Capitalism, Drawing and Cartoons (Part 2)

Read Part 1 of this article.

This article is inspired by some comments by ace cartoonist, John Kricfalusi, about Capitalism and cartooning. I would encourage everybody to read John's excellent blog, but at time of writing, it has been made private. (I left links to John's posts in the hope that sometime in the future he opens up his blog to general readers again.)

My first post considered the nature of work in creative industries from the perspective of animation students.

John K's second post considered the aims of Capitalism. John says that Michael Moore, in his recent documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, makes one of the classic caricatures of social democracy: 'nobody is allowed to get rich.' Of course this is quite fatuous.

It would be more truthful to say that a social democratic system should allow more people to get rich and that all people should have the same access to the means of getting rich. (Okay, maybe they will not be quite as disgustingly rich as today's super-Capitalists, but they'll get by nicely.)

This example seems to illustrate a persistent problem in debates about Capitalism v Socialism: the former is an idea about economics that may mold society, the latter is an idea about society that may mold economics.

Capitalism: What is it for?

Broadly speaking, I believe the aim of Capitalism is to produce markets and from these markets wealth. Socialism (or Social Democracy) is a delivery system for democracy. There is no like-for-like comparison between Capitalism and Socialism. So let's forget about it and just deal with Capitalism and whether or not it's giving us what we want.

Capitalism tries to produce markets. Big markets, small markets, markets for everything: markets for healthcare, markets for entertainment, markets for food. Companies and individuals try to enter those markets with products and services and to control them.

Is that a good thing? Well it's one approach to economics and it's pretty swell, as far as it goes, but there are trade-offs in every economic model. And some of those trade-offs are social (and creative).

Say Acme Animation Studio corners the market in cartoons. They hire the best artists and make the best cartoons. It 's unlikely, but let's just say that if somebody wants cartoons they go to Acme.

Acme can now charge whatever it wants. There is a market for cartoons and Acme fills that demand. Acme can now lower the quality of their product, because there is no other supplier of cartoons, lowering its costs and increasing its profits.

And that is to say nothing of the fact that Acme must buy or put out of business other makers of cartoons and must devalue the labour that goes into cartoon-making to reach its dominant position.

And if you imagine this to be a fanciful scenario, consider that a handful of huge media organisations produce most of the world's entertainment. Capitalism's problem is that it tends towards monopoly.

Individual incentives v Capitalist incentives

Individuals are motivated to achieve success: for some that means heaps of gold and dancing girls on tap, for others it is creating a character that makes them split their sides. Sometimes the goals of individuals and the profit motive of business overlap and everybody wins, but less frequently than we might imagine.

Despite the unprecedentedly wealthy period of history in which we live - even as we try to unf*ck the global economy - the wealthiest Western societies we have been growing steadily less happy over time.

In the early twentieth century, the best, most profitable way to produce cartoons also provided the most creative opportunity. Everybody one: Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Co produced Looney Tunes and Warner Brothers turned a buck. It was a narrow window of creative opportunity.

Capitalism is motivated by growth and business by profit. There is an obvious disconnect here between the interests of the truly creative person - for whom creativity is an end and not a means - and the capitalist, who wants to make a profit (and for whom cartoons are merely variably profitable widgets).

In search of a profit, Acme must devalue the labour the goes into making a cartoon - by mechanising its production or outsourcing it to poor countries - to maintain the value of its product. So the problem is not merely technical (poor technical skills or standards) but cultural (poor imagination).

Capitalism, Drawing and Cartoons

John K has been stimulated by Michael Moore's new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, to post his thoughts about Capitalism and cartoons recently. This has stimulated me to some thoughts of my own about Capitalism, cartooning and drawing.

I certainly have mixed feelings about Michael Moore. He's an entertainer, rather than a polemicist, and he's funny, obnoxious and self-righteous by turns.

In his first post, John makes some interesting points about cartooning students and some less interesting generalisations about college education. But among these he makes some sharp observations about the purpose of education.

