Insignificant and occasionally interesting contributions to the cognition of reality…

Illustration by Andreas Hykade. Courtesy of Chris Robinson.

Everything I’ve written non-Pimp wise has in some ways always sought to uncover the character or the essence of the subject. The subjects are often just main characters in a larger story. Last year I started writing a book about a relatively famous hockey player (Doug Harvey). He was a great player, but my interest was in his character. He was a fascinating figure who suffered from alcoholism and manic depression and beyond that was a bit of a unique figure who shunned the so-called normal routes in life. I didn't really have problems talking about his off-ice life with former players, but I did get the sense that the prevailing belief was that Harvey should be judged only for what he did on the ice, not off. I faced a similar issue a few months later when I wrote a piece about the actor Sterling Hayden. Again, I didn't care much about his films (hell..neither did he!), I was curious about his iconoclastic behaviour (yes...he was a boozer too). Most recently, there was the Pete Townshend/child porn incident. Townshend was, I dunno, the guru of my teens. His words and music about the struggles of identity and the anger and frustration of the music definitely provided me with an outlet for my own fuckedupness. Closer to home, most of us now know that Norman McLaren had some issues with drugs and booze and it's been said that Eve Lambart often covered up many of McLaren's timing screw ups. Yuri Norstein is a misogynist twit. But hey…as much as I try to find empathy with my subjects, I still speak from a nice safe distance…at least until recently. In March, distance was obliterated when I learned that an animator/friend of mine might have committed a pretty violent assault.

The Full Picture
Yes...okay. There's a big difference between committing a crime, having an illness and just being a basic prick. You can very likely fully enjoy Tale of Tales still knowing that Norstein thinks that women are subservient to men and that his wife remains an unacknowledged contributor to his work. Same with McLaren. How much of his success was due to Eve Lambart? Why wasn't it fully acknowledged? I don’t think it takes much away from McLaren’s achievements. I guess my beef with guys like Norstein and McLaren, and even assorted troubled hockey players I know about, is not that I, for one, want to exploit and destroy them...but rather to just acknowledge the completeness of who they are. Doug Harvey was a fantastic hockey player, so I find it even more incredible that he achieved this while battling manic depression and eventually alcoholism. Harvey's illnesses were a part of who he was...no different from Norstein and McLaren. But they should be known. Generally we read these superficial hagiographies that exist only to celebrate the subject. So ya know we get the charitable deeds, the setbacks that they had to overcome (generally financial or academic)...but umm...WHY is it okay for us to know how great some figure was with charities or kids or old farting ladies but NOT that he was alcoholic, depressive or had violent tendencies toward small animals? Artists, no matter what they might say, do not exist on islands. Everything they create is tied up with the society that surrounds them. You simply cannot escape that. As I've noted before...what happens when we get these sanitized visions is that invariably we get the opposite extreme: the gossipy, scandal ridden piece that seeks only to dish the dirt on the subject. These too are generally crap because they just dish the dirt without any deep contextualization. Take Cartoon Capers, a book about Canadian animation history. The author talks about both McLaren's and Ryan Larkin's addiction problems (and Arthur Lipsett's battles with depression) but doesn't even attempt to explore it. As a kid, I was stupid (more so) and I figured every celebrity/hero/artist, whatever, was perfect. They were angels. It made my imperfections that much worse. From the get go I just figured I was a fuck up destined to hell (I was right of course)...but what I'm saying is how many kids are getting fucked up by trying to emulate the illusory perfection of their heroes? I mean shit...I sure as hell would have loved to have known that from the start that these hockey players I worshipped were dysfunctional screw ups like you and me. Wouldn't it be more comforting to know your heroes are like you? Ironically...teenagers seemed to get it. I was drawn to Pete Townshend's music because it evoked anger, frustration, tension while his words articulated a variety of conflicts within each of us. Kurt Cobain is of course another example.