IvanEwert.com

The merchants of downtown Crystal Lake have been working on a promotion for some time now called Second Thursday. On the second Thursday of every month, the participating stores stay open late and make special offers or discounts available to their nighthawk patrons.

Originally I had been asked to create a new poster every month for the merchants to display, but the logistics of that turned out to be unwieldy for the merchants. I understand that - keeping things simple is always a better choice, in my opinion.

At any rate, the final decision was to create a single oversized poster that could be used for the entire year. The image to the left was our final decision - the focal point being an unusual clock which stands at the heart of downtown. I vectorized the image with the invaluable help of VectorMagic, then added the tree roots below to reinforce the sense of deep belonging and community which exemplifies so many of our stores.

Originally, the images were far too centered. Pushing things around created the kind of tension that I think is crucial to grabbing and keeping people’s attention.

The roots alone seemed a bit sparse, so I reflected the clock from the base to draw the eye all the way down toward the bottom of the page. The light blue curve was added both to balance the clock proper and to direct the eye toward the 2nd Thursday logo - done in bright red to pop from the midnight hues of the poster itself.

We decided to keep the information spare, both to increase the longevity of the poster’s usefulness and to draw the curious into a conversation with the merchants and storekeepers. We believe this will increase the sense of community, and create the impression of a “secret club” of those in the know. I even had the idea of printing up buttons for people’s jackets or lapels bearing the logo - but I think we’re going to wait to see how well the promotion goes over for a few months first.

Right now, the poster is legal-pad sized. Everyone seems to feel this will enable the merchants to post the image somewhere prominent without overwhelming the other material they need to present to their customers.

Overall, I’m pleased with it. As always, feel free to let me know what you think.

The projects have been flying fast and furious of late, and while that’s a very good thing for the bank account and creative juices, it’s historically left little time for blogging. However, seeing that the work is actually getting done, I figure it’s time (and past time) to start sharing what’s new again.

Last night the Web site for La Bellissima went live. La Bellissima is Crystal Lake’s first upscale lingerie boutique, and Kathleen Basista (the owner) is one of the most charming and pleasant people you’ll ever meet. She wanted to use a few specific elements in the site - her pink and chocolate color scheme, the sketch of a young lady dressing at her table, and the wonderful photography of both our mutual friend Susan Sieber and the photographers who worked on the Web sites for her manufacturers.

The pink by itself seemed a little overwhelming to me, so I added in the art nouveau flourishes seen in the sidebar. That led to the decision to place another in the area behind the photographs, which softened the blockiness of the photos and gave them a more organic, flowing, sensual feel.

I’m happy to say that Kathy was pleased with the end result. Last night L and I visited the shop - as La Bellissima also sells Triskele Moon Studios‘ jewelry, and the display cases needed to be filled, we figured we’d kill two birds with one stone by showing up together. They were preparing for an evening lingerie party, so a bottle of champagne was liberated to celebrate the launch of the new site.

Such is the life of a designer. Rough, huh?

My wife, Leanne, is the guiding hand, head, heart and soul of Triskele Moon Studios. She turns out exquisite jewelry day after day, all of it one of a kind and individually created without the aid of assistants or machinery. The Studios have been running for nearly three years now, and she’s managed to make it her full-time job. I couldn’t be prouder of her or of what she’s done.

This past weekend saw a lot of work. While we normally sell to local shops, on Friday she had her first ever art gallery opening in Lakeside, Michigan. While I’ll let her tell most of the story on her own site, the real story for me is that we got the kick in the pants we needed to set up said site.

Triskelemoon.com is now open as an informational site for anyone interested in the art of fine jewelry design. The online store is not quite ready for prime time, but I’ll be sure to post a note when it is. In the meantime, I’m focusing on adding the little graphic touches that make a site more attractive and user-friendly over the next week or so. Keep checking back to learn more about the jewelry and to see how a graphic site evolves over time.

I recently dropped the ball on a personal project. Gareth Michael-Skarka of Adamant Entertainment put out a call for submissions for his new magazine, Thrilling Tales - billed as “Pulp for the New Millenium.” I’m guessing most people who know me understand what the hero pulps were all about, but just in case, let’s review.

