One of the ways a line-of-argument can alienate me is if it under-values the worth of conceptual thinking. Sure, you won't see conceptual thought in lots of important places: ROI, sales figures, or even the plans for the future. Deliverables are the name of the game 99% of the time. The thing, in this life, right now. Whatever that is. But from whence does the thing come from? Where does innovation come from? Where does our understanding of a problem come from? From the conceptual. Conceptual thought requires of a thinker a disengagement with the contingent, with our instantiation, and our histories. People are fond of saying that "we should bring our experiences to the table" but this kind of empiricism only works some of the time. It works well at parties, for example. It also works well in group therapy, I'm guessing, and any other community-oriented or social behaviour. But if you want to look at systems, as systems, then perhaps it's time to think conceptually. It's incumbent on the thinker to separate the necessary from the contingent. It is not incumbent that the thinker constantly cash her ideas out. You need to let some ideas ride. ¶ Had a thought last night. Why not take the main menu down from the feature area. Clean up the top of the page. Feedback welcomed.

Labels: Siteway, Vague

¶ 3:59 PM

Last winter I received an interesting phone call. It was a Saturday afternoon and we were having a couple of festive drinks if you must know. Living in one hell of a good apartment in London, Ontario, at the time, I answered the phone in good spirits: Hello? I don't typically get business calls on Saturdays. I didn't recognize the voice on the other end of the line: Oh, hey, yeah, is this Antony from Siteway? It was Dave Ellis, business partner in a new pizza venture in Brooklyn. We chatted a bit about what it might take for me to do an illustration for the pizzeria's sign and menu. And then Dave got down to it: it was going to be a portrait of the "Mayor of Elisabeth Street", Vinny Vella, Sr., an actor I'd later recognize from Casino and Ghost Dog. Pauline and I were going to visit NYC soon and I told this to Dave. I suggested we meet up. Dave didn't know how to take this at first, but when we spoke a time later he thought dinner might be in order. Weeks later we did exactly that. It was a great night, the illustration was well received, and now Vinny Vella's Pizza (374 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg, NYC) is open for business. Here's a piece from the Village Voice. ¶ Have a great weekend folks. Watch for Admiration of Benefit #2, on Monday afternoon.

Labels: AdmirationOfBenefit, Freelancing, Siteway

¶ 11:12 AM

There are soul deaths and then there are soul deaths. ¶ Here's something I've been contemplating lately: I've been engaged with my work, and by work I mean the lines I draw, in an unprecedented manner of late. It's partly because I decided one day that this would be a good idea. And as you're all already aware, being a free agent requires the agent take care of sales, marketing, accounting, office and project management, and even janitorial services. So telling yourself to "focus on the work" is not only simple and comforting, it's rewarding. It's investing in better furnaces for HQ, better equipment at the factory, better ships for your fleet. I'm investing in the lifeblood of my industry: drawing. The drawing action itself has become a relaxing enterprise; an experience that is itself enjoyable, and not just because of the results. The results, the lines drawn as it were, are themselves relaxing, if only briefly. Imagine the ink from an industrial inkjet bleeding into your expensive art paper. It only lasts as ink for half a second. Then it becomes part of the paper. That's what I mean by relaxing. Like the final piece that snuggly fits into the puzzle. The easiest piece of all. And yet, it's rigid, in there, the instantiating unit. In any case, some by-products of this focus: a sketchbook that's not half-bad, some Siteway dusting, continued experiments over on flickr, and more steam in the engine. ¶ It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit. I see advertisements for active young men, as if activity were the whole of a young man's capital. Yet I have been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto. What a doubtful compliment this is to pay me! As if he had met me half-way across the ocean beating up against the wind, but bound nowhere, and proposed to me to go along with him! If I did, what do you think the underwriters would say? No, no! I am not without employment at this stage of the voyage. To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when I was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as I came of age I embarked.—Henry David Thoreau, from Life Without Principle.