I'm currently studying animation - from a very practical standpoint (at I guess what you'd call a trade school) - and I have not drawn a single cartoon yet in any class. And I doubt I will this year.

The entire curriculum is based on observation and observational drawing. The logic behind this seems fairly clear to me. Strong looking and drawing skills underpin cartooning and animation. (This is not to say that you cannot animate a bad drawing, but just that it won't look very nice.)

This is also not to say that if you can draw that you can cartoon. After starting this course I now have even more respect for the great animators whose work I loved before; they were clearly excellent draughtsmen and great cartoonists. Drawing is the basis for cartooning, but in my studies I'm learning that a further layer of visual understanding and skill must be learned.

John makes the point that many students mistake a cartoon style for a cartoon drawing, learning some stock expressions and visual style, without digging down to the heart of what makes cartoons work.

I think that a student without competent drawing skills - understanding of tone, colour, line and form and the ability to represent them - will be unlikely to pick up the principles of cartooning - line of action, hierarchy etc. - let alone produce good cartoons.

And here is where the capitalism comes in. Drawing is not a career; but cartooning is. Drawing doesn't shift any commercial units; cartoons on the other hand are big business. Imagine if every would-be animation student was told that he or she had to be proficient in drawing before they could study the subject. Admissions would drop through the floor.

For a number of reasons, but mostly because investing time in developing drawing skills is not directly saleable, whereas illustration and animation, commercialise that skill. This is why would-be animators draw cartoon characters from shows they grew up watching; they don't envision themselves as professional draughtsmen.

Next week: Who's to blame for the state of contemporary cartoons? It's the Economy stupid!

The Uses of Re-Enchantment

Reading Dylan Horrocks' review of Mark Barrowcliffe's The Elfish Gene and his short comic, The Physics Engine, struck me with a pang of nostalgia for the world of roleplaying gaming.

I have tremendous sympathy for kids who get into roleplaying games. The RPG geek's lot is somewhat tragic, and not in the usual sense. Far from the odious, egotistical stereotype, I feel that most teenagers (or at least boys) respond to roleplaying, offers two succours in an otherwise difficult period: a sense of empowerment and purpose in an otherwise chaotic period of development and a safe way of exploring (intellectually and emotionally) the fearful and banal new territory of pubescence.

Childhood is a mysterious time. Children are all artists and magicians. And they are all roleplayers. As children become self-conscious teens and young adults, they are often divested of free communion with the world of the imagination; many people feel this loss of beauty and enchantment bitterly.

Roleplaying is playing. It is about creating worlds, characters, exciting events and involving other people in one's own imaginative world. A bit like writing stories. Or acting. Or drawing cartoons. The charge of escapism is at least as legitimate of these other creative activities as it is of roleplaying.

I recently read Lynda Barry's What It Is , which saddens and inspires by turns. Barry gives a recognisable description of having her mental life stripped of confidence, imagination and creativity - albeit far more brutally than most of us experience - to conform with a vision of adult normality.

Ironically, this child's-eye view (indeed, caricature) of being 'grown up' has little to do with emotional maturity or social (or even personal) responsibility. It reminds one that being told to 'grow up!' is to be admonished rather than encouraged, where innocence is conflated with naivety.

Although I haven't taken part in a roleplaying game in many years, my memories of it are mainly of friendship and creativity. Respect for the natural world, understanding of and empathy with others, and foresight require imagination. It seems to me that the world could do with more of this.

Happy Birthday to Erok!

OK Erok! is now 1 year old!

One year and almost 200 posts later, I could never have envisaged how gratifying blogging would be. As well as stimulating my appetite for comics, it has helped me to develop a critical approach to the medium, hone my writing and generally be more creative.

I hope the next year of OK Erok! which will feature some (and maybe all) of the following:

• A new domain - www.okerok.com - to eventually replace the old one.
  
• A minicomic both in print and online.
  
• A complete and amazing site redesign.
  
