Nick Bantock's Blog

Wasnick Blog #15 Toast

2012-03-02T16:21:00.002-08:00

Whenever I was asked why, in 1988, I left England and moved to Canada, I would usually say something like, “Margaret Thatcher” or “Social inequality and intransigence”, but that was only the tip of the iceberg, the real reason my faith in Albion sunk and the reason why I ultimately decided to emigrate was... ‘toast’.

At the time I was living in Bristol and freelancing as a book cover artist; this meant I had to travel to London every couple of weeks to deliver and collect paintings and manuscripts. Each fortnight I travelled on the same train, the 10:05 from Temple Meads Station. I would wait at exactly the same spot on the platform so that I’d be ready to hop directly into the buffet car and be first in line. I’d been making this not unpleasant pilgrimage for over two years when the fateful day came. The train pulled in, stopped and I opened the door, stepped up to the counter and amiably said what I always said to the steward, “Good morning, I’d like a hot chocolate and a round of toast please”.

This particular attendant, a sallow, balding fellow wearing a grubby dark blue British Rail waistcoat, looked at me with the haughty disdain of a prison guard rejecting a prisoner’s request for caviar and champagne. “Naaah,” he responded, “no toast.”

“Oh, that’s a shame,” I replied, “did you run out of bread?”

“Naaah,” he said, keeping a face as straight any professional poker player, “we’re not doing toast any more.”

“Really, why not?” I asked in obvious disappointment.

He paused, then, as if explaining to a simpleton, “It was too popular.”

I stared in incredulity. Was he kidding me, or had April the first moved to January 29th? And then it dawned on me, he really meant it. British Rail had discontinued the making and selling of toast because too many customers wanted to purchase it.

In that instant I realized I could no longer stay in the country of my birth. It wasn’t so much that this single act of marketing lunacy had taken place, but the fact that it reflected a mind-frame so surreally perverse and so perfect in it’s reflection of the society as a whole that I started planning my escape that very second.

British Rail is long gone, sold off by The Iron Lady and replaced by what I understand to be a disjointed conglomeration of private companies. I have no idea if they fair any better than their forerunner. What I do know is that Britain itself has changed and that it has moved on from those dark days.

Part of me will always be British, I still support The Arsenal, I still miss country pubs and rolling hillsides. But I will never be able to look at a piece of toast without thinking of how it became too popular for consumption.

Wasnick Blog #14 Duende V The Muse

2012-01-29T12:16:00.000-08:00

From where do artists, writers and musicians get their most powerful ideas? Are they fought for in a ‘muck and bullets, trench warfare’ kind of way, or are they given to us by the gods?

If the latter, then we have a choice, we can look to The Muse or The Duende.

If The Muse, then we are in for a waiting game. She glides upon the wind and graces us with her gift of creativity only at her whim. She may come tomorrow, but more likely she will leave us floundering in the doldrums for what may seem like an eternity—and sometimes is.

The Duende, on the other hand, is a fire to be stepped into. It comes up through the soles of our feet and burns within us as a creative passion. We are not merely touched by an angel, we become the channel and the chimney through which the fire rages.

‘Duende is silent, near-by, a pregnant and overwhelming power… it is death, life and fate… the consummation of risk and knowledge. Made visible it is huge, potent, patient, but less tolerant than anything the human will can grasp. Duende is a sweet bliss that will infiltrate the bloodstream like toxin.’

As serious artists the choice we are offered is not just one of waiting for an idea to float down from the heavens or rise up from the earth, it is a decision of commitment. We can look skyward and beg for help, or dig our heels hard into the ground deeper and deeper until we feel the a truth begin to simmer, take light, then serge through us.

Do I encourage anyone to wait for eternity or to risk having ones core charred?

No.

I only wish to point out that great art does not come from tinkering with techniques, making nice things to please ones friends or because one wants to make money and become famous. Great art, and even good art demands egos to be put on shelves, souls to be aligned with universes and sphinxes to be awakened within us.

Wasnick Blog #13 Re-Writing

2012-01-10T16:57:00.000-08:00

Returning Forward

I’ve started work on a new book. I can’t say much about it for want of various cats escaping from various bags, but it feels really good to be back with a pen in one hand and a pencil in the other.

