I was just going down to get a few cookies and take a break from drawing, I swear. But then, there I was, watching an incredible story about Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist and creator of Tintin. The documentary centers on a fantastic (both meanings of the word) interview from 1971 by a young reporter who wasn’t hoping for much, yet he got an amazingly intimate picture of Hergé’s childhood, his sometimes stifling Catholicism, his experiences under Nazi rule, his divorce, and his waning need to express himself through his comics. If you are at all interested in comics or history or politics or adventurous stories or Tintin himself, I strongly advise you to check your PBS listings to see when this will be on again.

Just as I stumbled onto Tintin this evening, my introduction to him was similarly accidental. One of the people who happened to live in my dorm my first year in college was from rural Indiana, and he often wandered toward a bit of a fantasy world that was inspired by the things he read and the movies he watched. He had even given himself a new name when he got to college, perhaps inspired by Hergé who was born Georges Remi. He was the first person I had met who was really into comics and manga and Miyazaki, and his passion for those things was fundamentally influential to me and the career path I am now pursuing.

Anyway, much like I am stunned when a bookstore employee hasn’t heard of the Caldecott Medal, this guy couldn’t believe that I– an art major interested in children’s books– didn’t know about Tintin. Of course, the reason I was an art major and interested in children’s books had a lot to do with his passion for both subjects, but instead of recognizing his influence, I dismissed him as a bit of a zealot.

It wasn’t until several years after we had graduated that I first read any Tintin books, and then it was because I was waiting in a bookstore to meet up with someone. At the time I was still heavliy into children’s books, but not yet looking at comics very seriously. As I was waiting, I was done looking at the new children’s books, so I wandered the store and ended up by the graphic novel section. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but the encounter with my college friend had implanted the name “Tintin” in my head, and there on the shelf was a whole row of these stories. When I pulled one down and flipped through it, I was immediately astounded by the detailed artwork.

Hergé is known for his skilled combining of detailed, hyper-realistic backgrounds with these wonderfully caricatured characters. But my criteria when looking at children’s books (and now comics) is that is okay to be seduced by the art, but I won’t buy it if the story isn’t compelling. To shorten this lengthening story, I walked out of that store with three volumes of Tintin stories.

It’s funny to me when I think about the sequences of events that lead me from one point in my life to another. Even more interesting to me are the triggers that get me to think about those paths. As much as I have grumbled this past year (not here, I guess) about my graduate school experience, I am getting a lot of mileage out of the introspection it has imposed. Don’t be surprised to see more coming out of both the experiences I am recalling, and also the meta-experiences of how I came to recall these events. It’s all fodder for the paintbrushes.

Well, it’s been way too long. Like this comic I drew for the Daily Tar Heel, I haven’t had much room on my mental table to write much here lately, but I am going to try to change that soon.

School is winding down, and I am on to thinking about summer plans. So far I have a show at the end of June to plan for and work towards, I am working on pulling together the Lions, Tigers, Bears, Etc. show at Wootini for July, and I will be attending a week-long workshop regarding the life of a university professor in May. Otherwise, I am looking for freelance work in web programming or illustration and design, so let me know what you got.

Needless to say, grad school has been all-consuming, so this summer I should feel a little more available to the world. I’m really excited about the artwork I am planning on pursuing, so that should help me keep things rolling through my solo show this fall and beyond.

Speaking of inspiring art work, I just got back from Minneapolis where I saw two amazing shows. At the Juxtapoz anniversary show, up at OX-OP and Soo Vac, I got to see a lot of my favorite artists’ work in-person for the first time, including people who I have invited to the Lions, Tigers, Bears, Etc. show. This is going to be good! I also went to see the Kiki Smith show at the Walker Art Center. Just amazing! It was great to see another artist working across so many mediums and still stitching a central idea thread through all the works. Something to aspire to, for sure.

Anyway, there is much to catch up on, in life and here on this site. Expect to see new work up in the coming weeks, and possibly even a new look for the Bunch of Monkeys Workshop…

This morning on NPR, they ran a story about how New Orleans is sinking, and it has been for over a century. This is really more Cailin’s field of expertise (fluvial geomorphology) but I’ll try to give that layman’s summary:

Basically New Orleans is built on sediment. LOTS of sediment. And the deeper layers of the sediment are compacting and eroding as groundwater flows through it over time. They said that over the past century, New Orleans has sunken about two feet, but that the rate of the erosion has been accellerating, and the city may sink as much as a yard or a meter over the next century. Obviously that’s not good, since much of the city is already below sea level.

The natural course of things, had people not interfered and dammed and leveed the river, is that the Mighty Miss would overflow its banks, bringing with it a huge slug of sediment to replenish the deeper layers that are constantly eroding. The sand and soil would get layed over the top of the land, the relative height of the land would stay about the same, and, most importantly, it would stay above sea level. But once we began to build on top of this land, we didn’t want it to flood, so we protected our property with the levees and dams. And now we are witnessing why that isn’t sustainable in the long-term.

Now this isn’t new information. People have known this was happening for a long time, and some people even wrote about it a year ago in this little magazine, called National Geographic. In fact the opening paragraphs of this story are so eery, they may as well have been written by Nostradamus.

But the truth is that the story was written by well-informed scientists who have been studying the problem for years. After the hubbub about who knew what and when regarding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center it will be interesting to watch the finger-pointing and the “special investigations” (Ooooo!) and see who ends up the scapegoat for this horrible natural and unnatural disaster.

Personally, I don’t think it matters much why or how it happened that “better” plans weren’t made for this hurricane, or more proactive steps weren’t taken to stop the hijackers four years ago. What matters to me is what plans we are going to make for the next potential hurricane or for whatever psychopaths might decide to do in the future.

To (roughly) quote a good movie I saw recently, “We can’t change the past, and we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. All we have is now.”