I was saying. ‘Doodling’ isn’t just one of the most delightful words ever invented. (Dr Seuss has used it with oodles of noodles of doodles and other fun flapdoodle.)

It’s an art form, of course. A creative outlet. Perhaps for some people stuck in monotonous activities doodling is a much needed outlet for trapped creative juices.

I wonder, do you have to be ‘bored’ to doodle for it to count as authentic doodling?

Some people are incapable of just being still and I guess a lot of them doodle when they are not able to fiddle or wiggle.

Have teachers destroyed the therapy / art of doodling by confiscating pencils from doodling pupils? Or have they made it an artful act of rebellion?

When does a doodle become an artist’s sketch? Eh, dunno.

If you doodle, what things to do doodle? Are there certain times you find yourself doodling? Do some people sit down especially to doodle? That would be meditation then. Does that intention mean it’s not really doodling? Is doodling just an undervalued pastime that eases crushing boredom while on the phone or otherwise ‘trapped’ somewhere?

Has doodling by people in dungeon-like prisons prevented insanity? And does scratching the passing of days on a prison wall count as doodling?

Do doodles often inspire new ways of thinking, new pieces of art, new adventures, new engineering designs, new buildings, new websites, new ideas?

What about tagging and graffiti? Is graffiti al fresco, feral doodling? The mild-mannered doodle taken to dangerously exciting levels by the more anarchistic among us?

Where is the line between doodle and art? Is it a pencil or pen line? Do art gallery owners use the word “doodle” as an insult?

I wonder if what makes a drawing a doodle is that your mind is tuned-out while creating it? And if that’s the case, doesn’t that make doodling one of the finest “in-the-zone” kind of creative endeavours?

Has doodling dwindled in direct proportion to our increasing use of keyboard instead of pen and pencil?

So many questions. Well, why not? I am mentally doodling. You know, doodling is valued enough by humankind to have its own National Day – the next National Doodle Day is 11 February 2011. So make a wee note of that in your diary and be sure to doodle around the date.

The illustration above was doodled by President Herbert Hoover. You can see a fascinating selection of doodles from US Presidents like JFK and Reagan (“All the Presidents Doodles”) here.

Why have men stopped making things?

Why do so many men these days, particularly young men, not make and build tangible things like their grandfathers did?

I’m stipulating men not because I’m a sexist flower but because unlike men, for whatever reasons, women have retained hobbies through recent decades (why is the idea of having “hobbies” so cringe-inducing?).

Women are knitting, sewing, scrapbooking, painting, quilting, decoupaging cross-stitching, doing leatherwork, making paper sculpture into the small hours all over the world. Sewing cafes are springing up like Sweat Shop in Paris.

What are men doing?

Not much it seems. On Etsy, a site where you can buy and sell handmade and vintage goods, the proportion of women versus men is outrageously, stupendously, shamefully unbalanced – 96% women, 4% men (according to a 2008 study) given that all humans benefit from creating something tangible in the world. Uh-huh, a website where you can sell anything you make with your own wee hands is predominately used by women!

Humans, c’mon, this is sad.

Making stuff is a creative process that is deeply meaningful and, I believe, fundamental to our sense of wellbeing. Being in the zone when creating with your hands. Feeling the sense of accomplishment, achievement and resolution at having manifested something new in the world, no matter how hideous or lame it may be, are crucial feelings.

Why have most men in developed countries turned their backs on whittling, turning driftwood into furniture, making clocks, weaving, building bookcases and treehouses and all the rest? Is it to do with technology and global business? Are men using their creation vibes to instead make intangibles like websites, companies, design?

I’ve worked with so many designers and art directors who are brilliantly creative in their jobs but who are easily crushed when their ideas or designs don’t fly for whatever reason.

Why? Because so much of their ego is tied-up in what they make at work since they don’t have an outlet for creativity at home. While they are well-paid to have the creativity sucked out of them at work, what does it do to their own creative spirit, the spirit that spends all its time locked up at work?

It’s even more disheartening when you consider how much women like men who’re ‘good with their hands’!

Lots of professional men I know refuse to fix or repair things saying, ‘why do it yourself when you can pay a man to do it for you?’. Well, there’s everything right about that. But that’s not what I’m talking about. (Even while it might make a guy feel great to fix something tangible like his grandpa would have done.)

What did you like doing when you were little? Do that again. Yes, I really am including Airfix kits. What did your dad, granddad, uncle or other man in your life show you how to make? Have a go now. Remember, reconnect, recreate.

An ex-boyfriend of mine, a supremely creative person who inexplicably has his own successful accountancy business, had to be coerced to walk into a model shop at age 40 to buy his heart’s desire, an Airfix airplane kit.

He was embarrassed. I mean WTF is going on with that? Why? I can’t see Tim Burton thinking twice about nipping into a model shop and spending days gluing bits of plastic together to create a replica if he fancied it.

I suspect the men who’ve made and created empires like Richard Branson and the Amazon dude also have hobbies that involve making other things manifest with their own hands. I am sure the physical manifestation of a toy airplane, a wooden birdhouse, a metal coat hook, lollipop stick cabin or whatever, actively helps men create business success.

Etsy dominated by women? Men without tools? Why? What is going on?

Men need hobbies. Someone start a movement.

