Category: Ideas

Big and small.

Dulce Domum.

dannygregory19 Comments

I guess it began when our TV blew up — after a dozen years of faithful service. I suddenly had to reconsider how our living room would look, find a new TV  and a piece of furniture for it to sit on, making changes to our apartment that we haven’t had to think about in years. And I’d have to do it on my own.

At first, the prospect filled me with dread and a big sense of obligation — one more hassle to deal with.

Then a pipe broke in our neighbor’s radiator and ruined the ceiling of Jack’s bedroom. It’s all been patched up but because we don’t know how to exactly match the color, I realized we’d have to paint the whole thing. All of which made me look at the disaster area that is Jack’s bedroom — a dense archaeological  collage of all of the stages of his childhood carelessly layered on top of each other, a room he really only uses now to sleep in — and thought it would be a great thing to rethink, and a creative project we could both get excited about.

So Phase One was to research HDTVs and cabinets (that took the better part of a month) and then pry open the wallet and get all the elements into our house. I worked stealthily alone so it could be a surprise for Jack (who had come to accept that we would probably never have a TV again) and  last night we flipped the switch and basked in High Definition mindlessness.

Next up is to make a plan for Jack’s room. He doesn’t seem to have much of an opinion about it yet, but I imagine a cool book-lined studio perfect for knocking out masterpieces and impressing girls.

Redecorating is like solving a Rubik’s cube and as soon as I consider Jack’s room, I start to think about turning my office into a proper studio too ( Patti and I had often discussed fantasy plans to put in counters and flat files and stuff but never did). And maybe redoing the living room. And rethinking the kitchen while we’re at it …

I spoke to a man who lost his wife around the time Patti died and he told me he developed  a strong impulse to redo his home too. He started rearranging furniture, painting walls and making his nest his own. I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. Instead, I am inspired by Patti’s example and aesthetic and am thinking of the  sort of place she would have loved. Patti had big dreams for our home but the limitations imposed by her wheelchair and disability frustrated a lot of those plans. Accessibility was always a huge factor in what we could do and even though she made our home a lovely place, a lot of the decisions that went into were limited by whether a wheelchair could get around it easily and whether everything was reachable from a seating position. Now I have carte blanche and a lot more freedom to create the home we both wanted.

We collected  a lot of tear sheets and catalogs over the years to inspire us but I decided to start from scratch and just pull images that felt like home to me. When I look at this collection (and you can see some of them below) I learned quite a lot about where my head is at these days.

The fact is, when I lie in bed at night and think about what I should do in our home, it’s mainly about pruning, chucking out a lot of dusty-gathering tchotchkes and stuff that fills the closets that I’ll never use again. Honestly,  I won’t be putting up decorations this Halloween (though we have two boxes full of strings of jack o’lantern lights and felt ghosts and stuff) and I won’t be hosting big dinner parties and using the dozens of tablecloths and doilies and aprons we have jamming our drawers. When you live in a place for a long time you just accumulate crap that has outlived its usefulness and I feel an urge to shed that skin.

What would I end up with if I did all that? A blank, minimalist place with empty closets and big, bare surfaces punctuated by the occasional Eames chair? Is that what I want?

I think I thought so, but when I look at all the pictures I chose to represent my definition of home they all have the same themes: lots of objects, lots of color. They are busy, energetic places. Granted they look a bit more organized and freshened up than our place, but they’re also not that different from where I live, and, frankly, from the art I make too.

It is interesting to do this sort of exploration, to challenge my assumptions, purge the cobwebs even if it seems daunting, and see where I am and where I should go.

Sometimes, like Frodo, I yearn to leave home and seek adventures; usually, like Bilbo, I think they are nasty disturbing uncomfortable things that make you late for dinner. But when change is thrust upon me and the world becomes vast, it is comforting to come home, to tuck in one’s tail and curl up under fresh, fluffy new blankets.

The weary Mole also was glad to turn in without delay, and soon had his head on his pillow, in great joy and contentment. But ere he closed his eyes he let them wander round his old room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played or rested on familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him, and now smilingly received him back, without rancour. He was now in just the frame of mind that the tactful Rat had quietly worked to bring about in him. He saw clearly how plain and simple—how narrow, even—it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to; this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.

— The Wind in the Willows

Poking my snout out into the sunshine.

dannygregory37 Comments

Cripes, it’s hard to reanimate a habit once it’s gotten rusty. Such is the case with my online communications. I find I am thinking about drawing less and subsequently writing about it less too. However, I am still drawing. In fact, I am doing big splashy colorful spreads in my journal — but so far, they are just for me.

