220713: NOT REALLY THERE

These past couple of months have been weird in that I've not really felt like being a "comicky" person at all. This is odd because if there's been one constant in my life for the past thirty-odd years it's been comics. Music, football, speedway, girls, beer - all have come and gone and come again but comics have stayed the course. If I look back, I can probably only have two or three "interests" at any one time, and this is why the others fall by the wayside to be replaced by something new, but comics? Hmm. I'm still reading them, occasionally, on my tablet, but there's four weeks' wroth sitting at the comic shop and I haven't drawn one in two months. Ah, well, I'm sure I'll get back on that particular horse once the weather stops being stupid.

 

Of those I've read recently, none have made as big an impact on me as The New Deadwardians. It's a crime procedural set in an alternate Victorian era, where the dead have risen and the upper classes have taken a cure to prevent them falling prey to becoming zombies. The cure, although not explicitly stated, is heavily implied to have turned them into vampires, and all that that entails. It's really very good, and I hope there's a sequel. I didn't write this, though, to do some kind of review job. I want to tell you why it affected me so much. One of the central themes of the vampires' (called "the young" in the comic) lives is their lack of appetite for anything the living enjoy. They eat and drink, even though they no longer need to, because that's what they used to do. They feel no desire towards anything that could remotely be described as "sins of the flesh". They are more dead than the zombie-like creatures they sought to avoid becoming.

 

Now here's the thing, the whiny, woe-is-me, isn't my life terrible thing: I feel the same way much of the time. I get no genuine pleasure from much of what I do. I only know that I should and that one day the memory of the things that I've done might spark some pleasant, nostalgic feeling. I participate in and even seek out new experiences, but I'm not sure that I ever really enjoy them. Is that odd? Am I alone in this? And if this is what's happening to me, why on earth do I insist on pretending to like things hat cost me money rather than free non-entertainment? Life, eh? It's an anti-duck. On the surface paddling like mad but underneath as dead as anyone who ever took the cure...

 

. . .

 

The ghosts - because what else could they be? Insubstantial, howling things, all tortured faces and terrible masques, intangible trails and chilling touches. None more ghost - whipped the room into a frenzied cyclone of pain and torment, encircling the girls as they huddled together for security they knew was not going to be found. The eldest of the two whispered that everything was going to be alright, as much to herself as to the younger girl, and though neither of them believed it there was some comfort in her words. Of a sudden, the door flew open and the shape of a man stepped through, uttering an incomphrensible word that stulled and silenced the ghosts, who turned their unseeing eyes towards him. His face was covered by the brim of his hat, and with a long duster silhouetted in the low light from beyond the room, he looked every inch the cowboy from the Saturday morning picture show the girls had enjoyed in the life they had before this moment. He lifted his head and the eldest girl screamed - the youngest unable to utter a sound - at the sight of the shifting, unsettling mass that sat where his face should have been, as if what lay there couldn't quite exist in our world. With what passed for a smile in that shapeless morass the ghosts resumed their attack, the evanscent suddenly very, very real...

 

. . .

 

"Every has a right to have a favourite song." Good quote, innit? I made it up myself, whilst watching The Joy Of Easy Listening, which I'd taped off of BBC4 a few weeks ago. It - the show, not the quote - was about the genre that sprung up as technology brought music into people's homes and, as the young people had rock and roll and all that jumping and jiving music, filled a gap in the older generation's earholes. Easy Listening has been a much-maligned genre, in every incarnation of the music, from genuine soft orchestral music like Mantovani, Conniff, or Kampfaert, through the lounge music of Bacharach, Alpert, and Webb, the adult contemporary sounds of The Carpenters and Neil Diamond, right up to the hipster reclaimation of the form. All of it laughed at, derided by the music press and the cool people, but all of it brilliant. How could you not like music that is easy to listen to?

