24 Hour Comics: Bunnirah

I’ve been remiss in writing about my 24 hour comic experiences on this blog. Here’s what’s happened since 2009′s Shamanic Lemonade:

I missed two 24HC events in 2010. In 2011, we ended up with no family obligations for Thanksgiving, and I thought it would be fun to host a 24HC event at home that weekend. Only Adrian Wallace was able to stay the whole time, but we had fun and I produced The Four Humors. We spent a lot of time goofing off, so I had to draw a lot of essentially single panel pages to finish in time. This may be my weakest 24 hour comic, but I’m happy with it. It’s pretty much an elaborate pun I just had to get out of my system.

In May of 2012, I hosted another gathering, on a weekend less prone to family commitments. This would be my last group 24HC event in Portland. I’m glad my good pals Adrian, Conch, and Spider were able to make it. By this time I’d posted all my 24 hour comics to my new site on Comic Fury. I figured if I do two 24 page comics a year, I could post one page a week all year long. However, I found with The Four Humors that 1 page a week is too slow. So for The Crepusculars, as an added challenge, I drew on extra large paper and designed each page to split in half, so that I could have two pages to post each week. In other words, 48 pages of narrative on 24 sheets of paper. Would this be twice as arduous as 24 straight pages? Not at all. It prevented me from using some of my tried-and-true shortcuts, and forced a denser story, but certainly was not twice the work of the comics I’d done before. I’ve stuck with this format ever since.

The rest of 2012 was consumed by prepping the house, selling the house, and moving to Minnesota. On the official 24 Hour Comics Day in early October, we had just put the house on the market. There was no way I or anyone else could expect to plant ourselves for a whole Saturday of drawing comics. But then the house sold, much faster then we expected. Then Marcie left for her week-long conference in LA. There was still much to be done for the move,  too much to devote a whole weekend to comics (it’s best to set Sunday aside to sleep and recover), but I decided to try to work it in around the move preparations. My plan was to draw 12 pages in 12 hours for two consecutive days while I had the house to myself. What I discovered is that there is no substitute for setting aside 24 hours and sticking to that one day deadline. Things came up, there were distractions, amorphous breaks, and I couldn’t accrue 12 hours of drawing in a day. It then became just like any project that you work in around your daily life, and took me three weeks to complete. It’s not really a 24 hour comic at all, but it is The Return of Blinkey.

By Christmas we were in our new house in Minneapolis. In May, Marcie traveled again for a meeting and I had the place to myself for a week with no pressing engagements. On the spur of the moment I decided to draw a 24 hour comic. Months ago I had mentioned a dream I had on Facebook, in which I drew a comic about a giant radioactive vampire bunny. Several people demanded that I make the dream a reality. I knew then who would star in my next 24 hour comic: Bunnirah, Count of Monsters. This was my first completely solo, legit 24 hour effort. I never managed to hit the one page per hour pace, even thought I broke the split-page format a couple of times to speed things up. At hour 24 my last five pages were still in pencil, and the story was only 22 pages long. I didn’t want to rush inking the final pages, so I threw in the towel and went to bed. I dozed for about an hour, and then people were working on the street outside (a hazard of doing 24 hour comics midweek), and the dog was barking, and I couldn’t sleep. I read, watched tv, expected to doze off again, but didn’t. So I went upstairs and finished inking the comic. I consider this a successful 24 hour comic as per the Eastman Variation. It may not be my best effort, but I had an absolute blast with these characters. Be assured they will return.

The Unfair Critic vs Life Of Pi

Warning: I will spoil everything

This is a hard post to write, because I find myself in endless ironic loops. I’m just going to barrel forward and try to ignore them, you can do as you like.

I read Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I only knew what everyone knows about it: boy gets stuck on a lifeboat with tiger. I like animals, and I like ocean voyages, and I was hoping those things would be dealt with somewhat realistically. I was engaged by part 1, about Pi’s life in India. I thoroughly enjoyed part 2, the part about being stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger. I found myself frustrated and angry by the end of part 3, when the author brings everything back around to a question of faith. It’s not the book I want it to be, which is my problem, not the author’s. The author, as far as I can tell, achieved exactly what he intended, and I commend him for it.

