Had a nice long chat with Andy Konky Kru on the phone last night. After our talk I checked my feeds and was delighted to see his Evolution of Speechballoons (he insists it's one word but that's probably because he's German) visual essay had been picked up by Waxy who, thanks to the tradition of via, got it from Kempa. This'll be interesting, I thought to myself. Sure enough the link later popped up on Drawn and then, today, on Boing Boing. It's currently on del.icio.us/popular thanks to 155 262 people and Technorati has 41 links.
The irony, if that's the right word (I never know these days), of this is Andy's currently in Germany nursing an infected toenail with no internet access so he's got no idea this is going on. I might call him tomorrow.
Still, considering his site has been active for a good 5 years now (I forget exactly when we gave him the bugpowder.com/andy directory) it's about bloody time.
For context, see this post I wrote about the monster than is Konky Kru last year.
(Jez, can we get stats for that page or what?)
I've been invading the nocturnal fantasies of Woodrow Phoenix, cartoonist and creative mind of greatness (and designer of one of my favourite fonts):
"Last night I dreamt that we were living in the same house. And you had a new business. I can't remember what it was engaged in, but I was, naturally, giving you a hand with your corporate identity. The logo was a blocky pixelart rendition of a dog's head and the name was some kind of riff on Flintstones. Later on I went for a walk in the park and saw that you had taken over this large disused factory to sell paintings and original artwork created by comics artists and small pressers generally. Weirdly, Gosh! comics had also caught onto this idea and opened another shop directly in front of yours to compete with you. I went in there first, since it was in front of you [their plan was working!] and saw they were projecting work onto a wall so people could decide which drawings/paintings they wanted to buy. But the staff were very bad at advising people so I knew they would fail."
I should add that when surfing into the slumber of Woods is was not my intention to cast negative aspersions onto the staff of Gosh! and for that I apologise.
If you've caught me manipulating your dreams do feel free to let me know.
M'good friend Sacha Mardou is marrying Ted May on Feb 22nd, which is great news anyway but has the added icing that they're both cartoonists! That sort of thing makes me very happy!
The campaign to turn our good friend Steve into a global star begins.
Pretty skeletal at the moment but there are a couple of new songs you won't have heard before and they're all available to download. It's all very exciting!
Andy Luke has been a chum of mine for a number of years now. His comics were once described by Ralph Kidson as "like something a deranged serial killer would draw in his death row cell" which was aesthetically accurate even though Andy isn't a deranged serial killer. Well, he's not a serial killer anyway.
Anyway, he's recently posted a few single panels on his Flickr account and I was most taken by the one above. This one's also pretty keen.
This kind of art, most famously practiced by one David Shrigley, is very hard to describe because by most criteria it's not "good art", just little doodles done by someone who can't draw "properly" which if you're after clean, anatomically correct art that looks pretty is fine. But I find myself drawn to this sort of thing again and again and I can't really describe why. In fact if I could describe why it'd probably ruin it - the mystery is what makes it work, or something.
So I think Andy Luke's single panels should be printed in a big fat art book and sold for chunks of cash. And they should be blown up to poster size and displayed in galleries. That would be a good thing.
Those of you who watch broadcast television and live your lives as slaves to the schedules should make space for a five minute slot on Channel 4 at 7.55pm on Thursday, just after the news, for the network premier of m'good friend Matt Abbiss' short film Invasion, as part of their Mesh season.
Those of you who can't be bothered with such nonsense should download the movie and watch it now.
It's very good. Something of the sinister east European children's book aesthetic about it. Well done Matt.
Brenda, who comments on this blog, is looking to sell or rent her flat in Moseley. it's a 2 bed for £400pcm or if you're flush £130k outright. Here's a map. I don't know what it's like and have no idea what Brenda would be like as a landlady, but I do know renting a flat in Moseley for that sort of money is a pretty rare thing. So spread the word. Email brenda[at]b13.co.uk for info.
Anyone else need an announcement? If you comment here, this blog is yours for the next few days. Let us know what you're up to offline. Email me or leave a comment.