 

I've always been a fan. I didn't know that what I liked was Easy Listening until I heard it called that, around twenty years ago. I just knew that, of all the music my parents listened to, I liked this stuff the best. Bread rather than The Beatles. The Carpenters over Abba. Neil Diamond over Elvis Presley. But not Richard Clayderman. I wasn't deaf. The music I bought myself, my music, couldn't have been further from Easy Listening, all noise and angst and guitars and drums and youthful energy. But even then if a decent arrangement turned up I was all over it, I just didn't know why, and was probably a little bit ashamed. But by the mid-90s I knew, and I wasn't worried any more. I called the university music society I co-founded Easy Listening and I was probably the only one for whom it wasn't ironic. I even put The Carpenters on the flyer, hidden amongst Green Day, The Beastie Boys, and Nirvana, but mistyped it "Carpetners" - perhaps the shame wasn't all gone, subsonciously at least.

 

The music that is lumped under the umbrella title Easy Listening is actually a whole host of things but the one thing that unites it is that, somewhere amongst the thousands and thousands of songs, is the favourite song of people who you don't think really like music, like your Dad or your Nan. Everyone has a right to have a favourite song and there has to be a favourite song for everyone - chances are, it's got strings on it and it's something you don't have to think particularly hard about...

180713: BRITISH PEOPLE IN HOT WEATHER

So the heat's still here, and with it comes everything that is glorious about a British summer. Cocksure boys with their t-shirts off, thinking they look all cool and suntanned when, in fact, they're just making a great argument for eugenics. Stinking BBQs, as though hot weather gives you the right to pollute your neighbours with foul smoke and meat smells - you can't imagine these same people, in midwinter, standing at their kitchen window, wafting the smell of their rancid sausages out at passers-by, though they probably would if they could. And the moaning, all the moaning, all of it done by me.

There's one thing missing, though, and that's riots. Where are the riots? It's hot, the underclass are still oppressed, where are the riots? I make no bones about it - I'm a disasterbator, I want to turn on the news and find out it's the "shit is burning" channel, all day, every day, but so far nothing. Disappointing. Today's youth, eh? Oh well, I'm sure the Metropolitan Police will kill someone they shouldn't have soon, that'll do it.

. . .

Much to my doctor's chagrin - if she actually knew who I was - I self-medicate. It's the only way I can get anything done, because if I dosed correctly I'd be a grey, nodding cameo of a man, walking a line so mediocre they'd paint it magnolia. So I skip days if I have to get stuff done, and sometimes this tips me into depression and other times, more often, into mania.

Being manic is not actually a very helpful thing to be, unless you're preaching on some street, and it can make me a horrible person - like the kind of person I imagine I'd be if I were any kind of boss or manager. I get short, angry, unaccommodating of anyone else's weaknesses, like Danny DeVito in Taxi. On the other hand I also get creative, and able, and I'm fantastic company - my self-worth goes through the roof, often to the point where none of you little ants could possibly match up to me, and then the negatives start again.

I wish there was some other way but I can't find it. Bi-polar is what I am, no more able to change it than an amputee can grow a new limb or a diabetic can stop injecting, and so the cycle continues. Up, up, up, up, UP!, medicate. Down, medicate. Repeat until fade...

. . . 

It's the fifteenth anniversary of my Summer Of Gin, when I grew a full beard and spent most of the time in my room, with occasional jaunts to Brighton. All my housemates had left, and so I had a big empty house to myself, which I took advantage of by walking around naked all the time. I must have looked, for all the world, like a stumpy Action Man, only with a gin problem.

Yeah, gin - what a drink! As Milk & Cheese said, "Gin makes a man mean!" and they're not wrong. I once considered a smash & grab at a Brighton comic shop because the gin told me how simple it would be, even though the books in the window were pretty rubbish. This was after watching the Eurovision Song Contest and having been up all night the night before because we'd dropped something. Good times. Many of the stories from that time are embarrassing and awful but I'm the Larry David so it's all good.

I've not drunk gin since. You can drink so much of a spirit that you can't face it much again. Whiskey, fortified wine, Cinzano Bianco... the list goes on, and each with a most un-Bukowski story attached to it. You all have these stories. Life's okay, innit?

130713: HIHOWAREYA?

Dan Hartman is screaming at me from the TV but the sound is down and Steely Dan is playing on Spotify so Dan can shout all he likes. It's Instant Replay, anyway, because what else would it be?

. . .

The heat is oppressive. But that's all anyone says so it's lost its power. The heat isn't oppressive, it's boring. Someone said something about us not hating the heat, or the cold, or the rain, or the snow, but rather hating anything that lasts for more than 2 days, and I wonder if that's just the weather?

