Folks have asked me what I use to make these videos so I put together a supply list.
Originally this was a Facebook Live thingamabob but you may not have the time or inclination to watch it there. Maybe this pristine non-commercial stage will change your mind. Or not.
Oh, and if you have a problem reading my handwriting, a) join the crowd and b) look at this then.
I live with a person (who shall remain nameless) who doesn’t want to hear it. Doesn’t want to discuss politics, to fulminate over the latest outrage, to join in prognostications or stew in venom. So, each morning, when I read the paper, I have to find other things to tell her about. I read the headlines in silence, then turn to back pages and read aloud from the book review or the food section.
Today, I plumbed the depths.
I told her about the new Damien Hirst show, his first in quite a while, which is all quite mysterious, apparently containing “jeweled buried treasure covered with coral as if just pulled out of the ocean.” I do love his twisted mind.
And then, huge news! Scientists have identified a new continent. Whaa? Yes! “an underwater continent two-thirds the size of Australia — and they are calling it Zealandia.” New Zealand is the bit that protrudes above the water but the rest fit the definition of a continent. So cool!
And I shared an article detailing all of the unusual animals that have escaped into the streets of my city in recent years: a goat, a zebra, a kangaroo, several cows, and, gulp, a cobra. Most were sent to animal refuge centers, thank God. They omitted mention of any deep sea creatures, but we have been following one with interest since last summer: several whales that have been seen breaching in the East and Hudson Rivers, right off the shore of our island.
Each of these stories seem more directly relevant to our lives than a lot of the stuff I skim over. And they keep our mornings calm and sunny. Try it.
In case you are avoiding Facebook, here’s one of the Facebook Live videos I made recently. It’s terribly exciting: I do a drawing of my favorite teacup. This is something I have been doing for a while, filling an entire sketchbook with drawings of the same cup using the same pen and usually at the same time: about 7 am.
You may be tempted to fast forward to the good bits. Don’t. Savor the moment with me. Spoiler alert: there aren’t any especially good bits anyway.
Well, there is the one —but if you go too fast, you’ll miss it.
And the sketchbook I use in this video is unique. It was made for me by my friend and mentor, Roz Stendahl. She’s the bomb.
My grandparents had a living room and a sitting room. We hardly ever used the former; it was a long, large cavernous place with my grandmother’s gramophone in one corner and a fireplace we never needed in Lahore’s equatorial heat. The living room was just for occasional cocktail and dinner parties but the sitting room was used every day.
At the end of the work day, my grandparents and their junior partner, Dr. Iqbal, would relax with a gin and tonic and some monkey nuts from the drinks cart and discuss the business of the day. I would have a bottle of 7Up, tall and green with white bubbles painted up its side, and look through the book shelves. They were recessed into an alcove on the right-hand side of the room, teak planks reaching to the ceiling.
When there were adults in the room, I would concentrate on the lower shelves, a row of coffee table books on art and Pakistani archeology, a set of Will and Ariel Durant’s encyclopedic Story of Civilization, various slip-cased editions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and a Punch annual from 1954.
But when the adults were distracted or absent from the room, I would clamber onto the cabinets beneath the shelves so I could study the topmost shelves. There were the ‘grownup books’: fat, sexy novels by Harold Robbins and Henry Miller, chunky bestsellers by Robert Ruark, William Golding, Nikos Kazantzakis, and James Jones. These top shelves were where I first discovered Gerald Durrell, Irving Stone, Richard Gordon, and Paul Gallico. I’d stand on the narrow ledge, my head grazing the ceiling, my eyes skimming back and forth across the spines.
More than forty years later, I still remember all the publisher imprints, ingrained in my skull from staring so hard at the jackets of all those illicit books. Penguins in orange, blue and green, Faber and Faber, yellow jacketed book from Gollancz, Corgi paperbacks, and the gorgeous bindings of the Folio Society.
My grandfather had a second library, in his brown office, so-called to distinguish it from the white consulting room where he examined patients and kept his gleaming steel tools behind the glass-doored of white enameled cabinets.
These shelves were stocked with medical books in German, Italian and English, full of plates and diagrams of biopsied organs, tumors, amputations, and the unfortunates who presented with them. There was a series of books with acetate inserts that let me flip through slices of the human body, exposing the skin, the organs, the viscera, the skeleton, with each turn of the page. And there was Gran’s prized possession: a first edition of the collected works of Freud, in German, eleven volumes in stern blue.
As my grandfather worked at his desk, I’d sit cross-legged on the floor and slowly turn the pages of his medical school scrapbook, a heavy, black book with thick grey pages containing deckle-edged photos of his patients and their infirmities. An old woman with a goiter the size of a watermelon. A man with a moustache and no nose. Twins with matching tumors. A young girl with knocked-knees and no clothes. I still own that scrapbook and it still has the power to stir me with its voyeuristic perversity.