I didn’t see the movie, and I don’t plan to. I think I would hate it. The still images I’ve seen from the movie glisten with that CGI sheen. I don’t want this story to shimmer with magic. The situation is fantastic enough; I want the sights and sounds and smells to land with matter-of-fact, undeniable reality. I want to believe it. I want to be on that lifeboat with that tiger. I want to breathe the air in the middle of the ocean with a wild predator, at once dangerous, inaccessible, and part of a bond with a human being.

Part 2 of the book accomplishes all this admirably. Pi’s strategies for dealing with the tiger are surprising, ingenious, and plausible. Their journey is arduous and enthralling, and believable. The distance between human and tiger is never entirely bridged, because hello, it’s a wild animal. Believability is key. I desperately didn’t want the story to become fantasy. I enjoy fantasy, but with this story I was hoping to feel a more authentic connection to the natural world; the ocean, the sky, wild animals. Again, my problem. What’s the point in approaching any work of art with such specific expectations? I’m not writing the book. I can interpret it in my own way, but I don’t get to decide what happens.

Still. Expectations met, as I said, in Part 2. Even though there were some elements that stretched plausibility, that might be called magical realism. The oil tanker that blindly brushes past the castaways seems unlikely in the vast ocean, but also seems like one of those events so ridiculous it has to be true. The island of algae may or not have any basis in actual botany, but I had no trouble believing it. The one thing that really threw me was meeting the other blind sailor in the other lifeboat. That was so utterly unlikely, I thought the whole episode was a hallucination, right up until the two Japanese reps discuss it in Part 3.

Part 3, when Pi tells his story to the men from the shipping company, and they don’t believe him. So he tells them another story, with no wild animals, that they can believe. And then I start to doubt this wonderful story I’ve just finished. Why would the author do that? Probably for the same reason he wrote 100+ pages of Pi being in India and absorbing different religions. Pi is pious (is that why Martel chose that odd name for his protagonist?) and he prays a lot at sea, but it’s his empirical knowledge of zookeeping that saves him. So what’s all this religion in aid of? Only the central theme of the book, it turns out. In the end, we are given a choice. Believe the unbelievable, the much better story, or fall back on what fits with our own experience. Have faith, or don’t.

To clarify, I don’t really doubt the story with the tiger. It’s pretty clear what really happened to Pi (if anything can be said to have “really happened” in a work of fiction.) I think Martel is just giving us an exercise in faith, a miniature model of faith. I am not religious, so when I hear people talk about faith a part of me switches off. Faith is nothing to do with me. So I was frustrated to get to the end of the book and feel evangelized to, even in a most subtle and friendly way.

Still, I have to admit, all the things I wanted from this book–the sense of connection to the ocean, the sky, wild animals, the natural world–most people would call that a spiritual impulse. I don’t mind calling it that. One can seek and feel a connection to the larger universe without believing in God. We skeptics get a lot of spiritual juice from scientific observation. That’s why I so craved, and so appreciated, the realism in this story. Realism was my best path to a spiritual experience. When faith became the clear central theme, I almost felt my realist path to spiritual connection devalued.

Almost, but not quite. In the end I have to just let it go, as Pi lets Richard Parker go, connected and disconnected at the same time. Which again is the nature of spiritual experience, because unless you are fully enlightened and enter Nirvanna there will always be an element of disconnect. See! Despite my best efforts, Life of Pi remains the book its author intended. I’m gonna go read Spider-Man now.

Nidan Test: I’m Doing It Right

Last week I was lucky enough to do my 2nd degree black belt test in front of Frank Doran Sensei, who is a world-renowned, high-ranking teacher and head of my dojo’s division. With aikido, as with drawing, I often feel like I’m faking my way through, and not actually skilled enough to do what I’m attempting to do. After my test, Doran Sensei made it very clear that yes, I am training at a Nidan level, flaws and all.

Awhile back I wrote a post about drawing how I draw, and training how I train, rather than trying to draw or train in a way that is not appropriate for who I am. My test really affirmed this for me with aikido. Like any art, aikido is a lifelong pursuit, with more questions to answer and more flaws to polish continuously showing up. The goal is not to eliminate mistakes, but to elevate my practice so that the mistakes I do make are appropriate for my level.

It was immensely gratifying to hear that I am doing just that from a trusted authority. If Doran Sensei says I am a Nidan, I can believe it without question. It’s too bad there’s no absolute authority to evaluate my drawing… but if art wasn’t subjective, I probably wouldn’t be so into it.

