sorry, boys and girls, I had to take the link to the movie down. Too much personal content up there for any unscrupulous content collector to collect and pass off as original. I will put the soundtrack up for music collectors to enjoy and for the more unscrupulous to claim as their own odd composition.
The contacts list on my smartphone has bloomed like an eruption of brilliantly colored flowers after a long early spring rain. Color and shadow all over. Childish designs in thumbnail, the grey and white face of Baron von Doghead, snips of my own drawings, the brilliant pattern of my favorite Origami paper.
Wherefore do you cause your phone to be so beautiful, sirrah?
It can’t be helped. The minimum and maximum wage of futility are the same. ‘Tis like the breath of an unfeed lawyer, as the Fool told Lear. I’m preparing to exhale some of that breath in the Bronx Civil Court, alternating that prep with research on pink mucus in stools.
Please, what are you on about?
Creativity, man, for its own sake and for the sake of the joy it brings, cannot help but bring. Drawing cannot be helped, for example. In a grey, futile and slightly queasy day there is also this: invention, beauty, mastery. These things are excellent in and of themselves.
Package and sell them and they are even more excellent, if you can find a way not to make dainty little trollops out of them.
“No worries of anyone making a dainty trollop out of me, boss”
There was a woman, a very good looking young woman, actually, who had a small business running after-school programs and seemed to grasp the educational and group dynamics potential of the student-run animation workshop. When I increased the price to about double what the first after-school program was paying, she barely hesitated before agreeing to pay it. Her assistant was a great and supportive fan of the workshop, she urged me to organize the little mini-animation festival I put on for the kids and their parents. One day a week or so before the festival the usually cheerful assistant came in and told me her boss had died the previous day. Cancer she never revealed to anyone she worked with had ended her life at 34. Her business winked out of existence a few months later.
Fast forward a few challenging months and, temporarily (or permanently) out of public school programming, I am conducting a four session workshop for women with chronic serious diseases. Some are in recovery from cancer, others show up straight from chemo, some show up once and not again, others make half the sessions. A core of four is there every week. These first time animators all produced very cool animation, worked beautifully together, got more and more demanding about seeing the day’s rough cut before they left, high fived each other at the end. One woman in particular, Liz, was a great innovator. She came in with brilliant and ingeniously different ideas week after week. Her animation for the four sessions is here.
She was excited about assisting at the recent Stevenson workshop, the first I’ve done since last summer. The day before the workshop she was hit by the flu and couldn’t make it, she expressed her sincere regrets. I assured her there’d be more sessions, promised she’d be at the next one, whenever I could arrange it. A few days later I sent her the clip from the Stevenson session, telling her how difficult it had been and that she hadn’t missed much fun. I didn’t hear back. I wrote again a few days later, telling her I hoped she was up and around and that I’d be sending her the new website soon.
When the website was done I sent her the link, since she had grasped the idea so well and run with the ball so enthusiastically, once she’d had her head down on the table for the first forty minutes or so of each session. I emailed her once more after not hearing back, and was beginning to fear the worst for this talented woman I barely know. I have gleaned that she is living with cancer, and that it is not easy living.
When I got a smart phone I texted her that I’d joined the 21st century, hoped she was over the flu and feeling better and added this picture.
Several days passed, and hearing nothing from her, I imagined the worst. A gloomy thought twisted its way into my head: this workshop is the accursed kiss of death to the rare women who really get its potential and find it compelling.
Then tonight, at 1:35 a.m. a tiny bell in my pocket sounds, and she’s texted:
Congratulations! Sorry for the delayed reply. I’m so so happy flowers are growing (emoticon of red flower) Rain makes it happen (yellow umbrella) Happy Spring!
I wrote back:
Thanks. Good to hear from you — and happy Spring to you, too!