. . .

I'm nostalgic for something so flimsy that it didn't really exist when it actually existed and there'd be so little of it left to go back there's no point being nostalgic about it. But it's there, it happens, and you can't blame me for wanting a little holiday once in a while, and spending it in the past. Alan Whicker died yesterday, time was he was the only one who ever went abroad - I wonder if he took holidays in the past, too, or if the modern world was a sense of wonder to him, like the arl fella who came into my library once and stood, pleasantly amazed by everything he could see?

. . .

I've been thinking a lot about my friends lately, particularly three very special ones who I need more in my life than is probably possible. I see ghosts of one everywhere, the form and taste glimpsed, tangible and pleasing and disappointing in their fraudulence. Another doesn't need me anymore, which was always the plan, and I'm happy about that because the circumstances of our shared time always exhausted and crushed me a little inside, and third needs me more than ever and needs support I can't geographically provide. There's a fourth, but my thoughts are always warm and never longing, because that's the way it is, and I realise this is all cryptic bullshit. Sorry.

. . .

So it's been six months since I last wrote. I've been doing other things (and not very much at all). I'm trying writing again. You never know.

12/02/13: ICANNOTTTHINKOFANYTHINGELSELATELY

You're probably sick of reading about my comic and my webcomic and all that jazz, but I totally cannot think of anything else lately. It's obsessing me to a massively unhealthy degree because I don't want to do anything else other than draw, and any time spent doing anything else seems wasted.

I need to get a grip on it because, although I'm used to obsession and always seem to have something on the go, it can't possibly take over my life to the degree it has without any kind of guaranteed reward. Everything about it is deferred rewards at best, and even probably nothing more than a, "huhm, that's funny" or a flick through my display copy before you move on to the next table.

But I can see it occupying me a while, and I'm brimming with ideas, and I thought today how cool it would be if my next comic was introduced by the tortoise from John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath, and I want to draw it even though I don't need to start working on that for another month at least.

I gots it bad.

. . . . .

I finished Brandon Graham's King City today and fuck me if it wasn't excellent right up to the end. It's hard to say what it's about because it's about lots of things and nothing at all, really.

But it's about a catmaster, who can weaponise his cat, and his ex-girlfriend and her ex-soldier boyfriend who may be turning into chalk, which is also a drug he uses to escape the horrors he saw in the Korean Zombie War, and about the catmaster's best friend, who falls in love with a sex-trafficked alien, and all this against a background of a world-ending incursion by a demon king.

It's pretty cool. And it's hundreds of pages for £15. Buy it.

. . . . .

In a week's time I'll have been interviewed for my own job. And a week after that I'll know if I've got my own job, or if I'll be made redundant at the beginning of April. It should be a worrying time, with an uncertain future and all, but you know what? Fuck it. What happens happens. I'm not going to starve. I'm not going to be made homeless. I'm not going to die. So bring it on. I'll smile through all of it x

11/02/13: WHATEVER'S COOL

What’s cool? I only ask because I’m trying to second-guess an audience for an experiment I’m doing for the London Super Comic Con. My idea is that if you make something featuring “cool” characters, people will buy it if it’s half-decent, more than they will buy something that features characters they don’t know and is excellent.

I’m not at the point where I’ll declare my work excellent. I never will be. But there are people who $hill their wares at these cons who are absolutely, 100% geniuses. People like Philippa Rice and Dan Berry. And like my own pal, HeyJude. And I’m sure they’re happy with what they sell, especially as it goes to incredibly discerning people, but I bet their sales are half of those of the guy selling portrait prints of Wonder Woman or Darth Vader (you might see now why I ask what’s cool…).

At the Thought Bubble convention, everything seemed to be Adventure Time. That and My Little Pony. So I made a little picture of Finn from Adventure Time riding a random pony. Let’s see how that bad boy sells. I also did a couple of others – you never know, this might pay for the table that my disappointing comic sales won’t.

But is it right? These aren’t my characters. They belong to another guy and a massive corporation! But it is my art, I drew it myself and made the pictures and everything! And other people seem quite happy doing it… I’m sure I’ll feel dirty for a bit, though, but then accept it for what it is. And I’ll just keep telling myself – it’s an experiment, okay?