Magic is Real, in the Past

I recently listened to an old episode of Radiolab about memory. I was struck by the capricious nature of memory as described in the program. Remembering something, they say, is not like playing back a tape. It is actually a a reconstruction of the event being remembered.

This is a weird concept, especially in the digital age, when we take for granted the capacity to record and play back any visible or audible event with perfect accuracy. We expect our memories to work the same way. Even when memory is suspect (we’ve all forgotten things, or remembered things differently than someone else) we can compensate by externalizing memories. We can look at old photographs, read old journals, re-watch movies, and virtually re-live past experiences.

But what did memory mean to cultures with no photography, and no mass literacy? How does a society conceive of the past when all their histories are maintained by oral tradition and abstract art?

As any art historian will tell you, pre-modern artists were not too dumb to paint in a lifelike way; they just weren’t interested in doing so. One might say they understood the folly of Pygmalion (which my drawing teacher Joseph Mann was fond of citing). The map is not the territory. A work of art is a representation, not the thing it represents. So if a culture doesn’t care about lifelike recordings, what is their understanding of the past?

I’m speaking in wooly generalities here, but it’s a blog post, not a dissertation. Ancient cultures had a wide array of myths and legends– magical tales. Today we intuitively understand the universe to be predictable. It can be dumbfounding, sure, but it works according to rules that can be understood through study and exploration. It’s hard for us to imagine someone truly believing in magic. But if we had no records to go on apart from stories that had been passed down for generations, stories that had been imperfectly copied from one teller to the next, stories that inevitably alter, perhaps growing ever more colorful and outlandish…wouldn’t those stories seem as real as our photographs? Even if we’re aware that the stories change over time (again, ancient people were not idiots), they are our best tool for understanding the universe. And if our best tool is fluid and abstract, we might sense that it reflects a fluidity in the universe. Unlike a photograph, which reflects concrete, predictable reality.

Or–this is even better (and it’s really where the Radiolab thing comes in). Suppose you live in this world with only fluid, mythic histories, and you have an outlandish experience, like, say, being struck by lightning. And every time you recall that experience, you recreate it slightly differently, until it becomes an encounter with a monster or a spirit. That memory is just as real and reliable as the weight of a rock in your hand at the present moment. And then, you hear a story from someone else about magic elves. Why wouldn’t you believe it?

Magic cannot happen in the present, but it can happen in the past. For ancient peoples, magic was constantly going on in the past, as evidenced by both personal and ancestral memory. Boom! All ancient mythical stories are now true. You’re welcome.

How To Recognize Your Life’s Work

While gearing up for the launch of my current webcomic, I began to think of it as my Life’s Work. But what the heck is a Life’s Work anyway? That’s one of those phrases that takes root in my mind, but seems suspect the minute I write it. Why should anyone’s life be dedicated to just one work? There’s no need to put that kind of limit on oneself.

But I’m still stuck with this label. I’ve attempted to figure out why, and identified the following reasons. Perhaps you’ll find them useful if you’re an artistic type with too many projects in the pipeline.

1. It won’t leave you alone. Aethernaut started out as a handful of character sketches in high school. In college, I learned some new things that lead to building the world around them. I made a graphic novel out of it for my thesis (The U of O Honors College is the only way to study), and spent the next 17 years making notes, revising and expanding the story. So I’ve literally been working on it my whole adult life. Obviously it’s important to me.
2. It brightens your future. This is the flip side of #1; the project stretches forward in time as well as backward. Generating comic pages from my notes on Aethernaut will easily keep me busy for the next ten years. My failing has always been doing too many things, never arriving at a signature style or project or (gods help me) brand. I will undoubtedly continue to have side projects with different aims, but the prospect of dedicating myself to Aethernaut for the foreseeable future feels liberating rather than limiting.
3. It enhances your life. My own experience of this one is complicated to explain. I’ll try to keep it simple. Since working on Aethernaut, I’ve become more interested in lots of things, especially the planets and the history of science. But more than that, the whole world is more vibrant. Real life has all the magic of escapist fantasy. I can look at something, the Moon for instance, and see a distant mass of rock hanging in space, as well as a made-up, within-reach alien world, and both are equally uplifting. It’s bizarre, and wonderful. If you find a project that makes your personal world better, stick with it.
4. It’s your most unique contribution. This is sort of a flip side of #3; a measure of how much the project adds to the world at large. I won’t claim that Aethernaut is absolutely unique and original, but it’s the most unique and original thing I’ve ever come up with. If you can follow Shel Silsverstein’s advice and “put something in the world that wasn’t there before,” please do.
5. You’d hate to die and leave it unfinished. Do you ever imagine what would happen if you were to die right away? Not wish for it, not obsess over it, just consider it at idle moments. I think it’s a normal thing to do. Anyway, along with the obvious sadness of seperation from loved ones, when I think about dying, I want Aethernaut to be finished. That’s probably a pretty good sign that this is the project to get cracking on.

