Missing Brian
For whom the beautiful was effortless and the ordinary sometimes excruciating (muy simpatico)
(All artwork in this piece by the beautiful and much missed Brian Crum-Ewing)
I sometimes think the most important theme I keep coming back to, over and over again, is the difference between a full rich human being and the pathetic modern highly-constrained variation we keep self-harmingly defending – the mere consumer – what is left of a human being when stripped of every basic kind of responsibility, and therefore also all possibilities for serious growth and purpose.
And yes, I do go on about friendship and love a lot, because these most obviously positive and nourishing things a human life can contain, really are not often enough discussed nowadays (even though we are clearly profoundly miserable, without them).
BUT – just because I make them repeatedly, I should also note that neither one of those big points leads you anyplace simple at all. In fact, I've yet to find any easy solutions to big struggles – the point is to struggle usefully, which means knowing where to put your effort and your heart.
Friendship is actually one of the things which most clearly proves the value of rejecting the simplified (and seemingly easier) consumerist model of a life. When we start using the consumerist approach in our relationships with other humans, we make several very big (and very common) mistakes.
We want the other person to be a thing (solid unchanging object, which keeps pleasing as it first did)
We want the other person to stay within lines we favour (to fit and keep fitting our model of 'good' or ‘right’)
We want the relationship to serve our needs, for as long as we feel we need it. (infinite warranty)
First off I want to invert a common approach – when I say mistakes, I don't just mean a consumerist approach makes us miss chances to be kinder to another (though that is often the case) I also mean that we are missing every chance to treat our very own hearts with respect.
If a friendship is an object, and ‘the other’ changes to break (or challenge) our model, we often feel disappointed, even though, as I've said before – people are absolutely not objects, they are much more like music. The signal, not the radio. We all change constantly, and to find that bothersome in someone else is to ask for disappointment, every time (and to fail on our own mirror-check, too).
More to the point, many friendships and relationships have an arc, and then break or fade. If we insist on viewing them as something which was supposed to be permanent, we dishonour all of the lessons we learned with and from each other, and the good time we spent together, also.
On the other hand, if we begin by understanding that even the greatest symphony (or epic album) has an ending, then we can more easily treasure the transcendent moments and love we shared forever. The end does not define the whole, nor need time or distance erode the love established.
And even then, I shouldn't stop there, as if it is in any way simple.
The fact is, I'm wired up funny. Love people a bit too much for my own good (probably a byproduct of years of forced loneliness as a kid, thanks to my crazy cult school).
At a certain point in my teenage life (shortly after escaping the cult at last) I realized that there were a lot of cynical user-people who it was foolish to love, and many who were only too happy to take advantage of such an attitude, with outright unkind intent. To some, openness looks like easy prey.
Which brought me to a conscious decision point (not the first) about which way I wanted my character to develop from there. Should I thicken my skin, toughen-up and cool-off, to be more like so many people I encountered? Or preserve my weirdness, stay a bit too enthusiastic about everything (including other people) and instead work on improving my powers of judgement and resilience?
I went all-in for weird, and that's the second best choice I ever made (best is of course the Mrs).
And yes – this one hasn't been anything close to simple either – but I'll digress further in that direction another time. Doing friends today, and I really want to talk about one dear old friend especially.
I met Brian in 1982, because of a friend I made at a dance-club, thanks to our shared love of then classic (sixties) science fiction (Brunner, Zelazny, Pohl, Bradbury – it truly was a superb period).
No wait, let me back up just a bit, I should really say that I met Brian's drawings first. My dance club science fiction and computer keener friend had me over for a visit, and I was instantly fascinated by the amazing walls of his bedroom, which were (especially at slumping height) beautifully illustrated with whole big chunks of plaster drawn missing, and whole strange elaborate worlds peeking out from behind those ‘panels’. Escher with a sharpie, but not so innocent – torqued toward the macabre, otherworldly.
When I first met the young man behind them a few months later, I was surprised, he seemed too quiet and self-contained to have such strange magic contained within him. Mind you, I was also instantly charmed, because he was so beautifully well-read on the culture side of things, and was always actively reading more and more challenging stuff (a mania I’ve also had, life-long).
