Tim Lane's Blog, page 40
October 28, 2020
Joy N Shit
Unfriended, 2011, acrylic & crayon on canvas, 21”x21”x3.5” now has a permanent home. I am thankful for the support. Joy-Shit. Life.
Several years after beginning this series, I thought about the sentiment of these paintings after, during a snow storm, a semi crashed into my family’s car on I-69 and then fell on top of it. Everyone escaped unscathed. It was nothing short of a miracle. Every emergency response lead at the scene took a moment to check on us and say so. The had seen a lot in their time.
The expressway was shut down for many hours. We had to remain on the scene for two hours due to the snow.
It made me wonder if the kind of energy we emit invites outcomes. I thought about my theme: Joy/Shit. I didn’t really come to any firm conclusions, but I think I tried to make a half turn in my normal stance and face more joy after that event.
Unfriended, 2011
JOY N SHIT
art
October 26, 2020
New Colors!
Okay, hey, it’s been a long time since I have ordered new paints. So, yeah, I’m totally geeking out about this! But what artist doesn’t get excited about new paints? And new colors, too!
Acrylics
Utrecht: Light Pink, Light Portrait Pink, Light Blue
Golden: Titan Mars Pale, Light Orange
Atelier: Naples Yellow Reddish
Blick: Light Portrait Pink
Acrylic Gouache
Liquitex: Peach
Oil Paintsticks
Shiva: Medium Pink, Peach
October 24, 2020
I Saw You There, Just Standing There
Shopping made easy for all of your digital devices: Apple Books, Amazon Kindle Shop, or directly from yoursilentface.com.
Would love some honest star ratings, reviews and/or comments on Apple, Amazon, or Good Reads. If you didn’t enjoy YSF, that’s fine. Let me hear about it.
[image error]
Your Silent Face
By Lane, Tim
Buy on Amazon
Your Silent Face Available Now
portrait of the artist as a young man
Your Silent Face: The Playlist
I'll Have 2 Playlists & 1 Coming of Age Novel to Go, Please
Cool 80s post punk playlists here, including the companion playlist to my novel, Your Silent Face.
Your Silent Face: The Playlist
Here’s a link to the page at this website where you can purchase a PDF or EPUB file of Your Silent Face for all of your PC or Apple devices.
Your Silent Face Available Now
October 21, 2020
What Is Your Silent Face?
Your Silent Face is my self-published coming of age novel which is set in the Midwest in the mid 80s. Available on all digital platforms: Kindle, Apple Book Store, and yoursilentface.com content link below.
Key words: 80s music, New Wave, Gen X, Rust Belt, Native American, graffiti, urban poetry, Flint.
What lies ahead that doesn’t suck? Summer break forces Stuart Page to return home and wrestle with his fraying ties to the East Side of Flint, his memory an archive of cassettes he would like to erase. His freshman year of college was lame. More early Cure than Spandau Ballet, he might be overheard saying. More Gary Numan than Falco.
Flustered by visits from a stoic viking, fueled by an endless supply of beer, Stu picks apart an obsession with the lead singer of Joy Division and chugs the sour dregs of insecurity as he drunkenly veers through Flint’s blue collar fight culture, summer hook ups, the aftereffects of Old School Catholicism and Reaganomics in Your Silent Face.
Your Silent Face
By Lane, Tim
Buy on Amazon
[image error]
Your Silent Face Available Now
I try to discover
A little something to make me sweeter
Oh baby refrain from breaking my heart
I'm so in love with you
I'll be forever blue
That you gimme no reason
Why you make-a-me work so hard
—Erasure
October 20, 2020
Europe After the Rain
This song haunted me back in the day. John Foxx was ultra ultra. Enjoy the video (my apologies if there is an ad). From Top of the Pops, 1981.
Follow the amazing 80s alternative Spotify playlist that Pete Martens and I compiled. I listen to it while I’m painting, standing on my head, grooming my porcupine and juggling plates.
#TimeTravelTuesday
October 17, 2020
The Multiverse
New painting! Part of The Sublime series. Visit the galleries.
The Multiverse, 24”x18”
October 14, 2020
Okay, Fine, Fer Shur, Fer Shur
A couple friends have been having fun with the cast of characters in my novel, Your Silent Face. Here’s their casting call for an 80s film version!
Stuart: John Cusack
The Viking: Val Kilmer
Nigel: Tim Roth or Matthew Modine
Karen: Molly Ringwald
Brenda: Susan Sarandon
Susan: Ione Skye
Cammie:
Phil: Timothy Hutton
J Dog: Emilio Estevez
James: Nicholas Cage
Gina:
Pam:
David: James Spader
Uncle Charles: Harry Dean Staunton
Lou:
Stuart’s Parents: Jack Nicholson & Cher
Grandpa Norcross:
Valley Girl, 1983
YSF Available Here
YSF Companion Playlist Here
Your Silent Face is also available at the Amazon Kindle Shop and the Apple Book Store. Follow the companion playlist on Spotify.
