January 2007 Archives

The doctor gave me the results of my blood work today. It's a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I am going down the slippery slope. But I have a very young and ambitious doctor, and he told me to get a step counter. A step counter! He also wanted me to do aerobics, but I have to draw the line somewhere, so I said no. I do have some dignity left. My kids made me promise never to run in public, so I am certainly not going to start jumping about. Now where am I going to get a bloody step counter? Any fitness centre, according to the doctor. But I am not going near those places, I can promise you that. And he wants me to do 10.000 steps a day, lucky Orbit! Is that much, 10.000? I have no idea.

Terwispel is a village in Opsterland municipality, Fryslân province, with (1958) 1122; (1973) 912; (2000) 967 inhabitants. It is north of Gorredijk, on a sandridge. Its formation had of course to do with peat-digging, but in 1900 the calamity took place: Tijnje separated from Terwispel and became a separate village. The dairy factory was a small consolation, so that was closed and became a second-hand car-shop.

Now at least this is a very interesting author. I screen dumped some TV, listened to some radio, and had an interesting day. Pity I can't draw his voice, it is an integral part of his face somehow. He speaks with a strong accent, he almost sounds as if he is always drunk. He can't be though, the guy has a brain the size of a cabin trunk.

This is my first parental advice column thing of the next generation. In colour! I'm going to start collecting them on a fresh portfolio site as soon as I have done four or five. For now, I have deleted a couple from the old one to make a neat square.

If you're in Toronto, I urge you to go see Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. I went to the dress rehearsal last night and it is breath taking! Beautiful stage design too, how different from last time, when I saw Götterdämmerung. Totally overwhelming music. Or like it is said in this Guardian article, "It's music that batters your front door down."

Sometimes newspaper articles are turned into books. With boring jacket designs... But there is Google, and thanks to my stats I see people finding the drawing that illustrated the article!

This article could never be in a Canadian newspaper. In Canada it is perfectly normal to go to your family doctor for a yearly physical, in Holland it is not. That is why small private clinics are emerging, where you can just walk in to get your blood work done. The newspaper thinks it's ridiculous to test healthy people. You go to the doctor when you feel ill, period. Check-ups cause fear and hypochondria. I don't know where I stand on this. In medical things, I usually just go with the flow, I am not an expert. So when in Rome, I do as the Romans, because everything is different everywhere. I just went for my physical, I have to go back to my doctor for the results of my blood work this Wednesday. It's really strange, those differences in medical habits. Otger used to be extremely cross-eyed when he was little. Our optometrist in Germany had told us that Otger would need an operation as soon as he would reach school age. Which is six, in Germany. But then we moved to Belgium, and we went to a Belgian optometrist. She screamed and shouted when she saw our little 2,5 year-old. To the hospital! Immediately! And he was operated. And all went well. So in Canada, we go for our yearly physicals.

Not many people will run to the bookstore after reading this review. Sensitive talented boy with divorced parents has to go to a prestigious high school against his will. These components promise a lot of drama, but we're not going to get it. The boy is a happy student, the girls love him, he gets good grades, doesn't get bullied, and his parents are real nice. Come to think of it, there is hope. I could write a novel about my kids! We are not even divorced! Bigger Herman Stevens.

The hairdo is because of the swim class he just came home from. Home to a warm apple pie. I had no work to do today, so I indulged in motherhood. The whole family at the table at four in the afternoon, having tea with apple pie. Michiel boasted about the apple pie to our across the street neighbour, on their way home on the streetcar. So she demanded her share and we had the rest of the pie tonight around their fire, with port wine. This weather makes me quite jealous of their fire place. Minus twenty or something, too cold really to even cross the street with half an apple pie.

Piffin asked me why on the classical music station they only run ads for a fertility clinic, impotence problems and a secondary school for learning disabled students. Why indeed. Answers in the comments, if you please. And for the more intriguing mysteries of life in general, please visit Willem again. He posted two more episodes of his stokje. It's a story in one piece, Willem had trouble splitting it up. It came to me last night in bed, the best ideas always emerge there. Willem had asked me to think of a way to divide his story, but my idea came too late. In the first part he could have told the story about the collaborating aunt, up until the moment the name of the father of her children would be revealed. Cliff hanger! And in the following episode he could have told the story of the repatriated children from Indonesia, and have their story build up to the same revelation.

They say you have to do a thousand bad drawings to become any good. I am at 45 author portraits. I've done some portraits apart from these, so let's say I'm at one hundred portraits. Only nine hundred away from my first master piece! Even then I won't get between fifty and seventy million euro's. I'd settle for one.

