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Graphic Recording Catch-Up - featuring "Soul of the City"!

5/31/2013

Playing Catch-Up

Hello again! It's been so busy around here that I haven't had the chance to post any updates about anything. So here are just a few pictures from some recent graphic recordings... all of them incredibly fun in their own ways.

Above is a picture from the YWCA of Calgary's "Imaginarium" - a special space they're using for discussions about their future home. This will be an exciting journey to watch!

On the left are pictures from Mayor Nenshi's recent Campaign Volunteer Kick-Off Party (did I just say something about an exciting journey to watch??), and a snippet from a discussion held at the amazing City Hall School.

But here's what I really wanted to show you. A couple of weeks back I had the opportunity to draw some pictures at a really inspiring series of talks hosted by Calgary Economic Development. They've been holding a series of events called "Soul of the City", each of which has been about a different aspect of what makes Calgary tick. (I drew some pictures at a previous Soul of the City event, which you can see here.)

This one was about local food and featured talks by local chefs John Jackson and Connie De Sousa of CharCut fame; Luke Kimmel of the Leaf Ninjas (yay Ramsay!); Eliese Watson, Calgary's best-loved beekeeper; and Ron Finley, who came all the way from Los Angeles to tell us about how he'd started a local movement in his own hometown growing healthy food on boulevards and in empty lots. (He's got a pretty inspiring TED Talk on this subject, which you can see here.)

This evening ended with the chance to taste some of Calgary's local fare at the SAIT Culinary Campus - a rather delicious spot to visit.

Hope you enjoy the pictures - they were extremely fun to draw!

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Where are you tonight?

5/24/2013

5 Comments

It's Bob Dylan's birthday!

Since I've been doing a lot of graphic recording, I've been thinking a lot about how to draw images that capture words and concepts. And I was reminded of how I'd done something like this a long time ago (maybe around 1999?) as part of a Bob Dylan get-together.

But first I should explain what I mean by a "Bob Dylan get-together."

I used to follow Dylan's tour around a bit, and in the course of these adventures I became friends with other fans whom I'd meet again and again at different shows around the world. The main appeal of all this travelling was, of course, the amazing performances by Mr. Dylan, but the comraderie of all these diverse, yet like-minded fellow fans, quickly became a secondary attraction.

To start off, here are some comics from the Drawing Book from a few of those fun gatherings.

You get the idea. So, to make a long story short, there was one time when a bunch of friends had decided to get together after a show and play some kind of Bob Dylan trivia game. I couldn't make it to this event, so I thought I'd send along a contribution.

I listened to the song "Where Are You Tonight?" from Dylan's 1978 album Street Legal (for reasons too mysterious to understand, this has always been my favourite Dylan album). "Where Are You Tonight?" reads like a long list of briefly stated scenarios. I drew pictures - one for each line of the song. Then I cut out all the pictures and mixed them up, and sent them off to my friends in whatever city they were in (I can't remember). The idea was that they had to guess which picture matched which line from the song. Bonus points if they could do it without looking at the lyrics (i.e. if they actually knew the song that well!).

So, for Bob Dylan's birthday, all these years later, here's the same game for you. The song lyrics are at the end of all the pictures. Hint: The first panel just serves as the title of the song, and the next two panels actually correspond with the first two lines of the song. After that they are all mixed up.

Ok, I know that no one but the real Dylan fanatics would actually feel like undertaking this. So for the rest of you, it can just serve as a reflection on how graphic recording works - for example, it's easy enough to draw "There's a long distance train rolling through the rain," but how easy is it to draw something like "Strong men belittled by doubt" or "Horseplay and disease are killing me by degrees while the law looks the other way" ?? Well, you get the idea. I think my favourite picture in this little gallery is the one that depicts "There’s a babe in the arms of a woman in a rage" - or maybe, "If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise / Remind me to show you the scars" (what a line!).

Happy birthday Bob!

-sam.

P.S. My friend Margery & I are featured shaking hands in the panel that depicts the line, "In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed / Sacrifice was the code of the road." - That pretty much summed up our eventual strategy when it came to long unpredictable ambitious crazy Dylan tour expeditions!

