Books That I Enjoyed Paging Through in Libraries and Bookstores, But Have Not Read From Cover To Cover Until Now

The official picture posted online doesn’t do the building any justice. One of the first places my parents took us to in Winnipeg was the St. Vital Library. At the time, it looked the way I thought a library should look. It was all brick on the outside, and had winding staircases and rooms crammed with shelves of books on the inside. For some reason, I’ve always remembered it as a whimsical, gingerbread-gothic hybrid, all cupolas and gables, designed by some lovable, eccentric, and unknown local architect.

The building clearly isn’t a miniature Smithsonian, but rather something a little bit more modern. The quirkiness of the design itself can be chalked up to unusual shape of the property that the library was built on, and not just the whimsy of some lovable eccentric. And that anonymous architect has a name: George A. Stewart. So the building is a little bit more prosaic (though still something of an underrated local landmark) than I remembered it, but that isn’t terribly important.

What really matters is the world of education, enlightened ideas, and imagination that the City of Winnipeg opened up for a young boy who had blown his allowance on comic books, slurpees, and video games, and had nothing better to do with his time. Dickens, Zola, Descartes, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Proust, Locke, Marx, Tolstoy and Hegel: a feast for the mind, and all free of charge.

Hegel was, well, I’d seen his name referenced in a back issue of Howard the Duck, and it took me all of one sentence to realize that Hegel wasn’t my cup of tea. Stephen King showed much more promise than any of those dead boring guys. The book that got me interested in his work was Cycle of the Werewolf. On my frequent visits to the library, I’d take it off the shelf, flip through the book, admire the beautiful illustrations by Berni Wrightson, and occasionally read a line or two from the text itself.

The only part of the story I read in its entirety was the chapter where the fat chick gets chewed up by the werewolf. Was Mr. King such a master of terror that I couldn’t bear to read the book? With all due respect to Mr. King, that wasn’t the issue. I certainly didn’t have any problems reading Christine, The Tommyknockers, or The Running Man. However, for whatever reason, I enjoyed paging through the novel, but never read it.

Cycle of the Werewolf wasn’t the only book that I’d leaf through and enjoy, but never actually read. This is a pattern that has repeated itself with all the books written by my favorite authors. I thumbed through The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test at the library and owned a used paperback of The Right Stuff, both written by Tom Wolfe, for years before reading either title, despite the fact that I enjoyed reading Bonfire of the Vanities. Before I even knew who P.J. O’Rourke was, I’d paged through National Lampoon’s 1964 High School Yearbook parody on many different occasions in the humor section of the bookstore, but it didn’t occur to me to actually read the thing until Rugged Land reissued it in 2003.

Of course, once I got around to actually reading these titles, I wished I had read them sooner. I thought I’d worked my way through that list until I had a conversation with my sweetie, and I mentioned that Cycle of the Werewolf was one King novel I hadn’t read, even though I’d enjoyed looking at those Berni Wrightson illustrations for years. About a week later, a first edition of the trade paperback arrived in the mail – it had even been signed by Berni Wrightson. The colors popped, and Wrightson’s line work seemed even more detailed and ornate than I remembered it.

Of course, the book sat on my shelf for a few weeks. I’d pick it up, flip through it, and admire Wrightson’s illustrations. I even read the part where the fat chick gets eaten by the werewolf. But I didn’t start reading it from start until finish. Until last night. I couldn’t get to sleep, and I started reading it, beginning with January. I made it all the way to May, and I’m going to finish it when I get home from work tonight.

It’s so good, in fact, that I wish I had read it sooner.

My Andy Warhol: An American Valentine

Dad was a performance artist. I hadn't even heard of the word when I was seven, let alone known what it meant, but if Dad wasn't a bona fide, dues-paying member of that body fluid spraying tribe, then I don't know the meaning of the term. I can remember Dad settling a bet with a next door neighbor, and he cut him a check.

But not just any check. Dad got a big piece of poster sized bristol board, a sharpie marker, and a ruler, and got down to business. Mr. Deutscher even cashed that bristol board check, although I don't think the bank was too happy about having to honor it, but honor it they did.

Which is a long, very roundabout way of saying that if I have even the smallest spark of creativity in me, it probably comes from my father. Unfortunately enough for Canada, that sort of creativity didn't attract a lot of media attention on the Canadian prairies during the eighties. Nor did it pay the bills. Dad had to work full time at a discount clothing retailer to do that. Art was just something he did, unconsciously, on the side.

On the other hand, if you happened to be Andy Warhol, and you lived in New York, art was something you could do very consciously, full time as a matter of fact, and not only pay the bills, but make even more money than what a Canadian discount retailer could ever dream of making. Not only that, but your death would attract considerable media attention.