I haven’t been in my grandparents’ house since 1970. But I can still remember the sequence of the books, the smell of the bindings, the illicit thrill of reading books I was far too young to understand. The pages of books still provide most of the important experiences and enduring memories of my life.
After feeling a little vulnerable, I took to Facebook Live to express my anxieties. I’m not much of a Twitterer so I plied my steel nib and some India ink instead.
In case you had something better to do at the time, here’s a record of the event.
Jenny and I are spending the weekend in the country, enjoying the peace and quiet of a borrowed house surrounded by bare trees, piles of crunchy snow and the hoarse caws of ravens. We spend the evening listening to records on a turntable, playing casino, and reading books.
Jenny and I are both big readers; books are the shared love that first drew us together. I’m reading Michael Lewis’s new book on my Kindle, absorbed in a perspective on the birth of Israel that has overnight transformed my own (maybe I’ll write about that sometime). I have a half-finished paperback, A Short History of the United States in my backpack as well as a library book , Nutshell by Ian McEwan. I tend to travel with multiple books in multiple forms so I can shift gears with my moods. Even my favorite genre can become sticky and claustrophobic, like too many chocolates in a box.
Jenny’s reading several library books too and dipping into our absent host’s collection of cook books. She has always been a glutton for cookbooks. We have shelves of them at home and, on our weekly trip to the library, she inevitably hauls back more armfuls of heavily illustrated tomes from celebrity chefs. For me, cookbooks are a means to an end, cooking, but Jenny enjoys them for the vicarious pleasure, content to just rattle the pots in her mental kitchen.
We spent this Saturday morning on the Long Island Expressway instead of the library. That’s not the norm. Usually, we have a bagel from the baker on University Place, read the paper, then head to one of four public libraries in the ten-block radius of our house.
There’s the large Jefferson Market library with its stained glass windows and spiral staircase, a repurposed court-house with a red-brick tower. Or the compact Mulberry St. branch tucked into an alley by the Puck building. Chalky perfumes waft in from the Santa Maria Novella store next door, mingling with the excited murmurs of the kids from Chinatown playing computer games in the mezzanine and the exotic fragrances of the homeless men reading magazines. To the West, there’s the Hudson Park branch — we stop to read the chalkboard by the entrance. Some anonymous librarian always adds a witty welcome message: the first one we noticed was a celebration of grilled cheese and Lionel Richie, our favorites too. If we head East on our Saturday morning stroll, we end up at the Ottendorfer branch, formerly a 19th century clinic for German immigrants, its facade festooned with busts of Bavarian doctors. This branch is the smallest one, which shortens our visit but also produces the most book picks. I don’t know if it’s just especially well-curated, but we always come back with the biggest haul from the Ottendorfer.
We generally bring home 4-8 library books each week and stack them on a table at the end of the couch. Within a day or two, most of them have been thumbed and rejected. This culling is just the final pleasure of library gleaning, which begins with a visit to the new arrivals section of the library shelves. Jenny and I stand and browse side by side, reading spines, then examining covers and flyleaves, quietly passing good finds back and forth (“This looks like your sort of thing” “Read it last year”), amassing a stack on one of the library tables for further study. Then we read a page or two from each candidate, until we have separated the rejects from the chosen few. We check out the winners and stack them in our Trader Joe tote bags then head home to plunk down on the couch and further refine our search.
For the next few days, we dig deeper into each book, only occasionally making it to the very end. If dialogue sounds wooden, plotting forced, vocabulary opaque, then the book gets banished back to the TJ bag sitting beneath the end table. On rare occasion, one of us loves a book so much, we must go online to renew it so the other can get his/her fill of it too.
We can afford to be picky. New books are being published every day, the library shelves are groaning, and we have many pages to turn before we sleep.
Speaking of, I’m heading to the couch to read. And snooze.
Recently, I worked with Nelleke Verhoeff, a wonderful Dutch artist, on a little ebook of creative ways to express your love. You can get a copy for free, just in time for Valentine’s Day.
I traveled back and forth across America in the last few days so I was pretty tired this weekend. Being tired tends to make me irritated, whiny and slow-witted. My superego has no problem needling me, my id just wants to eat ice cream and drink beer, and my hapless ego shuffles around with its hands in its pockets. But I don’t want to talk Freud right now (I bring him up because I spent a vegetative hour watching James Fox’s show on Vienna, 1908. You might like to, too. Brilliant Lights Brilliant Minds on Netflix). Instead let’s discuss two recent scientific projects on the physiology of the brain.
The Times reported on a couple of articles published last week in the journal Science about inquiries into the purpose of sleep. They focussed on a new explanation: that we sleep to forget.
Here’s how it works. Our brains are made up of 100 billion neurons and each one is networked into many others. We have some seven hundred trillion synaptic connections that allow signals to pass back and forth. Every day, we are bombarded with information and experiences, all of which rewire our brains. Literally. Every experience causes these synapses to grow like topsy and, this new synaptic homeostasis hypothesis says, when we sleep, our brains prune those connections to preserve important memories and lessons and ditch the rest. It’s vital — wIthout enough sleep, our memories get inundated and fuzzy.