P.P.S. I ALWAYS think of this song when I walk along Elizabeth Street in Ramsay.

P.P.P.S. If you'd like to listen to the song while you peruse these enigmatic scrawlings, it's here.

Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)

There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain
Tears on the letter I write
There’s a woman I long to touch and I miss her so much
But she’s drifting like a satellite

There’s a neon light ablaze in this green smoky haze
Laughter down on Elizabeth Street
And a lonesome bell tone in that valley of stone
Where she bathed in a stream of pure heat

Her father would emphasize you got to be more than streetwise
But he practiced what he preached from the heart
A full-blooded Cherokee, he predicted to me
The time and the place that the trouble would start

There’s a babe in the arms of a woman in a rage
And a longtime golden-haired stripper onstage
And she winds back the clock and she turns back the page
Of a book that no one can write
Oh, where are you tonight?

The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure
To live it you have to explode
In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed
Sacrifice was the code of the road

I left town at dawn, with Marcel and St. John
Strong men belittled by doubt
I couldn’t tell her what my private thoughts were
But she had some way of finding them out

He took dead-center aim but he missed just the same
She was waiting, putting flowers on the shelf
She could feel my despair as I climbed up her hair
And discovered her invisible self

There’s a lion in the road, there’s a demon escaped
There’s a million dreams gone, there’s a landscape being raped
As her beauty fades and I watch her undrape
I won’t but then again, maybe I might
Oh, if I could just find you tonight

I fought with my twin, that enemy within
’Til both of us fell by the way
Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees
While the law looks the other way

Your partners in crime hit me up for nickels and dimes
The guy you were lovin’ couldn’t stay clean
It felt outa place, my foot in his face
But he should-a stayed where his money was green

I bit into the root of forbidden fruit
With the juice running down my leg
Then I dealt with your boss, who’d never known about loss
And who always was too proud to beg

There’s a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room
And a pathway that leads up to the stars
If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise
Remind me to show you the scars

There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive
But without you it just doesn’t seem right
Oh, where are you tonight?
...

Well, hope you don't think I'm too crazy. Like I keep saying, I had a lot more free time back in those days. Meanwhile, here are some post-show parting words:

P.P.P.P.S. This picture was signed by the panelists. The one in the middle is Greil Marcus. Who were the others, I wonder?

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Calgary Books... or, the lack thereof

5/18/2013

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Samantha's Secret Room

When I read Calgary Is Awesome's post about fiction set in Calgary, I thought: Oh, I love this subject!!!

CIA's Amy Jo Espetveidt writes about her experience reading a novel while literally immersed in its local (Ontario) setting. I had a kind of similar experience. When I was a voraciously-reading kid of about eight or ten, my grandmother gave me this YA novel: Lyn Cook's "Samantha's Secret Room" (because of the name. Back then there weren't as many girls named Sam, so it was cool to read this one). The setting of the story didn't register with me back then - I just remember loving the twisty plot, the romantic older cousin, and other important details like that alluring turquoise hairband.

Later (when I was sixteen), my grandparents built a family cottage near to the Ontario town of Penetanguishene (a name that confounded all my German friends). My grandparents were Toronto people - they didn't really know the Penetang area at all. Why do I mention this? Because about ten years after that (when I was about twenty-six) and I had started to pay a lot of attention to YA fiction, I realized that everywhere in Penetang you'd come across that same old book: Samantha's Secret Room.

So I read it again and I realized it was set in Penetang (in the 1950's). Reading the book as a grown-up, I realized that it was 1) still a great read, and 2) it was a fabulous example of a YA novel making brave, bold, unapologetic use of a local Canadian setting! And doing so in the 1950's, no less! Reading that story after I'd actually been to all of those places, was delightful. And it was even more delightful to think that my grandmother, who, to my knowledge, had never been to Penetang and knew nothing about its local stories, had just happened to give that book to me so long ago, without knowing that it held the story of a place she'd later come to call home herself.

Here are some Penetang pics. But now back to Calgary Is Awesome's call for Calgary-based fiction.