• More and more interviews with comics types from these isles.
  

Cheers,

Erok

Keep working

Patience is a virtue. Practice makes perfect. Hardly popular modern sentiments.

Shaenon Garrity writes a very encouraging article relating the premise of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers - that it takes 10,000 hours of concentrated practice (about 10 years) to master a skill, in any field - to the world of comics.

"I started drawing comics regularly, really working at it, in 2000. If Malcolm Gladwell is right, I'll have a chance at drawing really good comics starting sometime next year. That's something to look forward to. Start now, and you can have something to look forward to, too."

It turns out that many greats of comics took at least this long to reach their peaks. We all need something to look forward to, hope that our endeavours (creative or otherwise) will be worthwhile. In the meantime, be patient, keep working.

Saturday morning Watchmen

A note-pefect take on Saturday morning cartoons - think Scooby Doo, Defenders of the Earth - for comic geeks by 'Happy' Harry Partridge. The (better quality) original is here. The theme tune alone is brilliant. By the by, I find it incredibly inspiring how much work people put into making something like this. Almost worth getting up at 7 am for.

(via Conor via Wired)

Interview: Paul Grist

Paul Grist is certainly best known for his self-published ground-breaking police-procedural, Kane, and for his homage to the superhero genre, Jack Staff. With his new comic, The Eternal Warrior, Grist brings his minimalist graphic style online. OK Erok conducted a Q&A with Paul about how his visual style has developed.

Your layout seems very spacious compared to conventional comics layout. For example, there are only three ‘panels’ in some of your Eternal Warrior (and Kane) pages. You've said before that you were influenced by Frank Miller's Daredevil, in terms of storytelling and structure. Can you elaborate on this and your 'philosophy' of storytelling?

“The storytelling in The Eternal Warrior is different to what I've done in previous comics (Kane and Jack Staff), where I've tended to use the page as a single unit. With Eternal Warrior I'm trying to speed up the production process and I'm using double pages as a single unit, so what I might have got on a single page previously, is spread over two. This gives more space to the layouts.

What I'm doing is trying to get away from a traditional approach to the comic page - so not using the usual panel boxes, but trying to let the pictures define the shape and layout on the page. It's a different way of working - and I think a different way of reading - to what I've done before, which I think is in keeping with the type of story I’m telling.

I'm trying to do something that is very much a comic, where words and visuals work together. The page with the silhouette and the legend of Leonard - which is not something I've really done before - will be the approach I take for The Eternal Warrior. It's a different to what I'm doing with Jack Staff, which is different to what I did with Kane.”

In looking at contemporary comics, your work is very distinctive. Do you consider yourself a stylist, in any sense? How do you place style, in terms of importance? Do you think there any kinds of comics that you could not/would not adapt to?

“Each story needs a different approach. I think my ‘style’ is distinctive, without being the same regardless of the story. I'm trying to work my way through different story genres - humour, crime, superhero and now fantasy (for want of a better word) - eventually I'll find something I'm good at!”

Do you undergo a long creative gestation period before you start work or do you feel your way into a story as you write/draw it? How did the idea for the Eternal Warrior come about?

“I have had the idea of doing a Big Cosmic Comic rolling round my head for a while now. I did some pages, left them for a few weeks, then came back and redid them - basically I was just running on the spot! - but posting the pages forces me to move forward.”

In terms of your process, as a cartoonist, you seem to place emphasis on speed. Why is this? Has your process changed - or do you see it changing (through technological or any other means) - so that you can work faster? Can you describe your creative process from a to z, in terms of composing pages and pacing stories?

“The speed thing is just a discipline - ideally I would like to be doing something like The Eternal Warrior as a bimonthly companion title to Jack Staff - but I need to prove to myself that I can do it.”

The composition/pacing, as well as the writing, is all done on the page - it's all part of the same thing, after all - which I think is the best way to go for a writer/artist. I don't write a script which I then draw - as the artist I wouldn't want to tie myself down like that.