It will sound like nostalgia now (though I swear printed-page tech still works, for those who cultivate the patience – and once established, that patience will serve you well in many other settings, also) but in those pre-web days when information was still precious, instead of a noxious ad-driven cloud that even followed you into the bathroom, a person who liked to read difficult things, though they would get no marks or reward, was always fun to talk to. Even if you disagreed with them about everything, they definitely knew some things you didn't, and sharing your discovered troves was fun.
(And I swear there is still a very important clue there, for our long overdue inter-tribal re-connection efforts).
Which is not to say that Brian and I disagreed about much on a fundamental level. Argued? Absolutely, tons! - but both our hearts were working on the art and human heart line – always.
I soon discovered that he wasn’t just a voracious reader who truly loved to draw, he also wrote unceasingly – poetry, stories, philosophical and political essays, and he loved to play his guitar.
One of the funniest true insights I ever heard from an art teacher at the college where I worked as a model was "If you want to get great, get a couple of roommates who are at least as good as you."
He had done just this himself as a student, and not only had they all driven each other's creative growth with an invigorating combination of play and competition, and all ended up accomplished enough to then teach – they even formed a super charming art-collective "Fancy Action Now!"
I've had several friends who inspired and helped drive my efforts in that way – my childhood friend Gareth Lind was a superb early model of how hard work and rigour could win excellence (his brilliant film parodies and later political comic strips were run in one of the local Toronto weeklies, from the time he was my teenage roommate, right up until Eye magazine folded, decades later – and justly so – some people just plain earn their spot!)
I also had some amazing older mentors (natural teachers really like natural keeners), and their gifts stay with me too (as does the price they asked, sometimes respect, and sometimes much more).
But I don't think anyone in my life ever taught me quite so much as Brian – even though almost none of the time we spent together was directly meant as teaching, and not all of it was entirely serene, even if much time we spent was unique and wonderful.
I think I can fairly say we were both in a constant state of admiration and jealousy about one another for a very important period of years, in our mutual creative development. The natural fluidity of his line and his insight into figure and gesture always amazed me – and seemed so effortless.
My (autodidact to a fault) approach was far more thinking-side than ease and feel – which was great for subjects like architecture and spaceships (the subject of a self-published colouring book, which I put out ten years before adult colouring books caught on – only to be told I was crazy, everyplace I flogged it).
Boy though, did I ever work harder on drawing people, as I watched his work – and he did and then gave me a wonderful large architecture piece – done in rapidograph (technical pens) my own best medium, which feels like some proof my influence helped him stretch further, also.
Two days after the Chernobyl disaster we wrote and recorded a song about it, in about two hours, in my basement junk studio – effortless process (while I worked out some monosynth sequences for us to improvise atop, he wrote lyrics, which he then passed back to me to sing, while he played guitar). Heartfelt, agonizing and vital.
Frustratingly, I have more than nine-hundred master tapes from those days, and so was unable to find the very best recording we ever did (called Caravan – but not at all the classic of that name). But I still hear it in my head regularly, his sweet guitar Fripp-riffing to expand the chording and his poet’s voice calling, “no cobwebs, no cobwebs,” as the cymbals rose for the chorus come-around as the camp broke up to move again.
Sometimes we’d sit together and just draw and draw and draw for hours – and I have to say, that was a simple but sublime pleasure. Just like walking with a friend, you always risk and notice so much more. Call your art-pal and try it!
For a time we both got heavy into photography (so broke, we needed high-intention), and we did the same with game design, which lead to many fun game design and play-testing jams with more of our creative friends. (can’t always play chess or go, right?)
This might sound funny (since adult gaming is now well-established), but we weren’t trying to go pro, or make a fast buck. What really fascinated us was the interaction of two models. One, the thing the game was about – I did air combat on any old map in the house, a solitaire card game based on UN peacekeeping operations, and a board game simulating space program evolution – he liked more outlaw subjects like the (crack years) competition between urban gangs for territory and markets. (Got to give him points for good instincts – Rockstar has made several billion with his basic model).
