Pop Culture – Page 3 – E. John Love: a Writer.

Visual artist Sonny Assu fuses native symbols with pop culture

Visual artist Sonny Assu fuses native symbols with pop culture, and reminds us that native culture isn’t dead, or dying, or just about preserving the past: it’s alive and interacting with us every day.

Visual artist Sonny Assu fuses native symbols with pop culture, and reminds us that native culture isn’t dead, or dying, or just about preserving the past: it’s alive and interacting with us every day.

Intelligent, beautifully-crafted messages…

http://sonnyassu.com/work.html

Life: Connecting the dots between my Parents and Groucho…

This post from my personal blog connects the dots between my folks and Mr. Groucho Marx, who’s image and sayings were part of my parent’s vocabulary, and now, my own.

The human mind is amazing in its ability to associate, relate and synthesize.

I’m going through a “Groucho phase”, reading about Groucho’s life, and watching Marx Brothers movies on DVD.

While that’s going on, two significant dates from my personal life have come and gone: the anniversary of my late Mother’s birth, and Father’s Day, a natural time to think about my late Dad. I missed them both this year.

Anyway, this post from my personal blog connects the dots between my folks and Mr. Groucho Marx, who’s image and sayings were part of my parent’s vocabulary, and now, my own.

Mum’s Birthday, 2010: Connecting the dots between my Parents and Groucho…

Real ink on paper? Where’s it going?

In my life, I wonder if ink on paper is slipping away from me, just a little bit. There’s something reassuring about a newspaper: you know what it is, it’s size and shape and depth are self-evident.

Yet, I now receive much more info each day on my Pre than I could ever read (or need to, for that matter). Online news text has replaced the newspaper for me. I have never subscribed to one of the local dailies, and rarely pick one up. I think that eventually, I’m going to do most of my reading on my handheld.

Podcasts (mostly the CBC) and MP3 music files have started to replace my radio. It seems like more motorists listen to the radio than others, these days. (I’m just guessing…)

The “convergence” that people have referred to in mass media is the tri-fold convergence of broadcast, print and computer technologies. At leat, that’s what I learned back in Media Class, back in 1988. Like Vannevar Bush’s idea of a “Universal Machine”, computers and digital tech have co-opted, transformed and consumed the roles of older analog media. Digital is a medium for media, or a medium about other media. A meta-media?

Now, is the “convergence” truly occurring between my mind and the Internet? It seems like that digital immediacy that I’ve become used to in the past 5 years is the kinds of convenience that’s most likely to change my perception of the world around me.

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/365/mark/material/notes/Chap1/VBushArticle/vbush-all.html

Is Fiction a “Do Over” of Real Life?

Since 2002, I’ve been writing fiction (well, trying to write fiction), and over the past six and a half years, I’ve cobbled together a fairly extensive cast of fictional characters, all inhabiting a world that has numerous similarities to my own – but better.

Surprise, surprise.

In my first book, titled Owe Nothing, my main protagonist (there are a few of ’em) is named Jack Owen. Jack is a slang or familiar form of John, or so I have been told throughout my life. (Given that I was apparently named for my grandmother’s brother, John Edward, who was my Uncle “Jack”, I take it as gospel.) So, Jack is a twenty-ish version of me. Kind of. Or, the me I almost with I could have been when we briefly lived in motels.

Jack’s Dad is named Jim, after my Dad. He’s about 55-ish, and his main issue is that generally, he questions how he got to this stage in his life with apparently so little to show for it, and with such a weak and tenuous relationship with his son (so he thinks). I’m 43 – not so far behind Jim’s age that I couldn’t imagine his predicament. Both my Jim and his son Jack are in a kind of life path rut, but while Jack is near the beginning of his journey, his Dad is closer to the other end.

Jack has an older sister named Kelly. I drew a lot of inspiration for Kelly from my sister Kim: her love of animals, her tenacity, and her ability to defend others to her own determent. A second character also represents qualities of my sister: Regina Coffey, who suffers through an abusive relationship, and struggles to assert herself while raising her two sons with very little income. Regina is a survivor, but not a prosperer in life.

The world of “Owe Nothing” is a 2001-2002 version of East Vancouver, with a few curious throwbacks or hold-overs from the ’70s left intact. The main incongruity is that the two large, neighbouring motels in which much of the story takes place exist at all. The Mountain View Motel (where Jack’s family lives) and the Peacock Court Motel (where Regina Coffey and her sons live) were real places, both bulldozed sometime in the mid-1980s, I believe. The motel culture of Kingsway in East Vancouver was dying even when I lived in it briefly, as a kid in the mid-1970s. It was grimy and harsh in places, but also lively and friendly – like a motor-hotel version of a low rent, big city tenement project.

More to come…

Join my Owe Nothing page on FaceBook:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?v=info&edit_info=all#/pages/Owe-Nothing-a-novel-by-E-John-Love/81433960464?ref=ts