Short story long.

dannygregory17 Comments

politcians

“Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” — John, 9:25

My grandfather grew up in  a small village in Eastern Europe and this was one of his favorite stories:

A peasant comes to the village wise man and he is very upset. “My house is far too small for my family. It’s dark and small and smells of cabbage but I am too poor to afford a bigger one,” he complains.

The wise man strokes his beard for a minute and then says, “Do you have any chickens?”

“Of course I have chickens,” replies the man. “What sort of self-respecting Eastern European peasant do you think I am? I have six chickens and a rooster.”

“Bring them into the house and let them live with you,” says the wise man.

“What? That’s insane…,” the man says. “Chickens in the house?”

“Do it. Then come back in a week and tell me how things are going.” says the wise man and turns back to his book. The peasant leaves, grumbling.

A week passes. The peasant bursts into the wise man’s house. The wise man, not looking up from his book, says, “Well, did it work?’

The peasant explodes: “Of course not. It’s a disaster! There are chicken feathers and chicken droppings everywhere. And the house is even more crowded! We’re miserable.”

“Do you have a goat?” asks the wise man.

“A goat?” fumed the man. “Well, yes, we have a big, smelly goat.”

“Excellent. Bring the goat into the house. See you in a week.”

The peasant leaves, shaking his head with disbelief. He’s back five days later, frantic. “What have you done to me? My life is a nightmare. The goat ate my wife’s best babushka, the chicken have taken over my Barcalounger, and our house smells like a Warsaw subway men’s room.”

“Excellent,” says the wise man. “Your cow — bring her in next.”

“The cow? The COW?! She’s huge! I doubt I can even get her in the front door.”

“Do it.” The wise man dismisses him with a wave of his wrinkled hand and returns to his book. The peasant, his face turning an even more dangerous shade of vermillion, stalks out, cursing under his breath.

When he returns, his hair is dishevelled, his coat is spattered with chicken droppings, a goaty smell emanates from his overcoat, and cow dung’s on his boots. He doesn’t complain, he just stands there, broken, tears cutting a path down his grimy cheeks.  The peasant is clearly at his wit’s end. The wise man looks up and smiles. “Very, verrry good,” he says. The man gulps back a sob. A chicken feather drifts out of his beard.

“Now,” says the wise man, “For the most important step. Take all the animals — the chicken, the goat, the cow —and drive them out of your house. Get them all out.” The peasant merely shrugs hopelessly, then turns and shuffles out of the wise man’s house.

The next day, he’s back. He’s transformed. His eyes gleam, he stands tall, his energy has returned. “How is your house then, eh?” asks the wise man, a twinkle in his rheumy eye. The peasant grabs the wise man and kisses his leathery cheeks. “We drove out the chickens, the goat and the cow and now … it’s huge! It’s a mansion! It’s clean and bright and we are so happy. At last! You are a genius!”

Anyway, that’s my grandfather’s sort of story. It came to mind yesterday evening as I sat in the bleachers behind home plate and watched the Brooklyn Cyclones lose abysmally to the Aberdeen Ironbirds. I had one hand cupped over my left eye and a smile as broad as the peasant’s on my face.

Five hours earlier, it being a close and muggy afternoon, I had taken my Kindle and a single dachshund to my bed for a nice Saturday afternoon nap. I’d had a fairly rough night’s sleep, and was a little wracked with self doubt, missing Jenny in LA, and just generally feeling unnecessarily sorry for myself.

I awoke an hour later, groggy and sweaty. I had been sleeping face down and I was especially bleary-eyed. I staggered into the bedroom and splashed on some cold water. I saw a big crease running down my face, from my forehead to my cheek. My vision still seemed bleary so I splashed on some more cold water. I looked out the window and I could not focus on the view. The vision in my right eye was really blurry.  I covered my right eye and everything seemed fine but when I did the same with my left, the buildings down West 3rd street would not get sharp. I rubbed it some more. No change.

I waited. Ten minutes. Then half an hour. No real change. Clearly I had done something awful to myself in my sleep. I had been lying on my eyeball and somehow strained it or compressed it or worse. My hypochondriacal monkey had several helpful suggestions. Maybe my vision would never come back? Maybe I would be permanently blind in one eye? Maybe I’d had a stroke?

Jack and I left to catch the F train to Brooklyn to meet my sister, her husband and kids at MCU stadium to watch the Mets minor league franchise play Baltimore.

The ride to Coney Island from the Village is about 45 minutes long and I spent a lot of it in a minor sweat, my bowels liquid with worry. The monkey kept me company. Wouldn’t it be ironic if just as you decided to focus on art full time — you couldn’t focus at all? Maybe you’ll have to wear an eye patch? Maybe you’ll end up with a guide dog? Now you can really do blind contours! Ha, ha! 

The train comes above ground once you get to Brooklyn and I kept alternately covering my eyes to peer into the distance.  As we reached Avenue X, now an hour and a half after I’d woken up, things maybe, possibly, seemed to be improving. If I just used my right eye, it slowly began to focus on the housing projects in the distance. Then if I uncovered both eyes, it took a minute for them both to adjust. It was wonky but it was changing.