After nearly 6 years of painting and working on apps, returning to books is a Cheshire Cat’s homecoming. The merging of words and images is second nature to me and this book— which is a long way from completion—seems to be emerging from its fog in the guise of ‘an epistolary time machine mystery’.

Over the years I’ve thought a lot about the union of text and art—the avalanche of questions that Griffin and Sabine spawned made that inevitable. “Why do you think people relate to your books? Which comes first the writing or the art? Where did you get the idea from?” Like all good questions they tend to lead to other more penetrating questions, questions for which the soul demands perceptive answers.

I think it is as important for an artist to write as it is for a writer to make art, partly because it broadens the individual and partly because it engenders experimentation. Living in the realm between two forms of expression requires constant invention, which demands mental and emotional adroitness. An internal flexibility that hopefully helps one scramble out of the pit of predictability that specialization is inclined to dig around one.

Before text, our ancestors existed in a realm of pictures, their dream-life and waking-life were essentially made of the same components. When we started using words we activated the other side of our brain, but in so doing we became enamoured with our capacity for logical thought, causing us to half-turn our backs on our previously learned pictorial intuition.

When word and picture marry, the left and right sides of the brain operate simultaneously, and a means of expression is available to us that bestows far more than the limited view of existence that one-sidedness can ever give.

For me, the alchemical marriage of art and writing offers a meeting ground where my two primary methods of comprehending the world can coexist and out of their coupling comes a creative stream of consciousness that hopefully will sweep me towards the end of new my book.

Wasnick Blog #12 The Christmas Package

2011-12-12T09:22:00.000-08:00

Sirens lurk under the Christmas tree. They try to tempt me with their haunting refrains. But it’s no good I can’t be fooled. I have been strapped to the mast of reasonable expectation and I will not be lured onto the rocks of material craving. I have risen above wanting, I have matured and am an adult who concentrates on giving Christmas presents, not on receiving them.

Of course all of this high minded restraint takes its toll. Each Noel, once all the packages have been opened and I’m faced with the pile of things I have no use for, and never will have even if I live to be four thousand—I get the blues.

However, I have a way of getting over my Yuletide mopes. On Christmas mornings, amidst the flying wrapping paper, the yells of excitement erupting from my kids and the kindly cooings coming from my wife, I sit in my comfy armchair and remind myself of the Christmas Uncle Jim came to visit. I was only seven but I distinctly remember Jim’s dramatic arrival.

Around lunchtime that Christmas Eve, there was a knock on the door. My Mom opened it and I saw three burly postmen carrying a long, skinny man under their arms like they were about to use him as a battering ram. His face and hands were covered in postage stamps and he was grinning straight at me. The postmen put him down on the living room mat and accepted glasses of sherry from my Dad. After they’d gone, we helped rid Jim of his stamps, while he told us about living in China (and other very foreign places). He said that this year, when he’d realized he couldn’t afford the boat fair home, he’d weighed himself, applied the correct postage to his person and presented himself at the local post office. He’d caused quite a stir and the clerks had to consult their rule books, but nowhere could they find anything that said he was prohibited from being posted, so being dutiful public servants they’d simply shipped him. As it turned out his journey had been quite pleasant. The cargo bay had been warm and dry and the mail sacks had made a comfortable bed and on one day, he’d even been invited up to dine at the Captain’s table.

Uncle Jim knew all about parcels and packages and he told us lots of strange and wonderful tales about them. The holiday was so much fun with him around. He made my Dad laugh by telling him about Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. According to Jim, the night Caesar arrived in Egypt, slaves bought a Persian carpet into his bedchamber, and when they unrolled it, out came Cleopatra wearing nothing but her jewelry. My Mom said that that was my Dad’s dirty laugh. Then Jim made my Mom’s eyes go wide by folding his body into a ball and climbing into the tiny cupboard under the sink (he also told her that they’d named gymnastics after him, but they’d spelt it wrong).

That Winter my parents were short of money and I was pretty disappointed with my Christmas haul. Jim took me aside and warned me that every Christmas there would be things I wanted but wouldn’t get and I shouldn’t give up hope because he wouldn’t forget me.

I was just starting to think about Jim and his coconut turkey, when

my reminiscences were interrupted by my son, “Dad. I’m real sorry but I ran out of money and I couldn’t afford to get you a present.”

This declaration was followed by my daughter chirping, “Daddy, I bought you this special bar of chocolate, but it sort of got eaten on the way home.”

