Plastic
(mostly) models …
mostly airplanes and ships but also some tanks and soldiers. Nearly all Great
War and World War II warplanes and warships … a few German jets (I was never
all that interested in speed). Even tried my hand at technical illustration but
let it slide when I realized that there wasn’t much of a market for German
fighter plane renderings. I had a few impossible-to-find kits which I’d had
imported from Germany or Italy. Not sure how my mother felt about all the
sheets of swastika decals that arrived in the mail (her family having been
murdered by the Nazis in the 1940s). Only had one flying model — a balsa wood
de Havilland Chipmunk — that terrified me and made me heave a sigh of relief
when it smashed into a garage wall on its maiden voyage. This mania started in
Don Mills and continued after we moved into deeper suburbia (aka Scarborough) where
I had regular war games with my friend in his parents’ basement … I still have
a vivid memory of our re-enactment of the Battle of the River Plate with the
pocket battleship Graf Spee and the
cruisers Ajax, Exeter and Achilles in
hot pursuit. Eventually I tired of building and meticulously painting tiny
fighter planes so I took them out into the backyard and blew them to
smithereens with my BB gun … all save an Italian Fiat CR42 biplane and a model
of the ill fated German battleship Bismarck.
45
rpm singles … I
had a fair collection of these including rarities by bands like The Who and the
Merseybeats (that my grandparents had sent me from England. I even had those
early recordings by the Beatles. Also had a few Buck Owens and the Buckaroos
singles which heralded my eventual switch to country music. Not sure what
became of these records though I still had the Buck Owens ones in the early 1970s
(because we played them incessantly on the Mouse Lash Memorial Sound System at
McClelland & Stewart).
Drawing,
Book Design & Handwriting …
In 1969 I graduated from the Advertising Department of the Ontario College of
Art … certain that I didn’t want to hitch my train to the world of Advertising!
So after some 30 or more interviews I found a spot aboard the Design Department
of book publisher McClelland & Stewart. Apart from knowing very little
about the logistics of designing books it was fairly obvious that my
handwriting was far and away the worst in the department. So I taught myself a
serviceable italic hand (peer pressure of the positive kind) and continued to
refine it over the years. I had started out with a rather slow and laborious
drawing style but soon found that clients expected things to be cranked out at
a furious rate … so I developed a faster style (initially influenced by Heinz
Edelmann, John Alcorn and Milton Glaser). Back in the 1970s we often had to
pre-separate artwork which I found most enjoyable. I designed covers, jackets,
page layouts, text and picture combinations, coffee table books, cookbooks,
textbooks, novels, books of poetry and even a 2000+ page set of encyclopedias …
anything and everything that came along. Our household book collection grew at
a burgeoning rate. I plan to eventually write some blogs about specific
projects as I think of them.
33-1/3
albums and cassette tapes … there
was a certain overlap between my collections of singles and albums … I had all
the Beatle albums, many by the Rolling Stones and the Byrds until I discovered
Gram Parsons and Cosmic American Music in the late 1970s which made my album
collection skyrocket. Eventually some music started being available on cassette
rather than on vinyl so I made the switch and bought a cassette player.
Sketchbooks
… Over the years
I have developed quite a collection and it’s still growing! I tend to carry one
everywhere and sometimes I’ve been known to make notes or even draw something.
Looking at old books sometimes gives me new ideas. Suspect this will be an
ongoing project.
CDs
and MP3s … I
resisted CDs until I found out that some of the music I craved no longer was
manufactured on cassette. I actually bought my first three CDs before I had
anything to play them on. I built a shrine hoping a player would appear but I
guess my faith wasn’t strong enough. One of my CDs was actually played on a
national radio show in 1993 before I was able to play it myself. I have
downloaded some music (rarely for free) but still prefer to purchase CDs.
Websites
… No sooner had I
weaned myself off the demon television then I found myself hooked on
Cyberspace. First it was e-mail, list serves and message boards. Once I parted
ways in 2002 with the company I’d been designing textbooks for since 2000 I
found my energies being largely transferred to yakking away on message boards
devoted to artists I liked (such as Robbie Fulks) and some that I could take or
leave (such as Cat Stevens). Then there was MySpace and later Facebook. Sometimes
it feels better just to get away from all that by writing something like this.
I went from being the #1 poster on the Fulks board to having over a thousand
Facebook friends. Am I addicted? Is the Pope Catholic?
Stuffs
… So what does
someone like me do when the work seems to have all dried up? Dream up book
concepts (one of them exists in print ready form but it may never emerge …
still hoping), make handmade greeting cards (all good practice) and write blogs
like this!
So
what’s next? … I’m
no futurist so I don’t really know. As Rodney Crowell said, “I’m still learning
how to fly.”
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