Local Settings in Canadian Teen Fiction

I pretty much only read teenager books ("Young Adult Fiction" so-called), but I read them a lot. And I have some pretty strong feelings about the importance of placing stories in real, local settings. So I thought it would be fun - and easy - to come up with some Calgary-based YA story suggestions to send over to CIA.

But it turned out that this was really hard to do.

Let me give you some context. I know a bit about Canadian YA fiction. From Farley Mowat's The Black Joke to the contemporary fiction of Canadian writers like Tim Wynne-Jones, I love finding Canadian places referenced in YA novels (If you haven't read anything by Tim Wynne-Jones, rush out and do so right away. The Maestro, his compelling tale of a unlikely comraderie that is born in the northern Ontario wilderness, would be one good place to start).

But the settings don't have to be overt. When Monica Hughes writes about a nameless futuristic city in a YA sci-fi novel, it's close enough to Edmonton for me. When the amazing (amazing!!!) Beth Goobie describes her characters strolling along a well-described riverbank, I cheer for the unnamed, but implied, Saskatoon. But don't get me wrong - I also love it when authors place their Canadian settings front and centre (yes, that's centre with a -tre!), from Ethel Wilson's back-to-the-land classic Swamp Angel, to Cora Taylor's evocative prairie tale Julie, to Nan Gregory's Vancouver-based I'll Sing You One-O. (Swamp Angel isn't exactly a teenager book, but it's close enough for me.)

But Calgary?

Calgary is Awesome did track down a few titles for its blog, which is more than I was able to do.

So, there's local author Shirlee Smith Matheson. I've only read her non-fiction books - which certainly tell tales of local history - but I know she has a collection of YA books too, which I'm pretty sure are packed with Alberta - and probably Calgary - places and people. If this is the case, she's my one and only bona fide Calgary-setting YA author.

And there's longtime Calgary author Judd Palmer (who no longer resides here, I've heard) - who brought some cachet to the metier of being a Calgary author with his really beautiful-looking "Preposterous Fables for Unusual Children," (but didn't actually set any of his books in Calgary, as far as I know). These books are original and lovely, but I've always felt they might have missed the mark - supposedly for youngsters, I think they're actually enjoyed more by grown-ups. It makes them hard to categorize. But I digress, as usual.

I thought of Ted Stenhouse's Across the Steel River. I loved this book about the friendship between two young men - one Indigenous, the other a settler - not least because I had to wonder if there was a gay subtext in there (maybe I was reading into that - gay-themed YA fiction is a favourite subject of mine - and another genre of books which, though growing, isn't big enough for me. More on that another time). The novel is set in a 1950's Canadian prairie town which - I can't remember - may or may not be somewhere around Calgary. I might just associate it with Calgary because I bought it at the Calgary Children's Book Fair and Conference. This event, which was held at the Hillhurst Sunnyside Community Association for a few years, doesn't seem to be scheduled for this year (the person to ask would be Simon Rose, an enthusiastic Calgary children's author - but another one whose works may or may not actually be set in Calgary, as far as I know). Is this event no more? It was a great collaboration of local readers and writers!

And there's Vance Neudorf, whose impressively self-published first novel The Hammer (2008), as I recall, is set in a prairie town not far from Calgary (could be Three Hills - I'm pretty sure Neudorf hails from there himself).

I really liked The Hammer. I read it back in 2008 and really wanted to write about it, but got distracted by having a baby. I had been reading another new Canadian YA author - Ontario author James Bow - whose novel The Unwritten Girl was a bit of a sly homage to Madeleine L'Engle. Bow's novel incorporated a whole lot of references to her work. However, intentionally or not, it was Neudorf whom I felt was actually channelling L'Engle in his novel. Maybe it's the fact that both Neudorf and L'Engle seem to be fuelled by a strong spiritual Christianity, which inspires, rather than detracts from, their excellent storytelling skills. I thought The Hammer - at least, the early copy I read - needed some editing. But other than that, it was one of the strongest new local novels I'd read in a long time. That was in 2008. What's Vance Neudorf doing now, I wonder? Writing, I hope!

Why I Care About All This

Part of the reason I've thought so much about the importance of local settings is because of my own roundabout process of coming to terms with being a Calgary person.