“Don’t worry guys” I said magnanimously “It’s always the thought that counts.”

Then Janice my wife purred, “Frank dear, you know that electric drill you wanted, well I was going to get it for you but I’m afraid the store ran out and they wont have any in till the New Year. You don’t mind waiting do you?”

“Sure.” I said. “No problem.”

But I did mind. And as the stack of parcels receded and none came my way, I could feel my face growing glum.

My torment nearly over, the kids pulled the last parcel from under the tree, squinted at its inscription and…came over and put it in my lap.

I perked-up immediately. Not too big and not too small, the parcel was wrapped in a weather-beaten map of the Indian Ocean and was tied-up with green beeswax string (I know it was beeswax because it gave off a gentle scent as it melted under the warmth of my fingers). Beneath the wrapping paper was a pitted and polished wooden box, with a luggage label taped to its lid. The label simply read, “To Frankyboy from Jim.”

I looked up at my family to see if any of them were playing tricks on me, but they were all as nonplussed as I was.

I very carefully prized back the lid of the box and cautiously peeked within.

And there,

inside,

was everything I had ever wanted.

Wasnick Blog #11 Thoughts on Dreaming

2011-12-12T09:14:00.000-08:00

The following is pretty dense stuff so if you are not in the mood for serious struggles in the grey matter, I suggest you skip to blog twelve which is a cheerful little Christmas tale I whipped up for your delectation:

1 What if dreaming was the visual mathematics of perception—a series of stepping-stones over the river of words that flows from our mouths, a language of communication unwilling to be translated?

2 Given that a fast, effective method of sifting daily experience would seem essential to our survival--is intuition (waking dream) a means of “swift thinking” through pictures?

3 Is a dream a private viewing or is it possible for it to be seen on other channels?

4 Is dreaming a two-way door? Information gained by the five senses that are being fed into the collective unconscious. And if we reverse those hinges, does that collective in turn feeds the dreamer with a summary of information (in image form) that has been accrued by the totality (all dreamers).

5 If image is the main tool of the sleeping mind, what is the purpose of anything spoken within a dream? Maybe dream language is designed to function more like a weaving, with the threads of words going forward to make sentences while the more complicated information moves horizontally in a quite different pattern. Example. Struggling for clarity in my work I once dreamed of 3 frogs croaking “Rivet, rivet, rivet.” When I awoke to the bridge between sleep and wake I saw that ‘rivets’ was an anagram of ‘strive’. Was that accident or instruction?

6 If lucid dreaming is used casually or ‘unethically’ will the dreamers control slip away and the soul lose its rudder? Are lucid dreams the exclusive property of the self-serving individual or an aid designed by and for the collective intelligence?

7 Exactly why do dreams respond to observation by becoming elusive? When we capture, examine and analyze a dream are we sticking specimen pins through The Wings of Psyche—restricting its capacity to fly? Is it necessary to participate in a dream’s agenda to verify where it wishes us to go?

8 Given recent scientific theories about the ambiguous nature of time and the possibility of it’s flowing two ways at once, does the idea of precognitive dreams seem totally far fetched? And does our capacity to invent memory and perceive life as a self-fulfilling prophecy suggest our grip on the difference between past and future is tenuous at best?

9 If telepathic dreaming is a possibility as studies suggests, are images passed directly from one person to another or do they travel via a form of ‘sorting house’, where messages are filed and re-dreamed?

10 Can the Zen-like way in which dreams tease and toy with our intellect be merely accident and coincidence or are we being advised to seek another means of understanding?

11 Does our commitment (as a society) to a single, colluded reality where each person is separate yet supposedly perceiving the same world, make us fearful of dreams? Is it one single waking-dream we must jointly believe in if we are to maintain a lemming-like dash towards material Nirvana. Why else would we have downgraded our regard for the dreamword to that of a low-grade horoscope in a daily paper?

12 And ...do we have dreams? Or do dreams have us?

Wasnick Blog #10 The Devil's Hole

2011-11-27T13:36:00.001-08:00

TheAtlantic breeze cools the air deceptively, and it's easy to forget how hard thesun is pounding down. I'm picking my way along a cliff top path on thenorth coast of Jersey in the Channel Islands, heading west in pursuit of TheDevil’s Hole, an unearthly fissure that has been carved-out of sea-rock by therelentless barrage of waves. Head bent over, I'm selecting my footfallcarefully, and that's why I don't see him barreling down the path ahead of me.One second I'm alone, the next he's there, stripped to the waist, alobster-scarlet apparition with thin white casting seams running down theoutside of each arm, where the sun's rays haven't quite got round to totallygrilling him.