While my life is reasonably normalized — working, making sandwiches, vacuuming, chastising Jack about his homework — when my emotions occasionally overflow, I pour them onto paper and seal them between the covers of my Italian watercolor journal. There’s not that much to talk to people about anymore anyway. I so want not to be a draggy, whiney bore, and frankly that’s not how I feel most of the time anyway. But when I do, I’d rather just hole up and draw or write than drag others under my black cloud. My misery doesn’t really love company.

It’ll be seven months next week. Seven months. Shit. It seems both a lifetime and a blink. My wound has turned to a scab to a scar. It still affects my vision, still wakes me up in the darkness, still trips me up when I least expect it, and it has probably changed me utterly in more ways that I can bother to list. But I am still me, a more tentative, insular version perhaps, but still me.

I’ve stopped waiting for it all to pass. (Though, even this morning, it occurred to me yet again that the whole thing could be  joke, a test, and Patti would suddenly roll out of the elevator, telling me she just wanted to see how we’d cope without her.)  I’ve stopped goading myself with ‘Life goes on’ pep talks. I just know that some days I’ll feel fine, some days I’ll feel awful, and there’s not much one can do or say about it.

So far a day has yet to pass in which I don’t think about Patti, don’t see her in my peripheral, don’t wonder what she’d say I should do about some aspect of our lives. I worry that I am becoming what she prevented me from slipping back into: misanthropic, withdrawn, judgmental, timid, narrow. I tell myself I should do more, should organize the pantry, should call the friends who don’t call me anymore, should indulge myself, should cut loose. Or at least update my blog.

But my life is so full of stuff. I do my job, I do hers, I try to keep Jack on track, and the dogs from peeing on the rug. I collapse into bed each night and sleep till 5 a.m., then stare at the ceiling for an hour or two, and drag myself off the pallet.

In profound ways, the world ain’t what it used to be. Sure, sometimes I have the urge to seize the day, drain it to the dregs, paint the town red, and dye what’s left of my hair blue. But more often, I think my dogs are right, that it’s a good day to lie around in the sun instead of pushing the limits. I don’t think it’s depression but pragmatism, a sense that whatever force seemed to be watching over me, tapping its foot and checking its watch, has drifted away rather than remind me that I should check off my entire to-do list. The scoreboard is down, the crowd has drifted off, and I am okay with what is.

Our microwave died last month; Patti and I got it second-hand from a friend in 1988. I replaced it with virtually the same model just so I could soften the butter when I make Jack’s sandwiches.  Our big living room TV died last weekend — we bought it when Jack was two. I am sorely temped not to get another one; let’s see how long ’til Jack rebels.

This rumination makes things seem sadder and smaller than they are (another reason not to blog too often). The fact is, there’s a fair amount going on. Jack’s soccer team is about to wrap up the season and he is taking two AP classes. He also has a growing business making custom iPhone cases and has a dozen commissions in his backlog. There are a couple of things stirring in the publishing department; I’ll write about them when they become realer. Also I was just profiled in a book about advertising, and I’ll be in Cathy Johnson’s new book and then in Seth Apter’s.  And, I continue to exercise and lower my dress size —though my feet remain stubbornly 11 1/2.

Thanks for hanging in there. I will try to get back into the habit of sharing something here. I like formulating my thoughts in a digestible way  and I like hearing from you.

By way of explanation.

dannygregory22 Comments

I have been received occasional emails and comments from people wondering why I have stopped posting on this site. Let me begin by saying that Jack and I are doing quite well, despite the silence. We have both had milestone birthdays in the past month; he turned 16 and I turned (gulp) 50. We have been making a lot of art, spending time with each other and friends,moving our lives ahead. There have been setbacks and moments of deep sadness and anxiety, but as each one passed, I felt stronger and clearer.

I have decided however that I am less comfortable sharing enormous amount of detail here. I have received a lot of encouragement, wisdom and support from visitors to the site,  but I feel that these enormous passages in our lives should be expressed somehow differently, with more care and perspective. So, while I continue to write and draw about these days in my journal, I will be much more selective in how I share them, here and elsewhere. Instead, I shall use dannygregory.com as a place to express myself as I always have, about matters creative and artistic, rather than as deeply personal as the posts I put up in the early summer. I promise to share a lot of this material with you in the future — just in a different shape and form.

I don’t regret that public airing of my private feelings, but I no longer have the same need to do so. I’m sure you understand.

Also, after being plagued by malware and paying a consultant to repeatedly exterminate the vermin in my site, I have decided to radically redesign dannygregory,com. I will launch the new site soon and on it I will share a lot of material from my sketchbooks which I  hope you will find useful.