POST SCRIPT: 16.04.20 I sent a Tweet out asking some lovely men whose opinions I value to comment on this post – Leo Babauta, Jonathan Mead,  Charlie Gilkey, Jonathan Fields, Tim Ferriss, Glen Allsopp, Chris Guillebeau, Alain de Botton. Imagine my utter delight that two of them noticed my request and responded below. Click ‘comments’ to see.

Borrowing beauty – how libraries help us embrace transience

I used to want to capture beautiful things and keep them close. I used to be sad that flowers died. I used to cling on to good memories. I used to have huge bookshelves groaning with books.

I don’t know why it has taken me so many self-help books, and traumatic experiences, to get to grips with the joy of experiencing fleeting loveliness – feeling the beauty deeply and effortlessly, letting it go – trusting that the world is brimming with beautifulness ready to be noticed.

Borrowing beauty in experiences, people, giving, seeing, feeling is a natural human state. Modern marketing seems to have divorced us from this state by creating artificial desires and offering attempts to fulfil them. By creating insecurities in us (the marketing ‘problem’) and seeming to provide self-actualisation in various shades (the marketing ‘solution’).

I don’t believe we are meant to hold tight. I do believe we might hold dear, however. Time is of no consequence; a moment of deep appreciation is a gift more rare than years of remembering the beautiful thing is there with you in the other room somewhere.

It is a lovely way to live. I think of the word ‘transience’. Previously I would have felt transience was a melancholy state. Now I rejoice in transience. We are all transient here, everything is. The secret is to embrace that and allow the pureness of being in the now to overwhelm us for that moment.

So it is after this lengthy somewhat tangential introduction that I mention the luscious beauty that is the new cover designs by Klaus Haapaniemi for two well-loved Patrick Suskind novels. I can look and look at these illustrations and — is it because of the www which allows me to see these covers whenever I want? — not need to possess them even while I love them.

As I said, I used to need to own books. Collect and imprison them in huge bookshelves. I don’t have that need any more.

Years ago a friend of mine was baffled by my buying books instead of borrowing them from the local library. I was baffled by his read-and-return attitude. I thought him superficial. Now I see he was wise.

After several years of borrowing books of all kinds from local libraries I find the library a magical infinite universe of books. I can even pre-order new books, order others and it’s all free so you can gorge yourself with anything – take a pile of books out, maybe only read one, take them back.

I think most people don’t realise how luxurious, how decadently indulgent, libraries make reading.

I can read volumes of reference and non-fiction books and not pay for them and float about in fiction from any era, not simply choose favorites chosen by a particular book store chain or independent book shop.

I do feel slightly uncomfortable about my love affair with libraries (and librarians, who are always lovely!) because I am also a novelist and of course if people don’t buy books, well, em, what then dear reader?

Image borrowed from Penguin Books/Klaus Haapaniemi. Thank you for making the world more beautiful.

Are you a bulb or a trumpeting flower?

Is it Spring in your neck o’ the woods? It is with me, inside and out.

Outside my window gentle wild primroses, regal purple pansies and sunshine daffodils are bursting out amongst the papery fading white crocus petals and vanished snowdrops.

I took this photo:  for you to see the glorious, flamboyant trumpeting daffodil I was looking at just now.

I was thinking about the deep renewal that Spring brings us. I am really tuned-in to this awakening and as it resonates with me I feel it all accelerating and gathering momentum.

I think the seasons bring us a natural cycle that is healing for us. We can be nurtured by simply noticing what happens during each season and perhaps mirroring the natural energy radiated by the plants, insects and animals.

In Spring we see glory vanquishing adversity everywhere. Brand-new ghostly shoots burst out of bulbs underground, pushing frost-hard soil aside with slow determination. Shoots poke through brown earth and turn instantly bright green in the sun’s rays, capturing energy for the flowering to come.

Amazing.

Hibernating animals awaken. Will we?

Birds gather twigs and soft nesting materials like our husky’s wool fur. We wrap his molted fur around a stick and hang it near the feeder. Tiny birds tease out little pieces of fluff until their beaks are so full – a ball of fluff bigger than their heads – that I don’t know how they can see where they are flying. But they seem to know what they’re doing.

It made me think how we humans are naturally part of the raw energy and renewal, the awakening and thrust for living that happens in Spring. I wonder, do our body cells respond in some biological way we don’t even know about? If we weren’t quite so wrapped up on layers of plastic and synthetics and the pressing needs of living in a modern city, drugs and foods to salve and suppress us – would we too feel the overwhelming, intense leap in sex-drive that other native mammals like hedgehogs are feeling in Scotland right about now?

It’s entirely possibly that modern issues with sex drive, and lack thereof, often appropriated to “stress” might be connected to our disconnect from natural seasonal cycles?

How about you? Do you think right now your inner self is like a tight, power-pregnated bulb buried deep down yet full of remarkable potential? Or are you beginning to stretch a tentative shoot? Perhaps you are already in gigantic, glorious, hallelujah bloom: a giant daffodil of a person trumpeting your wonders for all. Crikey, you might even be one of those folks dancing naked around a bonfire in an enchanted forest tonight!

You could, of course, be a dormant bulb. Nothing wrong in that. Squirrels need food and they love a dormant bulb. Otherwise, if you’re thinking of releasing your potential – now seems like a pretty good time to get growing and unfurl little flower. Nature is with you.

Image made by my daughter and I using Rosie Flo’s Garden colouring book.