Loop meeting

I'm part of a collective of artists called Loop. I joined last fall. This is a sketch of some Loop members at a committee meeting, held in a noisy cafe across from the AGO, to organize our Toronto International Art Fair booth.

Last night we had a big general meeting. I could only doodle at this thing. There was no way I could do portraits because I was sitting between Gary Clement and Eric Farache who are too funny to be able to do any serious drawing, so I just doodled all over the meeting handouts. Eric cracks me up. He should be doing stand-up. He's a natural. Gary had me going too. I was laughing so much I snorted and he turned to me and said did you just snort?

I wanted to do some caricatures like I did in grade school, but I was worried that someone might get offended if they saw one of my cartoons of them. I don't want to hurt anyones feelings. They're nice people. I grabbed something Gary's was drawing and scrawled on it a bit. It is now a collaborative drawing I said. I hate collaborative art he said. But when I flipped it back to him he drew a lot more on it and it turned out kind of interesting. I don't think Gary would admit that, and I should have got it back from him so I could scan it and post it here.

I think it would be fun to make the members doodle for the whole meeting, all over that fat pile of documents, then stick them up on a wall. Getting to see how all these good artists would doodle really interests me. I can't show most of my doodles from last night because the info on a lot of the printouts is confidential. I guess if I had read them I'd have figured that out and drawn on the 'OK for public viewing' pages. But I didn't because basically I'm a pretty lousy member.

I also started a new nipple in my Book Of Nipples, but the light was bad, and that's a problem because these are pretty tiny nipple drawings.

on the subway

I like drawing on the subway. The ride is smooth on the Toronto Transit Commission underground. The buses are almost impossible to sketch on. The drivers tear around the city like they're possessed, old people get trashed on the violent stops and starts. It's really brutal.
The seats are decent on the subway and the Torontonions public is generally oblivious to or accommodating of all my attention. Of course I've gotten pretty good at dealing with the tension that can develop when people notice what I'm up to and not liking it. I have 3 or 4 subjects going at the same time, so if I get a hairy eyeball I just switch it up.
If someone is outright hostile, I'll offer to tear out the work and give it to them. This works every time and almost no one ever demands I go through with ripping up my book.

This old lady was really cute. She fussed with her collar and stared at me oddly for about 8 stops. She was so pretty. I wondered what she looked like without her clothes. Once in art class we had a 70 year old model. Her body was beautiful and firm. Just such a surprise when she disrobed. We were all stunned. But the old guy we had 3 weeks later was a wreck.

in Germany

My mother Jenny survived Auschwitz together with her sister Regina and their mom Machela. In April Jenny and I, along with Regina and her daughter Sharon, went to Germany for the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen Belsen. Sharon was born in Bergen Belsen right after the war. The German government footed the bill for our flights, accommodation, transportation and food for 10 days. Being stranded in Germany while an Icelandic volcano spewed ash into the airways created hardship for of the holocaust survivors attending the ceremonies. My mom and her contemporaries are mostly in their 80's and 90's. Some had just recovered from a bout of food poisoning courtesy of our five star hotel, The Maritin, in Hanover.

Bergen Belsen was a displaced persons camp for five years after the war. Now it's a British military base, a launch point for units deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq. Before it became a concentration camp, the Nazi's used this massive state of the art training facility to roll out Wermacht units.

With our flights grounded by the eruption, our hotel reservations expired and furthermore trumped by the attendees to Messe, a 13 tech trade show monster convention, our group was shuttled to the only decent hotel that wasn't fully booked, located on the outskirts of Hanover. Goodbye posh digs. Everyone anxiously waited for seats on jets, so I started making jokes about how Germany would have to reopen Bergen Belsen. That way all us Hebrews would have a place to stay if the clouds over the ocean stopped us from going home for a while like the media was forecasting. Ashes and Jews, it made for a macabre association. I got lots of laughs for that joke and I really milked it. I think I told it to almost everyone I could find who spoke English.

We walked past Bergen Belsen's memorials, encountering mass burial mounds numbered by their estimated body counts. Jenny and I visited her old barracks in in the DP camp, went into the old building and knocked at the door of her old room. A British soldier lived their now. Jenny looked uncharacteristically disoriented as she rejoined me and the Brit historians guiding us through the camp. She told me stories of my dad's post war smuggling days, when all the boys lived wild and crazy, as black marketeers, lost souls hunting for revenge and renewal.

Berlin was brilliant. I loved it. I want to move there. The art scene is fresh and the city feels alive There are so many young people and it's really energetic. I saw some great shows. They have incredible museums and on the weekend I went there, the city was quiet with hardly any traffic. A nice place to walk for miles. On the bullet train from Hanover, we stopped half-way because the driver had spotted a herd of miniature deer by the tracks. Everyone, even the drunk soccer fans, watched mesmerized. One tiny deer got lost behind a secondary fence adjacent to the tracks. We watched him run up and down frantically looking for a way out, the herd waiting restlessly. Finally after five minutes of this, he was free and they all took off away across a field and into a small forest. The young Japanese couple I woke to see this, thanked me profusely with lots of bows. They said it was the highlight of their trip to Europe. It was magical.

at readings

Paula and I have been going to poetry readings this fall. Lots of the poets in the Avantgarden series are Paula's friends from Margaret Christakos 'Influency' class at U of T. They are experimental poets. Liz Howard and Shannon Maguire are the co-cultivators of Avantgarden, and classmates of Paula. Cara Benson's performance was breath-taking. She brought deep spirituality to the room and her emotional vulnerability was moving. I found it easy to connect to her work. Sometimes she repeated sounds and words, chant-like. Cara did some really funny stuff like when for example a new visitor arrived, and as they clomped up the stairs, she would repeat with each clomp, "step", "step", "step"... like it was right out of her book. Really got us!

Sonia Greckol read her rapier-witty poems with such charm. Her work has an endearing blend of innocence and cynicism. The peices were comical and sharp. She seemed to find something new in every turn of phrase to amuse herself as she read on. It was a privelage to be in the same room as her as she invoked fresh interpretations of her material. She seemed to be reinventing herself on the spot, as if reading her own material for the first time, and really getting a kick out of discovering herself. How many times did I say that? Well it really impressed me.

Joan was the best storyteller of the night. She jammed up snippets of news reports and other media ephemera into a vast tragic-comic kaleidescope of epic proportions. Everyone loves this woman.

The Mansfield Press Launch was jam packed full of people and they were celebrating Mansfield's 10th anniversary. Many of their first published authors took a turn at the mike.

We're enjoying the This Is Not A Reading Series put on by Mark Glassman, with Charlie Huisken and his son Jesse, formerly of This Ain't the Rosedale Library. Much less reading and lots more of getting to know the authors. Eileen Myles at the Gladstone wowed the crowd. She is a dynamo. Very funny. So open and honest.

At this TINARS at Clinton's Joe Pernice sang and played guitar between insights into his life and work process during an interview with Stuart Ross, an editor at Mansfield Press and a prolific author himself. This is a drawing of Karl, our friend from a long time ago. We just ran into him this night after about 15 years. He's a therapist. He's out at 2 or 3 events every night! He found this one boring.

I was disappointed too.

The Descant 'Hear Hear' this summer was fun. Lots of accessible writing with punch. Mark Laliberte wears more than one hat editing at both Descant and Carousel. And he also wears some pretty cool hats. The guy has some style going.

The last time Paula and I were in the Free Times Cafe was on the way back to her old place on Euclid, on our first date. We stopped for cider in November. We walked arm in arm for hours. It was the start of something big.