Usually I start with an idea - perhaps an image or a scene - which I then draw/script. As I work I think how about how this scenario could develop and a story evolves. One way to describe it would be ‘organic’; another way would be ‘chaotic!’

Working like this led to occasions (on Kane and Jack Staff) when what I thought was going to be the beginning of a story became the end, so I worked backwards to reach my starting point! The Eternal Warrior is more linear than Jack Staff and Kane - so I’m not that disorganised, yet! - but I'm only seven pages into it. There's plenty of time!

It works for me, but I wouldn't advise it for anyone else.”

How do you feel about self-publishing nowadays? Do you see it as a necessary evil or a creative choice? The advent of print-on-demand and the internet have lowered the barrier to self-publishing. And there seems to be a natural flow from webcomics to paperback collections. Do you see yourself publishing an Eternal Warrior trade paperback, for example, at the end of its run or will you seek a publisher for it? Have you come across any self-published comics in recent years that have really impressed you?

“I do plan on printing The Eternal Warrior at some point - either as a back-up strip in Jack Staff or as a comic in it's own right - but the facebook group/blog is more an exercise to get me to actually finish pages, rather than coming back to them periodically and starting over!

The internet and print-on-demand allow you to get your work seen, but to make money from it you have to work with the comics distribution set up. The distribution system, for all its faults, allows people to publish their own work and (because it is based on firm sales) know before printing how much (if any) money they will make, so it's a fairly low risk financial proposition.

I don't think self-publishing is as easy as it was a few years ago - there are more hoops to jump through with Diamond - but I still see it as a viable option to being published by a 'proper' publisher.

Favourite self-published titles at the moment are Glamourpuss by Dave Sim and Rasl by Jeff Smith, but they're not the newest kids on the block!”

Joyce

What if James Joyce had been born with a huge, pendulous nose? Has this thought never crossed your mind?

Celebrated Irish writer and expat, James Joyce, was a man of many words. Too many, I often thought, as I trudged through his ‘20th century Modernist masterpiece’ Ulysees, required reading in college.

Joyce had rather neat, Irish features, gathered in the middle of his unusually long face. And even if you didn’t like his writing, his majestic chin was the pride of Ireland.

If not exactly a matinee idol, the young Joyce was good-looking, in his way. (Later on, and even after failing basic seamanship and being rejected from the crew of a three-master heading for the Nicobar Islands and from there to pirate in the Indian ocean, Joyce indulgently continued to wear an eye-patch.)

But things could have been so different for Joyce. For example, if Oliver St John Gogarty had not merrily opened fire at Joyce, one morning, over breakfast. If Joyce had remained in Ireland, rather than exiling himself to the continent. Or if Joyce had possessed a nose of giant proportions.

Certainly, we all wonder how Joyce would have coped with such a pendulous, olfactory protuberance.

Things would have been different for this floppy-nosed Joyce. It might have led him deeper into labyrinthine Modernism; he might have revolutionised the literary potboiler. It might have caused Nora Barnacle (awesome name, by the way) to spurn him as a sausage-nosed freak.

Joyce would have been different. His life and his work have taken a radically different course. It would have been much funnier.

Hello Alien Items!

As I wrote before, I am playing bass with Conor’s Alien Items project. Part of the fun of it is taking my creativity in new directions.

Here’s a character I developed, inspired by the music and the project. I have no idea what (if any) part it may play, but it’s here in my mind and now in yours. Enjoy.

Alien Items

My friend Conor has invited me to play bass on his Alien Items project.

Alien Items takes its name (and some inspiration) from a computer game called Elite, that we played as kids. I'm pretty excited about it, for all sorts of reasons.

Elite was a space trading game in which players would fly from galaxy to galaxy trading commodities, dog-fighting with pirates, improving their spaceships and undertaking dangerous missions.

I would describe Conor's music as a kind of melancholy soundtrack to the vast, empty reaches traversed by the lonely space-farer; or to adapt a title from Philip Glass, 'music for space-stations.' I hope you may hear it for yourself in due course.