Waters vs Nugent

I mentioned last time that I went to see Roger Waters perform The Wall, and that during Mother they had an animated CCTV camera looming over the stage, and it crystallized the connection between the personal and political in the performance. It also threw me into a tailspin, because the image of a goverment camera playing the role of overprotective mother made me think “nanny state,” a term which is generally used to denigrate social programs like welfare, medicaid, and public education.

Oh no, I thought. Is Roger Waters a libertarian wacko like Ted Nugent? Is he saying that the gummint needs to butt out and let everyone live their own lives? It kind of makes sense; all these monstrous meddlers are attacking Pink and forcing him behind his wall, and if they’d just leave him alone he’d be okay, right?

No, actually, it makes no sense at all. The whole point of The Wall is that we don’t do well all by ourselves. I guess it’s one more testament to the power of the performance that for a moment I was prepared to take all the fascist/xenophobic satire literally, and afraid that I was already in the belly of the beast. As I try to recapture those thoughts now, they seem ridiculous. I guess I was more absorbed in the show than I thought.

Anyway, it got me looking, as I often do, for some overarching, anchoring principle to identify right and wrong. I figured out in high school that there is no such thing, life is too complex for a single anchoring principle that holds up in all cases, but I keep looking for one anyway.

I’ve been trying for a long time to understand the meaning of left and right in politics. Now I’m just about ready to give up on the whole left/right terminology. Probably because on top of the traditional lack of adherence to the spectrum in America, our whole political discourse has become a joke. What used to be right-wing fringe is now mainstream, and what used to be centrist is now tarred as fringe-left radicalism. So, under the gaze of The Wall’s animated nanny-state-cam, I went looking for an underlying motivation that could identify Waters as an ally.

What I found was compassion. So this is my new overarching principle. Compassion vs self-interest, or to put it in simpler, more new-agey terms, love vs hate. (I prefer to put in terms of Green Lantern’s emotional spectrum, which comes with a cool insignia.) Compassion leads one to consider the well-being of others, to treat those who are different as deserving of respect and happiness, and to act accordingly. Focusing only on one’s own well-being…well, to borrow a metaphor, it puts you behind a wall and worms eat your brain.

So, to bring this post around to some kind of point, in future I will attempt to ignore party allegiance and evaluate acts and policies based on whether they spring from compassion or selfishness. If you are someone who acts only for your own self-interest, you’re not my enemy exactly, but I hope you’ll get some counseling.

Note to Self: Do What I Do

This sort of relates to my earlier post about style, and is the latest installment of the continuing saga of dragging all my unfinished drafts into the light of day.

I believe an artist should never be completely satisfied with his/her work. There are essential elements of striving and exploration that come from wanting to be better. But at the same time, an artist has to have enough confidence in his/her own work to feel that it’s a worthwhile pursuit. It’s quite easy for me to maintain the essential dissatisfaction, and not always so easy to maintain the confidence.

However it occurred to me recently; many of my favorite cartoonists exhibit stylistic quirks that don’t necessarily add strength to the images, but those quirks become part of the artists’ appeal. Maybe it’s just by virtue of association with the actual strengths of the artist, or maybe the ostensibly superfluous quirk is actually a crucial, personalizing factor. Either way, it got me thinking, the way I draw is the right way for me to draw. It may not be the way I want to draw, it may not measure up to my idols or peers, but how I feel about it is less important than how an audience responds to it. And for me to communicate honestly with an audience, I need to draw how I draw.