I don't think I really knew or understood what the difference was between Canada and the USA was until I watched that CBC documentary on Andy Warhol. I'd never given any thought to where I would live when I was older, let alone where I wanted to live. But after watching that tribute to Andy Warhol, I knew that Saskatchewan wouldn't cut it. The images and, ironically, the music ("Andy Warhol" by David Bowie was playing in a continuous loop during the documentary) and the lifestyle, well, it was as far away from Claude Langevin landscapes, potato salad, paper mills, and guys wearing Iron Maiden t-shirts as geek could get in those days.

At this point, I should say that all this occurred during the eighties. There were no two-hour waits to see a GP at a Canadian hospital and, despite the slightly higher unemployment rate, I suspect that those who had a job could have counted on a level of job security that an American probably couldn't be certain of. Pinkie (especially the Canadian variety) brains routinely got their panties in a bunch about Ronald Reagan wanting to destroy the world. New York was an ungovernable hellhole, and American manufacturing had seen much better days. Living in Saskatchewan or Manitoba wouldn't, and in fact shouldn't, have been such an unattractive option.

But unattractive it had become. Being a Mad magazine reader, I was well aware of all of America's negatives, but there was something so much more magnetic about our neighbors to the south. I might have gotten Andy Warhol's paintings confused with Ray Lichtenstein's canvasses, but the point is they both popped in a way that a Group of Seven poster never could. Even in what everybody thought was a general American decline, the culture still had more energy and vitality than everybody else. And I wanted to be a part of it.

And I would become a part of it, quite literally, as I currently live quite happily in Alexandria, Virginia with my beautiful California girl. However, I think being an American is as much of a state of mind as it is about living in an actual physical location, and I hadn't quite reached that stage yet. Andy Warhol was going to help me get there.

It was easy enough to look at picture of Frank Zappa, and say, "Cool man:"



And then see a picture of Gordon Lightfoot and snicker, "How lame:"


But it's a little harder, at least when you're worried about slipping a rung or two further down the socio-economic ladder, to embrace Kid Rock, at least in all his bizarre, hedonistic, let your freak-flag fly high glory:



Ella Fitzgerald and alt-rock were what I believed to be the more socially acceptable musical options, but I did have my go to hell moments. For my money, I prefer the lesser-known work of Vaughn Bode, to the more high-brow stuff produced by Robert Crumb. I've always had an affection for the works of P.J. O'Rourke and Tom Wolfe, but there was a time when I'd have explained my interest in Stephen King as nothing more than junk reading.

I don't want to come off as some reverse-snob, pissing on somebody's high-brow tastes just to justify some of my low-brow tastes. As a matter of fact, I don't really see it as high- or low-brow anymore, it's all just part of one big, beautiful... no-brow. You can't have the highs or the lows, and the best way to appreciate either extreme is to embrace the other side with equal vigor.

And that's what I love about living down here. I love that go to hell ethic, like the colors in a silk screen by Andy Warhol. It took me awhile to appreciate it. I had my own hang-ups about slipping further down the socio-economic ladder, but I managed to get glimpses of that freedom, of just liking something for the hell of it, and not giving a fuck what anybody really thought.

The first time I saw Takashi Murakami's artwork was in 1997, in South Korea. I couldn't read hangul, so I didn't know who he was. I couldn't play the status game, one-upping my imagined betters. I just liked those paintings, statues, and big balloon installations because... the colors "popped," like Warhol, and Murakami was riffing off the Japanese anime I'd grown up with as a boy and young adult. It was brilliant. I didn't know why, or even how, but I knew it was... beautiful.

It took awhile, but that was where it all began. I couldn't articulate it at the time, but it was the first time that I realized that there was nothing wrong with what I liked. I already knew it was okay to like William Faulkner and Ella Fitzgerald, but it was also okay to embrace The Cramps and Stephen King. Andy Warhol was great, but so were Playboy and the illustrations in Stephen King novels. I was raised just as much on the latter, even if my parents didn't know it, and it was artistically every bit as valid as what Warhol was doing. In fact, I'm sure that it is what Andy had been trying to tell me along. Once I learned how to say, "Fuck it. I don't care what anybody thinks," I knew I would be happiest living in the USA.

So thank you, Andy, for the inspiration. Despite the best efforts of the Canadian media, pinkie-brains north and south of the Canadian/US border, brain dead politicians (with D's or R's behind their names), and the Wagon Queen Family Truckster, I've found a place to live - and thrive - that I love like no other.

Me & Malvina

Weeds stopped using "Little Boxes" as its introductory theme song and opted for a cold intro last season. I think it was a sound decision. I prefer the pithy visual puns, and "Little Boxes" has to be one of the most smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious songs ever written.

I didn't always feel this way about Malvina Reynolds's, ugh, classic. Dad loves the Pete Seeger cover version, and I'm certain the first time I heard it was on the drive back home from a fishing trip with my father. Later, in university, I thought the bit about how "the system" forces us to conform and become "lawyers and doctors and business executives" quite clever and perceptive.