And then also the model of the mechanism we chose – what made playing with a whole range of challenges and outcomes fun, educational, interesting and satisfying?
Our political discussions got most intense, when we teamed up with the two most political people we knew, to form a comics collective, which was trying to do a political and commercial thing together, and of course self-destructed on the political line, long before the only two unstoppable creators involved (Brian and I), ever were harnessed properly to task (my did we ever learn a lot in the trying, though).
But it would be impossible to talk about Brian, without speaking of his poetry, which I think, of all his arts, was the closest to his heart. Again, long pre-internet, he mostly rejected even the zine ‘scene’ of the time, and chose instead to distribute his poems by photocopies, taped to hydro poles and on back-alley walls.
Would that I could say I had any better instincts (at the time) for practical communication! (Damn though, it sure had poetry in the doing, as much as the words)
And this is probably the most painful part of our long mutual dance, both of us admired the other, but we were also frustrated by our long inability to ‘find purchase’ (a firm grip) on the cultural world. We were fated to be obscure underground artists as much by self-harming neurotic patterns, as by any necessity.
Which makes me think now of Idries Shah’s irreplaceable line “Affection does not produce capacity.” So much self-forgiveness in that (and wasted effort saved, too).
Of course, we also had plenty of pyrrhic art heroes from the past to look to, for inspiration in our lowly frustration – the point is not how far you get in the eyes of others, but that you keep trying and growing, after all. But writing and art need eyes, and music, ears, just like plants need soil. They grow only as far as they are savoured. Sadly, connecting with the world is a completely separate skill from creating.
We did, as we matured, begin to work on this problem more deliberately, and even considered becoming the agent for each other’s work (eliminating the vanity-factor which inhibited both of us, greatly). But we were both far better suited for sitting in an attic relentlessly churning-out poems and drawings than flogging anything at all, even to the Annex dinner party set which always did find us rather charming.
But back to his poetic brain. He had two especially wonderful rare abilities with language. One was that he could sometimes come up with a word-image that just resonated with the moment, perfectly. He gave Catherine a few of those gems over the years, which we both still remember fondly, along with the days they vividly preserve.
Other times, he could do a stream of consciousness, minute after minute, which was, like a high-wire act, grasping with an almost dangerous courage and yet absolutely aching sincerity at something just beyond the ability of normal language to describe.
Utterly fascinating and often outright inspiring, even when ultimately indecipherable.
We were brothers in art for our most important (20s and 30s) learning years, and then our strange and solitary art souls got cross-wired with our dumb-ass pride, and we stopped seeing each other.
Happens too much, of course, I bet it has happened to you also. It isn’t that you stopped loving them, there just comes a point past which it doesn’t seem to work anymore.
God though, I am so grateful to have known this beautiful soul, and shared so long in his constant flow of thinking and making and being one completely unique and absolutely rich human on this earth.
The list of great lives is not ever the same as the list of famous lives.
(And the pantheon of art is not ever adequately represented by internet)
I was talking to my brilliant artist and curator friend Flavio (at his superb Tarantino/Belli gallery) just the other day and I mentioned Brian in our conversation.
I just knew that with his many years of fostering creative talent, Flavio would recognize that strange but beautiful tragedy of an artistic talent which did not ever entirely overcome itself, to shine upon the world at large.
Looked him up when I got home. Figured it was long past time for us to get together again and have a creaky-bone art jam.
Missed my chance, Brian passed January 28th, mourned by adoring family and friends.
Hurts, that I couldn’t console him at the difficult end, but I will always love him dearly.
My kind of comet – one brilliant flash of pure and suffusing beauty, for any in the world who were lucky enough to be looking up.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here’s more about that comics collective, and what we learned from trying.
And here’s a piece I did about the central caper of our comic - a working class revolt begun by crazy tech kids frying the stock exchange with a bargain basement EMP.
Sadly, never was feasible. (yes I am a creative writer, but I’m a technician, too - and so have to investigate such questions further, given the appropriate lab and resources).