Pulp magazines - particularly, the hero pulps - were more or less the predecessors to modern comic books, but were written largely for adults. Born in the Great Depression, cheap to buy and easy to read, the pulps provided a short escape from grim reality. Heroes were born here, heroes such as Doc Savage, The Shadow, and The Spider. These were larger-than-life vigilantes, men who went beyond the pale in the pursuit of justice or adventure. In later years, in my own adolescence, Indiana Jones became the standard by which many of us were introduced to the pulp hero concept. I went looking for whatever I could find that would give me the same excitement I got watching Indy race from boulders, or outwit the Nazis.

I found them, in the local library and the bookstore alike. Of course, as with anything else in popular culture, the quality varied. Still, I have fond memories of finding the reprinted Doc Savage stories and climbing a tree to read them on summer afternoons, and listening to re-recorded versions of The Shadow’s radio program. I enjoyed the pulps, and am always happy to see people trying to bring them back.

Back to the present day. I wrote a submission - Alec Shane and the Lethean Chant. It’s not a bad action/adventure story, based in prewar Afghanistan and the German attempts to sway the Afghan Kings into joining the Axis cause. I realized after writing it, though, that I didn’t like the hero. He didn’t stand out the way a pulp hero should, and every time I tried to go back to rewrite it I found myself stymied by how to make him something special. I put the project on the back burner and went about my life.

The first issue of Thrilling Tales was published on Valentine’s Day, 2008. Seeing the cover made me grin, and despite the rather high price point I decided to order a copy of my own, to see what I might have missed. And sweet Hugo Gernsback, I’m glad I did.

The stories are good, solid, fun stuff. There are wicked Bolsheviks, Chicago mobsters, Nazi U-Boats and lost civilizations. There’s gunplay and fisticuffs on every page, and a chase in every other scene. You’ve got heroes ranging from Commando Cody to Doc Faustus, from Agent 13 to The Corpse. I’ve had to limit myself to reading one story every night before bed, because I wind up just giggling myself to sleep over how much love the writers have for the genre.

Now again - it is genre, and the basics of the genre are pretty straightforward. The good guys are good. The bad guys are bad. Crime does not pay and the enemies of America are the enemies of Good. Still, I’m a dyed in the wool bottle-throwing leftist, and I have a great time with the stories. They’re simple, but they’re a helluva lot of fun.

During a break in the day yesterday, I popped open the laptop and started banging out a new story. The Lethean Chant will still get rewritten, someday, and thanks to the other authors in this magazine I have a much better idea of how to get across the feelings I want my pulp-era heroes - and villains - to inspire. I owe them a debt of thanks, and one to Mr. Skarka for publishing the magazine in the first place.

I was not born into, or around, the punk generation.

The music my parents fed me with was quintessential sixties-folk, psychedelic stories of love, equality, justice and peace. The music I gravitated to in my teens was a glamorous rebellion, not a real one - it extolled the virtues of independence in the name of pleasure, and the spiked black leather made to threaten the establishment had become a fetishized sex toy wielded by stiletto-heeled women and men made up like women. I knew the Sex Pistols, eventually; but knew them through that same pheromone haze - No Future meant no rules, and no rules meant it was time for a party.

But this post isn’t really about music. It’s about a book.

I’ve been sick, which is when I traditionally get a lot of reading done. China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station is seven hundred pages long, and starting it when I came down with the chills seemed like an excellent idea. I loved it until the ending.

It’s a steampunk novel that takes its punk side seriously.

The way I understand it, serious punk sees No Future as, well, no future. There’s nothing to look forward to in life - realism writ large and angry, waving a black flag against an empty sky.

At a given level, I get that. I understand it, especially given the political situation of the seventies and the desperation that still clings to the environments in which punk was born - unemployment, police brutality, a surfeit of casual violence.

But in entertainment, I didn’t think I quite understood it. These days I can see no future by turning on the evening news. Nihilism doesn’t take you away, it takes you apart, and by the end of Perdido Street Station I was in pieces. I was honestly angry that I’d invested as much time as I had to be denied the catharsis of heroism rewarded, to be reminded that good often - hell, generally - does not win and that crime tends to pay quite nicely.