As I wrote in this comic strip, I used to feel ashamed of coming from such a cultureless hick town. Then, inspired by New Zealand's brilliant children's writer Margaret Mahy, I started to feel that it actually behooves "hick town" residents to write about their towns, thereby transforming them into places worthy of culture and art.

A while ago, I wrote an essay that's partly about how Margaret Mahy overcame her inability to envision her hometown - and her home country - as places worthy of setting stories in. Here's a bit about that:

Mahy writes, "For a variety of reasons, partly because my own childhood reading was so predominantly British, my first stories were set in nowhere – or rather, in that place where all stories co-exist, where story is nothing but itself." However, Mahy's settings began increasingly to incorporate elements of a New Zealand setting, although initially, these elements were not necessarily apparent to readers. Mahy has said of her 1982 novel The Haunting: "In my mind the characters... lived in New Zealand, though there is no real clue to this in the story..."

...

"You'd think," says Mahy, interviewed in a 2005 article, "[that] you'd automatically be able to write about the place you've lived in all your life – but the stories I'd had read to me as a child [set predominantly in the United Kingdom] somehow disinherited me." Elsewhere, she has explained: "the landscape in which I had grown up and the idiom I heard every day seemed somehow unnatural to me..." Mahy's changeover from a writer labouring under what she has called an "imaginative displacement" from her native New Zealand, to a writer who, decades later, was able to say that she "felt quite triumphant over writing a story set in [her] own country," has been well documented, in numerous interviews, as well as in her own book of essays and criticism, A Dissolving Ghost, and Tessa Duder's 2005 biography, Margaret Mahy: A Writer's Life.

The conclusion to the essay was written as a comic strip, and this is part of it. You can read the rest of it here.

But you know what - I don't think this is the reason I can't find contemporary YA novels set in Calgary. It's not a case of that Canadian humility that makes us feel our hometowns aren't worth writing about. Most Canadian authors have gotten past that. It's something about Calgary.

Why Not Calgary?

OK, here's my theory.

I think there's a critical mass thing that happens - when enough people live somewhere, or at least know about that place, authors feel like they can write about it. So we have novels set in Paris and songs about Sunset Boulevard (or maybe that's a movie. But you know what I mean.) American authors always seem curiously unafraid to place their fiction in unapologetic local settings (even naming their stories after those place names - even when those places are fictional - from Centerburg Tales to Winesburg, Ohio) - but I think there's a different culture of place down there. As far as Canada goes, Ontario might be history/population-heavy enough that writers aren't afraid to throw down those weighty place names. At least, there are certainly a lot (a lot!!!) of YA novels set in Ontario.

On the other hand, there's also a strong precedent for nameless, placeless and/or fictional "Canadian" settings. From Margaret Laurence's Manawaka (based on Neepawa) to Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (set in the fictional town of Mariposa, modelled after Orillia), to James Bow's aforementioned The Unwritten Girl (set somewhere on the Bruce Peninsula, if I remember right). And there are countless stories that are just set "somewhere" - all specific references to location omitted - presumably (it always seems to me), so that the stories will be more "accessible" to American markets.

So here's what I think. Maybe Calgary falls into an awkward spot between a really well-known place (say, Paris) and that ambiguous, nameless "somewhere". Authors, or publishers, or somebody, must have the feeling that placing a story in Calgary places it somewhere in a reader's mind: somewhere limiting enough that it will distract from the universality of the story, or worse, dissuade the buyer.

Setting a story in some unnamed ambiguous prairie town gives the enormous markets - I mean, readers - in Ontario/the USA/etc the freedom to imagine the story in a prairie town of their choice. But saying it's in Calgary will immediately bring up an image in the minds of those buyers - er, readers - which might not appeal. Like... you name it... cowboys? Engineers? Right-wingers? Oil barons? Whatever it is, it's presumably not as "universal" as, say, an imagined character who lives in Toronto. That could be ANYBODY!

But ANYBODY could live here, too... and does. Are we letting Canadian readers know?

So What Can We Do?