I think this is a really hard one to guess. At least I had never heard of him, not that I am the great connoisseur. Amaze me! Okay, I'll do some book bragging, it's part of the blogging etiquette, to do book bragging. Otger had me laughing today. He quit reading kid's books a while ago, last thing he read was the Name of the Rose, for crying out loud. But now he has to do a book review about a book from the school library. He was in chapter thirteen before school was out.

My weekend production. I could do another six, and the drawing would keep developing. Theoretically. In real life I have to do an author on Monday and Tuesday, and colour this baby on Wednesday. But don't worry, I'm on schedule. I do have a story I can recommend, if you read Dutch. Did I say story? It's a film script! Willem has been writing the first part of his stokje. If he keeps this up, I can't wait to read the rest!

Orbit is extremely honoured to be in the newspaper. And this is the first author I have drawn that I have actually met. So I guess I owe you another obscure anecdote about myself. I could easily carry the log for a week, stories keep popping up in my head. But now for Adriaan van Dis. I think it was 1990, our Queen Beatrix was celebrating her first ten years in office. We were invited because Michiel had won a royal award as a promising young painter a few years earlier. And lots of other artists, politicians and important people were invited too, it was quite the party. But all good things must come to an end, so at some point we wanted to leave the palace. A lackey stood at the door. He opened it. A massive crowd started cheering. The lackey closed the door again, and asked us whether we were sure. We were sure. We took a deep breath and stepped onto the plateau at the top of the stairs. (bordes, isn't there an English word for bordes??) The cheering was deafening. I decided the only thing I could do was wave. What do you do with a cheering crowd, you wave. Period. And the cheering got louder, so I waved more, and louder. Until I started to feel suspicious and I looked over my shoulder. And there was Adriaan van Dis. No wonder the crowd had been cheering like that, Adriaan was a famous TV host back then. So I felt slightly embarrassed. But Adriaan wasn't so comfortable with the cheering crowd either, so he grabbed my arm, and we strode along the crush barriers together. Some fifty meters until the military police let us out and we could disappear into that same crowd ourselves.

I've been tagged! For the first time ever, would you believe it. Joost managed to find five tag virgins, not obscure bloggers at all, very odd. Being tagged is called “een stokje”, in Dutch, a stick. I've been given a stick. So let's try to Canadianize that a little, let's call it a log. So I can be the Log Lady today.

Five things about me that not many people know. I often write things about myself that not many people know. But I made sure to come up with stories I haven't blogged before.

1. My parents used to own a trailer on a campsite. We went there in the weekends, and it was a boring affair. I was a teenager, and there weren't many other teenagers around. One day my stepmother made me participate in a rowing race on the campsite's little lake. All of the other participants were little kids so I easily won the race. It was utterly embarrassing, the picture above doesn't tell half the story.

2. I was in grade 10 or 11, and I wore a hideous pair of glasses, they were the ones in the picture actually. I don't exactly remember how or why it started, but one day in gym class my entire class -myself included- played soccer with my glasses. And there they went, one part to the left, one to the right. My parents never found out, and I got a new pair.

3. Because I was often treated very unfair by my stepmother, and I had no way of defending or revenging myself, I used to often make tiny little cuts in our velvet living room curtains. In not very visible places, in the seams and behind the furniture. She never found out.

4. I can be very fast, strong and eloquent in emergencies. During some sort of political rally in the eighties the police in Breda had their dogs chase us, and I ran as fast as Superman. I had run fast like that once before, when a very creepy guy tried to grab me while I was walking to school via a shortcut along the back of the boys school. Much later, while hitch hiking back from a pop festival with a friend, we were picked up by a tour bus. The bus turned out to be carrying the security guards of the festival. Scum from The Hague, and they did not have very good intentions. My friend was sitting on one guy's lap, and I was standing in between the rows of chairs, so I had to fight off a lot of them. I noticed one guy who kept out of it, and I managed to have him make the driver stop the bus and let us out. My legs were completely bruised from kicking the bus furniture. And on another hitch hiking trip a guy in a van drove into the woods with me and this same friend. He threatened to rape and kill us. And swear to god, I talked him out of it.

5. I was pregnant after the very first time Michiel and I had sex. We were living in a beautiful old squatted villa in Enschede, together with ten other students, all of them boys. The night after my visit to the abortion clinic, all eleven of them were sitting around my bed, heavily impressed. I still see them sitting there, I felt like Snow White and the seven dwarfs.

And now the Log Lady will announce the next five people to carry the log. Listen carefully.