Simple and compelling, Elite also had a striking aesthetic of wireframe spaceships and planets that was elegant and immersive at a time when 3D gaming didn’t really exist.

I’ve always loved wireframe models - probably because of Elite - so I have designed a font (also called Alien Items) that echoes the Elite aesthetic and the sparse sound of Conor's music, to use on the project's future releases.

Anyone interested in playing the game can download Chris Pinder's Elite - The New Kind (PC) here.

Colleen Marlow in the house

Ruth and I had a lovely visit from Ruth's friend (and now mine), the polymath, Colleen Marlow, just recently.

Colleen is from California and was formerly a Physicist who painted. She has since reversed that relationship and is now a Painter, with a side-line in Physics.

It was a funny, inspirational visit all round. We visited and marvelled at Newgrange, stayed a couple of nights in beautiful Leitrim and exchanged practical advice about nutrition, life and relationships.

Colleen has some wonderful new paintings and some cool cards up on her website. Check it.

Six of the Best! Wonderful Taschen Books!

"Weasels ripped my flesh!"

Indeed. Be that as it may, wonderful German publisher, Taschen - purveyor of cult kitsch and artsy porn - celebrates its 25th year with some wonderful bargains. Here are six of the best:

1. Robots - Spaceships and other tin toys - whimsical, colourful, beautiful.
   
2. Mens Adventure Magazines - absurd, grotesque, fascinating.
   
3. Japanese Graphics Now - dense, futuristic, bold.
   
4. Illustration Now - weird, intense, amazing.
   
5. Fantasy Worlds - dreamy, preposterous, er... fantastic.
   
6. Chinese Propaganda Posters - comi-tragic, mesmerising, superb.
   

Inspirational.

I Make: Death-dealing Robot

Inspired by Ashley Wood. And this:

'Everyone knows that [Asimov's] laws will not work, because human beings will not use them when they build robots. Humans are lazy and weak and greedy, which is why robots will inevitably decide to kill them. We should expect this and come to terms with it. We have had a good run.'

I, for one, would like to welcome our robot overlords!

Daddybag (Theme from Nadthology)

There is a move afoot, in Irish comic circles, to produce a comic of stories about getting bashed about the tenders. I support this endeavour. Through the medium of song.

Ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure, OK Erok is proud to present... Daddybag. (Inspired by a true story of misfortune, capriciousness and vile fate.)




Lyrics:

You really hurt me in my daddybag
You hit my sack and you made me sad
Little girl why you hate my nad?
What I do to make you so mad?

Daddybag
Daddybag
Daddybag
Daddybag

D to the A double D Y B to the A to the G
A little girl hit me...
D to the A double D Y B to the A to the G
A little girl hit me...

Daddybag etc.

Who cares if Rob can't draw?

Rob Liefield is a comics creator and publisher who engenders mixed feelings in the comics world. On one hand, he is respected as an entrepreneur - despite acrimonious relationships with most of his commercial partners - on the other he is seen as an obnoxious creep.

Lots of spleen, in particular, has been vented about Liefield's poor drawing skills, as evident above (and many other places). However, plenty of comics illustrators, with less commercial and greater artistic sensibilities than Liefield, are not brilliant draughtsmen. They are not pilloried and nor should they be.

Rob Liefield had great success with Marvel Comics and Image Comics (which he co-founded) and I feel that something about the way he is viewed typifies a kind of schizoid self-loathing at the heart of comics culture.

It seems intolerable to some people that Liefield can be a commercial success without being a creative one. Liefield himself has readily admitted that he was in the right place at the right time:

"I'll be the first to tell you that we [the Image collective] were never the best artists. We were never the best at anything, but just like a song or a band or whatever, we caught on and we toured rigorously." [Wizard Magazine via Wikipedia]

Liefield sees comics not as a cultural medium (like Scott McCloud or perhaps Alan Moore), but as a sector of the publishing industry, which hires 'talent' and produces 'product'. Both are true. There is a publishing sector which caters to teenaged boys. It may be critically derided, but it is a commercial 'fact on the ground.'