We just have to keep telling stories about Calgary. We have to set stories in Calgary until it's as common to find stories set in Calgary, as it is to find stories set in Paris, or London, or New York. Or at least until "Calgary" doesn't read synonymously with "limited appeal" to publishers.

Am I totally wrong about this theory? Please let me know if that's the case! After all, I'm just making this up in my living room at 2 AM. Someday it would be fun to go listen in on what some real scholars have to say about all this.

Meanwhile, if you want your city to be known for the arts, you have to make the art yourself, and let people know where it's happening. That's why I'm writing comic strips about my neighbourhood. And I actually chose @calgaryhester as my Twitter handle (something I would never have dreamed of doing ten years ago... even if I could have imagined something like Twitter). (By the way, I realized afterwards that this handle might be awkward if I actually do ever leave Calgary, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.)

OK, I'm waiting for a bunch of indignant local authors who have set their novels in Calgary to set me straight. And I hope they've written to tell Calgary is Awesome that they're out there, too!

Notes... because I haven't said enough about all this

A few random related/unrelated things crossed my mind while I was writing all that...

1. Brooke's Blog

Back in university I made a friend who liked books, just like me (maybe even more). It seems we still have a few interests in common, because these days he's blogging about stories from around the world that refer to Canada. Not Canadian books - not books entirely set in Canada - but places in which Canada gets a mention from a non-Canadian point of view. This is a fun and actually pretty enlightening subject to read about. Brooke's blog about "Canada through the eyes of World Literature" is called Wow - Canada! And you should check it out. Even though he lives in Toronto (ha, ha).

There are quite a few pictures of Brooke in the Drawing Book, but here's the only one I can find right at the moment - from a very short comic strip called "Eulogy for a Scarf."

When I first saw Brooke's blog, I thought right away of this one tantalizing, seemingly throwaway reference to a Canadian setting in a non-Canadian book: it's from Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner is one of the few "grown up" authors I really love), and shows up in the last line of the last page of the book, at the end of a list of the characters' brief biographies:

After wading through this gigantic long novel about the Deep South, we find out that one of the main characters is from Edmonton, of all places! In fact, since he seems to have outlived all the other characters in the story, it looks like this one guy in Edmonton is the sole surviving keeper of the whole epic tale. Why Edmonton??? We never find out any more about it, despite the fact that this is a book that's all about finding out the reasons behind things. So you know there's got to be a reason. Just not what the reason is. That's one heck of an enigmatic Canadian reference.

Luckily, I'm not the only one who's been wondering. It looks as though a scholar by the name of Kayoko Shimanuki, apparently a doctoral student at Kyoto University sometime after 2006, wrote a paper called Absalom, Absalom! Reconsidered: A Story of Canadian Shreve. It doesn't explain why Faulkner picked Edmonton, but it does talk about how Shreve's Canadian-ness influences his perspective on this American story. I hope Shimanuki got that PhD.

2. More about Margaret Mahy

Here's some more from that essay about how Mahy struggled to overcome a whole nation's history of literaturelessness... and how Canada has suffered from the same trouble. But not anymore, right?

Mahy's "displacement" is accredited (in a 2004 interview) in part to "the default assumption then, [when Mahy was a child] and for a long time afterwards, ...that New Zealand experiences were less interesting and valuable than British or European ones" (Ridge 2004). Contributing to this kind of assumption was the absence of a solid oeuvre of New Zealand writing. Mahy explains elsewhere: "Other contemporary New Zealand writers also had difficulty in writing about New Zealand at that time, partly because there was so little to draw on. The indigenous writing of the 1930s and 1940s was very self-conscious" (Eccleshare). As Mahy says of her reaction to this literary climate: "I didn't imaginatively believe my own New Zealand stories in the ways I believed in the fantasies and such things that I'd been writing" (Larsen).

Some aspects of New Zealand's developing literary climate could be said to have had their parallels in Canada. Jennifer Andrews has written that the respected Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock "may have believed that Canadian humour... was better positioned to compete on the world stage when it was not overtly defined as Canadian" ("Humouring"). A traditional view of Canada's cultural output was expressed by British children's literature critic John Rowe Townsend in 1976: "Canada, in children's books as in much else [including, presumably, comics], remains in the American shadow" (210).