My chum Matt Broersma has a degree show at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Gosta Green on the 20th - 21st September, 10am to 5pm. Details, map (pdf).
There's a private view with drinks at some point. I'm not sure how invite-only it is so I'll let Matt confirm the time in the comments.
He's also got a great story, The Mummy, in the new Drawn and Quarterly Showcase along with Genevieve Elverum and Sammy Harkham.
The strip is in English and published in his native continent of America, which is a first for him.
I noticed in his flowery biography that "he now lives near the River Rea in England" which is true, except the Rea is barely a river, more a stream running through the second largest city in the country. Birmingham not good enough for ya?
After that nightmare of upgrading this site to MT 3.2 where they'd fixed all the little bugs that I'd previously assumed were how things worked and have provided the most complex default templates ever css-wise and a comments structure that needs some serious meditation to get your head around (and still isn't working on the Linklog and Podcast sections), well, I'm kinda at a loss for something to write about that isn't fucking tedious and boring. Actually, I probably will write about this experience soon but only once I've figured out a way to make it interesting. I think I've got the angle but it needs work.
Anyway, today was a return to Moseley for the first time since the tornado last month. It was kinda weird in that there's still a lot of scarring - trees roughly butchered back, roofs still half-tiled and workmen absolutely everywhere - but otherwise quite normal.
I was there for some post-tornado work myself. Jez and Nat were replacing their fence which had be crushed by a big tree and since I painted it last year it made a perverse kinda of sense for me to paint it again. Plus I'm absurdly available for odd-jobs at the moment.
It being a stunningly lovely day it was really good to be out in the sun getting mucky again. I miss these kind of jobs. I occasionally think about moving the huge pile of bricks at the end of the drive a few feet to the left just for the hell of it and then moving them back to the right the next day. I wonder if this constitutes a problem.
In the pub on Saturday, along with demanding the right to punch old ladies who let their dogs shit on the pavement (with the wonderful mental image of his dog Badger "sweating bullets" because he's been trained not to shit while on a lead), Jez had talked about "contributing to the hobby deficit" or something which seems to be related to the mass of niche things that have proliferated in this country of late. Stuff like Carp Fishing magazines in high street shops and model railway museums. When he mentioned today he was still thinking about it, it occured to me that if this is a proliferation it's might be because people, probably men mainly, don't tend to have a speciality any more regarding their jobs, or at least not one they care about. If you're some office drone entering data and processing invoices you may well have a desire to actually be good at something interesting, like driving a train or building furniture. So you have a hobby and get really really good at it.
Oddly enough I had a similar conversation with an old flatmate years ago about how, he theorised, hobbies were part of an ancient initiation right for boys who hadn't made their first kill yet. Once your hunt an ox or kill an enemy then you're accepted as an adult in the tribe. Before that you're missing a purpose so you get really really good at something relatively inconsequential, like football statistics or comic book artists. Since we have a lot of blokes doing boring jobs they don't care about which don't give them the same sense of purpose as hunting an ox... Hey, I've just discovered the origins for the rise of the adultescent!
Someone, I think it was the professional fence-putter-upper, say the phrase "mad as an ox" today. Do oxen get mad? I always thought of them as pretty docile creatures that pull things like wagons. Checking in the dictionary the term refers to a castrated bull, which explains why I can't remember ever seeing an on specifically. I'd just assumed they were docile bulls. Still, "mad as an ox" has a nice ring to it.
And then after painting it was over to ex-housemate Sam's new flat, also in Moseley, to set up their bemusing WiFi router, which I did. Go me! Now she and Charlie can comment on each others LiveJournals and IM each other from separate rooms. That flat will henceforth be referred to as the "House of Squeeee" for that is the kind of LJers they are...
In other news I haven't been reading any weblogs since Friday. No reason, but the catching up is getting a bit daunting (350 unread posts, not including linklogs). Hope everyone's okay.
I think I've got my blog back...
Those of you with long memories might recall my mentioning that a good friend of mine was working on a film and that I was looking after the website side of things. Well, today we launched the site.