. . . . .

I got thinking some more about the horsemeat thing the other day and a question occurred to me: would they tell us if they found human DNA in their tests?

I don’t think they would, because how do you do that? How do you inform a populace that, along with their Tesco Value burgers and Findus lasagna, they may have ingested the last earthly remains of some Romanian gangster who got on the wrong side of his capo?

You couldn’t! Imagine the reaction! People would be retching in the streets, scrubbing their tongues, and cradling themselves in the shower, Crying Game-style.

But it must have happened, at some point. Either by accident, where a finger, arm, or half a torso has slipped into the grinder and became impossibly entangled in the day’s meat output, or on grisly purpose, the result of a killer looking for an easy way to dispose of his victims.

Tastes like chicken, I suppose.

. . . . .

I listened to Tom Waits's first album today for the first time ever. I like Tom Waits. I like his gravel voice and his weird characters and the strange sounds he uses as rhythm on his songs. I figured he'd emerged into the music business fully grown, and had always sounded like that, but then I read the story of his first few years in Uncut magazine, and it wasn't so, it seemed.

So I listened to Closing Time and it's a fucking great album. Very singer-songwriter, and very California of its time, and all the better for that. It's already my favourite Tom Waits album, and probably nudging into my top 100, if I could ever bother to make one.

Waits is not for everyone - though I defy you not to enjoy his cover version of Daniel Johnston's King Kong - and so if you don't like him for the reasons I outlined in the third line above, then give Closing Time a try. It'll surprise you.

10/02/13: FACTORY OF LESS SADNESS

No Ripper Street tonight because of some shitty awards show. Worse still, Call The Midwife got to be on, polluting the airwaves with its saccharine awfulness – anything that employs Miranda Hart to do her usual “oh, I’m posh and rubbish” thing must be destroyed.

I don’t get awards shows. I have zero interest in what people are wearing – less still when you realize that what they are wearing has only been borrowed for the night from some hoity-toity designer. Anyone who obsesses over red carpet fashion should be declared an enemy of the state and be first up against the wall come the revolution.

And then awards themselves, hosted by a “humourous” host, making safe quips about his audience that will make them “squirm in their seats”, according to the next day’s press, although I’m sure every single joke has already been agreed and triple-checked by a cadre of producers and agents.

Who cares whether some old people think one film is better than another? What’s the value in a panel of music journalists declaring an album the Best Of The year? And no-one should ever put any value on a public vote. The public are idiots.

So if you like to watch these shows, or have ever bought, watched, or worn anything because if featured on or won something at these awards things, please reconsider your life. You’re making some terrible mistakes…

. . . . .

So Villa won a game! Their first in the league for two months! And hope has returned to the Factory of Sadness, at least until they lose their next game and the Sun falls on the once-great empire again.

I’ve started to feel physically sick when I watch the Villa. My temperature raises until my body is hot to the touch and I feel nauseous. That’s not normal, right? I should probably stop – it’d be better for my mental and physical health that way. And mostly I try not to care, but it’s soooo hard.

I can’t conceive of relegation but it is a very real possibility, although really any team in the bottom half of the table could go down. The Villa need to get on some sort of run, put a few wins on the board now, with the eventual aim of securing at least five more. Tough ask, but very possible.

I have to keep the faith. I have to believe it’s going to be okay, because anything else is a catastrophe and I don’t deal in those. Help me, Villa. Please.

. . . . .

I watched some great shows tonight. I watched the first Community of the new run, which was on par, but nothing spectacular. Par for Community, though, is still head and shoulders above most other shows, but there's a danger that without show creator Dan Harman it might slip into a pattern of ridiculousness and parody, trying to outcool itself week by week with ever-diminishing returns. For now, though, it's funny and warm.

But it's not a patch on Parks & Recreation and I got caught up on that, too. The standout characters - Ron & April - are inspired and unique comic creations that should walk straight into that Hall of Fame (if one existed), to take their place alongside George Costanza, Norm Peterson, and Sheldon Cooper. And they're just the standouts - there isn't a single joke wasted, not a single character not used to make funny, and not a moment on screen that doesn't look right. It's a pretty good show.

