50 Million Elvis Fans Can be Wrong...

This weekend I volunteered at the Hyde Park Proms on Saturday, and 'Elvis Forever', a tribute concert that does what it says on the tin, also in Hyde Park. I was volunteering for the Nigaraguan Solidarity Front, or something (my inability to remember the name of this organisation caused me several problems over the weekend), working the bar. It's some kind of socialist coop, where you work and get paid, but they take your wages. I'm not sure which brand of socialism they were adhering to, more Pol Pot than Che Guevara, perhaps. Nice people on the whole, most of them seemed to be veterans of bar work across many years and many festivals. They talked about Leeds and Glasto like they were talking about 'Nam or Korea - you weren't there man....

I almost wasn't here either, but forced myself into it at the last minute, and I'm glad I did on the whole. The Saturday was better than the Sunday. I got there just as they were setting up the stage. The stage was that big, Terry Wogan later commented, not because of the Proms, or even the King, but because the Pope was rolling into town later in the week. There's something appropriate about that, because Elvis is the king of kitsch popular culture, and the Catholic Church is the king of kitsch popular religions. There was a great atmosphere at the Prom, lots of people, mostly nice. Towards the end of the evening, a guy ordered a pint of beer for himself, and a vodka and orange for his wife. I started adding the orange, and said 'say when'. He said 'when' almost immediately. 'Not much orange in that', I said. 'Tell you what, stick another vodka in that', he said. I did that. 'Tell you what, stick another double in there,' he said. His wife was looking really horrified, 'What are you doing?' I added a double vodka. 'There's really quite a lot of vodka in there, right now,' I said. 'I know!' said the man, 'High five!' - and he high fived me, and went down the bar, high fiving the bartenders. Odd chap.

The bars were managed, or more accurately, mismanaged, by a totally superfluous team of, well, managers. What we needed, as barpeople, were skivvies, to get stuff for us and replenish stock. What we got was a group of people who looked like they got their management training from a socialist propaganda video. They stood at the back in cliques, smoking, drinking coffee, doing almost anything but managing. 'No,' I wanted to say, 'that's how managers act according to Communists, not in real life!'

Elvis day was a different crowd. More aggressive, less well off... Tom Jones was the big star of the night, and the fireworks at the end were okay. It was mostly just naff covers of Elvis hits, though, and, ugh, symphonic versions of the same...

Still, overall, fun experience. Would absolutely do it again. What I really need to do is get on that management team.

Hmm, June already. I'm really not a very good blogger, am I? Since my last entry, I have, er, split up with my girlfriend, moved out of my flat and into a room down the road and generally been going through a kind of existential crisis. I have offset this by doing lots of evening classes: French, poetry, and an art class called "creative colour for artists and designers". I'm scared to say it, but I think I might finally be getting it as far as the art thing goes. Not that I'm necessarily any better at doing it, but at least I think I understand a lot more about what goes into a work of art. At last week's class, for example, we were supposed to draw flowers using a stick with some ink on it, and then colour them in using inks. Fine. I had no problem with the drawing bit, since I have done rather a lot of that in the past. But as soon as I started applying colour, I found myself adrift in a sea of infinite possibility with no idea what I was doing. What was I doing? IN ANY CASE I NEVER WANTED TO BE AN ARTIST! I only started drawing because I couldn't get anyone to accept my story submissions... But you start drawing, and before you know it, you get sucked in by the whole "art" thing, and you want to get better at it for its own sake. So the long and the short of it is that I got myself to this position where I could draw reasonably competently, or some things anyway, but then having this massive dilemma about whether to branch out and use pencils, pens, charcoal, etc. and whether to go abstract or just draw things... the whole art thing seemed so stressful. Don't draw much nowadays, as Philip Larkin might have written. So, back to the start of this twaddle, I think I understand the difference between art and...well, something else. Artists don't really know what the end product will be. They are interested in process. i.e, they go, "today I will use blue and yellow to express emotion and all other colours can go and fuck themselves" and that is a sort of experiment, and what comes out the other end might be good or it might be bad. It will probably be good if you are Picasso, because your talent and training means that whatever you do will be skilled, but if you are a typical art school undergrad it will probably be pretentious and awful, because you haven't made enough mistakes yet. All this is blatantly obvious to most people who have had some experience, but god it's taken me years to understand that skill in execution isn't everything, that having an intention or idea and seeing where that takes you is far more likely to produce art than planning it in advance. Tant pis.

Drawing from (almost) life

One of the things I like to do to relax is a bit of life drawing. Ideally I would go to a class, but I find them a bit of a rip off in London, and there's always too many people at them. They run some okay ones at the Prince's Drawing School, but since they rejected me for their drawing course, I have been giving them the cold shoulder. On Channel 4 on demand you can watch these Life Classes, which are really good. It's not the same as drawing a real person, but it's the next best thing. Plus you get a really good tutor and you can pause it for as long as you like. I find it really relaxing, and it is nice to be able to do it from my desk.