This certainly makes sense to my bleary brain.
I have also been perusing a book by Sebastian Seung, a professor at MIT, who believes that this immense thicket of connections is the source of our identity, that we are who we are because of how we are wired. He’s part of a project to map these connections (sort of like the human genome project) to create a “connectome” and show that we are shaped by the brain structure we inherit and by the transformations the world make on it — nature plus nurture.
I’ve been looking at neural maps like the one above and I’m struck by how beautiful, delicate and deeply complex they are. We are each the sum of these deep networks and each one is unique. Sure, we come out of the box with certain structures set up, but every minute our brains are sprouting new filaments and plugs, then reorienting them, pruning and shaping ourselves. Every brain is constantly changing in special ways that make us each who we are.
It’s a powerful endorsement of the importance of authenticity, that we can’t and shouldn’t aspire to sameness. Mass culture and capitalism want to move us in that direction, to make us cogs in the machine, but our brains will never be happy trying to fit in. Instead, we need to understand, embrace and express our individuality.
That’s a key purpose of art, to show how we are similar and different, that we process the common experience through unique neural networks, that we are each the sum of inevitably different experiences. Sharing our perceptions allows us to be confident in the uniqueness of our selves and yet secure in our connections to all those other connectomes out there, all sharing our common experience of being different.
Chew on that. Meanwhile, I’ll be taking a nap.
Dianne wrote to me the other day. She’d never written to me before but I’d made her do it. She said:
Where Are YOU? I’m putting my foot down now. Summer break, ok. The end of the world as we know it, hey, please shine a light. just a wee one. A scribble in a pen that intimidated you, view out the window, your dog’s butt. No pressure, but moments of creativity just feel very important at the moment. My own, and those who are part of my psychic wellbeing. Sorry man, but you blog, you take on responsibility.
I stammered that I’d been really busy, that I was working on a bunch of new things, traveling to film stuff for Sketchbook Skool, and that I’d been doing Facebook live events every day, blah, blah. But I didn’t really tell her the truth.
And the truth is I’ve become hesitant.
This has been going on for a while with me, this impulse to pull back. Instead of sharing things, I amass them, filling up my hard drive with ideas, drafts, sketches, but not going the final step to finish and launch them.
I started this hesitancy last summer when I rented a studio, made a bunch of paintings and was then coy about it all, hesitating to write about what I was doing or share more than a glimpse of the work.
The monkey had a hand in this reticence. He said that none of the things I was doing was especially impressive and that maybe if I kept stockpiling them, their lack of quality could ultimately be masked by their quantity. Of course, that wasn’t true. I never made an especially significant number of bad paintings and ultimately had to just release the results candy coated in some baroque musings about the creative process, as if my handful of Sunday paintings was some earth-shattering exploration to deep wisdom.
Then I started working on a project that had pretenses to be a definitive exploration of the creative process. I did a fair amount of research and took a lot of notes which boiled down to a grubby handful of one-liner bon mots. Each was to be the basis of a short piece, maybe a chapter in a book, then more modestly an epic series of blog posts. then, after reading so much about the demise of blogs, I decided they should be little videos instead and I churned out a handful of scripts, shot them —and promptly sat on the bunch.
Then I decided that the quality of the ideas wasn’t so inadequately that I should make the videos less off the cuff to mask their inadequacy. So I tried making them more elaborate — but still they lurked in a folder. I almost shared them with my wife a few times, but then demurred again.
Then I started doing daily calligraphy videos on Facebook. These were initially fun to do, but then I worried they were no more than evanescent
trifles and stopped after a couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, my absence on the scene began to intensify my hesitation. I felt like I had to do something really cool or far-ranging, some awesomeness to make up for my indolence. That just made it heavier and heavier.
And, while I and my ego and character flaws bear the lion’s share of responsibility for all this balking, 2017 has not made it any easier. For the first time, I have really felt I had to watch what I say online. I have seen so much rage on the internet over the past few months, so much intolerance on all sides, so much fearful obstinacy, that my own tongue has been increasingly tied.
In the past, I’ve always liked to casually toss out the occasional extreme, not very well-thought-out idea, but the consequences for doing so have never felt higher. Sure, a reader or two has deleted me from their feed over the past decade and a half because I took a weird stance on something or other, but these days, it seems like whatever I do could end up on my permanent record. That’s not just self-aggrandizement; I think we are all a little paranoid right now. These are strange times indeed.
But the real fault lies with me. With my surrender to my inner critic and his incessant alarm ringing. With my harsh self judgement. With my short attention span.
So if you wished I’d write more, I think I shall. But I hesitate to promise anything. I’ve rarely live up to those pledges in the past.
I think I need to regain my confidence in what I am, what I have to offer, and in what is important to me and to you.
This post is the first step.
So thanks, Dianne, for the boot in the ass. I hope to pay you back in kind.
Danny Gregory 