We got off the train on Mermaid Avenue and proceeded immediately to Nathan’s to fortify ourselves with some medicinal hot dogs and fries. I kept testing my vision. The Cyclone, the Ferris wheel, the boardwalk, came into view. I could see details of the half-clad bodies on the beach. Folds of sunburnt flesh, bad tattoos, back hair, varicose veins, details that now looked gorgeous to my worried brain. I realized that the waving blob by the stadium was actually my sister and my nieces. Over the course of the first few innings, I saw the team’s mascot transform form a fuzzy, white shape ( a snow man? An ice cream cone? A thumb?) into a giant-headed seagull, prancing around the diamond.

By the time the Cyclones started to lose badly, I was agog at how beautiful the evening looked. The sky was lavender and fuchsia. The parachute jump was wrapped in a delicate skein of twinkling lights. I could read the signs on the bumper car track, count the bulbs on the scoreboard, see every kernel of popcorn on that large man’s lap near first base. Brooklyn was the most beautiful place on earth and I was, yet again, the luckiest man alive.

The art of time management

dannygregory16 Comments

calendar

When you punch a clock, even a gold-plated, corinthian-leather-encased execuclock, your time does not belong to you. You have sold it and the highest bidder can do what he wants with it. He can use it to make wonderful things that will improve the world or to get him coffee and scrub his bowl. You can gripe, you can whimper, but you have punched that clock and now it is going to punch you back, suckah.

These days, my time belongs to me, the new boss, same as the old boss. And I insist that this time I have bought back gets used properly, to the last tock of the ticker. There will be no lolling on the midday couch, no leisurely lunches or bowel evacuations, no navel gazing or whittling of any kind. Every day must and will be filled with productivity.

Now, because I am currently an “artist “(it says so on my LinkedIn page, so it must be true), I am allowed some wool gathering and beard stroking, so long as it is clearly being used to hunt down that pesky muse, drag her to the altar, and squeeze every last drop of creative inspiration out of her. That requires scrupulous documentation.

In the image above, you can see a page from my weekly calendar. I find it essential to structure my day so the hours don’t slip through my fingers and dribble out the door. I insist on logging what I do all day, as if I was still filling out timesheets. One simply must have a clear record, nicht? Otherwise, I might end up cracking open my first six-pack right after breakfast and playing the bongos all day in Washington Square.

So I log my hours and I color-code ’em too. Pink is personal time, hanging with friends, reading on books, kissing my girl, walking my hounds, discipling my boy.Yellow is what I now call ‘work’: drawing, painting, writing, making videos, stuff I used to call ‘fun’. And blue is old school, freelance writing and consulting projects for clients I am still connected to after all those decades in the salt mines. Those blue hours are the lucrative ones, folding-money-wise, but they also cost me the most. My heart is no longer in them though the monkey keeps picking up the phone and signing new contracts. But in my pink hours, I spend time scheming on how to get the blue hours down to a precious few. And I think I’m winning. Slowly but surely my calendar is shifting hue and by the time I’m in LA, I’ll be out of the blues for good and all.

I have had a lot of fun with the yellow hours this week. I have made a half dozen videos for my upcoming class and I am really hitting my stride. I am happy with how they are turning out and I hope you will be too. Another big addition to the yellow column is a new book — my lovely editrix, Bridget, just told me that the acquisitions group at Chronicle is really excited about my proposal and we should have the details of the contract hammered out any day. Then I have to get serious and write and draw it. I think my deadline is sometime in the spring. It’s going to be a humdinger.

20130829-231238.jpg
Pink is getting busy too, Jack and I spend two half days painting his room. You can imagine what a room that a boy has lived in for almost every one of his 19 years can be like. Instead of painting, I thought of calling in one of those companies that clean up crime scenes. I haven’t painted a room since I was in my twenties but it’s not a skill you forget and we had a great time working together, listening to music, cracking jokes and getting paint in our hair. Being Gregorys we managed to get splatters of white paint on the blue wall and blue paint on the ceiling but when we were done and exhausted to the bone, we agreed it looked amazing, like a real grownup room again.
Soon we will both leave our apartment for a good long while, meeting up again here at Thanksgiving and in the meantime we’ll have memories of a great summer, and of lots of time well spent

Big data

dannygregory15 Comments

20130824-180221.jpgInformation. The world is just jammed with it. I’m not talking about Facebook posts and texts from your besties; I mean the sort of analog information that is constantly flowing into the holes in our head and all over our skin.

But how much exactly? What would be the equivalent in terms I am familiar with — dpi, mexagpixels, gigs, etc.?