This is Hamsa, who was volunteering until early 2009. Don't see her much these days, which is a shame. Really clever, lots of fun, can't ice skate to save her life...

Maria

Maria brings joy everywhere she goes, and everyone loves her. I'm not sure exactly how she does this, as she moans all the time and complains endlessly. She's Argentinian, but has a Scottish accent (she denies this) and is generally extremely sceptical about everything. At lunchtimes we play the bean game together, and she usually wins. She's going to do an internship in Ecuador this April, and I will miss her (sob). In this picture she's actually talking to Juli on the train. They are great pals at work, although they have little in common if you ask me...

Juli

I have so many volunteers going through our organisation and most of them are really cool. I end up drawing them a lot over their stay, so I thought I may as well start putting them up.

This is Juli. She's German, completely crazy, but really nice. She's a proper old school rebel, and is always going on marches, protests, demonstrations etc. She often gets into trouble and sometimes lands in court. She's like one of the Baader Meinhof gang. She hangs out in hippy communes, goes to climate camps, eats out of bins at the back of Tesco (sometimes), the whole bit. I like trying to annoy her by talking about my share portfolio, but she doesn't take the bait. She's a really good caseworker, but doesn't have much patience with lesser mortals around the office. I think some other vols are scared of her! I wish I was as idealistic and committed as Juli, but I'm too cynical and pessimistic. Tant pis! I drew this on the tube train going from Colnbrook detention centre near Heathrow.

Okay, so one of the comics I bought in Angouleme was a real gem: 10 Petits Insectes.

It's loosely (very loosely) based on the Agatha Christie novel which was originally given the catchy if not politically correct title "Ten Little Niggers". Someone realised this wasn't exactly good taste, so other editions have been called "Ten Little Indians", but that's not great either, so these days it's called "And then there were none". The story is about 10 people who are invited to an island where they are bumped off one by one. That's what happens in Ten Little Insects, but there the similarity ends.

It's written by Davide Cali, who I thought I had never heard of before, but then I realised I had a book of his, "The Enemy", with illustrations by Serge Bloch. It's a really nice mix of doodles and collage, with a witty anti war message. The artist on Insects is Vincent Pianina, who I actually met and chatted to a while. Nice guy, he even drew a picture for Katy (my girlfriend).

Ten Little Insects, as the story suggests, replaces the people in the Agatha Christie setting with Insects. This allows the author to make some good insect-related gags and also to play up the grotesque elements of the story without it getting too gruesome. The art is beautifully quirky: a lot of it is just built up with primary colour planes without any lines. I wasn't sure this would work when I first saw it, but now I love it. The angular drawing style reminds me a bit of classic 1950s animation. In fact, this would make a brilliant cartoon. The characters and the humour are what make the book for me, though. Here's one of my favourites: the characters get to the island, and sit around a table. One of them puts on a record which says "YOU'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!"

They naturally assume that this is a sick joke, and one of the insects suggests they turn over the record.

Insect 1: What's on the other side

Insect 2: "You're all going to die (instrumental version)"

Basically, if you don't find that funny, you probably won't like this book. I like this book a lot. It's only in French (Amazon.fr) , but maybe some clever UK publisher will pick it up.

I hope I don't get sued for using all these images. Is that allowed?

Just returned from the Angouleme Comics Festival. To be honest, I found the experience a real downer - there's just so much stuff out there, and I can't see how my stuff fits into the picture. I'd spent the previous 2 weeks scanning pages into my computer and cleaning them up so that I could get them together: that's the first 235 pages of 'Year Zero'.

The thing is, when I was drawing them, I was doing it as fast as possible, because I wanted to learn how to draw fast and also to make up a story on the hoof. Flicking through it now, though, and it looks pretty thin stuff. I think for the next 240 pages or so (I'm on page 268 at the moment, out of 500) I'll work at it more, and put in lots of dense blacks, because they seem to reproduce well.

The Bicycle Thief still stands up though, although I'm a bit sick of people saying it looks like Quentin Blake. I love Quentin Blake, the man is a genius, but I don't want my work to be identified with his like I'm copying him or something. It's just because I use dots for eyes sometimes and I'm a bit scribbly.

Still, going to Angouleme gave me a chance to buy lots of new BDs. I think maybe I'll review a few and write about them here.

Ukelele Class

I started a ukelele class last week at the Duke of Uke store near brick lane. The classes are great and really challenging. It's quite hard to keep up. This week I arrived early and was able to do a speedy sketch.