Let me stress that if the book had been written badly, I’d have had no trouble wrestling with this. I’d put it down to a snotty author who pulled a dirty trick. But Miéville is an excellent author, one who kept me not only interested but dancing for about six hundred and fifty pages and had me burning through those pages in under two days. Every chance I got, I was in the book, wanting to know what would happen next; and in the end what happened was … no future.

That stewed for about a day. I woke up thinking about it. I stayed upset and off kilter, tossing things back and forth in my mind … and then I thought about my own writing.

My wife doesn’t read most of what I write. Neither does the rest of my family, because when I talk about it with them, they get unnerved. The levels of horror that I put into something like Vorare bothers them in the same way that this was bothering me. On thinking about it, I was forced to admit that, yes, the end of Vorare was originally meant to be the death of the primary character with no end to the injustices that he fought - something my editor called me on after receiving the draft. Miéville was doing what I tend to do, only he was doing it better than me.

My qualms with him ended at that point. I can safely say that he writes a mean novel in more ways than one, but that isn’t a bad thing. I enjoyed the Sex Pistols even once I understood them better, and I enjoyed Perdido Street Station even after my original shocks.

Still, I’m probably going for Richard Scarry the next time I feel sick.

It’s a little-known fact that I love research. I’ve often thought I’d like to enter academia, and the thought is still there. After all, both of my parents entered the postgraduate world later in life, my father continuing his fascination with computer science and the emerging fields of artificial intelligence while my mother turned her passion for social justice toward the study of law.

I mention this for two basic reasons. Firstly because it’s come to my attention that my constant Web browsing may simply be a corruption of that basic love of research. With no particular aim or goal in sight it’s been possible to simply hoard facts, which is considerably different from acquiring knowledge. In this age of easy access to often-incorrect information, being a Jack of all trades seems a common enough badge - and it’s hardly one of honor in my sight any longer.

The second reason is that I visited my mother in the city yesterday. She’s taken a small studio apartment from which she can finish work on her thesis with minimal interruption, and can still sally forth on day visits to see the elderly family members who live further afield. I admit that I feared the worst - my own experiences, or perhaps my inexperience when it came to choosing places to live, had led me to imagine all city apartments as dank little holes which smelled vaguely of natural gas and offered no more natural light than God gave Antarctica.

My fears were thankfully unfounded. It’s a beautiful little place, a perfect size for one person who’s unsure of what comes next. The light abounds, the air is clean. Above all, however, there’s room to stack your research.

I exaggerate when I claim that it’s easier to take a seat on a pile of papers contrasting Northern and Southern Ireland’s policies toward reproductive freedom than on an actual chair, and to claim that half the natural light in the apartment comes from the sun’s reflection off of legal briefs from around Europe would likewise fail a stringent application of the truth. There is still an absolutely stunning amount of literature in that room, neatly printed and compiled into stacks which line the walls like ruined Doric columns which have lost only half their height.

The books exist as well, of course, but they’re neatly tucked within cupboards and closets in place of shoeboxes and silverware. They don’t impress themselves on the mind with the same force as walking into a true studio - a place for study and reflection. You can practically feel the application she’s putting into this thesis, into truly understanding the facts and applying them with all her might to underline her efforts to extend the freedom of all women and, by extension, all humankind.

It’s awesome, in the best sense of the word. So I write today partly with tongue in cheek, to display those little tidbits which I’ve picked up in my absent-minded hoarding of flea-market knowledge; and partly with head bowed in my mother’s direction. It’s not only good to be willing to learn, it’s the best.

I know - my pronunciation is atrocious. Happy Lunar New Year nonetheless! As I stated a few days ago, I’ve always felt more hopeful in February than January, and after last year’s trek to Hong Kong I’m convinced that this tradition is a good one to pick up for my own.

I don’t get to cook very often in the house, but with Triskele Moon Studios’ big show starting tomorrow, I made the offer to whip up a bastardized stir fry for the holiday so L could take the time to finish a few more pieces of jewelry and pack things up for the event. She agreed, and so at 5 PM I arrived home ready to work. Luckily, L took some time to cube and sautee the chicken, which helped immensely.