Well, the Internet has loads of answers but none are really definitive. The best I can make out is that if our eyes were digital cameras, they would each have the equivalent of around 600 megapixels and the resolution of the images we receive is about 530 pixels per inch (as a reference, the resolution of images we get on the internet is 72 dpi). Our ears are also constantly receiving sound data, and we can distinguish differences in the ~160kbps range.  Our skin can feel vibration, touch, pressure, temperature and of course, pain. We have 20 square feet of skin, all studded with zillions of receptors — Our fingertips alone have 2,500 receptors per cm2.

In short, our bodies are getting a huge amount of data every second. A commonly quoted estimate says that our brains receive 400 billion bits of information each second. That’s 400 gigs, enough to fill my laptop’s hard drive, every second.

But…we have this enormous data stream coming in, and what are we doing with it? According to a recent study in the MIT Technology Review, our brains can only process 60 bits of information a second. And we are only conscious of about 2,000 bits per second. That means that .000000000015% of what comes in actually gets responded to.

Wow.

Obviously, the vast majority of the time, we are screening out almost all of what is around us. How is that even possible? Well, we are living in the preconceived patterns we built for ourselves long ago, the patterns that put most things into categories that require very little data. We simply don’t need to see every pixel of every face we encounter because we know immediately, “that’s Mary”.  We may not notice that Mary is wearing a knee-length, ocean blue floral print dress with six pearl buttons, etc. because that data has no immediate value. It wouldn’t help us to survive in the wild.  Those of our ancestors who couldn’t quickly form observations into categories would have been overwhelmed by data and couldn’t have responded quickly enough if Mary turned out to be a pouncing saber-toothed tiger.

Relying on these quick sorting algorithms has been a useful way to survive, what with terabytes of incoming data and the fairly slow processors in these 3-pound, neck-top computers we were all issued.

But … over time, the price we pay for this has grown higher. As the data becomes more intense (iPhones, laptops, 2000 channels, etc), we have retreated more and more into categories and preconceptions and further and further from all the stuff that’s going on around us in what we oldsters quaintly call “the Real World”. The problem is what happens when you decide that your Facebook stream is so much more manageable than the 400 gigs of real data. You will be utterly oblivious as you cross the street, lost in your smartphone, and a saber tooth tiger pounces or an SUV squashes you flat. End of your gene line.

Which brings me to drawing.

A few days ago, I was walking on the Lower East Side and I saw this building festooned with painted signs. I sat down on the pavement, leaned against a wall, and pulled out my Lamy Safari. I spent the first hour or so just drawing the building underneath the signs.  I started to see that the building itself was quite interesting, that it had curved windows and lots of interesting brickwork. I discovered how the building was constructed, how the windows lineup, where the structural underpinnings were arranged. I noticed all the stores on the ground floor, their merchandise and the ways that their awnings were hung. It seemed I was tapped into the full data stream (though oblivious to my dehydration, cramped buttock, and sleeping right leg).

Finally, I pulled out  a white pencil and start to letter the signs.

Here’s the thing. I had spend a couple of hours starting at this building but now I realize how much I still wasn’t seeing. Yes, I had studied its structure but I had skipped over a lot of the details, I had missed air conditioners, reflections, broken bricks and more. I had approximated so many things based on the patterns I could divine. And I had not observed the perspective or the lighting at all.

But what really blows me away was this weird mistake I made. I misspelled “Entrance”. It’s certainly a word I know how to spell. And I was looking right at the letters on the wall, paying careful attention to the letterforms, to the kerning, the condensed type, the wear of the paint, and then I misspelled “Entrance”. I can’t explain it (Oh, and to cover my goof, I purposefully misspelled it again on the left).

My brain, despite all the time and care I was taking, still had to jump to conclusions. And to a conclusion that I knew was wrong. I somehow drifted away and came back to see my hand adding that ‘E.’ Some other thing was inhabiting my skull, hands on the controls, driving along, a barely-literate lizard brain that just took over while my conscious floated away and debated what I should have for dinner. It’s literally, mind-boggling. Maybe it was a full blown right-brain thing, drawing what was in front of me and disengaged from the rational world of letters and numbers. But then why the mistake? Was I just overwhelmed by the raw data flow?

All this information. And all this human frailty. What we really need is a little wisdom.

Why me?

dannygregory46 Comments

 

20130821-091348.jpgI try to be good.

I take a multivitamin each morning. I floss each night. I give to my local public radio station. I rarely beat or kick my child. Then this….

So this morning, I take my dogs to the park and plan to begin the day with a small drawing, nothing too challenging, a little amuse bouche. I see this guy on the bench nearby and it seems he is planning to sit immobile for a couple of minutes so I dash off the drawing above. At home I write a little caption with a dip pen and white ink and I am happier with a journal page than I have been in weeks.

After breakfast, I decide to inventory my pens. I am going through a period of transition, easing away from markery sorts of pens like the PITTs and tending more to my dip pens. But I have a big messy box of steel nibs and I decide it’s high time to clean and inventory them. So I make a little page in my journal and chart my favorites.

