also, pinch me again

This is seriously about the greatest present I have ever received - my very own Sherman doll, which I can't believe exists. I love it so much. Thank you so much Laura x. 

like a dream

OK so this is kind of like a dream. If you want something to compare it to, imagine that there is this artist whose work you have always admired, and find compelling and brilliant in all kinds of ways, and then you find out that there is actually every chance that there is a bunch of material by this artist that has not been heard for 45 years, and it's sitting in a box next to you on the couch. That is my present condition, I kid you not. 

There is every chance they are in such degraded condition they won't play; they might just fall to bits. On the other hand... they are going to get the very best of care in a transfer process, so they'll be on the operating table before too long. I am almost scared to let them out of my sight, but by the same token, I know I'm not that great with looking after things like this! 

What is important to remember is that two weeks ago I didn't even know they existed. So if they don't really 'exist'... well... just back to zero. They can't be as good as what is already known to exist as part of the artist's published oeuvre (can they)? At the absolute least, I'll just be glad I know now that Pip once had a song called 'Golden Clown'!!!

(Oh and to tantalise a little extra: Graham Churchill appears to have had something to do with Joni Mitchell's very early career and to have produced an album associated with the children's TV show Rainbow; Dylan Loussier, if that's a person's name, is lost in the mists of time; and 5 Devonshire Ave Sutton? These days, the numbering in Devonshire Ave seems to start at 6 and there could surely have never been anything on the other side of the road...!) 

fastidious frog

The good old days before blogs were invented and you had to do comics to tell people how you felt. 1998 I had been back in Melbourne for a couple of years and at the tender age of um 33 I thought it was fine for me to be rude about the scene. (Bindi were a band who I don't really remember, sorry Bindi, though I'd love to hear either of their releases, the cassette EP with 'Purified Arse' on it or the one vinyl artefact, 'Crazy Bitch'). I had nothing against Bindi in fact I possibly even liked them. The meaning of the third last frame is lost to me now, sorry. 

Fastidious Frog here is not being at all fastidious, just an egotistical pissant, pissanting on his loyal acolyte from a great height. I have to say even though I'm me, or I was this person, however you want to put it, I do like the drawing here and I'm annoyed I can't do it this well anymore. 

 

moulting

So I guess it's getting warmer and both cats are moulting. Nancy does it big time (she also has dandruff). (Incidentally her dandruff is the whole reason I introduced tinned tuna etc into her diet, it seemed to work for a while but not any more and all it has given her is more of a weight problem). I have a nifty cat brush where the teeth retract when you squeeze the handle and give you a little mat of cat hair, it's cool and Nancy actually kind of likes it I think but Helmi just finds it too complex and nuanced - she will take three strokes of it and then hide under the table. There's less of her though and she is moulting less than Nancy so it's probably OK. They now eat from the same bowls, use the same litter tray and are also being brushed with the same implement, so soon they will forget they are different cats.

Last night, as I was going to bed Nancy came in and basically kissed Helmi, I know that's projection, but if I'd photographed it that's what you'd say it was, she sniffed all over her face and then just turned and left. It wasn't really kissing, I know, but nor was it 'fuck you, you fucking usurper'. This morning (this might be TMI but you know, they're cats, people and cats sleep together, it's not sexy) I picked Nancy up first thing and brought her onto the bed. It was a hilarious mexican standoff, with Helmi not purring and not knowing where to look, and Nancy looking at Helmi like, 'who even are you', and she turned tail and left soon after but she didn't go and grizzle or anything, she just went back to the living room and sat in the sun. 

garry shandling is dead!

Green Guide, Melbourne Age  13 July 1990 p. 19

I was trying to remember what sort of things I used to write about on this blog in the days before Nancy and Helmi were born and there was no facebook for my hardest-hitting reaction material, and I found this controversial post from 2006 where I dissed Monty Python and praised It's Garry Shandling's Show* although also found that when it came down to it some part of my brain had the same reaction to both (remembering phrases and ideas and being unable to help conjuring them to mind when 'triggered'). 