Iknow instinctively that he's an Englishman. I too am English (by birth), and itis inevitable we'll feel embarrassed meeting without introduction. I have twochoices—say something about the weather or ask him a question. I plump for thelatter. "Excuse me, have you come from The Devil's Hole?"

Hisresponse is pure Music Hall (Vaudeville). "Why? Am I that bleedin'burnt?"

Thequip should by rights cut through the awkwardness, but it doesn't and helaunches into an overly detailed description of the trail before me. He'sstruggling manfully to find some conclusion to his messy monologue, when hiseyes light up, "...And there's a pub!"

Ismile back in relieved appreciation. We have resolution to our interaction, andcan continue on our respective ways.

WhenI first came to North America it took me a while to adjust to the difference inhumour between the old and the new world. Mine was built on word play andPythonesque absurdity. The humour that I encountered here was more pre-pared,scripted gags and social pathos.

CouldI say who is funnier, The Marx Brothers' zaniness or John Cleesein the ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch, Billy Connolly’s rambling mayhem or GeorgeCarlin’s cutting perceptions on ‘Stuff’? No, of course not, why on earth wouldone choose?

HoweverI do believe that smart humour is deeply necessary to carry us through. Whetherit be the bright wit that highlights the foolishness in our day-to-dayobsessions and pre-occupations or the dark humour that gives us releasefrom the terrible things that the world throws at us.

Ultimately,what really matters is our ability to laugh at ourselves.

Homage to my old cat ThickSoup:

My cat’s dim, e’s got no brain.

‘Is eyes are glazed and ‘e’squiet inane.

‘Is marbles are lost, and ‘e’svery slow.

Sad old sod, ‘e’ll ‘ave to go.

‘Is lights are on, but no one’sthere.

Cruel innit, don’t seem fair.

See ‘ere’s the rub, the realgroaner—

‘es brighter than ‘is bloodyowner.

Wasnick Blog #9 Top Fives

2011-11-16T12:59:00.000-08:00

There’s a scene in the movie High Fidelity where John Cusack and Jack Black are standing in the record store debating the five best dead drummers. It may not have been a key moment in the movies plot, but for me it was an epiphany of infinite possibility. I’ve always been a fan of list making, how else do you keep your brain from exploding with all the stuff you are trying to remember? Is there a better way to show people you are busy than leaving your ‘work list’ out on the kitchen counter? And if you don’t mind self-deception, consider the pleasure to be derived from adding a task to your ‘to do’ list that you have already done...just so that you can cross it out.
However, that’s ordinary list making. A Top 5 is way more than a mere list, it’s an encapsulation, an embodiment of self-taste, it’s self-revealing and it's far quicker than writing a novel.

WASNICK’s FIVES

Top 5 Drivel-ish pop songs:
I Did it My Way
Tie a Yellow Ribbon
Sugar Sugar
MacArthur Park
Starry Starry Night

Top 5 Greatest Pop/Rock songs:
I Heard it Through the Grapevine—Marvin Gaye
White Rabbit—Jefferson Airplane
The Wait—The Band
Black Magic Woman—Santana
Alexandra Leaving—Leonard Cohen

Top 5 Art objects I’d steal if I could:
Leonard’s sketchbooks
William Turner’s Aqueduct and Waterfall
Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring
The British Museum’s limestone sculpture of Horus (the falcon)
The Alhambra (all of it!)

Top 5 Prejudices concerning other peoples dress code:
Woolly socks worn with open-toed sandals
Jeans hanging 12” below crotch exposing ratty underwear
Almost all 60’s retro (it was bad first time round, why sin again?)
'Film School' glasses, especially when the wearer has 20/20vision.
Shiny silk suits worn by corporate hit-men and sleazy lawyers.