20130821-091158.jpg

 

It’s a messy business, prying nibs off the holder, rummaging around in the vat of pen cleaner, ink and paper towels all over the place. I am trying to be fastidious but it really goes against my nature. An astrologer once did my star chart and told me I am something called “a triple Virgo” which mean I should be incredibly anal and neat and able to change a pen nib without courting disaster.

Hah ha. Not so fast.

I look back at the left hand side of my spread, and somehow, mysteriously, damnably, I have managed to smear black ink across my writing. What the hell? You can see below, I try to fix it up with another layer of white ink but it probably looks even worse.

God. Damn. It.

20130821-091357.jpg

I tell you this sad story for a number of reasons. First because I am still in the grip of the anguish it caused. Secondly, I guess I can try to extract some sort of life lesson from it to share with you so at least we can profit from this disaster. What would that  be?

“Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” WTF? That’s clearly not the case. That smear is a big, annoying mistake. It may not look it to you but to me, it’s a huge festering boil in the middle of Kate Moss’s forehead.

“It’s the journey not the destination.” Again, I guess so, but the ink blot was part of the journey, the Montezuma’s revenge, the Metro pickpocket, the cancelled hotel reservation of the journey. Thanks for not much.

“Slow down, butthead.” I guess. But I was trying to be slow and deliberate. Granted my whole dining table was covered with bottles and boxes and crumpled paper towels and my hands were black up to the wristwatch. I am a klutz and a slob so I should try to operate at 1/2 speed.

Maybe I should stick to crayons. And wear rubber gloves.

Epic.

dannygregory33 Comments

snail2

My mother just sent me a link to a site documenting a journalist’s trek on foot from southern Africa to South America (I’ll give you the link in a minute). This isn’t just another endurance stunt —Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for National Geographic so his trip is all about science and journalism. He started earlier this year and will take seven years to complete the odyssey.

I have always been fiercely attracted to this sort of epic journey.

A few years ago, I was in thrall as my pal, d.price, rode his recumbent bike some 5,000 miles from Eastern Oregon to Key West. I loved Travels with Charley and On the Road.  Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl (finally a movie!), Bill Bryson’s Appalachian trail book, A Walk in the Woods, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. The Happiest Man in the World by Alec Wilkinson describes Poppa Neutrino’s quest to build a boat out of garbage and sail it across the Atlantic. Mike McIntyre walked across the country with no money and relied entirely on The Kindness of Strangers (which is the name of his amazing book about the trip). The list goes on.

Ten years ago, I wrote a proposal for a book in which I’d follow the original epic travel journalists, Lewis and Clark, from St. Louis to the Pacific. I was going to adhere to their path and record the differences the couple of centuries had wrought. My editor said, “Make the trip, write the book, and then we’ll see.”  I didn’t. Life got in the way. Good thing Jefferson wasn’t counting on me.

Recently, Jenny has been urging me to drive across country with our dogs. I am sort of intrigued by the idea. Pros: 1. It seems romantic and epic and larger than life. 2. This is the perfect time of year for it. 3. It would be a great symbolic start to my life on the West Coast.  Cons: A) I don’t have a car. B) I think taking the dogs would make this a really bad idea. C) This is really her fantasy and she’ll already be across the country in her office in LA while I check into a long string of Motel 6s. For now, the cons have probably won but I still like the idea a lot, particularly if I could get a travel companion who I could stand to sit next to for a couple of weeks and who would be willing to stop and draw along the way.

Maybe next spring.

What intrigues me a lot about Paul Salopek’s journey is its emphasis on slow. He is taking seven years (!) to do this because he really wants to absorb the world as he goes. And he is looking for people along the way who are also seeking slowness in this madcap, speed obsessed world.

I think that’s the right thing to look for. Boy, it’s hard to slow down. I sat in the park this morning with my dogs and did a drawing. It was a small drawing, just filling a little box on the page, but I had to catch myself mid-way because I was tearing through it, barely looking at the arch I was drawing, just scratching out hasty, inaccurate and ugly lines. What the hell was my rush? It’s Sunday morning, I have nowhere to be till brunch, everyone else is sleeping, and yet I am belting through this drawing as if I was in an Olympic event. If I was Paul Salopek, I’d probably be half way to Rio by now.

Even though it’s been several weeks since I left the rat race, I still have my rat cleats on. I can feel it in the need I still have to accomplish things, to generate product, to log hours on my calendar. I so very much want to focus on the journey, the process, not the finish line but all these decades in the business world, in New York, still have me panting and pushing. I remind myself: I am on an epic adventure that will probably take another few decades to finish (in fact, I would like to push off the ending as far as possible) and what matters is the daily walk through life — the things I see, the people I meet, the lessons I learn.

If I’m really honest with myself, the reason I am not driving across country with my dogs is that the monkey is telling me I need to get to LA and start getting on with it. There’s no time for meandering and roses sniffing. I need to set up shop and start making something of myself. The monkey is wrong, again, of course. I make something of myself every day. It may not be something that can be direct-deposited, it’s true, but it’s also something that can’t be accelerated. Step by step, day by day, eyes open, head up.