I present for your clicking pleasure The Street Cleaner - a movie by David Early.
The main purpose of the site is to hold the trailer but there's some other stuff on there. Designing the site was a bit of a wrangle as Dave had some pretty clear ideas of how it should look but since as a digital matte artist (here's his IMDB page) Photoshop is his principle tool they were pretty static. Being a stubborn arse (and also wanting to produce something that Google could index) I wanted to produce something more fluid using HTML/CSS. Finding that middle ground, and making sure it worked across all browsers, was kinda fun, especially as I'd not done such a graphically intense site before.
Anyway, there it is. The actual 18 minute short is in the final stages of post-production. I'm not sure if we're going to be hosting a low-res version of it on the site but I'll let you know if we do.
And it would be remiss of me not to mention that I'm available for hire for this sort of thing.
Allowing for the fact that three members of the band are good friends of mine and two of them flatmates to boot, given that sort inevitable bias in my reaction to their first gig, I have to say that Plinth were quite frankly fucking brilliant. Well done chaps.
Andy/Zoop on guitar, Andy G on primal power vocals, Phil on drums
A rare full colour gig photo.
Fave piece of feedback so far (from mild-mannered colleague): "For the first few songs you were just playing with yourselves but in the last two you ejaculated all over the room." Lovely image.
Next gig on the 25th when they'll be headlining. Bring it on!
Photo were okay in a functional good-time post-Wire eyeliner kinda way. Shocked Elevator Family I was prepared to like until they butchered, and I mean fucking killed stone dead, a great Magnetic Fields song, at which stage I decided they sucked balls.
My flatmates Andy and Andy are in a band called Plinth along with fellow Waterstonian Phil and another guy. They've all been involved in various musical combos on the Birmingham scene over the years but Plinth is a relatively new venture. Their first gig is tomorrow at Bar Academy. It's a support slot so they should be on around eight. Then on the 25th they have their first headlining gig at the Flapper.
I've deliberately not heard them play so as to enjoy the gig in a pure manner, but with the plethora of guitars and amps in the flat I can say with confidence that they're good and will no doubt rock in a substantial fashion.
It's all quite exciting!
My chum Matt Broersma has a new comic out.
This is the Italian edition, so I'm just looking at the pictures. It's being simultaneously published in Italy, France and the US (by Fantagraphics!) and when I get hold of the English version I'll be able to confirm its brilliance.
Available soon in comic shops of distinction (so unless you're really lucky, go mail order).
Go Matt!
So, I asked Mark as we walked out of the cemetery, did you feel a sense of personal catharsis?
Not really, said Mark. Me neither, said I.
Funerals, as has no doubt been said before, are quiet odd things. They provide a space for ritual, a place to do what needs to be done in the company of others. A focus point. And probably many other things. But while they have these defined procedures and structures, they're really about emotions, and those are so much harder to predict.
In a perverse way I'd been looking forward to Andy's funeral. I'd put my feeling of being lost and confused down to not really being in the middle of things, stuck up here in Birmingham while those closer, physically and emotionally, were dealing with it as a group. Not to say I envy them in the slightest, please don't think that for a minute. I was just looking for an explanation. I was expecting, hoping, that by being with others who were feeling what I was feeling, who knew him in aspects of the way I knew him, that I would have some kind of emotional moment to break the numbness, probably involving crying or something.
But I didn't.
Okay, I nearly did. Having queued up for what seemed like hours to write in the condolences book (there were a good 200 people present) I suddenly realised I didn't know what I was going to write, so I wrote a short note to Andy himself, and a brief moment happened. It's perhaps interesting that this happened when I was on my own with everyone else keeping a respectful distance.
What I realised, though, was that while I'm really glad I went and while it was really good to be with other folk and talk, however stiltedly, about Andy, this is something I need to deal with myself, slowly, over time. And once I realised that I felt a lot better.
Maybe it was cathartic after all.
Jenni's posted an update. Andy Roberts died this morning.