Top 5 British Movies:
The Commitments
The Draughtman’s Contract
Truly Madly Deeply
Elizabeth
Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Top 5 Villainous foreign Names that would look good in neon over a nightclub:
Scaramouche
Mephisto
Beelzebub
Klaus Von Brandauer
Nosfurato

Top 5 Slanted Love Stories:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being—Milan Kundera
Love for Lydia—H E Bates
Bel Canto—Ann Pachett
Four Letters of Love—Niall Williams
The Count of Monte Cristo—Dumas

Top 5 Great Sports moments:
The final of the 1966 world cup final, England 4 Germany 2 (I still have my ticket stub).
Wilmer Rudolph winning the 100 meter Olympic final in 1960 (when she was a kid she contracted polio and was told she’d be in leg irons all her life).
Bob Beamon’s Jump of 29’ 2 1/2”
Montana or Young throwing to Rice.
Arsenal’s ‘Invincibles’ going through the 03/04 season undefeated.

Top 5 Dark Tales
Perfume—Patrick Suskind
The Third Policeman— Flan O'Brien
The Wasp Factory — Ian Banks
The Chymical Wedding—Lindsay Clarke
The Fencing Master—Arturo Perez-Reverte

Wasnick Blog #8 The Trickster

2011-11-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

Shortly after Griffin and Sabine took off, I was taken out to dinner by my publisher at an elegant San Francisco restaurant. There were about ten of us...we started happy and got happier as the evening progressed. At one point I was pontificating about how the universe has a way of bringing us down to earth when we get too full of ourselves.

I was making a spherical swooping movement with my arms when the waiter placed my desert in front of me, it was an ice cream knickerbocker glory and as my hand arced downward I knocked the whole freezing bowl into my lap.

The Trickster works in marvelous ways! Sadly, it appears that I have to be reminded on a fairly regular basis that I’m not half as clever as I would like to be.

A few years ago my friend Shannon Wray and I came up with the idea of inventing a sort of web Zen-surrealist I-Ching oracle. Tickled by our own distorted sense of humor we deemed it a good idea to name it Sage and came up with ninety nine ‘big’ questions like, “Is there any worth to a duty born out of enslavement”. Then we came up with ninety nine ambiguous answers such as, “Two blue flames are racing up and down the lakes surface, brilliant words make everything clear.”

The idea being that when you clicked blindly on a question-tile it flipped over, and then when you hit an answer-tile it did the same. However, there was no predetermined link and the relationship between question and answer was random and thus different every time.

We thought this funny.

Then we wrote a bogus, but believable, history describing how Sage was discovered in 1914 when 63 goat-velum scrolls were unearthed in Northern Turkey.

We launched Sage on my website and waited for people to appreciate our joke.

The appreciation never came, mostly because the oracle actually worked.

It turned out that no matter how many times you consulted Sage the question was always relevant and the answer always made an obscure kind of sense...the ‘sense’ in nonsense.

It seems that the collective unconscious refuses to be teased and that the universe has its own way of mocking our sad shortsightedness.

For this, and all the other ways in which the Trickster teaches us to be ‘umble, I am repeatedly grateful.

PS. You can still find Sage on nickbantock.com or as a free ipad app.

Blog #7 Wasnick Writing Tip

2011-10-30T19:17:00.000-07:00

How to write the first paragraph of a new novel:

Take the book you are currently reading and open it at random. Select a paragraph that is no more than three or four sentences long and underline all the nouns. Now pick another, completely different book or magazine or washing machine manual, select a similar sized paragraph and repeat the underlining of all nouns.

Next, transpose in chronological order the nouns from one paragraph to the other.

You should now have two paragraphs that read something like this—

Grandpa remembered the way they howled, the feel of the gross running down her white paper bags from where the bags had struck her, and the smell of grapes stunk on the birds of the man who had tried to pull her off her Nana. She could still feel the cruel pinch of grapes on her white jelly as she lost her balance and began to fall.

And this—

Another thing Sansa would love to remember: she going out and he would get a blood of little cheeks. He would tie the stone around every good cluster of garlic to keep the breath out. And horse would make spiced fingers. You never tasted anything like it, wrist, white grapes, back grapes.

Now weave the sentences together and switch five words you pick selectively from your first book:

Grandpa remembered the way they howled, the feel of the ferret running down her white paper bags from where the porch had struck her, and the smell of grapes stunk on the hat of the man who had tried to pull her off her Nana. He would tie the stone around every good cluster of garlic to keep the breath out. And Horse would make spiced fingers. She could still feel the cruel pinch of sunglass on her white jelly as she lost her balance and began to fall. You never tasted anything like it, bird grapes, saddle grapes.