If you have visited this page over the years, you are probably quite used to my occasional bouts of ambivalence about leading a public life and know that inevitably I shall prance back onto center stage, neuroses in full display and reveal more than a sane person probably should about my experience of the world.

Until then, I remain small and timidly yours,

Danny

—–

Oh, one more thing  —  Seth Apter has just published an interview with me in which I explain, for the first time, the real origins of Everyday Matters. You might find it interesting.

A Challenge for the Whole Family

dannygregory7 Comments

[Seth Apter of The Altered Page is conducting a Buried Treasure hunt and encouraged bloggers to resurrect one of their favorite long ago posts. I like this one. I may put up a couple more golden oldies to follow. Then back to the normal sturm and drang of the present.]

It’s the 13th anniversary of Patti’s accident. Jack wrote a lovely essay about how that event has effected him since he was just a baby. Here’s a video of him reading it at his school’s literary festival.

The video is above and here’s the text:

A Challenge for the Whole Family by Jack Tea Gregory
It was June 8th of 1995 when the incident happened. It felt like a normal day, nobody expected anything out of the ordinary. My mother was waiting for the 9 train and she was in a hurry. She was rushing to a demanding photo shoot that was very important to her career. While she was standing near the tracks, peering down the tunnel, her stress and the intense heat caused her to faint. She started to fall just as the train pulled up to the platform and the wind caused from the train whizzing past pulled her into the middle of the track, allowing her to avoid any electrocution. However, she wasn’t safe, the way she fell caused her spinal cord to bend and her back twisted, just before a dangling piece of metal hanging from the train hit her. She was immediately taken to the hospital where they placed an iron rod into her back because her spinal cord had been broken. My mother had been paralyzed from the waist down. She could no longer walk and was forced to sit in a wheelchair. Ever since that day, her life and those surrounding her was instantly affected greatly. Luckily, she was able to get through the therapy and with the support of her family, a new child, and a great sense of humor she was able to push past the injury and escape the pit of despair that many fall into. Many people who are hit by trains come out the tracks in different ways; some are bruised and some are killed. Luckily she didn’t experience the latter, but still life has been a challenge. Our family has also recovered from it and is able to say that they have grown used to it.
Living in New York hasn’t been the easiest, there are a lot of places that don’t have ramps or aren’t accessible. Whenever we find a problem we try and make the best of it. For example, when Mom got her first wheelchair, instead of grimacing about not being able to walk, she would place me on her lap and we’d ride down huge ramps and hills together. The rush between fear of falling and the fun of the wind speeding past our faces created a sense that nothing else in the world existed. My old school had stairs everywhere and she often couldn’t come to school performances or celebrations. I would usually try to take pictures of what was going on so that I could bring her a substitute for not having been there. I would bring her my work if we were celebrating a finished work party.
When my mother would pick me up from school, I would look up from the monkey bars and see all the kids starting to crowd around her. They would ask her questions like, “Do you sleep in a wheelchair?” or “How do you go to the bathroom?” Being the kind woman she is, she’d simply answer them as if nothing was wrong. But I couldn’t help but feel separate from the rest of the children. They found it cool and interesting that my mom was in a wheelchair. They didn’t know how it really was though, all the things we couldn’t do anymore because of this problem. We sometimes can’t go on vacation to certain places because the hotel has a flight of stairs or its elevator has broken down. There are a lot of cars that she can’t get into because they are too high for her to transfer into. However, we find ways around this. My father or I lift her up the stairs and we use a small piece of wood that we call “the Transfer Board,” which she uses to slide across onto the car’s seating.
Taxi drivers are our next issue. Since we didn’t own a car, taxis or the bus are our main form of transportation. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of the drivers actually know how to load up a wheelchair. We have to help them to understand how the wheels come off and how to fold up the seat. This can take about 15 minutes and it becomes very annoying after the 20th time.
This incident has changed our life completely and entirely. I can’t imagine or picture how different I’d be if my mother wasn’t in a wheelchair. Most people would think that this is a near to impossible lifestyle but it’s not. We get through each challenge and we do it as family, together. We have as much fun as any other family would; we just do it in a different way.

[Originally posted June 7, 2008]

Old Mad Men

dannygregory8 Comments

Tom Kane and I started working together in 1984 (!). We were junior ad men at a now-defunct New York  agency. Decades later, we are drawing-buddies, not colleagues; when we hang out, we occasionally reminisce about our careers and how things have changed over the years. Last weekend, we set up a couple of cameras while we sat around and recorded our chat about bygone days. If you remember stat machines or sending out for type or hand-drawn layouts  anything about design and production before everything went digital, you might enjoy this conversation. We did.

