Colin's Comment

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Aaaaahhh… sweet relief! The heat wave we’ve been suffering through has abated somewhat, I can feel my brain emerging from the morass it was sunk into… it’s warm enough to please the chirpy fuck-wits who love the heat, presumably because their brains are sluggish to begin with. Yesterday, when the heat was still on, I found the perfect spot for beating the heat. In Vancouver there’s a place by the water called Granville Island , decades ago this was all heavy industry , the sky black with the exhaust of steam engines producing barrels and all manner of things for the maritime trades. In the 1970’s and 1980’s the area was converted to arts and tourism, full of studios, galleries, theatres, shops and a farmers market. My art school was moved there in 1980 and I remember going to class past a chain factory with sparks flying out of the windows. There’s still some ship refitting going on and a brave and stubborn cement factory that refuses to be moved but most of the island is now arts-oriented. It’s one of my favourite places in the city and I splurged on a bus ticket to get there. In a quiet corner, in the shade of the Granville Street bridge is a little coffee/ice cream place, I never learned it’s name. The owner I think is Japanese and he’s put a great deal of time and effort fixing up the place over the years. They serve fresh, loose tea in a pot, unfortunately the scones were cheese but you can’t have everything. I sat outside with my first tea in days, vanilla, enjoying the cool breeze, gazing fondly at the good ship “Relief” dry docked under the bridge … it was heavenly!


After an hour I had to tear myself away as I was going to see cartoonist Julian Lawrence (Crucial Fiction, Drippytown) doing a two hour power point multi-media presentation on his life in comics, experimental film, publishing and music. Most interesting, turns out we have a lot in common (although I always assumed he was younger then me, I didn’t know it was by only three years), growing up with European and British comics and being inspired by underground comics. He does bear deep scars from a religious upbringing I didn’t suffer through, but he’s managed to become a pretty nice guy even so. He did some live scratch animation, which is interesting but always makes me ill, dizzy so I have to close my eyes. He also played several songs with his band with a surprise appearance by Drippy the newsboy! Afterwards there was juice and pretzels! Hoo-ray!


Today I spent house cleaning and laundry, during the heat wave I was letting things go. I’ve been too long away from the drawing table and I find that a nice neat work space is a lot easier to return too than some mess you have to wade through. I’ve been spending time painting figures, some for money, others for me. I don’t need an active brain to paint figures, I’ve been doing it for thirty years. I’m repainting and rebasing my French and Indian Wars figures for the Age Of Reason rules set, one of my favourites! I’m also working on a few mini-comics for the Word Under the Street book festival late September, it always pays to have new “product”. Nichol kindly came by to drop off my painting from the Pirate show (it was only on for 3 nights).
For some reason a pair of crows were chasing a squirrel, then they started fighting amongst themselves… can’t get along with anyone…


There’s a new soap opera on CBC! I must confess I do watch British soaps, like many of my friends I watch Coronation Str (oddly, many of the people I knew in the punk rock days are now Corries fans, anglophiles I suspect) and I also watch Corrie’s poor cousin Emmerdale, which gets me sneered at by Corrie fans. American soaps are just too surreal. Now there’s a new CBC soap, 49th and Main, my old stomping grounds, started out last week. Actually, with it’s mix of ethnic types and business’s it more resembles 49th and Fraser, where I used to live. For instance, I don’t know of an autobody shop on Main but there is one just off Fraser, also the bakery run by the only major white (Scottish) character resembles the German bakery on Fraser than anything on Main, although I admit it’s been awhile since I lived around there so things might’ve changed. It’s much more in the style of British soaps, real people and it looks promising. It’s about a widowed English doctor who’s South Asian (his family’s orginially from Goa, to be exact) who moved to Canada with his son to start a new life. One of the interesting things about the soap is that most of the characters are Asian, with South Asian’s predominate, with conflicts between generations of immigrants and their Canadian raised children, the role of women and racial tensions. Depending on how it’s handled, if the show can avoid the obvious cliches, it could work and I think it’s brave of the show to tackle some pretty touchy areas like that. There’s even a little politics involved, something never mentioned in Corrie Str!

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