It's been an odd few days, to say the least. The great thing about the internet is information can be communicated immediately, but the flipside to that is that information can be communicated immediately. Within hours of Andy R's accident I, and many other people, knew about it. And then we waited to hear more. And waited. To her immense credit Jenni did a courageous job of keeping us informed but there was only so much she could do. I went to bed that night dreading the morning, half wanting to jump up and keep checking online and half wanting to just hide from the unthinkable, except it was all I could think about.
In the past you'd hear news like this after the event. Now you live it in real time from a great distance. The combination of being involved yet utterly powerless is horrible. Other than reporting the news in the areas where people who know Andy might see it, I couldn't articulate what I was feeling. It was all so glib, my reaction so inconsequential, and worst of all, there was no firm basis on which to react. Writing this now feels so selfish and utterly pointless, but I need to do it, so it is selfish.
Andy is currently in limbo. He's unconscious and will probably never wake up. If he ever does he will be a shadow of the man he was. His daughter Sophie wrote "He's, in effect, dead." Which is true - he'll never be the man he was and that is just fucking awful - but he's still breathing. Do we write the obituaries now? Do we mourn him? Should we mourn him while he's still technically alive? What tense do we use for him now?
Am I beating myself up over these specifics because I just don't know how to deal with this?
Despite it being one of the most gut-wrenching things I've ever read (I was flinching all the way) I'm grateful to Sophie for writing what she did. She did an important thing by drawing that line.
My favourite recent memory of Andy was at the Ladyfest Birmingham festival last year. He'd come up with a couple of friends and was crashing at mine, so I popped down to catch the end of the show. The gig turned into a cheezy indie disco and I watched this 40 year-old man in his trademark skinny-fit t-shirt bopping away in the midst of a predominantly female studenty crowd, thinking he really shouldn't be able to get away with this, but he fits in perfectly. He combined the boundless enthusiasm of a teenager with the wisdom of a sage.
Last night I went to a party. It wasn't a big party, more a gathering really, but it was at a student house and had a bonfire. We sat around the fire from 9pm to 4am drinking beer and then tea and talking about all sorts of stuff, some of it deep, some quite inconsequential. I didn't talk about Andy but he was there. I think it was the sort of small but important thing he would have approved of. Just sitting and talking and coming away with, as he once put it, batteries recharged.
It might seem odd to some, but I think the best tribute to Andy is to just keep carrying on. To create, discuss, play, be alive and love life for all it's oddness and essentialness. It seems to be a normal reaction to this sort of loss to feel the need to do something but Andy was someone who endlessly did something, who delighted in people doing something.
There are a couple of biggish examples of doing something in the pipeline. Andy and Sophie were planning a "music etc." festival in Dalston for October which looks like it'll go ahead, while something will be happening at the Caption small press comics convention next month which Andy had been involved with since its inception. For the latter I'd like to suggest dedicating the exhibition to him with work like Jeremy's Get Well Soon strip, effectively having a place to remember him that doesn't overshadow the event, since the enthusiasm Caption tends to generate is a tribute in itself.
And that's how I'm going to try and deal with this. Just keep on going, feeding off the enthusiasm of others and giving it back many-fold, like Andy did.
My friend, and I know a friend of a number of people who read this, Andy Roberts has been in a serious accident. He's stable in intensive care with a head injury and is currently being kept unconscious. Jenni Scott has more news and is keeping us posted.
I've known Andy for many years mainly through the small press comics scene. He's one of those talented, intelligent, enthusiastic, passionate and generous people for whom the term "a lovely man" was created. And while that shouldn't make a difference to how depressing this news is, it does.
You better get well soon, Andy. We kinda need you.
Update Wednesday. Andy's daughter Sophie has written on her LJ: "He's, in effect, dead. There is a huge unlikelyhood of him waking up, and even if he did he would probably spend the rest of his life in intensive care because of the damage that has been done."
...