This also put me in mind (I mention it in the post linked above) of the Sydney Morning Herald reviewer who took the Shandling 25th Anniversary entirely at face value, whereas in fact it's (quite obviously really) a satire of chat shows, post-war American popular culture, and so on. And I thought, well, now I have newspapers.com I can track down that particular issue of the SMH and pull it to pieces a little bit more. Except, bizarrely, I can't find that review in there, at least not by searching 'Garry Shandling"+ "25th anniversary" or even just "Garry Shandling" between 1989 and 1991. When I had the sterling idea (just then) of searching on Gary Shandling instead, all I got was this gem:

Green Guide, Melbourne Age  29 June 1989 p. 30

So there's always the possibility that I have falsified a memory, but also, I might have read it in something other than the SMH, but I have just conflated all print media from that time in my memory to the SMH whereas there was probably a 'shit-ton' of print media around that I read but don't remember. What I did find was that the SMH reviewers - I was living in Sydney then and that's what I would have been reading by the way - were extremely enthusiastic about It's Garry Shandling's Show, unanimously and constantly, and were all bemoaning the fact that it was being shown at 11:30pm and, just the way indie music enthusiasts were about indie music in the 80s, being all convinced that if unimaginative media mediators gave something imaginative a chance then it would probably not only be hugely successful but also, make society a better place for everyone. I think we have modified our expectations a little more these days (but of course, we don't have Big TV limiting what we can watch, these days). 

I still think Garry Shandling was one of funniest comedians I have ever had the pleasure of delving into on a grand scale, though the work of a man of his generation working in the sphere that he did is going to age badly as was brought home to me a few months ago when I tried to watch his 1984 stand up special Alone in Las Vegas and found it dismally sexist and also, worse (?), dull. Comedy's like that, it can't survive, and I suppose the best comedy is the most responsive and intuitive so that (1) most of it has a use-by date (2) the bits that don't have a use-by date get absorbed into the zeitgeist and become stuff for the next generation of comedians to react against. 

The excellent, just excellent, Judd Apatow documentary about Shandling from 2018 cast a lot of light on his process, though left him nonetheless a bit of a cipher, which incidentally is perhaps what all comedians are, or at least the good ones. The amount of time he spent every day trying to push the envelope was a revelation but also his role as mentor to so many others (so many comedians I adore, too, like Sarah Silverman who is probably the current US comedian most likely to be inheritor of his mantle) was inspirational. Of course, not to put too fine a point on it, the whole defining moment for GS the man was the death of his brother, Barry, when they were both children (which now makes me feel weird when I think about the 'Dancing Barry' interlude in one of my favourite It's Garry Shandling Shows). 

Look despite all evidence to the contrary I stopped being a hardline proselytiser for things I liked lo-o-ong ago, about the same time I stopped believing in the canon, and I'm super content to hear about what you like but I'm not going to try to make you like what I like, and for all that there's no crime in enjoying something just because you do - it doesn't have to be current and if you (I) understand the context and no-one else does, that's to your (my) advantage. 

By the way, have you watched everything Stewart Lee has ever done? Because you really should. 

*I actually think there are still some eps of IGSS I still haven't watched, and I do have the full DVD set (it made me appreciate that the season Channel 9 showed in the early 90s, season 2 I think, was really superior to Season 1 when the show took quite some time to hit its stride - no surprises there). 

mountain goat

This is a picture of Helmi I took this morning at about 5:30 am, with a flash, she was sitting on top of me, which is what she likes to do particularly if I am sleeping or lying on my back (but also, on my side). However since it was with a flash, I can't really know if she closed her eyes because of the flash, or she just sits there with her eyes closed normally anyway. 

Like Ferdie and his lead thing, you can't ask a cat what does it mean when you... and I can't really know how to deduce why she wants to sit on me when I am asleep, but she does often choose the highest point on the bed, which might be a defensiveness thing, or might be a comfort thing or... I don't know!!!! I don't mind it. It does take quite a bit of balancing work for her to stay up there and I admire that. Often I'm only aware she's been there when I wake up for a split second because I've turned in my sleep and she jumps off (always right off the bed). 

She also, when I first go to bed, sticks her nose right in my face to sniff me. Maybe she thinks I am one of her kittens, gotten completely oversized (apparently she did have a litter of kittens once). 