Perhaps Liefield represents a stereotype of comics as juvenile, power fantasies (or indeed of comics creators as juvenile fantasists), that is embarrassing. Perhaps it reminds many of us that we once shared those fantasies, that secretly we still do or that those fantasies reflect the larger fantasies of modern capitalist culture.

In any case there are bigger fish to fry than Rob Liefield.

Letter from the Editor

I'm starting to feel that my description of this blog - up top there - is inaccurate. I mean, what is this blog about?

When I started OK Erok it was intended as a place for my creative endeavours as well as my cultural pursuits.

However, in the months since I began blogging, it has increasingly come to focus on comics drawing, illustration, and design (more or less in that order), with only occasional digressions about killing zombies, alien abduction and footballers' names and culture, in general.

I'll keep digressing, but let's face it, this is a blog about comics, drawing and creativity first, and Repo Man second.

I grew up reading American superhero comics, so there is naturally a lot of US stuff in here. I'm fairly ignorant about Manga and non-Western comics, but along with supporting local Irish comics and their creators, I hope the blog will become develop an international scope.

The evolution of this blog reflects my creative outlook, which is that process and development are the same thing; iteration and reiteration, finding out what you like and why you like it, who you are and why you're like that are all the one.

I hope you continue to enjoy it.

The Logos of Logos

While researching some logo ideas for Apeworks, I came across some logos by a US illustrative designer called Von Glitschka on his blog.

We are so totally immersed in branding, that we now take logos for granted. But for every Apple apple and Nike swoosh there are hundreds (nay thousands!) of lesser lights vying for our attention, from the street to the internet.

Most are not great, but some are brilliant. A good logo is kind of like a little visual puzzle, just missing one piece that the viewer possesses. This may sound a little over the top, but guess what Glitschka's logo (right) is for? You'll get a little buzz of satisfaction when you get it right. It seems like the simplest thing, but of course it's meant to. That's good design.

Glitschka had no fewer than 39 published in this year's edition of The Logo Lounge (the bible of logo design), which tells you he knows something about logos. He also podcasts and posts tutorials about the illustrative design, which tells you he cares about design and giving something back to the community. Kudos for both.

Surreal. Transcendental. Lynch.

Being a big David Lynch fan, naturally I missed his lecture tour visit to Trinity College Dublin, last October.

My friend, Paul, who did manage to go, told me it was a bit weird.
Really! I said. Weird? David Lynch?

Apparently David Lynch was promoting his book - Catching The Big Fish - the work of his foundation and the practice of transcendental meditation in making people and the world happier.

I've just read Catching the Big Fish and I must say that he has written a lovely book.

Although he claims to have no skill with words - and it is plainly written (a little like Thich Nhat Hanh) - Lynch makes some interesting observations about creativity, filmmaking - in general and his own in particular - and the nature of experience.

"I hear stories about directors who scream at actors, or they trick them somehow to get a performance. And there are some people who try to run the whole business on fear. But I think this is such a joke - it’s pathetic and stupid at the same time.

When people are in fear, they don’t want to go to work. So many people today have that feeling. Then the fear starts turning into hate, and they begin to hate going to work. Then the hate can turn into anger and people can become angry at their boss and their work.

If I ran my set with fear, I would get 1 percent, not 100 percent, of what I get. And there would be no fun in going down the road together. And it should be fun. In work and in life, we’re all supposed to get along. We’re supposed to have so much fun, like puppy dogs with our tails wagging. It’s supposed to be great living; it’s supposed to be fantastic.

Instead of instilling fear, if a company offered a way for everyone in the business to dive within - to start expanding energy and intelligence - people would work overtime for free. They would be far more creative. And the company would just leap forward. This is the way it can be. It’s not the way it is, but it could be that way so easily."

