Although I’ve been described as animated, I am not a cartoon. Yet over the years I’ve seen and sympathized with the struggle of the inked and painted – every day, finding yourself drawn into another situation: Your robot maid malfunctions, your pet dinosaur runs away, an evil wizard is out to eat you. Your relationships don’t grow, your waist won’t shrink, and it seems you’re always wearing the same thing. You feel stuck in a rut and powerless over your own life.
Now what if I said rearranging your furniture will change all that?
Sound crazy? Well, say hello to the new ancient Chinese art of feng shui.
This is the introduction to a book I pitched that will likely never get made so I’m putting some of the pages here. The concept was obvious – apply feng shui principles to fictitious 2-D environments = funny. And i thought it’d be fun to render modern cartoon characters’ homes in an old Chinese woodblock print style.
But there’s always more going on. My other book, Obscene Interiors, makes fun of the decorating found in online male personal ads – but it’s really about how current ideas of masculinity are in contrast to the entire concept of decorating, and how men struggle with this. (I won’t digress into queer theory here.) Point being – i like my projects’ core to contain a significant issue or concept, which is then presented in an entertaining and appealing format as a means to reach a larger audience. I could have kept Obscene Interiors as just a series of images shown in a gallery – which I did – but it’s audience would have been incredibly limited. By adding the captions and making it entertaining, it became a book that would be seen and enjoyed by thousands of people, without diluting the underlying message. Also, people really do need help decorating.
With Feng Shui for the Cartoon Home, the deeper idea was to consider how when one feels lack of control over their life/world they often turn to supernatural beliefs that offer some explanation – or idea of control – over their destiny. I don’t mean to explain the joke but, if the Simpsons say, used feng shui to fix their problems, and it worked – well – then the show would cease to exist because it wouldn’t be entertaining. (And we’d all be putting a plant in that corner there and getting a raise.)
Anyhoo – this book was pitched to all the publishers that I thought were the best match for it and they all passed. Which I find really lame because it’s a cute book and if SEVEN books on feng shui for cats can get published… I could have kept pitching this until eventually someone somewhere printed it, but really, I get bored. And I have like a million other ideas I’d rather mover forward on. That’s the weird thing about being creative and getting older – is realizing you will never get to produce all your ideas – not even a fraction of them – so you have to get very selective with what you’re going to spend your time on. This can drive people crazy when they see me walk away from what they see as a perfectly good, profitable idea.
But also, i hate being a salesman. Especially when I’m selling my own product. Self promoters gross me out. I’d rather focus on making the product than selling it. So if you’re not into what i’ve got I don’t push it. I’m into projects where people call ME and say omg we have to do this thing – because those are the projects that always happen.
