Road Trip to Visit Seth!

I met the Canadian treasure best known as 'Seth' last weekend. He's one of those cartoonist guys. Graphic novels and such. And unlike most popular regional Ontario artists, he has an exhibit at Museum London, hopefully long before his death.

Seth (not his real name,) looks to be in his forties. His show at the London Regional Art Gallery at the Forks of the Thames is called 'Dominion' and is his imagined very Canadian city called 'Dominion.' For those youngsters out there who may be reading this, Canada used to be called 'The Dominion of Canada.' In fact, what we now call 'Canada Day,' was known as 'Dominion Day' up till about Centennial Year in 1967 when all hell broke loose and we changed our flag from that thing with the Union Jack up in the corner to the current one with the bands of white flanking a big red maple leaf. Well, I suppose that's what you get when you ask an American - in this case Andy Warhol - to design your flag.

The exhibit itself is an installation of Seth's 60 or so cardboard reproductions of the buildings in his idea of a typical Canadian town as it would look in the post-war years. In his notes, he mentions that it was originally conceived of as a Northern Ontario town. But architecturally-speaking, it could just as easily be any mid-sized town anywhere in Ontario or all of Canada or mid-west United States for that matter.

The installation and imagination that went into it is quite impressive. And highly recommended. I'll spare you all of that high-falutin' artspeak and David Copperfield crap because you can go see it for yourselves. It's at Museum London till the middle of March. I almost wish the London Art Gallery was still located overtop the old London Public Library on Queens Ave. It would be more at home there. And a perfect reflection of the city that lay a block to the south.

When I met Seth last Sunday, it was because he was giving a little talk and artist tour of the 'Dominion' exhibit. I had accidently wandered into the show about a month earlier and realized that I had a copy of his latest graphic novel - or self-described "picture novella" which I had received as a gift last spring.

... And hadn't cracked open until last Sunday morning, the day of Seth's talk. I figured that since the guy was only two blocks away, I might as well go hear him and at least get my book signed.

I forgot the book at home but I was tickled pink at the man's writing. Lots of stuff about life and death and the fading of memory and the world around as it we get older. Put it this way, I could relate - simply as the author of a book of memoirs entitled 'Look Back in Anguish' and an autobiography called 'Living in the Past.'

I knew I was onto something good about the third page when Seth is talking about the birth of the title character George Sprott (the kind of star from the time when there was few television stations around - George is a bit like Elwy Yost and George Pierrot, the travelogue guy from Detroit television in the 1960s.) Seth writes that George was "born in Chatham, Ontario, although other sources suggest that it may have been Galt, Ontario."

It's that kind of subtle dry comic touch that I appreciate. In the town George lives, there are two television stations. The one he works for is the less successful of the two. Not hard to understand given the vision and lack of imagination of their management. The station is named CKCK. Back then every local television station's call letters started with 'CK.'

So I was about twenty pages into the book last Sunday when it was time for the artist talk. We arrive just about five minutes before it was to start. And as we're rushing to the front door, I see this tall elegantly dressed fellow in a long overcoat with a suit and silk tie underneath and he's having a smoke outside the front door. I immediately knew it was Seth. Never seen the fellow before in person, but I'd read an article in the Globe and Mail last May which described him as a dapper fellow prone to wearing fedoras and vintage clothing. Kinda looked like John Waters or Steve Buscemi, that funny-looking guy from the motion-pictures. And I mean that as a compliment.

Well, this day he wasn't wearing his trademark fedora but I knew it was him. For one thing, if it wasn't Seth, it had to be an out-of-towner. Because no one dresses that well for London on the weekend. No one in this town looks that dapper. Not even city-counciller Roger Caranci. But the real dead-giveaway was, who else would be outside a lecture hall a few minutes before showtime furiously puffing away? He's an *artist* - of course he's a smoker!

No one else out there with him so I walk up to him, repress the urge to ask if he might have an extra smoke and ask if he's Mr. Seth. Well, dang it all if I'm not right.

I tell him how much I've enjoyed the first 20 pages of 'George Sprott' and then ask him a - for me, rather intelligent question. "Now tell me, 'Dominion City' inside there, is it based on Chatham or Galt?"

Well, of course we both had a little chuckle over that. And then, as one who has had to answer similar questions too many times, he tells me that Dominion City is based on a number of Ontario cities.

And then, as no surprise to me, he adds London into the mix. He gestures to the left towards our main drag of Dundas Street and says that Dominion City is from the era of the fifites which was very much London, Ontario.

Ironically, in the direction he's gesturing, the ENTIRE immediate block before us has been razed to the ground on BOTH sides of the street to make way for a modern monument in ugliness known as The Court House, a mediocre piece of some kind of Post-Modernism called 'Bell Telephone Regional Headquarters' and on the other side of the road, a junior-hockey arena with a Disneyesque reproduction of the 150-year-old Talbot Hotel which was knocked down in its place.

The actual exhibit of 'Dominion' is far more representative of how that block used to look. The Talbot Hotel was previously a dump called 'The Belvedere Hotel' where you could get pickled eggs, 25-cent glasses of draft, a cheap room upstairs the size of a closet - and venereal disease. All in one night.

Down the block closer to where the Museum now stands and across from the Courthouse was a small three-floor block of building with 'Bill's Food Bar' as its anchor. The kind of diner which until its demolition in the early 1980s had remained unchanged since opening in the '50s. The kind of place that closes about four in the afternoon because it did a brisk lunch trade in milkshakes with the old stainless-steel cups and a cream-coloured gravy for the french fries which my favorite London artist once compared to looking like cum.

That, is the London which has a lot in common with Dominion City. The closest we have to that is the stretch of architecture on Richmond Street in the block between King and York. In fact, if you were to walk down that block on a winter's night you would swear you were in Dominion City back in the 1950s or the '70s.

I know Seth has felt that way. I happened to be sneaking a look at the first few pages of his graphic novel 'It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken' on Amazon and lo and behold, the narrator is visiting London Ont. in the early '80s and wanders downstairs into the old 'Book Brothers' used bookstore on Richmond looking for a collection of 'Peanuts.' Shit, deja vu. I'd done the same thing many a time looking for old 'Dark Shadows' paperbacks and vintage '16 Magazine's.

Anyway, back to the Dominion installation and George Sprott. It was heartening to see some of the buildings central to George' life that I had been reading about just that morning - the Melody Grill, the Coronet Hall, CKCK Radio, Narwal Books and the Radio Hotel where George spent his final years living in a shabby suite of rooms on the top floor. The building which housed Clyde Fans makes me feel I must broaden my reading of Seth's other books.

But the building I got the biggest kick out of was the sole residential house in the entire installation of Dominion City. The name-tag called it 'Inkwell's End.' It's really a reproduction of Seth's own house in a small town not too far north of here.

Soooo, how about it, gang? What say we make a trip up there and drop in on Seth? It shouldn't be hard to find his house. 'Inkwell's End' is etched into the glass of the front door. And if the reproduction is accurate, it's a red-brick three-floor single-family dwelling from about 1920 or so. That should narrow it down a bit. And I also happen to know that it's near the railway tracks. Thank you, Globe & Mail reporter.

Seth may not appreciate us knocking on his door unannounced and probably won't answer the door if he gets a good look at us from behind the curtains. But he appears to be a nice guy. The best way to describe him is that he seems like the kind of guy that you wouldn't expect to run into at the beach. I think you'll like him.