I’ve reached a parallel conclusion in aikido; I need to practice aikido that’s appropriate for my physical capabilities. This is another thing that feels like it’s taken me far too long to figure out. Every aikido student hears it all the time: relax, don’t tense up, extend energy, stay centered. It’s the absolute core principle of the art. It’s hard to internalize though. It’s easy to think that the softer, energy-focused aspects of aikido are quite good in theory, but not practical for self defense. And there’s always someone practicing hard, forceful aikido that reinforces that assumption.

Lately I’ve been practicing a lot with just such a fellow. Besides being forceful in his style, he’s much taller and much stronger than me. For a while, like a doofus, I tried to match his strength, which didn’t work at all. I also found myself trying to reach up higher than my arms want to go, which caused my shoulders to tense up and compromised my balance and extension. So I started wondering, can I reach with energy beyond the range of my little t-rex arms?* And that lead me back to Osensei’s four pillars of aikido; relax, extend energy, keep one point, and weight underside. I find if I stay focused on these four principles, which are sort of one principle, my whole body gets integrated and my techniques are much more effective.

Of course they’re more effective. I won’t get anywhere trying to do aikido with a body I don’t have. Just like I shouldn’t try to draw with someone else’s hand.

*In comparison to this one training partner, I have little t-rex arms, but they fit me better because I don’t have the giant t-rex body. If the rest of t-rex was in proportion to his arms, that’s the dinosaur I’d be. Please stop reading this ridiculous digression, and I’ll stop writing it. Deal? Deal.

Notes on Style

“…we must not force (style) upon our artwork, but rather let it grow of its own volition, from the totality of our influences and abilities (or inabilities, as the case may be). When style is not the natural outcome, the outgrowth, of all these things, we have instead a repugnant, off-putting mannerism. Many beginners, sadly, approach the whole matter “bass-ackwards.” They fret about style long before they master some reasonable drawing ability, learn to handle the tools of the trade, intuit the basics of design and composition, or (worst of all) eliminate affectation and dishonesty from their stories.”

Ivan Brunetti, Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice

I’ve been wrestling with the idea of style lately. I read an essay years ago about painting (apologies, I can’t find it and have no idea who wrote it) that talked about “manufacturing a style,” and made essentially the same point that Brunetti states so eloquently. My response was to ignore the idea of style as much as possible, drawing with a focus on communication and expression and letting the drawings assume whatever visual character they want. I’ve had some success doing 24 hour comics this way, but my other projects have suffered from a lack of design consciousness.

Basically  I’ve been so set on not falling into the trap of manufacturing a style, I’ve avoided making conscious decisions as much as possible. But that’s ridiculous. Art has to be deliberate, it has to consist of intentionality, or else it’s just noodling. Sometimes that’s enough, but usually it’s not.  And anyway, like the song says, “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.”

I feel kind of silly that it’s taken me this long to figure this out. You probably already know it, so just humor me as I spell it out for myself.  Honest self-expression can come from conscious as well as unconscious sources. The important thing with stylistic decisions is to ask, “Is this best for the story?” (Or the painting or the film or whatever the whole piece is.) Not, “Will this sell?” Not, “Does this look enough like artist X or genre Y?” Also not, “Is this different enough from artist X or genre Y?” Just, does it express what it needs to express in the best possible way? The artist can and should closely examine his/her own work in order to make it the best it can be.

Tree Climbing; The Psychic Method

I have about 5 unfinished drafts sitting in the drafts section, mostly relating to this one thing that seems worth sharing but that I can’t figure out how to talk about. I want to keep it short and simple but it keeps getting long and inscrutable. Trying again…

Something new and strange and pretty great has happened. I can’t tell if it’s a side effect of aikido, a by-product of drawing, or a sign of growing up. It’s probably all three. Here’s what it is: I find I can look at a high, far-off place, like a treetop, and have the experience of being there.

I relate this to aikido because part of our practice is extending energy, usually to make a non-physical connection to our training partner. The martial application is about taking initiative in the encounter, reading the attacker’s intent, responding with the appropriate timing, etc. I’ve gotten more interested in the energy aspect of aikido, for reasons I won’t go into right now (that’s another languishing unfinished draft). Suffice to say I’ve been practicing extending my awareness, trying to sense my surroundings on all sides, and trying to make a sensory connection across empty space. Much like what’s been happening with the treetops.

