Finished drafting and scheduling newsletter just in time for my hot date (it's nice to attempt to go about Friday nights like other humans every once in a while). This is edition 212 and it is about the art of subversion.
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“There's a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other are those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased: the world of those who deal with books professionally is more and more crowded and tends to become one with the world of readers. Of course, readers are also growing more numerous, but it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books and nothing else.”
Not gonna lie, sometimes my mind drifts off to a world where overnight I obliterate all trace of my online presence and pick up and move someplace I can slip into anonymity. Mexico perhaps, someplace I know no one and no one knows me, and where I don't even know the language. Set aside any semblance of professional pursuit from my creative endeavors and instead get a job waiting tables or tending to a bar or working at a bookshop, a day-to-day affair that requires no longview, all while speed-learning Spanish and spending my free time doing nothing but reading and sketching till the end of my days.
The excerpt at the very top is from Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER, which may just be the most post-modern book I've ever laid hands on. It's about an apparently misprinted book, whereby every other chapter seems to belong to a completely different book. In that regard, it can be quite challenging to get into, but in so doing it held up a mirror to me and reminded me of a thing I did in THE SOLAR GRID, in which I relegated the half of each chapter to what may seem like a completely new story, until much later you discover that it is all in fact one story. Which made me realize how challenging I must've made it for readers too.
Sticking with Calvino pays off though, because by around the 75-page mark, you're hooked, and the brilliance of Calvino's ploy begins to dawn on you like eureka.
We're not always looking for ideas, sometimes ideas are looking for us. Sometimes they violently break through the windows of your mind when you least expect it and sweep through you with unstoppable gusto. Attempting to resist can be futile. No use trying to shutter them windows when the winds of inspiration are too strong.
The thought of revamping my logo wasn't something that ever crossed my mind. I've had the same one for over a dozen years and it seemed to serve me well, but last night for reasons completely unbeknownst to me a new mark made itself known in my mind's eye and I immediately scrawled it into my current vomitbook.
Aside from the obvious eye, the logo is also comprised of 3 letterforms (as was the previous one), G, J and the Arabic letter ج. The G being the first letter in Ganzeer of course, as the ج is in جنزير (Ganzeer in Arabic). The thing about the letter ج though is that it is only pronounced a hard G in Egypt and pronounced J in literally every other Arabic dialect. Which means جنزير will often be pronounced Janzeer when I'm in touch with other Arabic speakers, so the logo is able to represent all possible phonetics in one single symbol. It's as complex as it is simple.
The eye may be a cliche, but fact of the matter is everything I do—be it art, design, or writing—stems from one unshakable trait: observation. Keen, unwavering observation. Without which I doubt I'd ever have anything worthwhile to say. In any medium, really.
I've always been a fan of the kind of symbols you can't help but want to scrawl on your desk when you're a kid. The pentagram is an obvious one, the swastika before we know what it means or where it came from, the eye of Horus, Fido Dido's head, and so on. I think this new logo has something of that quality, more so than the previous one for sure.
I may tinker with proportions and style sometime down the line, but for now I'll try it on raw, see how well it fits.
Made it past the 20-page mark on latest TSG thumbs and still plenty of story to tell. It is evident that capping this chapter at 20 is impossible if I want to do it any justice, and do it justice I must. Will try to see if I can close it at 30.
Mind turned to mush, I find this stage of comix-making to be the most mentally-draining. It isn't the most labor-intensive, but it requires the most figuring out.
Sent off a lot of hi-res scans to the folks overseeing the Italy exhibition which includes much never-before seen process stuff. Pretty sure it wasn't what they expected, pretty sure they think I'm demented.
A fellow artist and dear friend from Lebanon who gifted me this beautiful little art-print a couple years back had part of their home destroyed in one of the recent Israeli airstrikes. Reconstruction will be costly. If anyone reading this might like to pitch in, shoot me a message at shout@ganzeer.com and I'll share my friend's paypal info privately. For understandable reasons, they'd rather not make it public.
Issue #211 of my newsletter, RESTRICTED FREQUENCY, went out late last night. Here's the web version.