Every so often you stumble upon something on the web and wonder "what mad fool is this?" as you gasp at the enormity of time and effort they've put into some massive archive of stuff. It so happens that I know one such mad fool. He's a very good friend of mine. Annoyingly his name is Andy, like so many of my friends, and doubly annoyingly he refused use his real surname, or any surname at all. When in the mid 90s he appeared on the small press comics scene, which already had more than its quota of Andys, he was given the name Andy Konky Kru after the title of his comic. Since having a rather odd pseudonym is not that weird amongst cartoonists the name stuck and no-one thought any more of it. But Andy didn't just do cool little comics, he was also something of an academic, holding forth in debates about the origins and minutiae of comic strip art and backing them up with a somewhat encyclopedic knowledge base.
When Andy discovered the internet he did what a lot of people did and started cataloguing it. But being Andy he was incredibly focussed, concentrating on cartoonists he thought were good (he can be very specific about this) and looking for examples of early comics, early for Andy being pre-20th century, an era when most people don't think comics really existed. Of course the internet is a cruel mistress and despite his blinkers the tunnel of information was infinite and ever changing. The huge lists of links Andy would painstakingly produce and send to mailing lists would quickly go out of date as link rot set in, but Andy would go back and update them again and again. And these lists were huge things. Andy would present them to you and you'd feel obliged to visit every site, which of course you didn't so you felt a little guilty. But when you needed a reference to some cartoonist or publisher the lists pretty much always gave you a quality pointer.
Link rot was starting to bug Andy so, since I'd given him a directory on BugPowder to host the lists, he started posting the images he'd found directly on there so they couldn't disappear. Alongside this he started scanning and uploading samples from his early comics archive running from prehistory to 1900 which began to dominate the site, plus some samples of his own (excellent) comic art. Jez and myself just left him to it and were somewhat astonished one day to discover he'd used up over 100mb of space, back when 100mb on a website was a hell of a lot. Bear in mind these are generally not huge files. He was very conscientious, compressing the jpegs as much as possible and only uploading the essentials, but even so we quickly checked BugPowder's capacity, concluding that we were okay but that Andy had to slow the fuck down, which he did, but even Andy slowed down is still a force to be reckoned with.
While I appreciated what he was doing I must confess I never really got it, putting it down to Andy's somewhat obsessive nature. The site got some good plaudits but they tended to be from other obsessive comics historians. At the end of the day we could accommodate his work and it was obviously good work. People I respected raved about the site and that was good for BugPowder if nothing else. I finally fully got what Andy had achieved at Caption 2004, the annual convention for us small press and art comics types. With an laptop powered OHP display and a large piece of pipe (photo) Andy talked us through his history of comics and I, along with everyone else in the audience, was rapt. Beyond any embarrassment I felt for not noticing this earlier I was immensely proud of what Andy had achieved here. He, of course just shrugged it off but I was struck by the realisation that he hadn't just collected a bunch of images and stuck them online - he'd created a huge narrative that meant something and taught something new the rest of us high-brow comics nerds who thought we pretty much knew it all.
That's not to say he's not an obsessive loon. One look at his directory with it's thousands of carefully named files but no subdirectories confirmed that. Each of the hundreds of HTML files was carefully hand coded and cross referenced with no database backing it up. I toyed with the notion of automating it for him but it was so huge and complex I quickly abandoned that idea. The methodology behind its creation lay in Andy's brain alone. Us mere mortals could not comprehend it.
However, Andy's page had become something of a ball and chain for BugPowder. Currently the site lives on a server that is very cheap with lots of space but not overly reliable. Or rather it's reliable if you're prepared to keep up with updates and changes. If you just leave it be it'll occasionally b0rk big time, as happened the other week. We could move to somewhere less techy / more reliable but the issue of hosting Andy's increasingly massive subsite always put such notions on hold. Andy had mentioned that his uncle had a mass of storage available to him but he didn't want to change the URLs from BugPowder and since we were happy enough staying with the current host for now nothing more was thought of it.
That said, when BugPowder went down the other week a lot of people noticed, and the majority of them were looking for Andy's stuff. So to cut a (very) long story short Andy now has his own site at AndyBleck.com (No, this isn't his real name. I'm one of only two people in comics who knows his real name and I've toyed with killing Mardou to reclaim my exclusivity in that regard.) All the images have been moved to his uncle's site while the HTML pages are mirrored, pretty much, on his new site and on BugPowder. Nothing major has changed on the surface but we're now pretty much free to move BugPowder should be want to.