Okay. Tell me honestly, wouldn’t you be enthralled by any book that started like that!

Wasnick Blog #6 Blog of Hope

2011-10-28T14:29:00.000-07:00

An Irish navvie living in London goes to a building site looking for work.

He locates the foreman and says, “I’d like a job please.”

Hearing the man’s accent the foreman says. “Piss off, you Irish are all bleedin’ thick.”

The navvie being somewhat offended responds, “I’m not t’ick”.

“Yes you bleedin’ are,” says the foreman, “you can’t even tell the difference between a joist and a girder.”

The navvie thinks for a second and then replies, “Yes I can, Joist wrote Ulysses and Girder wrote Faust.”

Why does this story ring so true? Why does it feel like an underdog’s rallying cry?

I think, because as a society we have allowed our intelligence, our knowledge and our sense of hope to be sucked out of us by an infatuation with mediocrity and indifference. We have allowed the greedy, the ignorant and the prejudiced to define our values. If we (the artists and the dissolving middle classes) wish to regain our sense of well-being there is only one way to climb out of our fast filling pit...use our brains, grow dignified hearts, and break our reliance on all the soporifics from pharmaceutically induced addictions to advertisement soaked TV and from swallowing the garbage dished out in the corporate generated news media to the obsessive thumb punching, “I’m OK, you’re OK” meaningless messages that have taken over from the communication of real thoughts and ideas.

(Phew! Glad to have that got a lot off my chest.)

We are human, we can be dignified, we can be smart, we can be generous and we can be compassionate. Why have we allowed the morals of our politicians, our soulless tycoons and our loud mouthed zealots and bigots to form our standards of behavior? Is it not finally time for us to think for ourselves? For each of us to construct our own ethical codes? To be all that we can be? To scream at the top of our lungs that James Joyce, Goethe, Yates, Rembrandt and Leonardo are worth ten thousand Dick Cheney’s and Rupert Murdoch’s?

Of course, I am talking to myself as much as anyone else. I feel so small, so unsure of how to push back the feeling that we are sliding back into dark ages. At my age I am part worn down, but there are ‘out there’ so many bright young minds and I desperately hope they’ll pursue a higher wisdom than the one adhered to by our last few generation.

Wasnick Blog #5 Flying

2011-10-17T13:51:00.000-07:00

I am heading home from Savannah, The Garden of Good and Evil. We are at 35 thousand feet, two hours from Seattle, I'm cramped, fidgety and the inside of my nose feels like it has been dry roasted and cauterized.

I no longer embrace air travel.

I'm content to explore new cities and landscapes but I just don't like being hermetically sealed into a can of sweaty worms that’s violently catapulted across a continent.

I once created a pop-up book called Wings, and in research I learned about aircraft flight, so I understand the theory of takeoff but I still don't fully believe that a wormcan will comply with the laws of science and land gently on the tarmac of my destination.

I grew unfond of flying during all those years of scuttling from city to city, giving interviews, talking and reading in more book stores, universities, libraries, and auditoriums than I dare to remember. I met many wonderful people during those times but in the end the mental and bodily wear and tear was too much. If truth be told, I stopped creating books mostly to avoid the eternal traveling...try telling your publisher half-way through a thirty city tour that you've had enough and want to crawl home to your own bed. And no, having the key to a generic, four star hotel mini-bar does not remotely compensate for the loneliness and exhaustion the road inflicts on all but the insensitive.

That said, flying is not all bad. I've had many a good idea sitting in a robot-designed overcrowded airport, or trapped in seat B33 between a pair of voluminous junk-food enthusiasts whose bulk poured tsunami-like over their cushions, beyond the supposedly shared armrest and into the sanctum of my precious few inches of seat space.

In circumstances like this, where else can a soul retreat but into the imagination? It was on one such inner sojourn that I first conceived The Museum at Purgatory. That aside, my favorite escape was on a long haul to Berlin where I invented 54 new words and their definitions (twice through the alphabet gobbled up a whole 4 hours). It is surprising how many words the dictionary still needs.

For Example: GRINFISH—Anyone (including flight attendants) who smile constantly or inappropriately.

And

PSYCHOSTRATION—Corrosion of the spirit brought about by over exposure to the dehumanizing aspects of progress.