3. Proof that I'm insane

Once, I recorded... and graphed (!!??)... all the references to Canada that were made in over 20 years of "For Better of For Worse." (Actually, I think my multi-talented friend Andrew helped me make the graph.) I'm too sleepy to say any more about this now, for which I'm sure you will be truly grateful.

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Graphic Recording at City Hall

5/14/2013

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This morning I had a pretty fun and unusual experience - contributing a graphic recording to a meeting of the City of Calgary's Priorities & Finance Committee down at City Hall.

But before I tell you about that, I just have to reminisce about another time I drew pictures at a political gathering. I think it must have been in 1996, I had occasion to attend a session of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta in Edmonton. I was sitting up high in some gallery or other and... because it's what I always do... I drew a picture. Of the Speaker of the House. I think the Speaker at the time was Stanley Schumacher. Here it is.

Well, I don't remember all the details, but suffice to say, someone looked up and noticed me doing this dastardly deed, and pretty soon some security guards came up to ask me to stop drawing. The sketch was confiscated! I was (politely) asked to leave! Pages were passing notes all around the floor as MLAs shook their heads in dismay (and surprise). Apparently, it was against the law to draw in the "Leg" (that's short for Legislature, and it's pronounced "Lej").

Except, as it turned out, it wasn't against the law - not quite. As I learned later, every provincial government in Canada had such a rule: no drawing during sessions. So the Alberta Legislature was quick to put the sketching to a stop. However, when someone checked later, it was discovered that this wasn't actually law in Alberta. Apparently this had never come up before (hadn't any gallery-sitter like myself ever gotten bored and started doodling??), and the law had never officially been passed. I was told that, after this, the law would be passed forthwith. So, thanks to this picture, a nice new Albertan law. I wonder if that actually did happen. I didn't stick around to find out. But I did get my sketch back (along with some gracious apologies when everyone realized I was just a bored art student and not some sneaky reporter trying to capture the hidden details of the Assembly's inner workings).

That was a far cry from today's committee meeting at the Calgary City Hall, during which anyone and everyone in attendance was free to tweet, photograph, message, and otherwise create artistic recordings of the proceedings.

Which brings me to the graphic recording stuff.

The Priorities and Finance Committee is chaired by the Mayor and includes six Aldermen (although any aldermen can sit in). The public and the media can attend the meetings, but aren't allotted time to speak or ask questions (although they can be invited to speak). To find out the official list of functions performed by the committee, you can take a look here. Today, however, I was there to help out a City Administration team called the Engage Resource Unit. These folks have been working for quite a long time on the issue of civic engagement: in other words (theirs), they’ve been asking how they can make it easier for Calgarians to provide input into City decisions. Their project was up for review, and so they were among the people presenting their reports to the Committee today. My job was to draw pictures during their presentation and the subsequent Q & A.

Why would the Engage Review team think of doing something like this? Partly just to illustrate the fact that there are multiple ways to present information, and that sometimes a creative approach can make information more accessible to a wider audience. (I did some graphic recording for them at their recent event Continue the Conversation, of which you can see a very nice little video here.)

Good, in theory. I'm not sure how well I was able to illustrate the lightning-paced presentation and discussion that ensued - with a lot of content to capture, there wasn't as much time to draw. I think I recorded the question-and-answer part well enough, but I'm not sure how clearly I was able to convey the content of the presentation. My other challenge was not knowing how to pace myself - was this going to be a ten-minute rubber stamp, or a day-long debate? I'm actually not sure how long I drew - over half an hour, but under an hour, I think. Here's the picture that was there when the discussion ceased (and the initiative approved - congrats, Engage Review!):

I didn't stay for the whole meeting, but did enjoy getting to be there for the approval of a few other awesome-sounding agenda items, such as the Plain Language Policy, summed up here by the Herald's Jason Markusoff (who was also present, taking more organized notes than mine); and the Calgary Poverty Reduction Initiative, which happily enjoyed the Committee's overwhelming support, and which Mr. Markusoff wrote about here.

