It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken (Seth)

I’ve become interested in graphic novels lately. I’m not sure why – perhaps it’s the union of pictures and words that creates such a compelling medium -- two tools, used together to tell a story that wouldn’t be told the same way in any other format.

This novella, by Seth (Palookaville, Mister X), reinforces this new interest.

It’s written in the first person, and tells the story of Seth -- a Toronto cartoonist who becomes obsessed with a cartoonist from the 1950s named Jack Kalloway who signed his drawings ‘Kalo.’

Seth comes across a couple of drawings by Kalo in old copies of the New Yorker, and becomes intrigued by his style and his seemingly brief career.

He becomes even more interested when he finds out Kalo was from a small rural Ontario town, like him, and he begins trying to track down anything he can find on Kalo.

Seth’s interest in Kalo, he admits, may come from his attraction to the past, and the fact that almost anything that hearkens back to a bygone era appeals him.

Pages are dedicated to rambling soliloquy as Seth wanders through old industrial neighborhoods in Toronto, thinking out loud about what makes him tick.

I guess that obsession with old stuff is part of what connects me to the book. I see a lot of myself in Seth and his yearning for a time when things were simpler and better.
He’s scared of the future, which he sees as a societal evolution away from character and beauty.

“Life is about change,” his girlfriend tells him. “I mean, don’t you get excited just thinking about the future? So much will have changed by the time we’re old. It’ll be amazing. Think of the old people today and how much change they’ve seen.”

“Don’t even talk about it!” Seth retorts. “I look forward to the future with nothing but dread. Things are getting worse and worse every year. As awful as things are right now, I’d be more than happy if the world would stay relatively like this until I die. I can’t face the next fifty years.”

But then later, during a conversation with his friend Chet (Toronto cartoonist Chester Brown), that near-rage has subsided and he takes a much more thoughtful perspective on his appreciation for the past – though he arrives at the same conclusion.

“Look how pretty that old building looks against the night sky,” Seth says.

“It’s funny, there’s something in the decay of old things that provokes an evocative sadness for the vanished past. If those buildings were perfectly preserved it wouldn’t be the same.”

“It’s the difference between a dilapidated old farm house and a pristine deco hotel lobby. Somehow that lobby doesn’t convince you of the reality or the beauty of yesterday.

“I’d hate to think that my belief in the superiority of the past was really just a misplaced, over-rationalized aesthetic choice. No, forget I said that. Things are obviously getting worse every year.”

The conversations Seth has with Chet and his girlfriend give the story a human quality. Without those relationships it would verge on near-oppressive naval gazing, but it’s saved by their presence. They, along with the other characters in the book, also help us to see different sides of Seth. With his family he’s frustrated, with Chet he’s comfortable and gentle, with his girlfriend he’s a little more aggressive and possibly trying to prove himself.

Seth’s appreciation for the past is apparent in his illustrations as well as his words. Even Toronto, and Strathroy, Ont. where both he and Kalo lived, it turns out, are rendered in a simple, uncomplicated style that seems to be a throwback to the ‘30s or ‘50s.

Toronto is captured beautifully in the illustrations – but there no sign of the cold, post-modern all-glass office towers or condos that plague this city. Those are ignored, left behind while Seth records the decaying industrial buildings, mom-and-pop restaurants and forgotten local neighbourhoods. It’s almost a historic record of these locales, which sadly, seem to be disappearing from the face of this city as Starbucks and Indigo take over their spaces. Like Seth, I get sad thinking about it.

In his efforts to close in on Kalo, Seth is searching for something. Maybe it’s his own past, or the 1950s cartoonist’s skin he feels he should have occupied, misplaced as he feels in this time and place.

There’s no clear explanation of what he’s searching for or whether he finds it. Those truths are left to the reader to decide. The final, complete picture, though, is of a man’s exploration of nostalgia, discontent, and the realization of the truth behind what one old man shares with Seth.