However, working summers in a warehouse convinced me that being a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, or a business executive wasn't such a bad thing. If someone has the moxie and discipline to put themselves through school and become an architect or engineer, only an asshat would mock them for it. Despite my mercifully short stint in the blue collar trenches, I still retained some residual affection for the song. After all, nobody really likes a McMansion, no matter how hard the owner worked for it, right?

Maybe. Although I still had pleasant memories of fishing trips and sympathized with the class warfare angle (those lawyers might be rich, but they have no taste, ha-ha) I didn't fully appreciate what a douchebag Malvina Reynolds was until I saw this photo:



Malvina Reynolds is a soulless, bloodless, "political activist" freak. The houses are by no means "ticky tacky". They were built out of red wood, which is apparently one of the most durable woods that can be used in construction. As for the "boxes" charge, these are the kind of suburban homes latte sipping, Prius driving, urban hipsters would throw their own Grandmas under a Hummer to own.

In other words, these are creative, attractive homes to live in. It's not just the fact that there are X number of floor plans that can be combined in any number of Y different ways. Look at all the angles and cantilevers on the homes. It's straight out of Frank Lloyd Wright. The design is done in a fundamentally modern, American idiom. Why any self-styled "creative" person would want to mock it is puzzling to me. Malvina Reynolds is nothing more than a philistine for heaping scorn on the architects and the developer that built this development.

Look at the shriveled old bat:



It's not that hard to imagine someone like Malvina being taken on a tour of some Xenuawful concrete monstrosity of a Cuban or Soviet apartment complex and clapping her hands with childish glee upon seeing the communal kitchen or hearing that the happy workers only have to walk or bike two miles to the nearest bus stop.

But middle class people in America looking for a nice, affordable home? They can go fuck themselves as far as Marvina Reynolds is concerned. The architect who drafted the plans for these houses doesn't get any credit for his creativity from Malvina either, although some commie hack probably got a blow job of a "folk song" for his concrete abomination, if Malvina Reynolds ever visited the USSR or Cuba. And brainiacs like Malvina Reynolds profess astonishment when Ayn Rand's novels are embraced as classics by the masses in America???

So, Malvina Reynolds, you, like your hero, Karl Marx, can go suck it. As for me, I'm putting Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Mid-century Suburb by Rob Keil on my reading list.

Geek Bling

Rocky had the coolest watches. Nice, retro digital watches: one was a Fossil, and the other one was ordered directly from the maker online. Very bling, very geek chic. At the time, I was still under the thrall of the WASP credo that a watch should be understated.

Which was kind of retarded, now that I think about it. It's easy to be "modest" and wear a plain Timex when the cuff links you're wearing were inherited from your grandfather. But for those of us without the benefit of a trust fund - a category to which I most definitely belong - next to our wedding bands, watches are probably the nicest, and only really acceptable pieces of jewelery most men get to wear.

Thanks to Rocky's inspirational example, I've been wearing big, chunky metal time pieces strapped to my wrist for the last five years. However, until last week, I didn't have the courage to follow his more fashion forward example. That changed, when I saw the Projects Iridium Watch.

Since I check my Blackberry constantly, watches have become more jewelry than timepieces for me. Accuracy is not an issue with this watch. It's a simple design, but I like how the blank white face "pops" because there are no hands visible on the face, just the red and blue dots moving beneath the face of the watch.

While I do love this watch, I don't like the fact that the wristband attached with screws to the case. Pins would have been appreciated. This is the kind of watch that would look great with a grosgrain strap, but that is no longer an option due to the difficulty of removing those tiny screws.

Which is a shame, because when I saw this online, I knew I had to have it. Next time I see another clever timepiece from Projects, I'll think twice about the purchase because of that odd design quirk.

Red Squadron

Putting glue on the little plastic pieces of a model and sticking them together is the easy part. Actually painting all those itty bitty parts is the big challenge. Masking tape and tweezers help. And that black paint that got mixed in with the red paint? It adds realism to the X-Wing fighter. Now it looks like it has seen battle against a whole squadron of Tie-Fighters.

Bikini Girls With Machine Guns

James Ellroy once said (and I'm quoting from memory), "Don't write about what you know. Write about what you like to read." It's good advice, and if I'd followed it when I was younger, this blog post could have been a comic strip.

When I was in junior high school, I loved comic books, and I liked drawing. The classroom was my studio, my binders and the lined paper within a canvas, a Bic ball point pen was my brush, and the various denizens of the Marvel and DC Universe were my inspiration.

For some bizarre reason, I also enjoyed drawing punk rockers with large mohawks. I'd seen a review of the bio-pic "Sid & Nancy" on television, and although I was surrounded by legions of hair metal headbangers, my heart beat in solidarity with the punks. Workingclass London toughs and New York City hoodlums trump Canuckistani Beavis and Butthead everytime.