—-

Here’s the link to Paul Salopek’s journey.  (I have put off giving it to you till the end of this blogpost for fear that you would rush off to read it and never come back to finish my blather. Clearly, I am better at slowing you down than I am at putting my own brakes on.)

My Summer Romance

dannygregory15 Comments

In the interest of trying something new, I’ve recently taken to spending my mornings in a basement with a naked person and a pencil. The oddest part (if you’ll forgive an old copywriter the observation) is not the graphic nudity but the graphite.

As you may know, I have been a loyal pen man ever since I took up drawing last century. When I draw with a pen, I have always said, I am committed to my mark and so I draw more slowly and am fairly sure of my stroke. My line is decisive and, if it’s wrong, I must live with it and work my way out of the problem I have created.

But now, I have this pencil. Actually it’s usually a stick of graphite in a wooden handle with a little set of gripper teeth to hold it in place. And I must say, it feels sort of right for now. First off, I like the feeling of it in my hand, the chunkiness of it. And I like the organic variations, the way the mark gets soft and grey or bold and dark and everything in between. I like the range of hardnesses, the Hs and Bs with all their numbers and degrees of yield. I am least fond of the ends of the spectrum, the super hard H pencils that rip into the paper like cat’s claws or the utter spinelessness of the super soft high number Bs, malleable as turds in my paw. But in between there are a nice number of notes to play, combinations, of soft and smooth, hard and precise.

A long pose is a process and it starts by ogling. I stare at the model and paint him or her with my eyeballs. Then I take a few measurements, the overall height, midpoints, widths as a function of head heights, that sort of thing. Then I do a blind contour, my eyes slowly coursing over the edges of the body while my hand, unattended, records the line. I may look down at the page once or twice or not at all. Surprisingly, this first automatic line is usually pretty damned accurate, capturing the mood and balance of the pose, and it remains the basis for the several hours of drawing to follow. Maybe the knowledge that this is just a pencil line lets me feel comfortable and willing to take this blind risk. In any case, I can also go back in and correct here and there. I like being able to erase. It’s a relief after all those ink spattered years, like letting out my gut after I pass my reflection in a shop window.

Then I start remeasuring and seeing if my proportions will hold. I may have to erase an entire shin or redo the foreshortening on an arm — the first hour is all about tweaking and nudging until I can drop down on any point on the body and see that the angles and relationships are right.

The next hour or so is all about light and volume, trying to get a sense of the dimensions and weight of the body. I go back and forth, using the pencil sometimes as a tool that can blur and blend, and then one that makes hatches and crosshatches, creating tone out of marks. I still have one foot in the world of pen and ink, working in line as much as tone.

Finally, I’ll bring out my bag of colored pencils. I quite like all the colors and the fact that every color has so many permutations and degrees of intensity. though they don’t have the agility or smoothness of my sable brush and watercolors.

If you have had any sort of art training, you might be appalled by my technique but it works for me, these stages and homemade techniques, and I am reasonably happy with the process and my progress.

Lady in black and red
Beefy in black and red
Alarmingly thin in colored pencil
Large hair in colored pencil
Blind contour
Portrait in black and red
Portrait in blue
Jack asleep in pencil
Jenny asleep and foreshortened
Washington Square in pencil
Little person in ink

So I quite like the pencil, but it’s a summer romance, not marriage material.

The fact is, pencils make me feel like a wimp.

Maybe that goes with how i’m feeling these days, a little wimpy, a little less confident about my view of the world because I am evolving and changing. So maybe I want to record my life in pencil right now, and not to commit for the rest of time. I will not be getting a tattoo this month either.

Ink is forever. Pencil lines are more like thoughts, fleeting, evanescent, unreal. Any pencil drawing I do in my sketchbook is bound to blur and fade with time. Generally, I want to be confident and see and record the world as it truly is, but in times like these, when my life is turning a corner, and the view out of the window seems to blur, then maybe it’s more appropriate to render them in this fragile and temporary way.

This period of being soft and fragile and hopefully isn’t a permanent one. I’m in transit shuttling between one life, one coast, and another. Transit is a time of indefiniteness when you aren’t sure which suitcase you put your sandals in and if you left your toothbrush behind. But that’s okay, because when you get to your destination you can put everything in its right drawers and hang the pictures and reshelve the books. In the meantime, it’s okay to live with a little blur, to have erasers standing by just in case. Mistakes made in pencil are still lessons, but gentler, less consequential ones. Nonetheless each one helps me improve, perfect my line, tighten my observation, be in the moment, which is what this whole thing is about, this thing called drawing, and this thing called life.