I'm trying to do a colour page at the moment, which involves using photoshop, which I don't really know how to use. I'm following Brian Bolland's highly useful lessons at his website, but it is still an arduous process, and what i'm drawing seems to bear no relation to the style I have when I use a pen. I can post some results later. Meanwhile, here is a doodle. I spend a lot of time on the phone at work and do doodles with a biro. I throw most of them away, but if I do an interesting one, I blow it up on the photocopier and take it home. Don't ask me where this is supposed to be...

Heavy Week

I've been working all week on trying to finish something for tomorrow's small press fair. I was previously hoping to do two or even 3 different strips - but i have only just managed to finish one.

Also this week, my first workshop at Colnbrook Detention Centre (I give legal advice to detainees). The whole experience left me incredibly depressed: people who have been detained 3, 4, 5 years beyond their criminal sentence, because they are foreign. It would be fine if they were being deported, but they aren't. They are just rotting in detention, slowly going mad, because the Home Office can't or won't obtain travel documents and it's too politically dangerous to release any of them. In the evening, after the workshop, coincidentally, was the LDSG report launch on indefinite detention: detained lives. It looks like an interesting report, and I look forward to reading it. Alisdair Mackenzie spoke - always amusing and value for money, but Alison Harvey of ILPA was the most impressive and impassioned speaker.

Here is a drawing I just did. It was supposed to be a self-portrait, but doesn't really look like me, still, interesting...

Work in progress

I am frantically trying to get together something for a mini-comic for the beginning of february. Here's some work in progress. It's kind of a diary.

Yesterday I was supposed to have an operation. I got to the hospital, and got into the disposable ward clothes, and then a doctor came round. He said the procedure I was supposed to have done, he didn't do. He could do a different procedure if I wanted, or come another day. I said we'd leave it for today and come back and have the right procedure. Katy and I had breakfast in Carluccio's for a treat, and whilst she chose a gift for someone I peered out of the window and sketched the square outside St. Barts.

New Year Post

Actually, I haven't posted for nearly a year, but I intend to do it more often now. Over Christmas and New Year Katy and I were visiting our friends Kata and Kristin in Iceland. We had a great time. Here are some pictures I drew out there.



Okay this is the hut we stayed in in the middle of nowhere, outside Reykjavik. There was a hottub out back, so every day, we went out, did stuff, came back, had dinner, played games and then made cocktails and sat in the hot water in the cold air under the stars. Can you think of anything better than that?




This is the mighty waterfall at Gullfoss. You could actually go and stand incredibly close to it. The path was covered in ice and treacherously slippy.



Kristin's mother, Kristin, lent us her cabin near Borgenes, in the west of Iceland. Katy and I drove our hire car to the giant glacier Snæfellsjökull. This is a sketch I did from the car in a place called Hellnar. It was too bloody cold to get out and draw...

Below, our friend Kata is a big activist in Iceland. I drew this quick comic strip after she told me about an encounter with the police that morning...

Chinese New Year

We went down to Chinatown (London) to see the celebrations. Thousands of people. Really impossible to draw. We didn't hang around long. Got some noodles and went home. Here's a sketch...

Angouleme

Jazz Club

Went to the Vortex Jazz Club for a friend's birthday. Eddie Parker was playing with his band. The music was brilliant, but the monologues between numbers was a bit eccentric: "I was reading a book the other day," Mr Parker informed the audience, "It was one of those that takes about 3 years to get past the first page. It was brilliant. It was about really intricate objects described really intricately like beef sewn together with golden thread." Whilst the audience digested this information, he would fly into another number. "I was reading this book the other day," he warned after the next number - "It was by Michel Foucault - Madness and Civilization. It's all about how mad people have been pushed to the edge of society..." The audience sympathised. Other in-between speeches included impressions of madmen in the Forest of Dean and suggested lyrics for the Strictly Come Dancing tune: "I don't care about the silly peeps, they can eat my friend's shit". A true English eccentric, but a great flute player. Here are some sketches I did in biro on the table reservation card.

Popeye

I was out Christmas shopping and saw a recently-published album of Popeye, collecting thimble theatre strips from the early 1930s. It's a beautiful book: oversize format with colour sections from the weekend and black and white strips. The only fly in the ointment is a pseudo intellectual introductory essay by some fraud called Donald Phelps. I was hoping for some background to the Thimble Theatre strips, perhaps some discussion of EC Segar's technique and narrative development, or maybe an analysis of Popeye's appeal in depression-era America. Instead, Phelps takes the coward's way out with, well, for example:

"Segar was affected, not with parody, but with camp as a viable comic tone. Involved in this feeing was his awareness of farce and melodrama, not as "effects" to be siphoned as lubricants into the hiccoughing mechanism of some formula, but as vigorous imaginative currents, as the natural prerogatives and powers of the comic-strip medium, which meant its terrain, to be expanded, exploited, and gloried in; and, also the comic strip's point of contact with the actual world; even as belived some of the most redoubtable of the silent-film makers: D W Griffith, Abel Gance, Erich von Stroheim, Thomas Ince."


