Our daughter is wrapping up an animation job in LA at Sony. She and her husband are hard-working, talented artists who specialize in animation of people and animals and objects that appear in films with live actors. They are just wrapping G-Force, a live-action movie about secret-agent guinea pigs.
Her gesture of fondness for her Animation Lead led her and another animator to cover the supervisor’s work station in tin foil. Tin foil in tinsel town. While it isn’t Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapping the Eiffel Tower, I think it would look just right at home in the Guggenheim.
Today we said our goodbyes to Emily and Mike. I shed a few tears at the airport. It’s hard to say goodbye when the distances are so great.
Apart from all the sightseeing we did, what was really interesting about this trip was seeing with my own eyes where our daughter lives, what’s in her fridge, what the view from her balcony is like, where she buys her groceries, and what the neighbourhood looks like. Normal stuff, really, but it helps me to visualize her day-to-day experiences. (These are also the very things that I try to bring to life in this blog about our Bear River experience!)
Emily and I spent some time sewing and it was fun to share that creativity and to work in her studio room that I have only seen before from the other side of a webcam.
She has developed a stuffed-animal or ‘plushies’ line and has been selling her creations online for just over a year.
“Etsy” is a phenomenally successful virtual store where you can post and sell handmade creations. It also functions as a community with forums and sub groupings. Emmy was invited to join a plushies group and they challenge each other with regular projects/tasks. The last one was to design a fairy-tale character plushie based on someone else’s description. Emily describes her creative process and steps in her blog. Her resulting mermaid sold within hours of its posting….to someone in Texas.
She and her virtual friends use the Internet to publish, market, and promote their creativity. I think this way of taking charge of distributing one’s own work is only the beginning of a global trend that will eventually challenge conventional shopping and distribution.
While Emily worked on her mermaid, I went through her scrap bag and made two small shoulder bags based on a technique that I saw Louise use in Toronto. It is basically sandwiching and machine stitching scraps between a backing and netting. This is a fast way to combine fabrics without quilting.I was inspired in my choice of colours by the expressionistic paintings and by the Matisses we had seen at the LACMA.
I also bought us $5 worth of barley kernels and made us each a ‘magic bag’ to heat in the microwave for sore sewing and blogging necks!
We spent some time exploring the immediate neighbourhood and we visited the local public library. I was impressed with its size, considering that the neighbourhood is just 7 years old. It was bright and welcoming and had a huge wall of videotapes and DVD’s. How I wish I could transport it to Bear River!
Emily taught Larry and I how to make maki rolls so that we could bring some variety to the potlucks we attend in Bear River! I love Bear River and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else….but the restaurant choices are pretty limited in the Annapolis Valley.
In preparation for the ‘lesson’, we visited a Japanese grocery store in LA. They had a huge books and magazine section too. It was amazing to see how much less Japanese goods cost in LA than in Toronto. Honestly, I saw more of a price range difference between Canadian and US goods.
I’ve brought home some seaweed sheets in my luggage. Let’s hope the videos we took help us to remember.
It now feels like the 2 weeks flew by. It sure feels good to spend time with such creative, hospitable people, especially when they are your kids. Thanks Emily and thanks Mike!
When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are
- Jiminy Cricket
Mike and Emily are huge fans ofDisneyland-Mike was even an animator on The Wild- so when they invited us to spend a day at the theme park in Anaheim, I was intrigued to find out just what the big deal is. I get why they like to go. The rides and the animatronics are the three-dimensional manifestations of their two-dimensional livelihood, interests, and obsession with animation.In their work they get into the heads of their characters and visualize what it would be like to be in an animated movie. At Disney, that imagining comes closer to reality. They step into the movie and become participants.
*Hand in hand, we can do
What it takes to make our dreams come true
Each of us, if we trust
In just one dream
I had never been to Disneyland and hadn’t had an urge to go since I was a little girl watching the Walt Disney show on TV in the 1950’s.
I’m not an animator. But neither are the majority of the people who throng there daily (Disneyland has only been closed on 3 days ever….JFK’s assassination, September 11th, and in the 70’s during a Yippie Vietnam War protest).
I mentioned the billions that Getty left to LA. That’s peanuts compared with the money that Disney annually rakes in. With worldwide sales of over 30 billion last year, they are not slowing down any time soon. Even with the rise in the price of gasoline, the number of visitors to the park has increased this year.
What I found there were crowds and crowds of happy, smiling people — in spite of the line-ups for rides and the over-priced fast food. Disney attracts all ages, although the bulk of people looked to be under 40 and there were lots of families there.
So what is the appeal?
From the moment you plunk down your $62 US for admission and walk through those turnstiles, you are inundated with happy, upbeat, sentimental Disney movie lyrics over loudspeakers. You are waved to and smiled at by cheerful cartoon characters. You step into what amounts to a gigantic stage set where the proportions of the surroundings effectively shrink you down to the size of a cartoon character.
*It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears
It’s a world of hopes, and a world of fears
There’s so much that we share that it’s time we’re aware
It’s a small world after all!