Labels: AdmirationOfBenefit, Clear, FeaturedIllustration, Heroes, Siteway, Vague

¶ 7:51 PM

It's been too long since I've taken a day to do some Siteway housekeeping and today was that day. The pulldown menu to that sits second from top on the right column has now been updated to reflect Siteway weekly illustrations from this past spring and summer. In addition, I've updated my long list of an Illustration page. With a new illustration every week I'm going to soon need a simplified way of organizing my portraits here on Siteway. It's satisfying to do this sort of work, however. It's sometimes hard to believe I've been maintaining this site by myself for more than a decade. It's so big now that I sometimes need Google just to find my own illustrations. ¶ Half the time I just don't know. It's the other half I concentrate on. I put the focus on the work. I can only hope the practise translates into better and better visual representations of what is going on between my ears. Not to mention all the stuff I haven't yet drummed up the courage to post. Lots in store, lots in store.

Labels: Future, Siteway, Vague

¶ 4:31 PM

I've spent the evening quite literally downloading stuff from my brain into the computer. It was getting too jammed up in there. I've felt, recently, that I've been carrying around too many half-thoughts, too many plans, too many avenues. Many people, at least in my experience, benefit from this kind of displacement (from mind to world) and I'm no exception. It manifests itself in many ways, depending on the individual and the situation. I've missed out on some fun times this evening but instead I've secured my mental footing. I needed a night to focus purely on thought. ¶ Good night.

Labels: Siteway, Vague

¶ 9:33 PM

There was a time, a time not too long ago, when, if you were a fly on the wall of my office, you'd see me animating banner ads day in and out. And if I wasn't actually animating them, I'd be in a meeting about them, or having beer with my co-workers brainstorming about them, or coming up with concepts for them. I used to enjoy many parts of this life and I'm grateful for my early days in Advertising. Not only do I count many post-university friends in the industry I worked, but I also had my fair share of mentors and insights. I might have even helped a few people along the way. With the positive, however, came some pretty weighted moments where I would feel decidedly unfulfilled, decidedly unhappy, decidedly scared. I don't romanticize this. I was scared. I would expect most people would include these feelings into the category of Necessary Evils, that is, working for a living. I grant this possibility. But I find it curious that ever since I started to take those anxieties seriously, my working life improved, in the sense that I enjoyed it more. And this is long before I left employed life. This started when I started to talk to my managers in the kind of candid professional tone that I'd been trying out since high school. It didn't work as well on teachers, for the most part. This is in part because they had too many things going on at once to ultimately care about an average and well-behaved student who seemed to be heading in a pretty good direction (me). Managers, however, who know the difficulty of creating a good team, have always appreciated it. Even if I wasn't the strongest member of said team. What am I getting at? Two things. 1. You're probably more valuable to your employer than you realise. 2. I built a new banner ad today. It's for Siteway Select. It's promoting my newest print available, of Marlon Brando in the Wild One.

Labels: Advertising, CareerTalk, Freelancing, Siteway, SitewaySelect

¶ 11:19 AM

I've made some small changes to Siteway over the past few weeks. Do let me know if anything seems out of place on your browser. I have some additional tweaks in mind. Siteway has become very much a working site, even more than it had become, and overall I'm still very happy with the tone herein. One day soon I'd like to take Siteway to a place where an HTML/CSS/Ajax superstar can help me takes things even further. Ideally this will happen in early 2008. If you are said superstar, get in touch. ¶ I'm marketing myself as a P.I., a private illustrator, not just because I like film noir (though I can't deny its influence). I've long talked about how I have attempted to model my career on independent professionals like the working actor. Though there are many one-man shows, the private investigator has captured the imagination of story-tellers more per capita than all other freelancing careers combined. That's just conjecture. I believe it to be true, though, for all the obvious reasons and some less obvious ones. One less obvious reason is they typically embody the tension between, on the one hand, the law, the mainstream, the expected, and on the other, the truth. In other words, they're on the margins, self-sustaining and yet unselfish. And, while I can't claim to hold this position, I can certainly aspire to it. ¶ Watch for some of my illustrations in the upcoming Rich Lists issue of Forbes, hitting newsstands in late September.