You can stare at that sentence as long as you like, and no meaning will peep out. I didn't choose to reproduce this sentence because it is the most pretentious, or the most meaningless, in the essay. It was picked at random. The whole seven-page essay (in an oversize book) is like this. All of the author's limited repertoire is on display here, though: note the overlong sentence, separated by semicolons, giving the illusion of a well-structured thought to an incoherent ramble; note the name dropping to show off the author's erudition (the author frequently does this, even though there is no reason why anyone should have heard of half the people he cites); note the tortured metaphors and the quite meaningless assertions ("farce and melodrama... as the natural prerogatives and powers of the comic-strip medium") made in a matter-of-fact tone.

Having studied English Lit, I'm quite used to meeting these sort of craven attempts at criticism in the field of cultural studies. They are there to fool the intellectually insecure, who think that big words, long sentences and esoteric references are the same thing as being clever. They aren't. Or as Phelps puts it:

"Imagination was, in his altogether just and surpassingly creative view, the perennial tenant of actuality, even in its crudest, least negotiable aspects"

Quite. What saddens me, is to see rubbish like this in the introduction to a Popeye book. I kind of thought that comics were a folk medium that was secure in its world and didn't need pseudo-criticism to justify its existence. Popeye is good because it is good, or "I yam what I yam", as he would put it. It seems I was wrong. Depressingly, we are promised the next installment of Phelps' essay in the next Popeye volume. That's something to look forward to.

But how good is Popeye? Incredible. In my opinion, it stands up better than Krazy Kat strips from the same era. Segar has the same scratchy, doodle style, and the same - let's face it - artistic limitations, coupled with a stylistic facility, honed over pages and pages of strips which makes even the poorest draftsmanship easy on the eye. One of the joys of the volume is watching Popeye's face take shape, over weeks and months, as Segar refines his style, until it finally resembles the iconic face we recognise from the animated cartoons. I love the scratchy pen lines for shadows or night skies. The way hands look like bunches of bananas. The way a crowd watching a fight all look like bald, identical homunculi. The best thing about Popeye, however is the story. Segar is a master of suspense, keeping the reader engaged whilst we wait for Popeye's next big fight, or showdown, or another crazy plan comes to its disastrous fruition. As the climax approaches, Segar lines up the next plot, so that the climax effortlessly segues into another story. He's like a master plate-spinner. Most of the gags are still funny too. Some elements of the strip have dated: particularly Popeye's tendency to thrash Olive every now and again. Actually, when was that ever respectable? Overall, I would say that Segar's achievement was to create a believable world in which anything, even the supernatural, can happen, and yet keep the world operating within some sort of physical laws which are difficult to define. I'm still enjoying reading and learning from it.

Christmas etc.

Went to my Mum's place for Christmas. I was a bit bored there, to tell the truth, but my mate Alex was around, visiting his folks. Did a bit of drawing, but nothing spectacular. It brightened up when Katy came to visit on the 27th.

Good news on the job front. They offered me some work after that interview I thought I did so badly at the other day. 3 days a week. Not sure what the salary will be, but it sounds good. That means I will have 2 weekdays, plus the weekends to do as much drawing as I like. Brilliant! I am going to treat it like a job, and work as professionally as I can on my comic and other projects (stories etc.) The catch with the job thing is that I will have to get qualified properly before I can start. That means most of January will be spent revising.

Also, I brought my scanner back down, so I can scan in some pictures...

Job Interview

Had a good weekend. On Sunday, we cooked a huge Christmas lunch. There were 11 of us. Half were vegetarian, and half weren't, which complicated the whole process. It was a lot of work, but worth it, I think, in the end, and I cooked a perfect turkey! Katy made bread sauce and enough potatoes to feed the Russian army. Still looking for work. I just had an interview at the place I am volunteering at. I hated the whole experience, as usual. Still not sure if I want the job. The money is excellent, but the workload commensurate with that, which means - no time for drawing. Haven't drawn much for days. Going to do a page of Year Zero, my long project now.

Poetry Reading

Katy and I seem to be having a surprise date once a week, which is quite fun. Last night she took me to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, where there was a poetry reading by a poetry group called the Lazy Birds.

The last time I went to a whole evening of poetry reading, it was dreadful. I only remember one guy who made the rhyme "two recent divorcees from human resources", but that was the highlight.

These guys were a lot better. My favourite was Sjaaak which was a kind of Brechtian operatic poetry, but very funny too.

I drew some sketches - think I'm getting a bit better at representing people, but still need a bit of work. I'm using the technique with 9b pencil and blending stick which Anthony Zierhut uses on his sketchblog. Have a look.