The whole process of uploading everything allowed me to accurately quantify exactly what Andy has built here. There are 5,369 images weighing in at 396mb. 3,185 (240mb) of them are history related sitting on 645 pages. These took 12 hours to upload. In his defense this has been built up over many years but even so!
Do have a look at Andy's site. It's a marvel to behold even if you're not interested in comics. Start off with the Early Comics Archive where each thumbnail takes you to a readable page of comics. If you fancy something a little more academic, check out the Speechbaloons in Comics and Evolution of Speechbaloons pages (the former being comic-specific, the latter looking at art generally). There also Andy's big find, Lenardo and Blandine, a comic from 1783 which blew the "first ever comic" stakes back a good 75 years. Andy's old linklists still survive in a slightly reduced but still comprehensive form here along with his selection of 90 Comics Without Words featuring mostly contemporary cartoonists. The first two issues of his tiny A7 anthology Flickermouse are online along with his own minicomics Konky Kru, Mumpitz, Unspanned and some of his more abstract works. Then there's the main focus of his creative output these days, the Realistic Drawings (for want of a better term). These really need to be seen in their full size glory and there are so many of them but this is a personal favourite. Finally there's his photography, the "best of" selection is here though there are many more, along with some sculpture and related abstract pencil drawings.
Phew!
When I first worked in Birmingham as a bookseller from 1998-2000, three of my colleagues shared a flat in Bournville. Now, Bournville is a rather strange place. All areas of Birmingham have their own characteristics and quirks, especially in the south, but Bournville is like a nature reserve, only it's urban. There are no pubs, off-licenses or major commercial developments, gardens have to be kept tidy, none of the eyesores of modern life (satellite dishes, etc) are allowed and in order to live there you have to abide by strict rules of conduct. Thankfully within walking distance is skuzzy Stirchley which seems to make up for the absence of vice in Bournville itself, but it really is like arriving in some idyllic village in the middle of the Cotswalds. All very nice and yet at the same time all rather wrong.
But anyway, Andy, Andy and Dave moved into this flat on the edge of Bournville Green over one of the shops. The flat backed onto the Cadbury factory and had no immediate neighbours thus was the perfect venue for a party. And so, as 1998 drew to a close, a rather large number of our peers from the world of bookselling and elsewhere descended on sleepy Bournville for a nice cozy soiree that turned into something much much more.
Permalink | Posted in A Life of Pete, Autobio, Birmingham, Friends on Monday, January 3 2005 | Comments (4) ?subject=[Weblog] 030105: NYE in Bournville" title="email me about this specific post">Email
As you may know, my mate Dave Early is making a movie. He just sent through a couple of teaser images. I share.
(Click for big)
He writes: "The shoot went brilliantly, I'm just finishing my first cut of the film, then I move onto the sound mix, special effects shots, colour grading it and getting it back onto film. After that, we hit the festivals!"
My good friend Dave Early recently decided that after working in the film industry for many years it was about time he knuckled down and made his own movie. Filming has started and it all seems to be going frighteningly well.
My very small part in all this is managing the web presence, and the holding page went up today.
The fact that it's called The Street Cleaner and that I'm currently a street cleaner only occurred as I was ftping it up...
[Update: Dave on IMDb]
My writing muse has vanished leaving quite a few half-written blog posts sitting on my hard drive, so here goes in point form:
Had a lovely evening at Matt and Anna's in Moseley on Saturday, which was needed as I was getting a little stir crazy. Matt has a mad collection of undergroundy French comics (or Bandes-Dessines) and it was something of a Hicksville moment being surrounded by loads of comics I'd never seen before. Was quite taken by the publisher Freon along with Flblb who published two of Matt's books. Strange that a Texan cartoonist living in England has only been published in French. But there you go.