I hope you don’t have any objection to this wonderful bit of work being here (and I sent her the link)
3:42 a.m. I’m glad you sent this. I’m very upset and can’t sleep. Seeing this animation was uplifting. Thank you . … (emoticon of girl holding up hand)
3:45 a.m. I’d share this on my Facebook (emoticon of two people holding hands) except one thing. If it’s not too much bother, I’d like an edit…
Here I had an actual laugh. A small one, yes, but genuine (nobody here to impress with a fake laugh) and, like I said up top, I’ll take me larfs where I can get ’em.
3:49 the part with the butterflies has the cat jumping in. (Cat head emoticon) At one point its head changes to a dog. That’s not my taste (slightly disgusted looking emoticon)
3:52 I’d post your page without hesitation if that part were eliminated (a series of emoticons animating a round yellow face bursting into a laugh)
3:55 Thanks for replacing maddening thoughts with delightful ones.
She made my day with that one.
4:08 I enjoyed Jesse’s project! (gold star emoticon) The patterns in the beginning are well done. The tumbling guy has fun hair. (emoticon of a thumb up)
4:14 I will try to sleep and think of (emoticon of rowboat, I think) being inside (angel fish emoticon) animation (some kind of water emoticon). Thank you. (emoticon of little angel head with halo).
An excellent one by animator Bill Plympton
Need to trim this down and send it to a friend I’ve been out of touch with. Following up on yesterday’s energizing meeting, the guy turned out to be engaged and engaging and had a lot of helpful information, I need to continue the networking. This cat knows two well-known animators he’s offered to introduce me to. Let’s see if this embed works.
As it was created by capturing a flashing screen, Dior, the girl on the top row, was caught looking dour. Here’s try number two, where she’s smiling:
My friend who asked me yesterday how I continue to write in the face of indifference emailed to clarify what he actually meant, a much worse question, to wit:
I meant, how do you maintain the focus and motivation to write, given the discouraging features of your life in general as you’ve described them to me over the last few months?
And my answer to this more pointed question remains basically the same as yesterday’s.
The moment of grace, musical in a way, the tap of the keys clacking, a bit hypnotic, reminds me of the best of myself, no matter what discouragements lurk. It is a relief to see my thoughts making themselves plain in black on this white screen.
His clarification does remind me of something though. I had a dear old friend, very old, she died at almost 93 a year ago next week, who loved my project, the student-run animation workshop. She had good reason to love it, she was the inspiration for it. After the death of her youngest daughter on an icy road in Vermont she heeded the advice of good friends and opened the Elinor Beth Music and Art Workshop for local children. I was one of the workers in this shop, though, as it was spring and we were kids, we spent more time in the backyard kicking a ball around among the budding trees and shrubs than we did at the easels painting.
The inspirational thing about Florence was how much she loved to be on hand quietly encouraging us to be creative. I’d ask her to show me things, she always told me she loved my way of doing them better than the ‘academic’ way she’d learned to do it. She assured me there’d be time to learn whatever I wanted to about technique and the “correct” way to do things but that the most important thing now was to love what I was doing for its own sake. And to keep doing it, in the way only a creative kid could. I’d go back to the easel, slap another painting up there, hang it on clothes pins to dry, grab some cookies, suck down a little apple juice and dash back into the intoxicating back yard.
Florence and I remained lifelong friends. At one point, two or three years ago, telling her about the great potential and probable impossibility of actually accomplishing what I’d devoted my life to– getting the animation workshop up and running– she told me she didn’t know how I could sleep at night. She said it was a great idea, but how I could face the discouraging obstacles I was facing was beyond her powers, seemed superhuman. “I love what you’re doing and it’s a fantastic idea. I just don’t know how you can sleep at night,” she said with characteristic love and concern.
I laughed, brushing her worry aside with bravado. “I don’t know either, but I sleep fine. Don’t worry about me,” I told her.
Not long after that I began to have trouble sleeping.
So if this blahg goes suddenly silent, you’ll understand what happened.
gratuitousblahg 