On drinking the water.

dannygregory14 Comments

20130811-164947.jpg
As our plane swooped down over Mexico, endless green filled the windows. My first instinct was to wonder what sort of farming this could be, dense, unbroken and stretching to the horizon in every direction. As the wheels touched down, I saw it was jungle, an impenetrable mass of unruly, complex life. The runways had been cut out of the wilderness but no attempt had been made to cultivate the creepers and trees. Nature was too vast, man too small.
Mexico is a mostly modern country with drive-through Starbucks and TGIFridays. But many Mexicans accept the unrelenting power of nature, impossible to dominate completely when the air is humid and the sun shines brightly all the live long year. Grasshoppers the size of iPhones, careen through the sky with chartreuse scales and hot-pink wings. Raccoons wander into four-star restaurants and take corn chips off the bar. Cars are sun-faded, concrete is cracked, donkeys walk slowly. It’s not a rich country, but that’s not the reason things seem shop-worn and resigned. It’s because Mexicans accept the inevitable encroachment of Nature, that it’s pointless to be fastidious when geckos will wander onto your kitchen counters and carpets of kelp will wash onto your freshly grouted patio.
I like it.
In New York, we have been beating Nature back for 500 years and we think we’ve won. So we can’t help but freak out when mice nibble on the organic granola box, when mosquitos find their way under our 600 thread count sheets, when Hurricane Sandy knocks out our wifi for a week. If Nature gains the slightest foothold, we take it as a sign that our entire civilization is crumbling.
I like that in general Mexicans are so much less uptight about perfection. They are cool if you do things that are a little risky — but hardly dangerous. Things that would have flocks of lawyers descending anywhere in the States. Unsecured seatbelts don’t have those annoying warning alarms. There are packs of cigarettes in the minibar. People build restaurants out of driftwood and light them with masses of candles. Some cars are missing fenders or bumpers and are painted patchily by hand. Most streets have no sidewalks or street lights so walking at night under starry skies can be an adventure.
We sat in a beachside restaurant that served food that would have been the envy of any entry in the NYC Zagat. But before our appetizer arrived, the waiters patrolled through with smoking pails, emitting clouds of burning citronella so chokingly dense we could barely see our $12 artisanal margaritas. The mosquitos and gnats were barely dissuaded but no one bothered to complain to the Health Department, pausing only to reach under our designer linens to scratch the welts.
Mexicans don’t value their lives less than their Northern neighbors. They just accept that we can’t control everything all the time. And that this acceptance makes life easier and preserves resources for more important things. Insisting on perfection makes thing a lot less interesting and spicy. It’s also a losing battle.
Maybe it was the heat or the Negro Modelo but my pen line was a little looser in Mexico. I did a number of scrawled pages in my journal, drawn half lying down, book propped against my spreading gut, mango juice on my unshaven chin. Maybe this was how Gauguin felt.
I am sloppy as a rule, but I’m not always loose. I value looseness because it feels more organic and expressive, more human, more natural, more the way life is. Less uptight, less gringo. Jack tells me his drawing teacher insists they draw standing up, with their pads on an easel, and that they draw from the shoulder, not from the wrist, to make bold and sweeping lines with their whole bodies. Flat on my back on my chaise, I am far from that, but I feel integrated, natural, in tune with my surroundings. My body, immersed in sweat and heat and verdant richness, feels sensual and at ease. My inner critic, the monkey is dulled too. He is chewing lazily on a mango in the shade, indifferent to my drawing. He can’t be bothered to nag me when we have the jungle at our doorstep. In Mexico, monkeys sit on your roof, squat on your car, hoot from the trees above your hotel window. But it seems they stay out of your head.
Over this past week in Mexico, I haven’t been as insanely productive as I might have been. But I have been more in tune with my nature. I’ve dismantled waves, I’ve counted grains of sand, I’ve listened to grackles eat French Fries, and I’ve felt the walls of perfection erode. Rules, goals and expectations, it turns out, may not help me make as much stuff as simply sitting in the sun and letting the world grow on around me.

Doing the wave.

dannygregory15 Comments

20130806-200906.jpg
I spent last week in a basement in SoHo, looking at great length at naked people. I’ve spend the past two days looking as intently at the sea. I watch the waves and try to understand how to draw them, to turn their ceaseless roiling into lines on my page.
This close to shore, a wave’s life seems to last for five seconds, rarely more than ten. It emerges from the surface as a slowing building wall, some twenty yards wide. The pressure builds from both ends towards the middle and it becomes narrower and sharper at the peak. When I pull myself off my chaise and galumph into the sea to stand waist deep and cool off, from the side it is a narrowing triangle that reflects the sun as its angle grows more extreme. Its leading edges are dappled with bumps and ridges of energy that shimmer like the frosted glass on a public bathroom door, shadowy figures moving behind it, flashes of light bouncing of its front. The sun shines through its knife edge as it rolls forward, gleaming. Webs of foam are swept back from the ruins of previous waves and rise up to adorn its front wall, a white trellis quickly shredded in the wave’s rapacious path.

When the wall has grown as tall and thin as it can, it begins to collapse. A crest of foam appears along its battlements. The energy that was coordinated in the wave’s big charge now grows chaotic and splinters into fingers of white. The tongue of foam laps down the front of the wave and plunges into the surf, wrenching down its keystone and dragging it all down behind. Some of the froth ping-pongs on the surface, leaping to and fro, and then dives deep into the sand. The grandeur of the surge turns into a mad dash towards the shore, each water particle for himself

How the hell do I draw that?Leonardo tried. So did Hokusai.