Willem – Ann – IJsbrand – Eva - Lex

Off to bed, I survived on Advils and alcohol today. Now I am sweaty and achy and snotty but the deadlines are made, this one as well. My editor and I thought this to have been my last parental advice column drawing. The newspaper is downsizing to tabloid size, and merging with other regional newspapers. The newspaper business isn't exactly booming. But guess what, the publisher now wants me to do the drawing for all their regional papers! So I am going to get more money for the same amount of work! And it's a dream come true, my name will be printed in the Eindhovens Dagblad!

Sometimes it's just more work than I thought it would be. I wanted to have it done today, but I will have to take another day. An emergency orthodontist appointment put a spoke in the wheel. But the drawing business was nice enough, I listened to a very appropriate story. I love his accent, it took me back to our days in Stuttgart.

Yes, the drawing is going to be some kind of duet too. Tomorrow. But today there is another duet. Fie back in Belgium blogged it. And who ever brought Dolly Parton and Melissa Etheridge together is a genius. I watched all the youtube bits of their performance, really hard to choose a favourite. Really hard to find two women more different, wow. To watch in awe.

Janet Luis starts her review with a line from an old Bernlef poem: "like an old face is often already visible through the young one (and therefore beautiful)." This is remarkable, because when I started sketching, I found it difficult to really "understand" Bernlef's face. And studying this younger Bernlef gave me a better idea of his personality. In the caption underneath the drawing we read: "He put the smallest Leica in his pocket." That is unfortunate, because I drew a Kodak camera. I had no way of knowing which brand of camera Dick would carry, I didn't have much to go on. Just the publisher's marketing text, which only mentioned the main characters in the novel were a photographer and a painter.

My dog walking friend Pamela invited me over to her house this morning, she wanted me to show her some computer stuff. And I desperately wanted to see her place, because not only is she a painter, but her husband is a special effects guy, and their house is packed with latex monsters and animals, and chopped off limbs and such. But then her husband called from a studio, where they were shooting a commercial for a radio station. He had forgotten something, could she bring it, by all means. So there I am, in the middle of a studio set, swarming with people. Camera people, sound people, advertising people, radio people, what have you. I expected to be thrown out for trespassing any second. But I guess this is Canada, everybody is just so unbelievably nice all the time. The director came up to us to shake hands. I expressed my amazement to Pamela. She said that for all he knew, I could be the owner of the radio station. Well yeaheah, one day I look like a psychiatrist, and now I look like the owner of a radio station? Makes me wonder what I really *do* look like. Anyway, best part of course was seeing the Canadian version of Giel, naked and slimy, making his way out of the giant egg Pamela and her husband made...

Thanks to Björn for finding this video. In our first year of art school we also had to practice drawing circles. Circles and ellipses. Sheet after sheet after sheet after sheet, I don't remember the requirements exactly. The teacher was called Brein, in English that translates to Brain. Of course practicing circles was boring, we didn't know about any World Championships. I doubt if that would have made us more ambitious. But when the day arrived that our circles were going to be reviewed, nobody had done enough work. Fortunately mister Brain called us into his room one by one, which gave us the chance to provide every student with more than the required amount of work, in the hallway the drawings mysteriously traveled from one portfolio into the next. So we all went into mister Brain's room with the same drawings. He never noticed. Or maybe he did, but he never said anything. Strangely enough, all the students got different marks.

Orbit found a new way of persuading Michiel to go for a walk. He just puts his head on Michiel's book and leaves it there. And I bought three liters of fresh milk this morning at NoFrills, and all of it was bad, so I had to drink black coffee. And that was all the excitement of today. Oh no, another thing happened. One clementine dropped out of the box as I was trying to fit it into my beautiful Dutch canvas bike bags. And it rolled all the way down the ramp, which is some fifteen meters long at NoFrills. When I had finally loaded all of my groceries into the bike bags and reached the bottom of the ramp, I lacked the courage to pick up my clementine. Nobody present had seen it fall from my box. I would just have been a strange lady picking up a piece of fruit from the street. I hope somebody else has taken it, they are really good clementines.

I trust this author will also be guessed right immediately. M10 are you there? I'll give you an unnecessary hint, just because it's on topic today. This author was in the same prison Willem was in, because they both resisted draft. Austerlitz, it wasn't really a prison I believe, it was sort of a mental institution. Anyway, Willem is 72 today (tomorrow for me, stupid time difference, I already congratulated him, over there it's already January 9), go congratulate him!

Very strange, I just discovered this illustration isn't even in my portfolio. I did it in 2003, and I am going to tell you a funny story. As all of you will know by now, I have bought a new computer. So one night Michiel was retrieving the email from the old computer. And while doing so, he discovered that on our server there is a reservoir of old mail with misspelled email addresses. This mail should of course always have been redirected, but this had somehow been overlooked. So there comes this gigantic wave of ancient email. And what do you know, somebody ordered a print after seeing this illustration in the newspaper, way back Easter 2003. It was a really nice email, from an architect, who claimed he lived in a house just like the one in the drawing. I could not leave such a nice email unanswered, what on earth must he have been thinking of me, not getting back to him... So I wrote to him immediately, mmm, three years after the fact. And see, he still wants the print!