Last week I was back at the NEC for a second job. I think I might be spending a lot of time there over the next few months. However, tomorrow I'm working for Birmingham City Council Environmental Services which means I'm on the bins! Well, I'm probably street cleaning but that's just as cool! Hopefully I'll be driving around in one of those little invalid carriages with big brushes ploughing through obstinate commoners as they wait for their bus. But as ever I will have no idea exactly what I'm doing until I'm doing it.
Finally got in touch, in a roundabout way, with an old Uni mate on Friday - told him to Google me for my email so if you're reading this James...
And that's about it.
Armadillos are the only creatures, other than humans, who are capable of carying leprosy.
FACT.
Well, whoopy-do! My chum Gary Northfield has his debut in the highly prestigeous British comic book The Beano with his new character Derek the Sheep
Be sure and pick up a copy or ten this week (issue 3214, dated February 21st) and write to the editor telling him how much you really like Derek. Draw a picture if you feel like it. In crayon. Purple crayon.
Chum Andy Roberts (of the band Linus) has a novel idea for paying his course fees:
I want to do an MA this Autumn. I've never been to college before but I can do this one without having a degree. I'm applying this week, but even if I'm accepted I'll have to raise three and a half grand or so (3,552 of our English pounds, to be precise) to do the course. Probably have to get a loan, but I want to avoid that as far as possible, so...I propose to fund my course partly by pinching an idea from the singer-songwriter Momus. When he got sued a few years ago, he invited people to contribute to his legal fees by sending him some personal details and some money, and he would write a song about them. These were eventually compiled on an album.
Now obviously, I'm hardly as well known as he is. But I'm no slouch when it comes to songs, and I love the challenge of being commissioned to write. Plus, I'll go one better, by offering to write a song about anything the donor wants to hear a song about.
Jez starts a series of posts related to a comment I left on his blog 18 months ago:
About one million years ago, Pete said "You know what'd be really useful? The JezUK recipe page. All that groovy vegetarian stuff you make. Think about it." So I did. For a long time.
Linguine with feta and olives is the first one, with more to follow.
I spent a lovely weekend with good friends Dave and Ruth and their little kids Alice and Grace a week back. Lovely and top and great. Alice has a doctors kit with plastic tools for inspecting and cutting people. One of them is a dentist's mirror. Whether I was inspired by the exploratory playmaking of the kids or whether I'm just that way inclined I'll leave you to decide but I looked at the mirror, I looked at the camera, I looked at Ruth and Grace on the sofa...
I'm at my old mate Mark's house showing him how to blog. Um. Probably delete this later... (When I write about Mark properly)
It's not often you'll find me linking to a geocities fan site, but denislawsonobsession makes me smile, mainly because Dennis Lawson (who, of couse, played Wedge in all three Star Wars films) is the father of Jamie, a good friend of mine, and I've never known someone who's dad has a fan site devoted (literally, devoted!) to them. Happy to say Lalla, who runs it, seems fairly sane. At least as sane as the rest of us. Anyway, those who know him, check out these photos of Jamie as a kid in Celebrity Knitting magazine! I mean, I know someone who was in Celebrity Knitting! How cool is that!
Oh, Frazer, what are we to do with you...
British comic artist forced to leave Croatia Residency visa denied due to bad translationZagreb (pte, Apr 4, 2003 12:05) - A top British comic artist has been booted out of Croatia after officials translated "freelance" as "unemployed".
The artist Frazer Irving who earns 50,000 pounds a year and has already had at least one major exhibition of his work in the Croatian capital Zagreb said he was stunned by the news.
(more of this kind of thing...)
He also brought with him cool chocolate...
Permalink | Posted in Friends on Thursday, January 30 2003 | Comments (0) ?subject=[Weblog] 300103: Atsushi" title="email me about this specific post">Email
Unfortunately, someone complained to Angelfire, the free hosting service, that Brett's site was racially offensive to the Welsh and they removed it. At this time Brett's PC had died and with it his copies of the pages. For a while you could get it on the Wayback Machine but it's gone even from there and neither of us thought to make new copies.