This could sound a bit pat from somebody else, but I find it a fascinating into the creative mindset of an uncompromising artist. It really shouldn't be so strange to think that the creator of Eraserhead and Mullholland Drive :

"It’s good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won’t be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. You can understand conflict, but you don’t have to live in it.

In stories, in the worlds that we can go into, there’s suffering, confusion, darkness, tension and anger. There are murders; there’s all kinds of stuff. But the filmmaker doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering. You can show it, show the human condition, show conflicts and contrasts, but you don’t have to go through that yourself. You are the orchstrator of it, but you’re not in it. Let your characters do the suffering.

It’s common sense: the more the artist is suffering, the less creative he is going to be. It’s less likely that he is going to enjoy his work and less likely that he will be able to do really good work…

Some artists believe that anger, depression, or these negative things give them an edge. They think they need to hold onto that anger and fear so they can put it in their work. And they don’t like the idea of getting happy - it makes them want to puke. They think it would make them lose their edge or power…

If you’re an artist, you’ve got to know about anger without being restricted by it. In order to create, you’ve got to have energy; you’ve got to have clarity. You’ve got to be able to catch ideas. You’ve got to be strong enough to fight unbelievable pressure and stress in this world. So it just makes sense to nurture the place where that strength and clarity and energy come from – to dive in and enliven that."

Street Art

I took a couple of pictures of Street Art, the other day. Whenever I see an interesting piece of stencilling, graffiti or poster, I always want to take a photo of it.

I more or less based a whole trip to Stockholm around recording good pieces of Street Art. Why?

Two reasons, I think.

Firstly, Street Art makes the city visible. It draws attention to the urban environment, to its material and architecture and to its structure and logic. There's nothing didactic about it, it's just that an image on a wall draws attention to itself, because it's not meant to be there.

And secondly, Street Art is good. I don't mean that it is of good quality - much is not, like much of everything we do - but rather that it is a public good, it's presence is a statement of optimism. It says that beauty can flourish in the most unpromising setting. And it's out there in the world, free for all to view. Which is nice.

Since school, I have been fascinated by graffiti - especially the original graffiti - (and hip hop) and tried my hand at both.

And I love stencil graffiti, such as this rather sweet image of famous Irish newsreader Anne Doyle.

When people talk about stencilling, they tend to think of Banksy.

I must say that while I dislike the work of Banksy for many reasons - chiefly, I find it glib, smug, superficial and pretentious - lack of talent is not one of them.

Banksy produces politically themed advertising masquerading as Art. I see no difference between his use of political imagery and Che Guevara t-shirts. Shepard Fairey Obey branding is much more honest, in that respect.

I prefer Keith Haring and Blek Le Rat.

Bruce Mau and The Accursed Share

Ha! The title of this post sounds like a pulp adventure novel!

This Saturday, in the course of a mammoth shopping trip - the kind I never do - I went into Chapters book shop and bought Bruce Mau's Life Style. Although I am a biblophile (bordering on biblioholic) I did trade in about six old books - half the price of the new book - which, incidentally, was on sale. Woo!

Anyway...

During some random research I had read Bruce Mau's incomplete manifesto for growth and been impressed. It's published in Life Style, along with a lot of other interesting thoughts and images from Bruce Mau Design. Here's a taste of the manifesto, but I strongly recommend reading the whole thing:

"1. Allow events to change you.
You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good.
Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep.
The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents.
The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study.
A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift.
Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere.
John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader.
Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead."

There is a point to this anecdote. Coming across the book seemed to be one of those happy coincidences when the Universe fulfils a deep wish. Firstly, seeing the "process is more important than outcome" point above - which has recently become my unofficial motto - sort of reminded me that I'm on the right track.

Secondly, in the course of some current research into the gift economy, I have been wanting to find my copy of George Bataille's The Accursed Share. As soon as I looked for it, it showed up, peeking out of a pile of books.




Naturally, I opened Life Style to find that Bruce Mau had designed the book.