Saturday, December 24, 2011

Banana Nanny

A while back Dylan had the urge to write about a lot of things, but he was struggling with the idea of his public persona as a publisher vs his personal thoughts about comics, art, teaching, process, etc. So, we started a blog called Banana Nanny. It was kind of a free-form, personal blog where he and I would just post our thoughts about all of these things. Dylan wanted to keep it mostly secret, only letting a few close friends know about it. At some point he thought that too many people were reading it and he got uncomfortable and decided to delete the blog.

I thought it was gone forever, and unfortunately most of it is... but for some reason the first 5 lines of most of the entries is still on my blogger account's dashboard. I've been trying to deal with blogger about retrieving the lost information, but it seems hopeless. So, all I have are these screengrabs of the beginning of each entry.

Keep in mind these were pretty personal posts from Dylan.  I think he expressed a bit more of his personal frustrations and anger with the comic industry and art world that he often felt at odds with, but cared about so deeply. We both did. My own posts were often about my frustrations with the art world at the time, but also random things like the spelling bee as a metaphor for the problems with popularity in the arts. Dylan's philosophy about promotion, production and popularity vs. art was a very good one. other stuff about time travel through art and Star Trek. His rants against the Portand Mercury's Comics section were in many ways an exercise of his humorous side - his frustration with that publication was that it ignores so many talented Portland cartoonists who deserve a slot on their local comics page. He channeled that frustration into comical rage directed at the talking dinosaur comic strip. Please keep in mind that this is only the opening thoughts of each entry, thoughts that were fleshed out and explained through lengthy posts, so please don't take offense of judgement to these incomplete posts.

We didn't expect a lot of eyes on this. I feel a little weird posting it here. But I miss this blog. I was sad when Dylan shut it down. I'm even sadder that I can't get to the rest of it. I think Dylan felt like a lot of his ideas needed to be out there somewhere, but he was still uncomfortable with the reality of having eyes on these thoughts. The post "Push Push" and "Links" both spoke about this.

Dylan wrote some really good things on Banana Nanny.  He also wrote some angry rants. And some really funny stuff, too... Here's all that's left of it.












3 comments:

  1. I want to read more. I hope the rest of these posts turn up somehow someday.

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  3. Dang, I wish I had known about this blog. I'd love to read the rest of these entries somehow.

    Your post, Tom, called "words" is something I think about a lot. One of the big problems in our culture is that railing against some larger power structure is so rapidly consumed by that structure nowadays that it tends to just leave artists blinking, covered in gunpowder. It's hard to get inside the invisibility cloak.

    Of course there is always another underground. And maybe people are getting smarter. But mainstream American culture, which I used to find so amusing, or even fascinating in a macabre way, now just feels like choking on garbage. It's not funny anymore.

    Lastly, I also enjoy and am enraged by the way so-called Christians contort themselves into saying/believing things Jesus would have called a major smack-down on, like bigotry, consumerism, blind patriotism, and the list goes on. One of the biggest shames of our times.

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