So I watch a hundred waves wash in. Some are green, some blue, some auburn with kelp. My mind’s eye looks for a freeze frame, the single moment that explains the wave but is also of the wave. But though the waves arrives in a somewhat even rhythm, they are not purely cyclical. They follow similar patterns but each has a variation. Overeager waves shoulder past each other, jostling and disrupting the regular flow of energy, crashing the transition from hill to wall to blade to foam to shore.

So each drawing becomes an abstraction of waves in general. It’s impossible to track a single one perfectly. My pen’s not that fast. Nor’s my brain. I can record only the averages of my observations.
20130806-201209.jpg
Everything changes.

The best life-models aren’t the best looking or those with the best bodies. They’re the ones who can hold perfectly, unnaturally still and come back from their rest breaks and hit the exact same marks. They can look the same for three hours straight while I try to bolt down my powers of observation to notice the exact angles of their limbs, the creases in their hide.

Cezanne rarely painted cut flowers in a vase. He preferred pears and oranges that could sit in a still life for weeks without changing shape. His favorite subject was a mountain.

I am impatient, but training myself to be less so. To slow down and study, to be here and see what really is. Man, that’s hard. Especially when your subject jumps and changes its nature every millisecond. But the truth is, it’s not the sea I have to contend with. I am changing constantly. My eyes flit, my lungs expand, my heart pulses. I am all aquiver too, pulsing with nature’s rhythm.

Even if I drew Cezanne’s Mt. Ste. Victoire, or one of my beloved pieces of taxidermy, or a frozen photo of a great tsunami, I would be changing and moving. I change with every heartbeat. And even if I could control my breath and slow my eyes, the world would keep turning, the stars would keep dying, the universe would keep expanding, and life would move on. I learn with each line I make. I am different than when I began observing. The wave moves me too.

The Buddha told us long ago: Change is inevitable, suffering is optional. Roll with the flow.

The sands of time.

dannygregory58 Comments

20130805-202959.jpg
I am sitting on a powdery beach in Southern Mexico, feeling many things. The breeze in my face, the sun on my feet, a slight sense of guilty residue in my heart. My monkey bays at me, telling me that I no longer have the right to a vacation, not after this crazy plunge I’ve taken.
My body seemed to agree.
I was really sick for the last couple of days. It came upon me on Saturday at lunch time, a queazy, bloated feeling that had me bent over the porcelain by the end of the day. A sleepless night, then up at 4 a.m to catch an early flight. After a long drive down the Mayan Riviera, we reached this beach. I was green, pale, silent, and my traveling companions were more worried about me than they were willing to say at the time. But I am from hardy, working stock, and I greeted this morning with a renewed constitution and a smile.
It’s odd how often I am sick and injured on vacations. I have almost never missed a day of work and yet I invariably end up at remote chemists on tropic isles, at Italian emergency rooms, in ocean liner infirmaries. My body is a company man, and decides that the only right time to fall apart is only when it’s off the clock.
My mind is also trained to work pretty much non-stop, so vacationing can be a much -needed challenge. It takes at least two or three days for me to stop, to disconnect for emails, from the newspaper, from the meal schedules, and to let myself float away. On arrival, I spend time scheming by the pool, thinking how wonderful it is that I have this opportunity to make big plans, to re structure my office, or to make a long-term strategies. Then one day, the switch flicks and I drop it all, just vegging, listening to the pop music on the pool speaker, playing beach volleyball, having my hair braided. I think it must correlate to my sun tan lotion. As I let my SPF go down, so descends my death grip on the “reality” back home. I begin to unwind. I began to wake up and see where I am.
I am still in “on” mode this morning, my malady notwithstanding. I remind myself that despite my blazing announcement that I now have the freedom to create 24/7, I haven’t done much on my blog. Yes, it’s been a week and a half, but the monkey is impatient. And he’s not on vacation yet either. Where are all my wonderful creations? Or shouldn’t I really be busy freelancing?
Here is the lesson I draw from this internal debate:
I need to be here now. It’s wonderful that Here and Now are 78 degrees with a tropical breeze. But I need to be present always, all places. Sometimes here and now are not so nice. A crowded subway platform. A boring conference room. A hushed back room in a funeral home, smelling slightly of lavender talc and ammonia.
Regardless, I must be here now. There is nothing else. The past is just an illusion, a mental construct I drag along with me. Sometimes it seems better than now, sometimes worse, but it is irrelevant either way. The chunks I blew last Saturday are long flushed. The green pallor is gone. I can be grateful about that but that is all. I can pick at the scabs of my past decisions but regret is a waste of the present too. All that matters is now. What I am doing with this moment. With the potential that is here. To enjoy this, to be happy here, to accept what is.
And as for the future, it never arrives. All tomorrow ever is is my fantasies about what might be when it actually is. It’s not concrete or knowable and wasting now constructing plans on these prognostications is just sculpting with clouds.
On vacation, after I get over the hump, I have that realization each time. That I must enjoy this expensive day to the max, avoid getting sunburnt, have a couple pinås, eat some fresh fish, and chill the hell out. Leave the world of back home back there and back then.
And that’s really all that matters every day when I am back home too. To inhale deep, to avoid the chimp, to be in my skin, to deal with what’s happening and make it neither greater than it is with mental constructions nor lesser with denial.
Life is what is. And that’s just exactly how it should be.
That’s the lesson I learned when I first started to draw. And which I need to remind my self of all that time. That being grounded in reality, seeing what’s in front of me, warts and all, is the only way I can be happy and adjusted. That I have to keep re-realizing what art has done for me. It has shown me the beauty all around me and that it exists even in apparent ugliness and pain. If I draw it like I want it to be, it doesn’t satisfy my need for truth and connection. But if I see it as it is, here and now, I join with it, and I feel at peace.
That’s enough thinking for now. I’m off to draw those coconuts above my lounge chair. Then it’s siesta time. I dream an awful lot on vacation. Do you?