Old Mad Men. Part 1.

Old Mad Men. Part 2.

Old Mad Men. Part 3.

Oblique Strategies

dannygregory2 Comments

A couple of days ago, Jack and I went to hang out with a friend of ours while he works on his latest album. He was spending a week or two in a giant recording studio on the West Side. It was Saturday but he had a bunch of engineers huddled in the booth while he sat alone in this gigantic space and laid down bass tracks. During a break, he explained that it was one of the last of the great studios, built in the ’70s, an enormous space with warm acoustics, where lots of classic albums had been recorded.

It seemed a unusual place to find my friend, who is famous for cutting edge electronic music and dance tunes. I’ve usually experienced his works in progress as MP3 files that arrive in my email box, songs that are reworked and morphed over the years. He generally works alone and surrounded by computers. But here he is in this creaky wooden yurt of a room that looks like a sauna and feels like the end of an era.

He told us that he was trying to record an album using no electronic instruments, no effects, a string section, and even the electric bass he was laying down would ultimately be replaced by a standup. He asked if I’d ever heard of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. I nodded but then admitted I hadn’t. He said that Eno had a made up a deck of cards each of which had some instruction or limitation which you’d follow to turn your work in a new direction. It had inspired him to try something completely different. It reminded me of a film called the 5 Obstructions in which Lars Van Trier has Jorgen Leth make and remake a film according to various rules he’d give him. It was one of the things that inspired me to think of ways to shock my own system when I draw, to challenge myself to work in very particular ways or with various limbs tied behind my back. It’s the idea behind the Everyday Matters challenges, to provoke you into a direction you’d never considered, trying something that may be uncomfortable but which opens a door.

Creativity is all about fresh perspectives, about finding the truth and seeing what’s really there. You have to break out of the box you’re in and get things moving — even if that means tricking yourself. Sometimes you have to draw with your eyes closed to see clearly. Sometimes that means standing on your head, or drawing with a Sharpie, or using your left hand — or turning off the computer and getting in a string section.

I'm a Mac. I'm a PC.

dannygregory11 Comments

author1I got my first Apple in 1983 or so, a IIC. From then on, I remained in the Apple lane, never even looking at PCs or Windows. Thanks to Photoshop and Final Cut, my ability to make just about anything on my computer expanded my creative world. Over the past quarter century, I have owned a dozen or so macs and macbooks and ipods and am responsible for the conversion of lots of my friends.
People who were not on board with Macs seemed unimaginative, conservative, clueless. The fact that they outnumbered me ten to one just confirmed my commitment. I had the same resistance to Blackberrys, until my company insisted I get one.
Maybe that Blackberry was Bill Gates’ foot in my door. Increasingly I realized that these days I do most things on-line. Sure, I use Photoshop some and edit the occasional video but the fact is I spend several hours a day on my computer and 90% of them involve the web and email. Oh, and my Blackberry has gotten me used to doing a lot of online things on the elevator, in bed, walking down the street.
Recently, the right fan on my two-year-old MacBook Pro conked out and it started making a lot of whirring noise. It also crashed quite often and the fact that I still have Tiger rather than Snow Leopard installed has become a limitation. This weekend, I decided to bite the bullet and start shopping for a new laptop. (Actually, it’s a bit laughable to call my MacBook a laptop; it is chained down to my desk by its external mouse, second keyboard, USB hub and two external backup drives. It’s been months since I was able to budge it.)
I started at the apple website, going through a shopping list of features. Okay, I want a nice fat drive, and a 3 Gig processor and extra ram and Applecare and… by the time I was done, I’d spent almost 3,500 hypothetical dollars to end up with something that seemed pretty much like what I had bought two years ago.
I wandered down to J&R electronics and looked through their wares. At first I though the prices were misprints — there were huge displays for a couple of hundred bucks, rows and rows of sleek, gleaming laptops for $600 or less. The newest thing in laptops is something small, simple and almost primitive — the netbook; no CD drive, no spinning hard drive, just a reasonable processor, a bright display, a full keyboard, and the ability to get online, all in a package that weighs a couple of pounds and is priced at roughly 1/10 of my dream MacBook.
Now there’s one obvious difference: Windows. I have always assumed that this ubiquitous operating system was ugly, confusing, non-responsive and really hard to set up (not to mention the status quo and domain of account executives, the military and Republicans). But I was willing to take the leap because I’d only be using the netbook to go online; I wouldnt even install email but do it through the browser.
I bought a navy blue Asus EEE for $375, brought it home, turned it on and with 90 seconds was connected to my Airport Express and online. I have shut down my trusty MacBook Pro to give it a well-deserved rest and will only turn it on to touch up scans and polish videos. Unless, of course, I discover I can do all that online as well.
I think I can make this transition because increasingly I have less of a relationship with my computer than with the places I go with it.
It’s more like a TV or a house phone, an appliance rather than a custom environment made just for me. I am more comfortable with being mainstream because the Internet allows me so many options. Soon enough, we will all live in the cloud of computing, where all of our files reside online and applications just appear when we need them. That’s fine with me.
I will let you know how my conversion goes…