By the way, every day things are getting better between her and Nancy. They will trill to each other now (but they never get too close). Helmi, encountering Nancy in her bed, will sniff her and then stand there wondering what happens next. Nothing ever does. It's the longest thaw ever but I'm enjoying it. 

unknown new old project

Having more or less finished my debut graphic novel I feel like I might be on a roll and I am kind of inspired to do another. I started one in, I think, 2006* which probably needs resolution. I only did the first chapter (hmm - vague memories of starting up a chapter 2). I published this as a little comic book (maybe ten copies?)** with another unfinished story, but whether my plan was to work them both up into full-length works I don't remember (I actually think not - the sub-story was probably only going to have three or four instalments). I have to say that looking at these pages (some of the originals have been shredded in storage, by the way, which is kind of bizarre, but I think I have photocopies of everything) I must say my drawing was considerably better 15 years ago compared to now. 

I really didn't know where I was going with this story, though I was definitely pushing the envelope in a few directions, many of them possibly even unresolvable. The two main characters were both immensely unlikeable: this semi-naked man, Julian, who is kind of a hippy but/and also a thoroughly unself-aware misognynist, who can't come to terms with anything about his own awful perspective both on the two women he lives with and his son. The woman above who loves him completely one-sidedly, is basically vacuous. I have to say that looking at this now - whether the work itself reveals this or it just brings it back for me - I was 'not in a good place' in 2006.

There was also a sub-plot about the son's friend who is seemingly abducted with the inference that he is murdered, and I remember thinking I didn't really know if that was going to be the case or not, and torn between what you can't do in a comic and what is a cliche. If I pick this up and start again, I will have to make sense of those issues. 

For Persiflage, I was really keen to rule all the frames and then draw around them for a fairly regulated but slightly organic feel. In this instance, clearly I didn't give a loose root about the frame shape and I was relying on feel. I don't know how I feel about that now but if I want to use these pages as is then I will have to stick to that format I guess. 

I do like the challenge of picking up something I started when I was 40 or so and seeing it to conclusion. I think I might have a better handle on how to guide a narrative now (I know that's arrogant, I'm really a beginner, but whatever, it's not my day job or anything, I can just dabble in this stuff for my own amusement, right? Right). 

*Probably 2007, as I discuss it briefly here

** Possibly more because I recall giving it two different titles, neither of which seemed adequate, and drawing two different front covers, although that said whether I printed copies of both I don't remember at all. 

dogs

Ferdie is often prone to running away when he's not on the lead, which is a hassle and dangerous for him. But the weird thing is that when he's on the lead, he doesn't seem to care much at all. It occurred to me how much I'm projecting this idea that he comes back from a walk when he's on the lead all the time, going 'damn it, call that a walk, I did nothing and went nowhere' whereas in fact he seems entirely not to care. It just makes me wonder what he thinks 'agency' really is. Does the fact that he will run away when he's not on the lead mean that he understands freedom and values it? Or is he completely ambivalent, and just floats through the world with either a restraint or no restraint? 

Barry, on the other hand, is a good boy. 

perry mason

So last week sometime I signed up to another freakin' streaming service, Binge, because I'd heard good things about this new Perry Mason show, particularly its dedication to period style, and that interested me. Unfortunately I was also drawing a lot so I didn't get to look at as much of it as I could have and also unfortunately for whatever reason my chromecast isn't working anymore so I had to watch it on a little screen anyway. 

Also unfortunately, and I honestly would not have even started watching it if I'd known this, the whole story is a mystery re the kidnap and murder of a baby. I know murder is compelling as a story, and I am aware that for whatever weird reason the people of Earth gravitate to stories about the desolation and demolition of the weakest (or perceived weakest) amongst us, but crime is not just or even most interestingly the murder of babies and children and young women. The predictability of this story hinging on the gruesome murder of someone young is so... predictable that of course if the story had not been about such a murder people would be like 'well that was weird'. I guess the second place getter to murder of young people is big bank heists or whatever, which is even more boring. So it's a baby murder.

To be frank, the whole thing is really a bit clumsy (although as I have already admitted, I was a clumsy viewer too so it's possible there were things I just didn't get because I wasn't paying close enough attention. You know those old people who watch shows with a partner and always interrupt with 'who's that - did he do...?' and then everyone misses the next bit of detail? That'd be me, except there's no-one here to ask, so I just suffer and/or read the synopsis on wikipedia). There's a whole corrupt snake oil religious organisation which seems somewhat tacked on for the sake of, I guess, spectacle. There's a tentative and therefore half-arsed, to my mind, attempt to bring a black policeman into the Perry Mason fold, whereby the man in question (Paul Drake - and btw I understand that 'Paul Drake' is a common name in Perry Mason narratives) isn't much more than noble and frustrated, oh, and he loves his wife. What a mysterious character. 