I love the preparation of a good meal, and stir fry especially. There’s a wonderful cleanliness to it, despite the constant washing and drying of vegetable skins. It’s meditative and calming, the constant slice and chop settling into a rhythm that matches the music wafting through the kitchen. To the left you can see the basics: Carrots, onions, red pepper, green pepper, snow peas, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, ginger and garlic. The sauce is offscreen, easily made by combining soy sauce, red pepper flakes, ginger, garlic and scallions into a small measuring cup, then dissolving cornstarch or arrowroot powder into the sauce to thicken it up.

Since this was a quick and dirty surprise meal, we didn’t marinate the chicken. Instead, we sauteed it in toasted sesame oil and black pepper for a bit of western seasoning. This house can’t go wrong with garlic and pepper.

The actual stir-fry demands a wok, or at least a deep-sided pan. I had a wok in my bachelor days, but I’m guessing it was lost in one of the moves. Today we use something left behind by mom, which works very well but somehow doesn’t feel quite the same.

You must be careful not to lean over the pan directly, if you’re using chili oil or red pepper flakes. The capsium smoke will mess with your eyes to the point of real pain, and the whole point of this exercise is to feel good about what you’re doing - not to mess up your contact lenses.

Presentation has never really been my strong suit, which is another huge benefit to stir fry. Done properly, the vegetables never lose their vibrant colors, and if you choose carefully you wind up with a great combination of reds, greens, yellows and oranges on the plate. Of course, if you’re me, you also throw in enough crunchy chow mein noodles to make the entire thing the kind of beige consistency so beloved of Midwesterners throughout history.

I don’t use them often. It’s a celebration, though; so the diets can go hang. I have every intention of making this meal a good one. The soft noodles are below the stir-fry and crunchy noodles - you can stir-fry them after cooking them in the leftover oil and chili paste from the actual dish, which not only imparts a lot of flavor to the noodles but also makes cleanup a bit simpler by soaking up a good deal of the oil and picking up any delicious crunchy bits left behind when dishing out the stir fry proper.

After we ate, I sent L up to her studio to finish getting ready while I washed up and cleaned the kitchen. Once that was done, though, it was time to relax a bit by editing these photos, blogging about the meal, and mixing up a specialized drink for the holiday.

A Kowloon is named after an administrative district in Hong Kong. I don’t know how the drink got its name, but it’s a good choice for the Lunar New Year - sweets are de rigeur, and the oranges for good luck make this the ideal.

1 measure Kahluha

1 measure Cointreau (the actual recipe calls for Grand Marnier, but I find this works well)

3 measures orange juice.

Remember to stir it with a chopstick for the final reminder of an excellent day well spent.

We’re sitting tight through another blizzard here. Despite the inconvenience, and all the difficulties that come along with them, I can still safely say that I really enjoy these days. The snow is coming at a forty-five degree angle now, which means the winds have died down from this morning. Visibility is better than it was, which is to say that I can actually look across the street to see my neighbors’ houses; and there was enough of a break to let the first murder of crows come looking for the food I set out on Monday - twenty of them that I counted, sitting in the red maple trees just outside our front door.

I’m working at the dining room table, with the AeroGarden’s soft but bright light over my right shoulder. We have our first sprout, a tiny bit of basil pushing its way through the Styrofoam faux-snow of its seed pod, and seeing that little hint of green is enough to send me into a full-blown grin. There’s life and growth and warmth within, it says, even as the ice collects on our gutters and mountains of virgin snow pile up like barricades along the side of our street.

I’m tempted by this weather. It sings to me to go out and do something, to shovel the walk or build some cryptic structure in the backyard again. Dares me to set something up for the elements or neighbor’s children to melt down and kick down, to blow up or blow away. Still, I’m on the clock, and the weather will have to wait. I’ll play this afternoon, I promise the skies, and hope that they keep blessing the ground with their deep embrace.

There’s been an interesting development in the way I read recently, one I used to try to avoid.

When I was in theatre, I had to give up on going to see plays or movies with my peers. They weren’t capable of just sitting down and enjoying something - it had to be studied, analyzed, broken down into its component parts and critiqued. It baffled me, and fascinated me, but in the end it just began to grate on my nerves. Not everything, I argued, had to be understood to be enjoyed.