Island life.

dannygregory28 Comments

I feel the breeze blow through what’s left of my hair and remember my vow to enjoy it. It’s not actually wind, it’s the rush of air that come from falling into the void and waiting for the net, the catching hands, the sproing, thunk! of your opening parachute. You can gnaw through your bonds one by one, and feel only tremors, but then you sever that one pivotal strand and you suddenly fall free, released on your own recognizance. Now you own it.

I own every day, dawn to dark. I alone will decide whether I lie on the couch, or sweat at this keyboard, or wander the streets or sob or cavort. But of course this isn’t really anything new. I have been the boss of my life since I began this job of being human. It’s just that I had forgotten to look at my business cards, hadn’t read my employment contract. I have aways been in the driver’s seat. I just hadn’t turned the ignition key till last Wednesday.

When I graduated from Princeton, I bought this book.

20130730-091626.jpg

The South Pacific Handbook was to be the manual for the next stage in my life. I was going to move to Truk in Micronesia. The handbook told me that the women still wore grass skirts and went around bare-breasted and that they used gigantic round stones as money. I would be a 20th century Gauguin, except for the painting bit. I wouldn’t need a real job, I would just build a hut and fish and eat bread fruit and coconuts. I still had a few hundred dollars in the bank from my job at McDonalds the previous summer.

By the end of the summer, however, I was living in the East Village in a 4th floor walk up. Only the local drag queens wore grass skirts.

The South Pacific Handbook has been on the shelf of every apartment I’ve lived in since, a reminder that one can postpone one’s dreams but needn’t forget them. I take it down every year and am grateful that I didn’t risk death by boredom or some horrible tropical disease or scurvy and remind myself that Gauguin died of syphilis. Then I put the book back on the shelf. I never take it to the used bookstore, however, because deep inside me I know that one day that youthful romantic ember deep in the lower basement of my soul will glow bright again and I will book a flight or a slow boat and live that crazy dream.

I’ve been on a metaphoric tropical island for six days now. The sun is shining, I am wearing shorts and flip-flops, and I am just beginning to wander the endless stretch of beach. It’s the island called Greater Dannyiana, a long flight from the mainland on which I’ve been dwelling since I bought the South Pacific Handbook. This place is probably vast, I don’t know yet. It contains a lot of empty real estate on which I can build huts and workshops and landing strips and office buildings. I could turn it into a modern-day Tahiti, filled with chain hotels and alcoholic natives, or I could keep it lean and pure and idyllic. Or, most likely, something in between.

There are monkeys here. I hear them calling from the trees. They tell me I must make a business plan, must take on lots of freelance work, must keep in touch with people who run ad agencies who will hire me back once I abandon this folly. I should write to all the people who run weekend workshops, build a slick commerce website, sign a half dozen book contracts simultaneously. They tell me to stay out of the sun, that I’ll catch some thing from the mosquitoes, that there are lots of wild animals in the jungle. They remind me that freedom isn’t free.

I did make a list of things. And it’s on this computer somewhere. But I haven’t looked at it yet. Instead I made one commitment. I will try to go to a life drawing class every day. I will draw a three-hour long pose. I will draw on a large piece of paper that’s not in a book. I will write nothing on the page except the date. And I will do it with a pencil. The monkey reminds me: I am not used to doing such long drawings, I am not used to drawing with a pencil, I always draw in a book, and I am not a huge fan of drawing strangers, even if they are bare-breasted. The monkey asks me if I quit my job to do this. And I do not answer the monkey. Instead, I pack up my awkwardly large bag with my drawing pad and my pencil and my iPod and my bottle of water and I ride a CitiBike to SoHo and I sit in the basement and I draw.

And then I discover that the reason I feel a breeze in my hair isn’t because I am falling. I am flying.

20130730-104026.jpg