Luckily, I had the chance afterwards to colour things in, tidy things up, and try to make the whole mad scramble a bit more visually appealing. Here are some details:

Well, it was an experiment, and I'm honoured that the City administrators and Council invited me to contribute to their process. It might turn out that civic committee meetings don't make for the ideal graphic recording conditions, but I do feel pretty excited about the possibilities of merging a traditionally dry, bureaucratic organization like a civic administration with an emerging and essentially weird practice like graphic recording. I guess that might say something about this administration. I think the fact that Mayor Nenshi conducted the entire meeting while wearing a St. John's, NB team jersey just speaks to that. (And by the way... what team was it? What sport??? I was too busy writing everything down, to even notice!)

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Public Art is Alive & Well

5/12/2013

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Last week, I walked from the East Village over to Bridgeland on the other side of the river. Before I crossed the bridge, I noticed this (I later stole this photo, which was posted here on Twitter):

Meanwhile, some noted Calgary observers were discussing this same subject on Twitter:

Jeremy Klaszus ‏@klaszus The weird East Village decals of people in water are being removed—on this pier at least #yyc

Zoey Duncan ‏@zoeywrites @klaszus Looking forward to whatever replaces them. They weren't terrible, but certainly weird.

Aaron Stayner ‏@BigtimeYYC @zoeywrites @klaszus Thank goodness, never cared for those.

Aaron Stayner ‏@BigtimeYYC @zoeywrites @klaszus Besides we need something colourful under those bridges. Grey and white didn't cut it.

Jeremy Klaszus ‏@klaszus @BigtimeYYC @zoeywrites They were, uh, different. I agree — something with colours would be good there!

Well, I kept on walking over the Langevin Bridge. And when I got to the other side, I found myself underneath the enormous grey concrete flyover. Here's how it looks:

Thousands of people drive under it every day, and numerous Calgarians also walk, jog, bike, wait for the lights to change, stop at Starbucks, and fill up their cars... UNDER IT.

I used to live in Bridgeland, and I still have the same whimsical thought I had then: THIS is the spot that's crying out for a mural!!!

Just take a look at the flyover, and then imagine all that grey concrete covered with something like Dean Stanton's fabulous colourful Sunalta School mural (right).

I'm looking forward to the new RiverWalk public art. But if I can ever figure out a safe way to do it, I'd love to propose a colourful facelift to the underside of the flyover.

And this has nothing to do with the flyover, but it's just something else I noticed as I walked along McDougall Road in Bridgeland. A house with a lovely frosted-glass pattern on its window... and a garden-implement-inspired gargoyle keeping watch. Whatever happens along the RiverWalk, I think public art... of one variety or another... is alive and well in Calgary's inner city.

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sam hester

I am a graphic recorder based in Calgary. I like local stories. I write comics when I have free time. And I leave eraser shavings everywhere I go.

Looking for a
graphic recorder?
Look here!

contact me

sam@the23rdstory.com

my website

www.the23rdstory.com started as a blog and now includes some information about my graphic recording practice as well.

I also have an (old) website which features a lot of my (old) work. Look out, it's a bit clunky and there are a lot of links that don't go anywhere, but there are still a few interesting things there:
www.thedrawingbook.com

Graphic Recording Catch-Up - featuring "Soul of the City"!

Playing Catch-Up

Where are you tonight?

Calgary Books... or, the lack thereof

Samantha's Secret Room

Local Settings in Canadian Teen Fiction

Why I Care About All This

Why Not Calgary?

So What Can We Do?

Notes... because I haven't said enough about all this

Graphic Recording at City Hall

Public Art is Alive & Well

sam hester

Looking for a
graphic recorder?
Look here!

contact me

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Graphic Recording Catch-Up - featuring "Soul of the City"!

Playing Catch-Up

Where are you tonight?

Calgary Books... or, the lack thereof

Samantha's Secret Room

Local Settings in Canadian Teen Fiction

Why I Care About All This

Why Not Calgary?

So What Can We Do?

Notes... because I haven't said enough about all this

Graphic Recording at City Hall

Public Art is Alive & Well

sam hester

Looking for agraphic recorder? Look here!

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my website

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Looking for a
graphic recorder?
Look here!