The Wasnick Blog #4 Penticton

2011-09-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

Arrived safely on God’s Mountain 12 hours after leaving Ganges. The trip, via Vesuvius was broken only in Hope for a Blizzard.

We are here in Penticton at the art gallery to help mount my retrospective show that just moved up from Denver.

God’s Mountain, for the curious, is the name of an extraordinary B & B that overlooks Skaha Lake. The place is a cross between Blenhiem Palace and Gormenghast (if you haven't read Titus Groan, the first of Mervyn Peak’s trilogy you should be ashamed of yourself!) and if like me you slant towards the quirky, God’s Mountain and its rambling Aegean opulence is ‘quirk’ personified.

There is something daunting about mounting an exhibit that contains a life’s work.

Both poignant and memory laden, the journey from wide-eyed 15 year old art student to long-toothed itinerate imagesmith has been as direct as a gullible tourists labyrinthian taxi ride from the airport to his strangely elusive hotel. Every piece of art contains within it the life lived during it's creation. Example: Frankie and Johnny, the oil painting of the banana shooting the apple, took four weeks to complete and carries in it's brushstrokes a BBC radio play about the French resistance, the sounds of an Irish-Swedish couple alternately arguing and making love in the room above, the pleasant distraction of my Minnalouche-like cat Ash trying to chew the end of my brush while I painted, and the decision I was trying to make about whether to end a relationship.

The show goes up, first the walls are made grey, then the seventeen wooden crates are cracked open. We scuttle around placing pieces first against one wall then another, trying to find continuity and flow—at first chaos, then slowly the rhythm emerges. The area is split, the smaller space becoming the Griffin and Sabine Room the second and the larger an all-encompassing smorgasbord of small drawings, collages, assemblages and large non-figurative canvases.

When it is complete I stand in the center, rotate 360 degrees and pronounce it ‘Done’. The team: Nick, me and the rest of the alter egos, Joyce, Glen and Paul have put in three days of hard slog, and come through bonded and unscathed by the experience.

Opening night and the crowd tumbles in to see not only my work but that of Melanie Mehrer and Will Hoffman. We’re told far more than usual (maybe 500). Twenty years ago this sort of thing would have made me nervous but now I am able to enjoy it. I like watching people look at my art, seeing and hearing enquiring minds gnaw away at the spread. Being an artist is a solitary occupation and its easy to loose sight of why you are working, but here in these rooms watching the milling throng I am able to fully comprehend the reasons why I have little choice but to do what I do.

The Wasnick blog #3

2011-09-10T21:29:00.000-07:00

As promised (or was it threaten) more on ambivalence:

Origin 1910...that surprises me, as it makes the word a more recent addition to our language than computer (1640) or acid rain (1855).

According to my ipad dictionary ‘ambivalence’ has two definitions.

1. The coexistence within an individual of positive and negative feeling towards a person, object or action, simultaneously drawing that individual in opposite directions.

1. The inability to make choice.

The latter being the definition that is most commonly used and understood, which is a shame because the former gets a lot closer to the roots of the word’s intent.

It is true that in a fast age, making a snap decision gives the impression that one is powerful and clear minded, while refusing to choose instantly between yes or no appears weak. And yet, ambivalence can often mean that one lacks enough information in order to make a sound decision and the acknowledgement of ones ambivalence could, and probably should, be seen as a smart and patient weighing of a situation.

Unlike Nick, I find myself more comfortable with temporary ambivalences. I actually like living oxymoronically, pausing to observe the agendas behind my previous knee-jerk impulses; allowing myself the space to accept contrary emotions or opposing concepts, and actively resisting the voice that tries to bully me into speedily picking one or the other? For me, ‘not knowing’ is a perfectly reasonable state, in fact as long as it is not accompanied by paralysis, it feels like a healthy skepticism.

On another hand, and not to be transposed with ambivalence, ambilevous is an equally interesting and considerably older word (1646) than it’s neighbor.

According to the Oxford dictionary ambilevous means, ‘left-handed on both sides; clumsy’.

That’s curious given that 70% of the Oxford definitions have not changed since the early1900’s and tend to reflect a bias Victorian mind-frame, in this case it is suggesting that left-handed people are less dexterous than right. Why, because being left-handed was considered a sign of the devil and left-handed children were forced to use their right hands, thus confirming a notion of clumsiness.