I keep referring to treetops because that’s where I can most readily do this,* for reasons which I believe have to do with drawing. Or rather, thinking about drawing, which really amounts to simple observation. I’ve been studying the trees and shrubs every time I walk the dog, in anticipation of scenes in my next webcomic on a crazy forest planet. I’ve arrived at this strange sense of a relativistic point of view. In my quasi-educated terms, nature is a series of fractals. The same shapes and patterns recur constantly at different scales. The five foot bush next to me is composed of the same materials and the same basic forms as the 70 foot tree across the creek. I’m not at the top of that tree, but the top of this bush is the same thing, in a different frame of reference.

I said at the beginning that I have the experience of being high in the tree I am looking at. To clarify, I don’t literally hallucinate the view from the treetop. What I do get is a sense of expansive connection to the landscape, the same sensation I get from actually being in a high place and taking in the view. For many years, as a kid and a young adult, every time I looked at a high place– tree, mountain, roof, even clouds– I wanted to be up there. I’ve climbed a lot of trees and mountains, and a handful of rooftops. I was even lucky enough to climb a 21,000 foot mountain in Nepal, which is as close to walking on clouds as one is likely to get in real life. Climbing and hiking, interacting with nature, always felt much more rewarding than just gazing at stuff. But it’s still not oneness with nature, which I think is what I’ve always really craved when looking at those high places. Now, when I look at the treetops, I don’t feel that longing. I feel deep satisfaction, as if the desire for oneness has been realized. It hasn’t– I’m no enlightened monk or anything. I think it’s just maturity. I think I’ve just had enough life experience to shift that romantic yearning into an appreciation of what is real and accessible.

So it turns out growing up is pretty cool.

*I’ve tried the same thing with distant hillsides, the ocean, and the moon. Results inconclusive.

Movies Made to Satisfy Expectations

We rented Cowboys & Aliens. My experience was much the same as with many Hollywood blockbusters: the first act is quite good, suggesting interesting characters and unique situations to come. In the second act, everything quickly devolves into familiar clichés. By the third act I don’t care anymore. Cowboys & Aliens followed this pattern with a vengeance, weaving tired stereotypes in with the familiar clichés and piling on the unearned dramatic payoffs in the final scenes. This movie was not made to challenge or surprise, but to go exactly where the viewer expects it to go. I guess people like that. It’s certainly a good formula for making money. But, no one will remember this movie in five years. The memorable movies are always the ones with surprises.

If you’ve been following my blog, you know I’ve been thinking about the disproportionate effect a small number of billionaires has on our politics. This movie got me thinking, could the same be said of big-time producers and our culture? A handful of names crop up over and over in producer credits; Brian Grazer, Jerry Bruckheimer, Steven Spielberg, etc. Could there be a tiny cabal of producers who constantly give us the same movie, dressed up with different actors and sets?Are they restricting us to a diet of easy, familiar stories, when we could be consuming inspired, challenging surprises?

Well, not really. I looked at the top grossing movies of 2011, and didn’t find any big prevalence of my producer cabal. Most of the movies have half a dozen producers I’ve never heard of. If I was a diligent researcher I would look at top earning movies of the past 10-20 years, and track producers, directors, and studio executives, but I prefer to guess based on my initial shoddy search. My guess is, there are too many people involved in making movies to assign all the influence to the top dozen recurring names.

Anyway, there’s a big difference between politics and movies. Surprising, challenging movies get made all the time. Quality movies are out there for anyone inclined to do a little searching. (For sci-fi fans, I suggest Primer, Ink, Monsters, and Attack the Block, to start with.) They don’t tend to get big-studio funding or mainstream promotion, and maybe that’s wrong, but they also aren’t made to appeal to the lowest common denominator, which seems to be the focus of the big studio mechanisms. Anyway the big studios will only become less relevant as digital streaming continues to shrink their profit margins, and the technology of movie making becomes cheaper and more accessible.

So, a moviegoer can always go look for a better movie. Politics don’t work that way. We all have to live by the same laws of the land. We don’t all agree on what those laws should be, but no one gets to pick and choose which ones apply to their own life. So in a free, civil society, we negotiate and compromise. Unfortunately the bad billionaires are busy distorting those laws in their favor.

I can hear David Koch right now: “If you don’t like it, move to France!” No David, you’re the one who should move away if you can’t abide the little people having any influence.