Drawing with Tim

dannygregory15 Comments

Tim is three now and it’s high time he learned a trick or two. I read in an old German dog-training handbook (“Wie die Ausbildung von drei Kilo Wiener, um Ihnen eine heiß Tasse Kaffee” by Dackel J. PferdApfel) that, with the judicious application of a stout cudgel and hard taffy, one can get even the most timid long-haired miniature Dachshund to speak.

We spent a frustrating weekend working through the manual with Tim and were finally rewarded with his first few words. After a month of follow-up work, he is now entirely fluent in English, has shed most of his Dusseldorf accent (replaced for some reason with a Bensonhurst growl), and bores us with long monologues about lunch meat, cats, and the perils of thunderstorms.

Now we’re working on a much bigger challenge — getting him to draw. On Tuesday night, we began his first drawing lesson and he did a passable portrait of me, before moving on to sketch some flank steak, a barbecued chicken and a meatloaf. Fortunately, a local documentary film crew was on hand to capture his first faltering steps and they’ve been posted online.

I urge you to try to encourage your own family members to draw. It’s fun, it’s relaxing, and it’s easier than chasing your tail.

This video is also available in HD and on Youtube.

Everyone has one…

dannygregory7 Comments

prison1

In a masochistic fit, I have been reading the comments people have been making on YouTube about my commercials. People are so extreme. Some complain about the interest charges Chase put on their card, others link them to some fictional Nazi past, others cry or write paeans to actors playing minor roles. Some just dispute the commercial’s claim:

“This commerical suck balls no atm in the world that quick what a bunch of liers “

Some just plain hate my client:

Chase is an enemy institution that every town should vandalize with bricks and spray cans.

The most recent frenzy has been around the fact that I had Peter Murphy of the band Bauhaus cover “Instant Karma” by John Lennon.This strikes people as a betrayal on about six dimensions and they have filled five pages of comments on YouTube.

“Oh, come on, Pete, are you really that strapped for cash? “

“i could imagine Peter appearing on that commercial as a cute dolphin [sic] to the sea.”

“I hate this song, initially sounds like he’s trying to squeeze one out…”OOOONNNN and OOOOOONNNN and OOOONNNN”

“I owe chase $600.00. I love this commercial so I might consider paying them back.”

“Brilliant! … Nice to see such esoteric luminous creative for a freaking bank commercial. It’s about time things were bumped up a notch!”

I just like the song, and I like Bauhaus, so I am a bit mystified by the fuss. But then,  I’m just an ad guy.

Another phenomenon is when people who are involved with some aspect of the commercial, adopt it as their own. For instance, people who like one of the actors or in, one case, a dog, who appears in the spot.

There’s grumbling though, even among the fans:

“dangerous!!!! Chase is encouraging young people to break the laws and run a muck!!!:

Sometimes the reaction is positive. Like, in this case, when a song I used in a  spot became a pretty big hit and “100 Years” by Five for Fighting was back on the charts.

dude can u plz tell me the name of this song ive been lookin for it for like 2 years now -.-…

“i love this song. it’s soooo amazing. i want it played at my wedding.”

Sometimes there are a lot of positive scomments, like the ones for this mawkish spot I did a few years ago.

“This is like one of the most touching commercials I’ve seen to date. Wow, I’m sold! The power of commercials cannot be underestimated!”

Then there’s the really fantastic post where someone took one of my commercials and endeavored to prove that it was seeded with hidden swastikas, proving that Chase was trying to bring back the Third Reich. I kid you not.

If they make fascism look warm and fuzzy who wouldn’t want it?

its great to know others notice the obvious swastika in the Chase logo. The fact that they even shift the logo to show the swastika shows that they are trying to get us sheeple to get used to the logo again.

Yeah and Kermit the frog is a alien transported to brainwash us all. Damn dude take your medication, I dont give a damn about Chase but that is about the strangest connection Ive ever heard.

And one final spot from

a scum sucking rat turd.

I love the Internet! (This post is for my pal, Richard Hall)