That’s presumably a large part of the reason why many of those friends are still involved in theatre, and I’m doing office work.

However, over the past year I’ve been fortunate enough to act as a first-round reader for two novels by a woman I admire. I’ve tried hard to look at how every piece made me feel, made me think, what was good about the good parts and how the other parts might best be improved from my viewpoint.

I’ve also had the good luck to find another woman who’s capable of critiquing my own work very, very closely; and whose opinions I respect immensely. That’s resulted in my needing to tend my own garden much more closely than I have in the past, moving forward in a conscious way with the things I write.

With this in mind, the latest book I’m reading for pleasure is James Michener’s Poland. It’s a good book, both in terms of narrative and historical education, and I’m enjoying it immensely. I have, however, picked up on two serious critiques in terms of overemphasizing elements of his style.

The first: Class plays an important part in the novel, which is well and good. The families being traced are essentially nobility, petty nobility, and peasantry; allowing Michener to give a good sense of how class lines transition from medieval times to the Soviet era. However, every single chapter  (so far - I’m up to Jan Sobieski’s lifting the siege of Vienna) ends with by underlining what each person/family received from the actions they took, and every single underlining ends with a variation on the statement, “And the peasant got nothing, which was his due.”

Now, I’m as pro-letariat (sorry, leftist humor) as the next guy, but it’s hit a point where it’s becoming comical rather than sympathetic in my eyes. I feel vaguely as if I’m reading a discarded Frantics sketch rather than a sweeping epic of history, because now I’m watching and waiting for the punch line and the boot to the peasant’s head.

Secondly, Michener’s chosen to use architecture and food as primary symbols with which to underline some of the differences between the classes and their lifestyles. I do not say he does this badly - indeed, reading the lavish descriptions of how the food is prepared and distributed really shows how much research and devotion he has put into this novel.

It becomes too much again, though, fairly quickly. It reads almost as if he’s wedging these thematic elements into the structure of each chapter, rather than weaving them in as appropriate. Banquet scene? Check. Castle one examined? Check. Castle two? Check. All right, on to the action.

Again, I’m not disappointed in the work as a whole. I just find it interesting that I’m really beginning to notice things that used to pass me by without comment, and beginning to think of how I might try to improve on them with my own work. Both of these, I think, are signs of growth both as an artist and as a person.

I wasn’t ready to look at things so critically earlier in my life, for whatever sets of reasons. I realize, however, that I’m a chronically late bloomer - and I’m okay with that fact now. It just means that I’ll still be learning and evolving long after most folks my age solidify and stagnate.

One entry in a month? That’ll never do, I’m afraid - had it been any month other than January. Living here, January is almost the perfect month to hide yourself away from the rest of the world, to burrow deep into the light of your home and shut out the endless gloaming. Yes, the days are getting longer by fractions, but most of the time you can hardly tell the difference through the slate-grey skies.

This month’s been odder than most. We’ve had two sessions of bizzarrely warm temperatures, and one serious blizzard that drove far too many people off the roads when they stepped out of doors. Here in the house we rode the warmth out with a smile and the blizzard with a shrug, knowing better than to fight it. It’s January, regular as clockwork.

February is technically the worst month in Illinois, bringing sharp wind and sleet ringing down in their last hurrah out of the north and west, the spirits of winter hanging on ’til the bitter end with hooked fingers of ivory-colored ice. It’s a dirty month, when even new snow is immediately coated in the grey of exhaust fumes and the brown of emerging mud.

I’m fond of February, though. In a way, it feels much more like a new year than January does. Yes, it’s messy and terrible, but there’s a promise at the end of it, a promise that good things and green winds are just around the corner. It’s easier to manage somehow, knowing that you’re winning the fight to outlast winter, knowing that just by holding on against the cold you’re going to come out on top.

We’ve set up an Aerogarden today, and its bright light - though artificial - is cheering in a way that’s difficult to decribe. Little seeds are growing not two feet from the dining table, and the sound of the pump is the sound of melting ice and unchained streams. There’s something growing in the month of February, inside and out; reminding us all that it’s time to start moving again.