Now this is how a newspaper wants to end up. Thank you so much for sending me the picture Casper!!!

Casper promised to give Jan Cremer the "Floyd on fish" treatment tomorrow, can't wait to see a picture of that. In his "Cremer tapes" Jan allegedly boasts about everything fantastic about himself, but I bet he's never been wrapped around a fish before. This would sooner happen to Dimitri Verhulst, the Jacques Brel of Flemish literature. Not that Jan Cremer doesn't have his fantastic sides; before he had his Cremer tapes, he was on the Warhol tapes, and even on Dylan's basement tapes. Allegedly. And he was in a relationship with Jayne Mansfield. And he turned down Janis Joplin. Allegedly. Anyway, since it's Friday. I copy the recipe from a weblog called Foodporn, they describe it better than I possibly could, originally it was of course a BBC cook again:

"I love doing interesting things with fish. My favorite bizarre and unusual recipe with fish is a trout recipe, which is "Trout in Newspaper." You need black and white newspaper, which is harder and harder to find these days as they get more and more into color printing and color printing inks are poisonous, but you need black and white newspaper. And you take a whole trout and you slit it down the middle and you stick some herbs and maybe some sliced lemon into the middle of it. You fold it up in several layers of newspaper, make a sort of package essentially, a tight package of your trout wrapped in the newspaper. Then you hold it under a tap until it is completely soggy and wet. And you put it into a hot oven for about 25 minutes. And the outer newspaper will dry out. The inside ends up steaming it. The heat of the water will steam the trout. All cooking smells are kept inside that newspaper package.
chantrelle: Like parchment.
neil: Except it's much thicker. And the other cool thing that happens is then when you come with your scissors at the end and you cut the trout out of the newspaper, the skin and everything sticks to the newspaper and you get this perfect, absolutely perfect, pink trout. It takes the head and the tail and the skin and you just get this perfectly cooked and perfectly done fish onto the plate. And it's something I learned watching a TV episode of "Floyd on Fish" many, many years ago. [Keith] Floyd, another magnificently boozy English cooking show host. He went off to a trout farm and said, "What is your favorite recipe?" and they said, "Trout Newspaper." Then he put it into his book, Floyd on Fish, and I seem to remember he got something wrong. I always love that, misprints in cooking books are always interesting. At that point I think they said you cook it for, like, 10 minutes or something. We tried it and it doesn't work. You need about 1/2 an hour."

I was in the process of writing yesterday's-today's-whatever blog entry. I post-date this, it secretly is Friday morning. And then I kept hearing this noise in the chimney beside my desk. I knew it had to be a squirrel, but it freaked me out. I my imagination it was already running around my studio. In the silence of the night sounds can be so frightening! I turned off the lights and went to bed, I didn't even turn off the computer. So first thing in my pajamas, the unfinished business.

Of course the drawing is black & white with the parental advise column. I just left the colours there for my own fun. I use the colours to be able to quickly select parts of the drawing, it works faster than saving and loading selections all the time. But tonight I suddenly had white paths of one pixel wide between the areas I was shading. Blast! Every time something like this happens I wonder, is it me, is it the new computer, or is it my new CS2? I didn't have this problem with Jan Cremer, so I guess it was something I myself did wrong. I am going crazy.

The first normal boring day of the year. No guests, no visits, nothing out of the ordinary. Drawing, groceries, cooking, watching a DVD. Oh, and I went to the library with Otger, my little book monster. He's buried in the Name of the Rose now. Orbit is especially glad things are back to normal, new year's eve left him very upset. So many people in the house, two dogs even, chewing his bones. He lost his balance completely, nervous little thing. Ate nothing yesterday, and woke me up at three this morning, to do a very thin business in the back yard. All much better already. Now he is taking the DVD's back to Rogers.

Those holidays just don't stop, I don't know what it is, this year. Maybe the lack of winter, neighbours seem to keep walking from door to door, other years it's just way too cold for that. Tonight a neighbour brought us a huge piece of heavy heavy fruit cake, that he got from yet another neighbour. But he couldn't possibly finish that amount of fruit cake. So there we went again, desert! There was some groaning from the kids, but hey. Holidays are food & drink. So we had the uranium like cake while watching Gold Finger. Otger has decided to watch every single James Bond movie, after seeing Casino Royale on his birthday.