That is the problem really, although I suppose it's my problem, not the show's exactly - that its idea of 1932 is 'the real 1932 is just 2020 people without phones and a little more hicksy'. Hey, I imagine that in 1932 there really were enlightened straights like Perry Mason is in this show, who were wokely accepting of gays and non-whites, and naturally as viewers most of us would like to think that, if we lived in 1932 fuck yeah we'd be like that guy (perhaps a little less 'troubled' though). But I bet there were straight white males even in Perry Mason's lower middle(?) class milieu who would never talk to a black person and would be barely even aware that gays existed. Hmm. Having said it doesn't matter, I guess I should shut up about it. Don't even start me wondering again whether people said 'having sex' in 1932, particularly in courts of law. 

In other news, I finally finished the graphic novel (at least, all the drawings - I still have to scan them and mess with them in photoshop, but I think this will be less onerous, and I could probably watch more crap on my new best friend Binge while I'm doing it...). 

regroup

So now I am 15 pages away from finishing my coronavirus pandemic project, I guess that means the virus itself will finish up in a couple of days? Actually, it has occurred to me that I could do with a few more months of forced inactivity just to get a handle on all the stuff I've accumulated and done nothing with (I was just looking through my dropbox folder called 'camera uploads', which has retained around 8000 photographs I've taken. It's a slow task to retrieve them, but randomly I found a picture of Arcade Way in Keilor; my aunt Maggie talking at my mother's birthday party about seven or eight years ago; the photographer's feet, but not shoes I recognise; an action shot of Ferdie terrorising Barry when he (F) was a puppy; and a book chapter about Port Stephens. So, seriously, I could spend a valuable day going through that junk and sorting it. Because let's be fair it's a waste just creating it and never doing anything with it. 

final chapter

 

territory

 Helmi and Nancy fighting on a saturday morning. 

I know cats are territorial, of course they are, but I can't quite figure out whose territory is whose around here. I went into the spare room to draw. Nancy followed me in and staked a claim by the heater but she only ever goes in there when I'm in there. Helmi also came in and they had an uneasy time with Nancy closer to the heater and Helmi just hovering. 

Then they had this tiff, which is so babyish. 

back on the horse

So after completely avoiding the gn for a week I am on a push to get the fucker done with. Just filling in gaps really, right now, including pages that are either chapter intros or things I decided down the track needed to be inserted for continuity reasons. I had this page scripted but then I reorganised it while I drew it then went back with the liquid paper (even after this) and tightened it up. It is a really nice feeling to see the end in sight. This is about the moment where someone says 'oh yeah that is entirely the plot of that movie we saw two years ago'. I wouldn't be surprised at all.  

So I decided a month or so ago that just for clarity's sake I should divide it into chapters, and I needed some single-page drawings to announce each one. I actually thought these would have to be complex and detailed but now I've become of the opinion that they don't need to be. 

I was going to go down the boring track of finding images on google image or something but in fact they often don't give me what I already had in my mind, whereas real life is a better image search. Thus this archway, which is actually a bit drab in situ but was totally what I wanted for what it promised and how I could fake it up for something bigger:

One of the things I like about using real life is there are little details that I would not have thought of including because I'm not even entirely sure what they are, and my pictogram approach to illustration requires that only things that signify something should be there. But in this instance I figure unknowns give the whole thing a little more clutter of meaning. So I am happy with this so far.  

 

it do be like that sometimes

 A famous 2019 saying, typified by this reality. 

'new music'

I am writing this to the sound of the first Echo and the Bunnymen album Crocodiles. I don't think I have ever owned an Echo and the Bunnymen record, let alone album (this is the 25th anniversary CD, which I bought in Dixon's Brunswick St a few months ago but have not listened to until now). That's not so important. I just wanted to reminisce.