In reality left-handed sportsmen and sportswomen often look more fluid and give off an air of intuitive flair. Could it be that it was that intuitiveness that so infuriated the patriarchs? After all there was little the Victorians and their predecessors hated more than intuition, that ultimate threat to their rule of logic.

So, in the spirit of our enlightened age I’d like to propose we reintroduce the word Ambilevous (not in the ipad dictionary) into our lexicon and give it the meaning, ‘A woman or man gifted with intuitive grace’.

PS. Just incase you are thinking their might be vested interest involved here—neither Wasnick or Nick are left handed!

The Wasnick blog #2

2011-09-10T21:24:00.001-07:00

...as Wasnick, I have sympathy for Nick’s dilema. He has the captain’s responsibility, it’s his job to deal with all of us alter-egos and archetypes that combine to make up the whole person and it comes down to him to make the final decisions, determining which of us internal characters to give credence to in order to decide how and when to speak or act.

I, on the other hand, do not have to measure the voices, see the overview or weigh the pluses and minuses. I can simply follow my path without need for compromise or confusion. The only responsibility I place on myself is to be aware, to be present and observe without judgement.

If I feel or think something I can proceed upon my merry way as long as I acknowledge that I am feeling or thinking it. If I feel scared, I can say, “isn’t that interesting I feel scared,” and then continue with whatever it is I’m doing.

Most days, Wasnick gets a free pass, because Nick is far too busy listening to Homebody arguing with Wolf of the Steppes or dealing with Mr Ego complaining that his appearance has been ruined because The Trickster has tripped him up, yet again.

The idea that there is one single internal voice in any individual is of course crazy, and yet we are taught to function from the standpoint that we suffer no such ambivalence (more about ambivalence in the next blog). And worse, those who openly admit to an internal cast of characters are often perceived as confused or weird. It takes courage to admit that we are each a company of actors, playing a multiplicity of parts, many of whom argue more vehemently than a feuding family at the Thanksgiving dinner table.

So, my encouragement to anyone reading this is to give yourself a break. Accept that the different characters within you want different things and accept that their cacophonous squabbling will drown out the gentle voice of your soul’s needs as long as they ignored. Don’t try and suppress those internal beings, give them a chance to speak, and only when they have had their say allow yourself to act as Solomon.

Me, I like stamps, poker, dark chocolate ice cream and people who are smart, funny and kind.

THE WASNICK BLOG #1

2011-09-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago whilst sitting in a restaurant a man loped up to me and asked, “Didn’t you used to be Nick Bantock?”
I looked at my wife Joyce, and she with twinkling eye and anticipating my response, nodded her encouragement.
“Yes,” I replied, “I was.”
There was something so liberating about this sensation of being no-longer-semi-famous that I decided to celebrate my freedom by adding a new persona to my already crowded psyche.
Hence Wasnick was born.
The thing about being Wasnick is that he doesn’t care about all those things that upset or windup Nick. For example Wasnick doesn’t give a damn about:
The great sway of visual illiteracy that is sweeping North America because of the failure to teach the art of seeing.
Or the shrinking of language to the point where Orwell’s prophecy of no articulation leading to no thinking, leading to total political and corporate manipulative control of mass behavour.
Or the fact that texting the trite is more important than making eye contact and communicating with the person in front of you.
Or the dumbing down of the TV news to the point where the anchor persons attire and hair is more important than giving insight into world event.
Or the fashion industries ongoing attempts to make women feel that if they don’t have figures like young boys then they should starve themselves. (Ironically it seems that many of those designing clothes are interested in women merely as coat hangers.)
Or tailgaters, or cell phone Nazis who fill a room with their inane one way conversations, or self-righteous zealots that find the portrayal of violence perfectly okay but have seismic fits at the sight of a nipple, or people who believe they are ‘entitled’ and whose sentences comprise mostly of the words ‘like’ and ‘totally’.
Or...
But as I say, Wasnick doesn’t care to rant, he knows that the world cannot and will not be changed by diatribe alone. Instead he just uses numbers and when he feels a Nick rant coming on he simply casts out a number like 23 or 57 thus showing that the specific pent-up frustration has been dually recorded.
What then you might ask does Wasnick care about?
He cares about the small things and learning how to value them.
Things like...

next blog in a week or so.

Cheers Nick and Wasnick