Then, magically, Brett found it archived on the website of The Plough And Harrow, a Welsh pub the landlord of which had recognised the earthy truisms in Brett's work and decided it was too good to lose. So, thanks to this great and good man we can one again present to you the genius that is The Amazing Welsh Landlord Site by Mr Brett Tremble.
Brett is also the mind behind the The World of Mayonnaise - where condiments collide!
While visiting Kate this weekend she said she hated having her photo taken because they always looked bad. I said that was because she wasn't relaxed in front of a camera. So I set about proving her wrong by snapping loads of shots of her. Eventually she stopped taking it seriously and these were the best three. See, she doesn't always look bad in photos!
Permalink | Posted in Friends, Photography on Tuesday, January 7 2003 | Comments (0) ?subject=[Weblog] 070103: Kate can take a nice picture" title="email me about this specific post">Email
It's another girl!!! 7lbs 10oz Mother & baby doing fine!I'm actually lost for words... ;)
My mate Graham wrote a wee piece about Lydia Lunch at the ICA in there and gave it to her at the event, thinking he had another copy for his portfolio. He didn't, and he's getting desperate. He's got cuttings from over 10 years of zine and magazine writings and it'd be a real shame to have a gap in there.
If you have one, please send it to: Graham Russell, Waterstones, Leadenhall Market, 1-3 Whittington Avenue, London, EC3V 1PJ, or email me.
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Great turn of phrase from Jeremy. I am awed at my own reality, indeed. Sums up well a feeling I get from time to time - suddenly I exist in the eyes of the whole big existence thing. It's not a bad feeling, just an odd one. An "Oh, you noticed" kind of thing.
My chum Mike has started collecting his hungover ramblings on a new site:
Mike Woods is unwell, and he's going to tell you how he brought this about, because he has absolutely nothing better to do. If you read it, then neither have you, and judging by the paralysis of culture, service and industry in this benighted island of ours, there's a lot of you out there. There is not supposed to be any decoration, there are no polls, prizes, pictures or puzzles. You are not only discourgared from adding your two-penny'th, you are all but prevented from doing so. Queries will almost never be read, let alone answered, and in spite of everything this interweb you like stands for, no links to anything but the most pointless articles posted by my incestuous little band of drinking partners will be offered. You will never, ever need a sophisticated browser to find out how ill I am each morning, and you will not be invited to download RealFlash or Arseplayer or any such whizzy begubbins. Without warning, I may post material that you find offensive, including but not limited to blue language, bilious misanthropy and photographic studies of my decrepit and repulsive body as pinkly nude as the day it was spawned. And so, without further ado, on with the daily diagnosis of the diseases and distresses that are my drinker's dues.
On a private mailing list, Father Jack writes:
I'm at least a week closer to death than I was at tea-time yesterday.
The incidence of mortality caused by obesity in the US is almost
exactly equal to that caused by starvation across the African
contintent. Every offering from the sandwich man this morning had
parsley in it. You can buy a gun in the sports shop on Putney Hill
but I haven't come across a decent tab of acid for nine years. The
water in London is so polluted that Metropolitans are statisically
far less likely to conceive children than people who live in rural
areas. War looms. Despite being subtly advertised as fuel that will
make your children achieve better results at school, sugared
breakfast cereals contain over a hundred artificial chemical
ingredients and a 30g serving contains as many calories as the
average adult requires for 2 days. Dennis Leary has outlived Bill
Hicks. Just before her execution date, a Texas woman appealed for
clemency on the grounds that she had become a born-again Christian.
`Please,' Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation, `don't
kill me.' Boats give you cancer. Lemonade is made from orphan's
tears. Mornings are made of sunlight, worms and psoriasis.
Thank you, Father...
Once again it is proven to me that a friend of mine is so completely wasted in his place of employment. Welcome to Mike's Place.
An old friend who I haven't been in touch with for 18 months or so just emailed about a gig she's got coming up. It seems she's now trading under the name Miss Hypnotique and she performs like this:
That's a theremin. I knew she was messing around with it but this is certainly a development! The gig's at 93 Feet East on Brick Lane, East London on September 18th, the day before my birthday! I think I might well be there!