Someone said to me the other day that listening to the music of the 80s (or something - let's say the year I reached my majority, 1983) in 2020 was like listening to the music of uh, 1940something in 1983. Which is very more or less true. I like to think of myself as someone who listens to music from a broad range of eras, and I also like to think that I don't give a flying fuck what the music I listen to says about me (I was cogitating a little bit about this a few days ago when I was thinking about what the 60s meant in the 80s). As I have also mentioned in recent weeks (I think when I was meditating on 10CC's How Dare You) musicians in the 70s were so often motivated to create 30s or 40s-style music, which is so odd in hindsight (and of course not what the 70s is remembered for really or defined by). There was of course a massive amount of 50s-style kitsching going on in the 70s too - think of the victory lap 'impromptu jam' of 'Are You Ready, Eddy?' on Tarkus. 

Anyway, that's off topic. I was more talking about myself at 55 and what I should and shouldn't be allowed to listen to and still think of myself as somewhat having a finger somewhere near the pulse. 

When I was a kid and had a show on RRR - 1983 - there was a guy who did the show I think after mine, his name was Toad. He was a really nifty guy and I liked him, butand he was mired in the 60s and not in a way I thought of as cool, that said, I can only recall any essence of his playlist thus: one time he brought in an american woman, who seemed like a real hippy, and who claimed she was going to manifest a whole soundscape for Toad's show which began with something from The Doors' An American Prayer. To me, a little newness fascist, this was like saying that a cavewoman was going to skin a sabre-tooth tiger for dinner and not in a good way, notwithstanding (I now realise) that record was only five years old. I wonder who Toad was really, Wayne, do you know? 

The reason I've been thinking about this is actually because of Tam Vantage/Richards-Matlakowski. Tam is one of those songwriters who is sort of able to generate all kinds of styles and sounds from not much, he's a bit of a genius really and makes it look effortless (maybe it is). Last month he produced a few cassettes of demos and I was slow off the mark and only scored #4, but I have been listening to it every time I get in the car, and I shit you not every time it plays I think 'wait who's this again? All I know is it's a really cool 70s-80s band.' I don't know if you'd label this as Tam being timeless or old-fashioned or me just being clueless, perhaps based on this description alone you'd say Tam was derivative (I wouldn't say that, although there is one track for instance which starts off sounding like the Buzzcocks' 'Boredom' then goes into something else, which is kind of cool, not derivative). 

And I do listen to music made now, but I have to confess it's probably hardly cutting edge music at all. I really like the Waterfall Person album that came out last year; I am waiting with bated breath for the Pop Filter album which I gather is on its way to me as I write; I bought the second 208L Containers tape the minute I heard it was out. But to be honest I don't know enough about new popular (indie) music in 2020 to know whether these are where it's at and whether the fact that they undoubtedly fit with the kind of thing I've always liked means I'm still relevant or they're not! I also have to say, I'm not as uptight about this shizzle as I might appear to be. If I have to be the new Toad or his hippie friend then so be it.

This afternoon on fb someone posted some invitation to post an album you love in its entirety and would never skip a track. My go-to is, of course, The Red Crayola's Soldier Talk which I happen to think of as the consummately perfect LP: there is not one thing wrong with that record, IMO. I am also aware that this was a record I played just as my brain pressed record on the standard gauge forever for me. I was 17, it was the age most boys in history had been initiated into the rites of the tribe, this was my culture giving me instructions: 'from now on this is your baseline set of beliefs'. I wonder if there was an equivalent film? Maybe it was Make Mine Mink, I don't remember when I first saw that. An equivalent book? Well, I did read both Voss and The Man Who Loved Children when I was 17 (at/for school) and I did for a long time after claim those as my favourite books, although I would also have to say I haven't revisited either since then. 

I have probably droned on about these things on this blog before, I can't remember, I am aware they are consistent interests to me, but just to reiterate, they are not things that worry or concern me so much as just interest me.   

helmi report

From my notes I gather that today is the sixmonthiversary of the day (18 March) I first heard of the existence of Helmi. I believe I actually took possession of said unit on the 21 March, so on what day do you actually celebrate a sixmonthiversary? In any case she is doing very well, in the sense that she is a continual mystery to me but not an unpleasant one. 