October 13, 2020
Please Don’t Stand So Close to Me
I listened to The Police a lot in the 80s. So good. Still is. They’re included on my Spotify playlist that accompanies my self-published novel, Your Silent Face.
Follow and enjoy the playlist. Find the novel on Amazon, Apple Books or on this website.
Your Silent Face: the novel here
Your Silent Face: the playlist here
October 10, 2020
The Butler Did It: A Review of Your Silent Face
My friend, Bill Butler, read Your Silent Face and enjoyed it. When he tried to post a review on Amazon, it was rejected. I guess it was NSFW??? Ha! Here’s the uncensored review! I really enjoyed reading Bill’s take on the novel, and I’d love to read what you think. Rate and review on Amazon, Goodreads or send it to me.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Stuart Page, working class and Catholic, is on the edge of becoming an adult in this novel set in 1980s Flint. Tim Lane, a Flint native and poet, tells the story in a series of episodes that jump around in time. The best parts of this book are Lane’s descriptions of what it felt like to grow up in Flint after the good jobs left town. Stuart is sensitive and smart. He tags buildings with Krylon, but he also inscribes his poems with a Sharpie on a wall in a parking lot. Stuart’s best friend, Nigel, is a chess master, as well as a quoter of Surrealist poetry, and a good dancer who moves through the world with an unfailing cool. Although Stuart and Nigel are budding intellectuals, they spend much of their time drinking, navigating the simmering violence of the East Side, and bird-dogging chicks. These guys get laid a lot… I think. Stuart is one of the legions of horny young people conditioned by a Catholic upbringing to feel guilty about sex outside holy matrimony. Stuart refers to the sex he has with desirable Flint girls as “mashed potatoes,” which conjures an image of up-and-down movement that ends in something not quite orgasmic.
Nigel lives with his mother, Brenda, (one of several MILFs in Stuart’s imagination) in an East-Side house virtually wall-papered with the maps that used to come with the National Geographic. The map-covered walls are a constant reminder that there is a world outside Flint, presumably better, and a foreshadowing of the escapes to be made by people in Stuart’s circle. Nigel is something of a screen upon which Stuart projects his fantasies of how best to live. It appeals to Stuart that Nigel seems slightly smarter, is good looking (Stuart remarks at one point that he and Nigel look alike), and can produce inscrutable but still poetic speech that seems to plumb the depths where Stuart would go. The Stuart-Nigel relationship is a mystery underlying Your Silent Face.
The narrative is immersed in consumer culture. Lane specifies the brand names of cars, booze, shoes and clothes, colognes. At first, I was reminded of Ellis’s name-checking of brands in American Psycho, but Lane isn’t critical of these products for their role in the superficiality and deadness of American consumerist culture. His adolescent characters identify with the brands. Music is a central part of the characters’ lives in this book, especially Stuart’s. The kind of music you like is the kind of person you are, according to Stuart, who is a complicated amalgam that includes Morrissey, Thompson Twins, Tears for Fears, and at least a dozen others. Stuart and his friends live in this familiar world of corporate consumerism partly because they don’t know anything else, and also because they think it’s fun. Contrast the teenagers’ limited and corporatized experience with the experience of East-side adults, who live in the world of bills, ailing elderly parents, and children to rear. Glenn, Stuart’s father, regularly sits in his living room, staring silently at the crabapple tree in the backyard, embodying exhausted resignation supported by a quiet masculine competency. When shit happens, he handles it as best he can.
Stuart says that Flint is the murder and unemployment capital of the US, and he means the part of Flint on his side of The Wall. In his encounters with the rich people of Flint, Stuart can only see caricature. Stuart has nothing but contempt for one of his girlfriend’s “posh” parents, and Lane’s/Stuart’s use of the word “club,” as in country club, has all of its meaning as a separator of those who belong and those who don’t. Stuart visits his college roommates at a Grosse Point home and is served pina coladas and “hors d’oeuvres” by the mother, poolside. Class consciousness feels like it’s applied with a trowel in these scenes, but it makes for good reading. In perhaps the best scene of the book, Stuart makes a quick exit from Cammie’s party at her rich parents’ house, where everyone is friendly and polite, and heads for an East-side “party,” where there is some kind of gang bang going on upstairs, violent skinheads circle like sharks, and the basketball court is hard-packed dirt.
Your Silent Face has a huge cast of characters, and I can see Lane developing any number of them for future books.
— Bill Butler
YSF Available Here for Kindle
or Here for Apple Books
or Here for PDF
Tim Lane, author of Your Silent Face