It is the weekend, but I am working today; a couple design things to check off, and a fair amount of email to catch up on. I'd also like to squeeze in a review of Camus' THE STRANGER to throw at Ganzeer.Reviews hopefully together with a drawing or graphic of some kind. When I started Ganzeer.Reviews, I had this lofty idea of doing my own visual interpretation of the work being reviewed, but that's just more time which year after year proves to be my scarcest resource.
Hopefully enough time to exercise and tidy up some as well.
Sudden bout of insomnia.
Unusual for me, but my mind has been somewhat preoccupied with some personal life stuff. I've been thinking about being in Houston and whether or not that makes sense for me anymore, especially given that the original impetus for my being here at all was my ex-wife's job, prior to the whole ex bit. Presently, the only concrete thing keeping me here is my kid and my desire for us to remain in one another's lives. But aside from that, there really is very little about my being here that makes any sense. No job, no regular clients, and very little semblance of a personal network. Granted, the place I've set up here is a great “base of operations” to live and work from (and it took me a pretty long time to set up too), but I've always been of the conviction that your place of residence ought to be where you know the most people (community is everything)—especially once past a certain age—and that is a box that Houston does not check. And I highly doubt it will ever check given that half the people in this ludicrous sprawl of a “city” (mostly comprised of single-family homes) seems to be in the oil & gas field. I'm all for being a positive force of change in one's environment, but I'd be delusional to think that a city like Houston can be bent and shaped into the kind of city I'd like to live in, at least in my lifetime. An awful lot would have to change. While fighting an uphill battle is not something that is at all foreign to me, this would be one of the uphilliest battles imaginable, uphillier even than the take-down of dictators, believe it or not. They really love their big cars and freeways out here in ways I have seen nowhere else, and the whole car thing is a major antithesis to my very being. Has been for a long time, even way before reading Boyer's NO MORE FOSSILS (the reading of which only solidified my convictions).
A curse and a blessing of mine is a certain problem-solving mode my brain seems to enter whenever presented with an issue, and presently the problem-solving nodes seem to be very active without managing to accomplish any actual solving of problems. Hense, I imagine, the insomnia.
I'm noticing that many people my age or thereabouts seem to still be stuck on the want for marriage, which I find a little surprising. Especially given that many said people in my orbit happen to be in some kind of creative and/or intellectual field: painters, writers, printmakers, technologists, academics, and so forth. These are the kind of vocations that are typically associated with unconventional thinkers, but how unconventional can one's thinking really be if they are so keen on adopting an awfully conventional lifestyle choice? One instilled in us by family and society at large. One can't really claim to be a unique maverick, immune to social norms if they fall for one of the most widely spread, seldom-questioned social norms of all.
Of course I say this as someone who was once married himself, someone who liked to think of himself as a creative, unconventional thinker, but it was only the experience of marriage itself that helped me recognize its inherent flaws (still on great terms with my ex btw). The funny thing is, many people of a certain age are quick to accuse those less keen on marriage of not having grown-up yet, of being infected by some malicious “Peter Pan Syndrome”, and “not taking the relationship seriously”. But, if you look at older folk, the ones in their sixties who have been widowed or divorced and become interested in starting something new with someone else; they don't care about marriage. They don't typically care about their new partner's job or education, nor do they necessarily care a whole lot about sex, and they certainly don't care about having children. The only thing they care about at that point is companionship. Companionship with someone they get along with.
It is only towards our later years do we realize what is truly important in life. Perhaps what younger people can learn from this is the understanding that genuine companionship is the thing that matters most in a relationship at any stage. Everything else is secondary and beyond.
Generally speaking, there are 4 types of clients:
1) Very knowledgeable and know exactly what they want. 2) Very knowledgeable, but don't quite know what they want (happy to delegate). 3) Not knowledgeable, but know exactly what they want. 4) Not knowledgeable, and don't quite know what they want.
#1 and #2 are good to work with, although I'm partial to working with type #2. Type #4 can be okay to work with, sometimes, but #3 you need to stay as far away from as possible no matter what they try to lure you with. They do not delegate any of the decision-making and will insist on things you know are terrible.