This is her about three nights ago when she spent forever in the middle of the night (look, I was awake anyway) tormenting her favourite toy, a tailless orange mousealike. Yes she talks to it. 

it was 31.5 years ago today

 

Or thereabouts, I don't really recall. I guess when I made my forays to the US between 1986-2001 (in particular) I thought they would be defining elements of my life and maybe they were in a sense but many more defining elements have come along since. Which is fine. Zeb Olsen stuck the picture above up on facebook a few days ago, it is me and Rick Smrstick at Yo Yo Studios in, I'm guessing, early 1989 because I'm pretty sure that's when I went to the US with Zeb. She went on to do more groundbreaking things than I ever did, in the scene. But we did also play on this record which I was pretty happy with I guess: 

Yeah so I started with the intention of writing about how the Go Team really only operated as a functioning unit for 1989 and who knows what happened then, but I've sort of lost track of what I was saying as I disappeared down a few rabbit holes at once, and realised that the Go Team single that Kurt Cobain played on, the last one, is now selling on discogs for $380 or something, whereas the one I played on is selling on discogs for about $11 which possibly means it hasn't even kept market value since its initial release (I don't know what it sold for initially, but that's not much money). I never owned the Kurt Cobain one, but I just listened to it online, it's not all that great, at least, it's not worth more than $11. In my opinion. 

The other weird thing is if you go looking for the Go Team on youtube you mainly just get the Go! Team, who first started releasing records around 2000 (in the UK). I can't remember when I would have had this conversation but I did once ask Calvin why he didn't sue (or somehow register his objection to) the use of the Go Team name by a big-name group, and he said they weren't very good anyway. Which is... well, firstly not true because they're fucking amazing, one of my favourite groups of the 21st century and I love their music more than most things, but secondly, not much of an answer, even if you feel satisfied there's a karma element to them. So he would have sued them if they had been, in his opinion, an artistic threat? Oh well. I actually think life's too short to sue people over intellectual property; just have another idea.*

*That said, I listened to an interview with Tania Lacey yesterday about the battle over Titsiana Booberini and while I did really enjoy that short film, and don't necessarily see how it could be a long film, I understand her unhappiness about someone else claiming ownership of it as a story. That's different anyway. No-one was using the Go Team name anymore.  

only good news

So much to my surprise absolutely everything went smoothly with getting to the vets and getting the injection and the claws clipped and so on. I did get there early, also to my surprise, and was therefore 'compelled' to park in a clearway (like, at 8:47 when the clearway ended at 9) but didn't even get punished for that. Nancy did not peep, let alone howl (as she has been prone to do in the past) at the indignity/horror of being stuck in a cage and more to the point she was, according to the vet (I wasn't allowed into the room) perfectly behaved. And she has had her claws clipped which is the best thing ever. 

Rumour has it she is slightly overweight and should reduce a little, but on the whole, consensus is that she is the perfect cat in basically every way imaginable. 

nancy's big day out

Helmi stands happily all over the laptop keyboard (she will go to bed in about five minutes, I'm guessing) while Nancy sleeps obliviously in the background. She has about two more minutes of ignorant bliss. 

This morning Nancy is going to the vet to have her annual injection and also, glory of glories, to get her claws trimmed. The first is necessary, the second is more than necessary. I would like to get Helmi's claws trimmed as well (she has a bad habit of clawing the furniture/door frames) but I'd need to learn how to use a dart gun first. 

Within the next ten minutes I am going to have to manipulate Nancy into the carrying cage, which is always a slightly delicate (read: vicious) manoeuvre requiring surprise and muscle. She is getting smarter in her middle age too, but luckily so am I. 

Since one day it will be remedied probably, in some fashion, I should just explain the previous post: in the new Blogger interface, the 'NEW POST' button becomes overlaid with the 'Posts' (i.e., previous posts) button, and while I don't know which one 'pressing' it actually selects, I do know it's not possible to want both at once. 