I was probably more Jean-Michel Basquiat than Leonardo Da Vinci, but what else was a young boy living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan supposed to do? Certainly not pay attention to the teacher droning on in front of the class.

My parents, who either wanted to encourage their budding Keith Haring, or at the very least get their little brat to stop destroying his school supplies, bought me a sketchbook and some charcoals for Christmas. This had the unintended effect of killing off any desire to be an artist on my part, although I did stop defacing my binders.

Of course, my parents weren't to blame for strangling any artistic sensibilities in the cradle. Their gift opened my eyes: until then I had no idea what a difference the right tools could make. A Bic on a maroon vinyl binder cover just couldn't give me the same results as charcoal on heavy bleached white paper stock. Ironically, it was the very comic books that inspired me to do sketches on any flat surface that put a stake in the heart of any desire I had to draw.

I'd read the letter columns of my favorite comic books (I was a weird kid, and there ain't a lot to do if you're raised to be a devout Catholic in Manitoba) and the advice from editors, writers, and the artists themselves was the same: anyone who wanted to be a pro shouldn't use comic books as their only artistic model

It was good advice...of a sort. I'd agree that if an artist isn't careful, he can end up drawing a lot like Rob Liefield, who has obviously spent a lot of time drawing boobs, boobs, and more boobs:



And not much else. Adam Hughes draws beautiful tits:



But one of the reasons why the tits are so spectacular is that the hands look pretty good too. And hands are a lot harder to draw than a pair of breasts.

Combine it with a general appreciation of the human chest in all its permutations (see the Justice League cover at the top of this post), and it's no wonder that Hughes can make an easy living as a cover artist while Robert Liefield, well, I don't think that Obama would want to hang this in the Oval Office:



Still, as a neophyte just starting out, ray-guns, dinosaurs, and bikini babes with machine guns would have been better practice than using coffee cups and the tree in my backyard. The latter are boring, and even when done fairly well, are never quite as satisfactory to draw, initially anyway, as an alien blob getting ready to chow down on some little green men.

And if the boring sketch of dull everyday objects doesn't pan out, the process quickly becomes one great big cycle of negative reinforcement. By the time I got to university, I'd given up drawing everything, except for the occasional spiral in the margins of my notebook. There were a few coughs and splutters of artistic activity, but by my late twenties any interest I had in putting pencil to paper in a non-verbal capacity had died out.

But the story doesn't quite end there. My muse and I were buying some games for our nephew at a Toys 'r Us, and she suggested that we purchase a copy of The Boy's Guide to Drawing for myself. After one very happy month of drawing aliens from the book almost every day, I've hit a wall on one robot I've been trying to sketch. I can't nail the right perspective on a pair of tank treads that I'm trying to draw.

I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet. My brother-in-law has some "How to Draw in Perspective" manual that is gathering dust on his bookshelf. I flipped through it a year ago, and thought it looked pretty dry, but it is starting to look a lot more interesting now. How else am I going to learn how to draw the best bikini girls with machine guns this side of Adam Hughes?

And Step On It!

Crystal meth vending machines: I'm okay with the idea. Back in the day, when I grew my hair down to my shoulders and struggled to get through The Communist Manifesto (all forty miserable, tedious, soul-crushing pages of it) I would have snorted and dismissed the idea. Now, even though I wouldn't use them myself, I don't think they would be such a bad idea.

Part of the credit (or blame) for this change of heart can be laid directly at the feet of P.J. O'Rourke. During my senior year of high school, I thought that he was funny, but there was no way his ideas could work in the real world. I still think he is funny, ten years later, and now I think he might be on to something with that whole unfettered capitalism thing. If it's one thing a Commie or a Christian hates, it is the idea that someone out there might be enjoying themselves.

All of which is a roundabout and extremely tangential way of saying that I'm really enjoying O'Rourke's latest book, Driving Like Crazy. Reading the introduction to his latest collection of articles, I remembered the reason why I was originally drawn to his work in the first place: he can argue, effectively, for ideas that I thought I would never seriously entertain. In this instance, that American automobiles are, or were, the best designed and engineered cars on the planet.

I don't know enough about cars to judge whether or not P.J. O'Rourke's arguments are correct. But that is really besides the point. It's nice to read authors with whom I agree. However, it takes a lot of talent to hold someone's interest when the author is writing about a subject the reader is unfamiliar with, and goes against what he thought was the commonly accepted wisdom on the subject.

Thanks to recent advances in medical treatment, I'm sure I'll be enjoying O'Rourke's cheerful brand of iconoclasm for years to come. And despite his answer to my question about his plans to write a memoir about his days at The National Lampoon, I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope he changes his mind about that firm "No" he gave me.

As for Karl Marx: you, sir, can go suck it.