Labels: Cinema, Forbes, Freelancing, Siteway

¶ 12:24 PM

It has become something of a tradition of mine to write a state-of-the-Siteway address at the beginning of May. I began writing on Siteway in early May 2000 which makes this blog roughly seven years old. From the banal to the ridiculous, self-promotion to self-analysis, I've tried not to think about the categories of my writing too much (I've recently adopted the use of tags which are an attempt to coalesce themes). I see no reason to abandon this form of expression, and I look forward to more. And don't worry, I haven't forgotten about Avery Hutch. ¶ Having said that, the rest of my sites are not exactly as established as Siteway. While Siteway is situated in the real world, as the company that I actually run as a freelance illustrator, the other three sites exist primarily in an imaginary world (being actual web sites, however, brings them a little closer to this world). Tonicville is the fictional city I'm developing, Phelts is the company that finally got it right, and Coastalmatic is the name of the cinema in Tonicville that lifted Tom Phelts' company from small-time to big-time. Hence Phelts' interest in film. However, it's not as simple as all that. I'm working hard developing three additional visual languages for each site that work independently and as a family. The goal is a showing of illustrations, drawings, posters, artifacts, and even some sculpture from the Tonicville world in Spring 2008. Between now and then, however, I'll still be showing portraits from the Siteway canon. ¶ One way to think about my over-arching objective is to think of Siteway as the solid real-world foundation to a wonderful playland of ideas, stories, film, and art. Tom Phelts, Matchstick, and the rest of my characters and props will populate a world inspired by the ideas within Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. You'll see the world first, at the Spring 2008 show. Until then, there will be glimpses on the other sites. I've abandoned the weekly Coastalmatic animations not because I didn't think they were going in a good direction but because I don't have the capacity to commit to another weekly art object. And I don't want to sacrifice quality. ¶ Here's to May, here's to our upcoming sailing course, a summer of adventure, and always an eye on the prize.

Labels: Clear, Coastalmatic, Phelts, Siteway, Tonicville

¶ 12:55 PM

The other night I was trying to think of something to write on Siteway and that's when I realised something wasn't right. Usually, I think about what I'm going to write about in the same way that I treat oxygen. If I can't breathe this second, I'll breathe in the next. Ideas were everywhere. But the other night it dawned on me that my Siteway voice was drying up. Prognosis uncertain. Tonight I read about Jason Kottke's decision to stop his micropayment experiment. For those of you not familiar with Kottke's earlier decision, in a nutshell he decided to quit his regular job to take blogging seriously enough to devote his entire labour towards it. He decided to do this via a public support initiative in a very similar way that a public broadcaster might. I was a supporter, it should be noted. I'm not entirely sure what to think. I'm deeply saddened by this news*. When I first read his post, I instinctively thought of writing to him directly, if only to find some answers. Please pardon the hyperbole, I know it's hard to read, but you have to understand that it was his blog which inspired this one. I'm sure we haven't seen the end of Kottke, but a part of me brushed up against that eventual inevitability tonight. *I should note that I'm not saddened by the decision per se, but that it wasn't a smashing success that included things like growth for Jason. I thought it would be. ¶ The voice is drying but not dry. There's more where this came from.

Labels: Siteway, Vague

¶ 12:25 AM

What have I done? It's too late for that. What have I become? Truth is: nothing yet. ¶ These are the lyrics from a Snow Patrol song entitled Chocolate which is one of those songs that simply is 2004 to me. It's also one of those songs that has a title that seems to have nothing to do with the lyrics. Is there a name for this sort of thing? ¶ A few of us, including the one and only Rado, went to see them at Lee's in April. For me it was a sober evening because I was following doctor's orders regarding alcohol consumption with antibiotics. When Chocolate came on I understood that the film idea I had been mulling over in my mind, a treatise on guilt, had to be made. With a little help it now seems more likely.¶ Lady luck has, for the moment, returned. We had probably the best Japanese food I've ever eaten last night at Fune. Deliciously touristy without the traps and service as if it were ripped out of airline magazine copy. ¶ Today is a big day. This morning I woke up and immediately went out on to the patio to spray paint would-be blood onto my print. Later I'm picking up my custom-built frame from the Victor Gallery for the Square Foot show. Then later still I have a lesson with Jason Bourne on the life of an internation spy, followed by a night of spirited drinks to be followed by a day of Siteway work.

Labels: Lyric, Restaurants, Siteway

¶ 11:12 AM