Hello all. If you want, in our Short Attention Span Theater Life, you may just scroll to the video below and watch it purely without the explanation. Or, if you’d like to know the story of how it came to be, please read on! I came home to Illinois for Easter but to also celebrate my joint or dual birthday with my father on April 21st. Which ironically, is also the founding day of Bonaventure Cemetery in 1846. So a triple header of a blessed birthday! Its also the birthday of Robert Smith from The Cure, but that’s just me making a fan connection. And speaking of blessed, I was adopted by some great parents who clearly took the birthday sameness as a sign from above many years ago before being blessed by the birth of my younger brother two years later. So you see, to be both born of a sign, under a sign or connected to “signs,” which is simply another word for “significance,” I’ve always paid them attention throught the special lens of my very blessed existence. In fact, I’m not sure if I consider anything insignificant. We as human beings process a lot of them at any given moment through our senses, and if anything, spend most of our time, sorting through them to identify which are the most important and meaningful. Which then comes down to our frame of reference or knowledge of life. I get caught saying this a great deal, but some of us just use salt while others use it, enjoy it, but want to know why we do and where it came from. That would define my mind at a glance. So no surprises here, I was simply out for a walk in Mahomet, Illinois, where I once had a young love named Shannon, and where there are some pretty interesting cemeteries, on a trail called The Buffalo Trace Prairie Trail which like its name, was once buffalo grazing grounds and where natives and pioneers tracked them. You see, even my walking trails have to have rich historical texture as I like walking with ancestral energy things you could say. And if ever in the area, do check out The Museum of The Grand Prairie nearby and the loads of unique walking trails replete with awesome historical markers and ways of observing prairie restoration and other types of plant and land studies. Really interesting! All of that said, it was on a walk there on the Buffalo Trace Trail Loop where I caught site of these medeval like spikes in menacing clusters growing out of the lower part of Honey Locust Trees. Picture every ancient battle movie scene with swinging spike armaments, sometimes horror flick or on The Walking Dead, the spiked walker, you’ll understand. Except these are smooth and worn over with bark, like a true appendage. And in certain light seem like flowers made of really sharp tooth picks. Nature’s barbed wire.
Even if initially alarmed and awed by the sight, I could not help but to be in deep respect for its life as well as the intelligence of its survival mode. Tree huggers need not apply? Or bring gauze and Neosporin if you dare! As I continued to walk by these woodland warriors and considered how they might be useful planted around my house in case of an attack, my mind turned to Easter, the state of the world, and how we now must all be wise as serpents and harmless like doves. Or live more like The Honey Locust Tree. The video and narration is the end result and while it may not be for or speak to everyone, I truly hope you taking something away from it that is meaningful.
Tag Archives: Spirituality
My Interview With The Inimitable Dame Darcy
I can honest to God say I’m friends with a mermaid, a doll, a cartoonist, banjo aficionado, a witch and a ghost. And her name is Dame Darcy. Yes, you read that right.
Dame Does Sexy Scary
We first met just a few years ago at an event she was connected. Nothing ordinary of course. It was photographic exhibit called The Legendary Children and was devoted to transexual themes. She was very doting on me and I remember her saying kind of drunkily, “You’re adorable.” And that was it. Dame Darcy was my new spirit crush. Artists tend to do this. We adopt people who we see as kindred and in Savannah you really appreciate the value of that.
As an artist of sorts myself, I envy people like Dame Darcy because they’re very driven to do what they do and they’re always doing it. Now and again you meet these sort of savants who simply eat and breath their craft. If Darcy isn’t illustrating her own works, she’s illustrating someone else’s. If she’s not writing a novel and illustrating it, she’s writing something for someone else’s work. If she’s not doing any of that, she’d playing banjo and singing or making dolls or painting tarot card sets to sell in her Etsy store. Or she’s writing, casting, starring and pitching a treatment for a movie or TV show about mermaids and pirates. And then in her spare time like some people might drive for UBER or Lyft, she’s playing a ghost for the incredibly popular group-think-tank-game called “Escape Savannah” that’s like a CLUE game with a haunted twist. Dame Darcy moves at the speed of light and is almost her own artistic elemental. But at heart she’s kind of like a little girl who refuses to “grow up” by continually piping the adult world through her child like sense of the universe and then giving back to the adult world through her art, her child like sense of the universe. Its a gift for the world and she has a lot to say and amuse with via her many talents.
Which is why it was such a special thing to “capture” her before she headed out on a promotional tour. We sat down in my makeshift studio in my kitchen to talk about growing up in Idaho town with a population of 15 and how her family emigrated there as they were the family of John Wilkes Booth. We delve into some of her mental processes around her art, where some of it stems from in terms of influence and style and along the conversational path hit on a wide range of other subjects regarding working with sensations Neil Gaiman (Sandman Chronicles) and the legend Alan Moore (Watchmen) and a laundry list of other artists and performers like Tiny Tim. The interview ends on an interesting leg as I address a controversy that whipped Dame Darcy’s name through the media last year in that she legitimately had in her possession some of Kurt Cobain’s hair and nearly sold it for a significant sum of money before the auction was pulled because of Courtney Love’s protest. The story has an interesting finish and I invite you to sit for awhile and listen. I can assure you that no one in this world will ever accuse Dame Darcy for being dull and I am always eager to see what she’s making next!
FULL INTERVIEW HERE! JUST CLICK
Dame Darcy’s Etsy Store where you can buy fabby artsy things!
CORRECTION: During the interview I mis-stated that Dame Darcy might have been one of the earliest or first female comic book artists to be published. This was a distracted statement of mine in the preliminary part of the interview. What I meant to really say was that she was the youngest female comic book artist ever published at 17 years of age. No offense to the many female comic book artists going back almost 100 years now!