 love ya guts new blogger interface

sally field's memoir in pieces +

I bought the Sally Field book because I thought it would give me some insight into television in the 60s and 70s and it was more engaging and entertaining than I had imagined it would be. Field is a woman who grew up in the 60s, was not educated, is very smart - sorry to say those four things are likely to make a particular outcome but the last thing, and a certain je ne sais quoi (sorry I know that's a copout) allows In Pieces to rise above the miasma of movie star memoirs. One thing I find particularly fascinating is what's not in there that everyone knows, so she does not map out her memories or her own story on touchpoints that the fans expect - best example being the 1984 'you like me' speech which came after her second Oscar, for Places in the Heart. Not even countenanced, not important, and it's not modesty or false modesty - she has no trouble going deep into discussing herself or her achievements or triumphs - it's just not relevant to the narrative here. Perhaps even more interesting is that unless I missed it I am pretty sure she mentions Forrest Gump once, in a list of movies she was in, and possibly does not even mention Places in the Heart at all. People like Pete Duel, who was her costar in Gidget (Moondoggie) who killed himself in the early 70s (after watching his own performance in some tv show, but apparently because he was so miserable about being an alcoholic) does not even get a mention (I only know about this story because I watched a youtube clip of her on The View talking briefly about him). She puts quite a bit of work into discussing Don Porter, who played her father on the show, so it's not like she doesn't want to discuss the era or the backstage politics or related things (eg that the Monkees, who were shooting on the adjoining lot, were a bunch of patronising, sexist, insecure dicks). Other odd things relating to Gidget which I noted both in this book and in the surrounding publicity - she mentions that she came up with Gidget's catchphrase 'toodles' (I mean, genius move right) but does not make the connection that her evil stepfather Jock Moloney called her 'Doodle'. I mean, different uses obviously but not a million miles from the same word.* 

I can't remember when I first watched Gidget. It was being repeated in April 1977 and I do vaguely recall a Gidget-Get Smart double bill at that time, but it was also being shown when I was in my late teens (Channel 7 started showing it at 5:30 in the afternoon very late - like, 30 December late - in 1982, and kept that going into the summer of '83).** The show had a lot of vigour and I suppose the weirdest thing looking back is that I was indulging in the same kind of nostalgia for a time I had existed in but not been sentient for: the last episode of the original Gidget series screened in the states on the day after my 1st birthday. In the early 80s, so when I was 17 - early 20s, and really enthused about alt-60s things most obviously the Velvet Underground, I remember people talking about bands I liked which are now seen as consummately 80s as being 'sixties' bands - The Church, The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, Huxton Creepers, Hoodoo Gurus. I think this might have been more to do with instrumentation than anything, though I guess it might also have related to hairstyles (long or short, it was usually 'natural', not sculpted and bizarre like 'modern' groups had). I also engaged with the 60s as a wellspring of cool via for instance Ciao Manhattan, which I went to see (I think) at the Valhalla in Richmond, or the various rock film marathons at the Valhalla (seeing Let it Be, Monterey Pop, fucking Woodstock etc). I could not hack The Flying Nun and unsurprisingly SF was repelled by the whole shebang (although once again, experiences during the making of that show make part of a revelatory narrative and it is during her Flying Nun time that she starts to attend Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio West, at the invitation of her FN costar Madeleine Sherwood). 

Such a horrible show.

So I am not sure whether I was introduced to Gidget in 1977 (I'm leaning towards that, tbh) or 1982. If it was 1977 that was probably my introduction to Sally Field because I know I not only saw Sybil in the cinema but also read the book (!!!). SF talks about this as a 4-hour two part TV series but I remembered a movie, and looking through the newspapers I see that yes, it was screening at the Rivoli in Camberwell (that was probably where I saw it, though who knows) in early 1978. (It also screened at the Valhalla in July 1979 on a double bill with Bergman's Face to Face though I definitely didn't see that, or at least, I've never seen Face to Face). I also saw Norma Rae when it was released, probably 1979. As I formulated a canon of 'stars' and made the subset of actors I liked, she was a part of that subset, not that I have followed her later career extraordinarily closely I have to say (going by her memoir, it hasn't meant much to her either). 

In her interview on The View, SF said the book was really more about, and a tribute to, her mother. Margaret Field comes across (not unnaturally) as a complex person with an acting background and a drinking problem, somewhat detached but more damaged than cruel: reading between the lines (and sometimes, reading the actual lines) you come to see that Margaret's inability to emotionally connect with her children is most likely more to do with her own mother's emotional failures than anything else (and her mother was poorly parented as well). Still, it's a failing. I think SF runs a nice line between not letting Margaret off the hook, and showing that the hook was really the culprit (if that's what letting someone off the hook means). SF's stepfather was sexually and emotionally abusive, to an extent she only reveals to her mother very late in life (although Margaret was somewhat aware and claimed that a partial admission from the man in question ended the marriage). Not to be glib but he also sounds like a really tiresome person to be around, although I admire SF's tentative steps into fudging territory whereby she makes many references to him as a motivating and inspirational force. She also suggests in one passage which is the kind of thing Chrissie Hynde got a lot of stick for that she was (within the parameters of an understanding that she was not equipped to give consent) a participant in some of the sexual abuse, though she does also, and I get this, necessarily articulate how difficult it is for her to completely own her memories. 