The Big Bang Theory is still funny, too, although there's something of a backlash that I both understand and don't. It is what it is - a network sitcom, long-lived enough to go into syndication, and with all the compromises such shows (Seinfeld aside) have to make. I got caught up on that, too, and Amy Farrer-Fowler is getting close to HoF territory, too.

So, yeah, you should watch TV. And enjoy it. And you'll do that if you watch those shows. Trust me.

09/02/2013: HORSES!

This whole horsemeat scandal smacks of a massive over-reaction. Yeah, it’s probably not the best that you don’t know where the meat came from, and that it may have gotten mixed up with other meats in some God-forsaken part of eastern Europe, but there are a few things that make me laugh.

1)       It’s meat. I’m not one to proselytise overly about my vegetarianism, but if you’re eating the dead and slowly decaying flesh of another animal, you don’t much have the right to get all haughty about it. It’s meat, whatever the species, so suck it up.

2)      Am I the only thinking this wouldn’t have hit the headlines so much if, instead of horsemeat, it was pork or lamb they found mixed in? Of course it wouldn’t, because they’re not cuddly, and we don’t give them names or bet on them down the bookies.

3)      Food is too cheap. Way too cheap. It’s why most of us are so fat. Or should I say that the wrong kind of food is too cheap? And, believe me, Tesco Value burgers are the wrong kind of food. But, if you pay pennies, you shouldn’t be surprised if one of the corners they cut to bring you the food so cheaply is that the odd horse gets thrown in with whatever mechanically-recovered bits of beef they blasted off the bones of a scrawny cow, then you made your bed. Now lie in that horse bed.

4)      Even if what you are eating is 100% guaranteed beef, you have no way of knowing what happened to it between the cow popping out of its mummy’s lady tunnel and it hitting the supermarket shelves. Unless you rear, slaughter, prepare and cook it yourself, you just don’t know. You don’t know if what that cow ate, what drugs they put in it, whether a butcher hocked up a loogy into the mincer… you just don’t know.

So, yeah, chill out and either buy more expensive food, stop eating meat, or enjoy that delicious neopolitan meat of many flavours – all of them dead!

. . . . .

Sometimes life is life a movie. Not my life. That would make a pretty shitty movie, although the star would be incredibly charismatic. But other lives, and none more so than that LAPD guy on the run in California.

Christophe Dorner is his name, and he got fired a few years ago after making an accusation of bullying against a fellow officer. To hear him tell it, the rest of the force closed ranks on him, supported his colleague and backed her story. He says this is because the force is racist (he’s black) and corrupt, and few who have had many dealings with the LAPD could disagree.

So Dorner went on a rampage, killing a policeman, the daughter of his former captain, and her boyfriend. He also wounded some other cops. Funny thing is, the LAPD actually wounded more people than he did in mistaken identity shootings trying to capture him. Funny for me, not the people shot, that is.

Dorner posted an online manifesto, ranting at this and ranting at that, but making clear – well, as clear as an online manifesto can – his motives. There is some chatter that the manifesto we’ve been allowed to see has been edited by the cops, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they?

I can’t help but think he’s pretty cool and the whole thing is exciting, but then I’m a disasterbator and nowhere near normal…

. . . . .

If I believed in guilty pleasures - and I don't because why should you feel guilty about anything you like, especially something as stupid as music or books or film - then one of them would be Take me Out.
It's not everybody's cup of tea, and that's fine. I don't like lots of shows but I don't spend much time telling you about how I hate them. Except Call The Midwife. If you like that and are under-50, you should apply for voluntary sterilisation, pretty much immediately.

But, yeah, Take Me Out is awesome. And it's not just me - Charlie Brooker claimed you could learn a lot about life from TMO and it's hard to disagree with him. What makes the girls turn off their lights? What's that secret ingredient - other than washboard abs and a gun show - that pushes their buttons? Why don't the fat guys get the loving, even from the fat girls?

I usually get a favourite girl - Gracie & Lois in recent series - who makes me laugh and who I wouldn't mind a roll in the proverbial with, but there's no-one this time around. A couple of girls have been hot in an interesting way but they've been picked and whisked off on dates with men who don't deserve them. Obviously.

Still, I keep watching. It's dating by proxy, which is all I'm allowed to do now. Not that I ever did dating when I could, but you understand. No likey, no lighty? I likey.