What is absent in Disneyland is the outside world. There are no newspapers and neither are there reminders of the War in Iraq. There is no global warming and there are no panhandlers, no television sets, no advertising, and no cars belching exhaust. There is no need to be on high alert for potential criminals. (The weapons check at the entrance has taken care of this).There are no bills to pay, and no boss to answer to. There is only a very large protective bubble of smiling, predictable storybook characters.
*It’s the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
Every time Disney makes another animated movie, an aspect of it is integrated into the theme park. There are rides that evoke Pinocchio, Snow White, and Peter Pan, for instance. Like Mickey Mouse, these cultural icons are shared by all. So, in a way, when people come together in the theme park, there are no unknowns. Everyone understands the references and probably has some kind of personal memory to something Disney.
Emily and Mike took us on some ‘safe’ rides. We sat in a car that pulled us on tracks through sets where animatronic people and creatures talked and sang and acted out stories. Many ‘ghostly’and dry ice effects were involved.
Larry and I even got to blast out evil with our ray guns.
Disney has been in the theme park business for long enough to really know how to touch the crowds. They do it in movies and at Disneyland, they do it live-in-person. There are many Disneyland workers serving you, herding the crowds, straightening out the baby strollers parked in front of the rides, constantly sweeping up any hint of litter or fallen leaves on the immaculate walkways.
*Welcome to our family time
Welcome to our brotherly time
We’re happy giving and taking to the friends we’re making
There’s nothing we won’t do
Discreet loudspeakers play the music and narration that accompany the floats during regular parades where all the characters dance, sing, wave, and smile their way through the idealized ‘town’.
I have to admit that in spite of myself, after I had been indoctrinated all day with happy melodies and had watched all the floats and dancers pass me during the parade, I actually felt a rush of emotion when Mickey’s float passed by. And when he turned to look at me, I felt a tear form. It was like an out-of-body experience as I watched myself be moved by a person in a costume. But you see, in those few moments I felt that I was seeing the real Mickey Mouse….the same one I believed in when I was 5 years old.
Going to restaurants here, you would never know that there is a food shortage anywhere as the food portions are enormous, the cost is less than in Canada and there are lots of fresh ingredients. It is also standard fare that at the end of every meal, the server comes to the table with containers for you to pack up the left-overs.
There is also the custom of refilling your drinks….the bottomless 1/2 litre glass of, say strawberry-lemonade and the glass of water. I wonder if this has something to do with fact that all of LA is sitting on an ancient seabed of sand and is constantly artificially irrigated. Maybe this is so ingrained into the psyche, this need to irrigate, that it extends to people too.
We’ve been to a lot of fast-food, sit-down, chain restaurants and the number of employees is staggering. There is someone to greet you, someone to bring your drink, someone to take your order, someone to serve the food, another to pick up the dishes. I am assuming this means that there is lots and lots of cheap labour here. The majority of our servers appear to be Hispanic, as are the staff in the public galleries, the parking lot attendants, the taxi drivers and the multitude of gardeners and pruners looking after the manicured gardens and pools. You can see groups of Mexican men standing in the parking lots of the some malls or outside of Home Depot waiting for Californians with disposable income to offer them work in landscaping or building or whatever.
This divide is very visible and you can see who the dominant culture here is not. At the same time, the Spanish influence in Californian architecture is huge as are the street names and cities too. There is always Mexican food on every menu and in every grocery store. So while it’s chic to live in a Spanish-inspired home, it’s quite a different thing to be a new arrival from south of the border.
At the LA County Museum of Art, there was an exhibit of modern Chicano works calledPhantom Sightings: the end of the Chicano Movement. The title alone has created quite the stir in the Mexican community as to whether the Chicano Movement is over or not and does this show truly represent the community? It is the first such show at the LACMA in 20 years, which in itself is pretty controversial.
Because I am a tourist here, I have spent the last 2 weeks interacting with more latinos than with non-latinos. This has altered my interior landscape of who a ‘Californian’ is and my new image is in sharp contrast to the former stereotype I carried of blonde surfers. I’m guessing that Latino-Californians have noticed this too, so this piece in the show really hit home to me.
Shockingly, I know neither the title of the piece, nor the name of the photographer, but it is a photo of a campground of Mexicans on their illegal journey to the US. There are no people in the photo, just their abandoned belongings and their shadows. They are anonymous.
Down past San Diego, near the border, there are official street signs that show a fleeing family as reminders about who is allowed in this free country and who is not.
I think that if I lived here I would want to find out more about latino culture (is this even the’ correct’ term? Should it be Chicano? Mexican?) So much to learn, and so little time.
In the fall of 2007, Flora and Larry moved from Toronto (population 2 million) to the tiny, beautiful tidal village of Bear River in Nova Scotia (population 800) seeking a life filled with creative pursuits such as organic gardening, painting, and silversmithing.
Life in Bear River is frugal, but rich in all the important ways - beauty, music, artists and friendly souls...that's "Community" with a capital "C"!