“When you get to my age, you realize that everything mattered."

Shopgirl: Steve Martin

The other night my brother and I were driving from Barrie to Toronto at night. There’s a point in the journey, when the city is still miles and miles away, when the road rises and a blanket of lights stretches out across the horizon, serving as a reminder of how enormous Toronto really is.

We got talking about the city, and how it’s really a collection of lives. Millions of human beings -- living, breathing, working, loving. And how each of them is connected, in some way, to others around them, forming tiny little networks and communities, pockets of friendship and community that interconnect and stretch into a giant web that make this city, which sometimes seems so cold, into a beautiful, livable place.

Shopgirl, based on a novella by Steve Martin, explores one lonely girl’s life in Los Angeles, and how she, almost by accident, builds her own little community.
I read the book first. It, like the movie, provided a glimpse into the life of Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes), a pretty ordinary young woman who lives in the big city, works at Saks Fifth Avenue, and every once in a while draws a picture, in a small way living out the artistic ambitions that brought her to the city in the first place.

She’s lonely, but her issues go deeper than that– touching on depression. She wants to change her life but she doesn’t really know how to go about it, and is just sort of surviving.

“She keeps working to make connections, but the pile of near-misses is starting to overwhelm her,” says Steve Martin, who serves as narrator as well as one of the leading characters in the film.

By accident, two people come into Mirabelle’s life simultaneously, and they couldn’t be more different from each other, right down to the way they meet and their opening lines.

Jeremy, played by Jason Schwartzman, is a sloppy 20-something who has a job stenciling logos on amplifiers. Mirabelle meets him in a Laundromat.
“Hey. I mean hello. Hi,” Jeremy says, by way of introduction. He later tells her: “I’m an okay guy by the way,” and you intrinsically believe this is true, though there isn’t much substance to him beyond the fact that he is an “okay guy.”

Ray Porter, on the other hand, played by Martin, is a distinguished, wealthy, 50-something millionaire. He meets Mirabelle at the Saks glove counter where she works, purchasing a $145 pair of gloves. Disarming, yet giving little away, he leaves an impression on the wary Mirabelle. Later he gives her the gloves with a note that reads: “ I would like to have dinner with you.”

Mirabelle, glowing a little from the excitement of it all, dates both for a while. But inevitably, despite his assurances that he’s “not looking for anything permanent,” she falls in love with Ray and mostly forgets about Jeremy, who goes off to pursue a dream, somehow inspired by Mirabelle to do so.

Ray sweeps her away with well-practiced charm, gifts and maturity that give her a sense of comfort. But in reality, she’s less secure with Ray than she was without him, because his love is fleeting and superficial and he’s searching for something that Mirabelle can’t provide, and that maybe no woman can provide – perfection.

Things between then go okay for a while, but there’s a sense that this can’t last. And then the moment comes when it all has to fall apart.
Ray is planning a trip to New York, and he tells Mirabelle – cruelly though he doesn’t realize it -- that he’s thinking of buying a place, maybe a three-bedroom ‘in case he meets someone and wants to settle down.’

Those careless words break Mirabelle’s heart, but give her the kick she needed to walk away.
“I can hurt now or I can hurt later,” she says, before saying goodbye.

Somehow, Ray is not ready to love Mirabelle and never will be, and despite his early warnings to her, his spiel about “ keeping our options open,” and his attempts to make it clear they weren’t really together, her true feelings took over and she fell in love with him.

In the meantime, Jeremy has moved towards becoming the man Mirabelle needs, and when he comes back into her life, she sees that.

Ray has shown Mirabelle what she needs -- through what he doesn’t possess -- and Jeremy, through the process of life, has developed some of those characteristics and become someone she can love.

And when their paths cross it’s the right time and the right place, and something beautiful happens.

“I’ll protect you,” Jeremy says, now grown up and successful. And his words are just what Mirabelle needs to hear.

“What he offers is tender and true,” the narrator says.

Isn’t that what we all need?