Most intriguingly, she talks a lot about her tendency to retain archives of her own life - letters, scrapbooks, diaries (her own and others') - but to only partially examine them. Indeed, that she kept diaries is only revealed once, way late in the text, and she seems to have trouble negotiating between the unreliability of her own memory and her own knowledge that she was not necessarily entirely truthful to herself in her diary keeping. 

It is also often difficult to be entirely sure what she wants us to understand about her relationship with the various men she's been involved with over time, and this does take up a lot of the book, but is not entirely resolved I'd say, particularly as she talks a lot about the beginnings and only summarily about the endings. Burt Reynolds sounds like a complete dick, and SF doesn't distinguish herself there either, being apparently a real enabler. Her first marriage, to a childhood sweetheart, is described with greater complexity and some wistfulness. Her second marriage is painted as dreary, and I'm not sure what we're meant to make of this, although I will note that she didn't publish her book until after Reynolds died and I think both the ex-husbands are still alive, so maybe she is just being politick. 

I also suspect, once again reading between the lines, that she was a better mother herself than she gives herself credit for, with all the necessary problems inherent in the stop-start world of the entertainment industry.

OK so I'm not writing a review just rambling and I have a day ahead of me in which things have to be done, Nancy and Helmi are genuinely playing/sniffing each other/enjoying the sunlight, so like them I feel optimistic about our little family here, also some of my houseplants seem to have revived and, while I have shitty work commitments next week, that's next week, not today or tomorrow, so... into the day peeps.

* Blogger won't allow me to left-justify this paragraph for some reason 

**By the way looking at the TV listings for Channel 7 in 82/83 I was shocked to see that Class of '74, of all things, was being rerun at 9am at this time. Did these people have no pride?! I guess not. Why even expect them to. 

friday

Once again exhausted by Friday. Reading Sally Field's autobiography. Tomorrow will be a substantial improvement although once again like today I probably will not leave the house.

what was i thinking

God only knows why this is taking so long. I am going to draw a lot of books behind Billy. Smiling Billy creeps me out btw. I can't pretend to know what makes a man attractive, though you'd think I'd do better with cats. 

Nancy has been her usual perfect companion today, sleeping soundly as she should, except in a brief time when the next door neighbours' washing machine was driving me mad and I went into the bedroom until it stopped, and read, and Nancy came in and walked around the room a while until I followed her out. The washing machine had stopped, I sat on the couch again and replied to emails, and Nancy went back to sleep. She basically rounded me up. 

i can't go on, i'll go on

Only managed to draw up two pages today, though I suppose there is a lot more of the day left. So the funny thing is that I do actually have a contract for a real special book which does have to be delivered in less than a year, I really should get that happening again. I suppose the imposition of the September deadline for this epic work has made me prioritise it. But it has also really made me see how insanely hard it is to draw everything you want to convey, people should be made to do this kind of thing as a project if they want to be a writer anyway, it really expands your horizons. This is at the beginning of the final section of the book where Elyse and Billy get together. In my mind, and not in the book so you know who really knows, Elyse is about ten years older than Billy - she's probably my age. Billy is in his late teens in about 1990, I am guessing. So maybe it's a little less than ten years but she's definitely older. That said, he has a certain bearing. I wonder what he smells like. I think wool wash. 

Piotr

I was very pleased with my output yesterday, I created the character of Piotr. Actually, I had created him some months ago based on something Victoria had told me about probably four or so years ago, how in Poland there is one man who does a huge amount of voice over for foreign language programs - so - he basically tells viewers what's going on in the show, rather than hiring people to overdub particular voices. According to her, the same one guy does a huge amount of this work, so he is really ubiquitous and has been for decades.

So my idea was for Elyse to meet a person somewhat like this, who had been an extremely familiar everyday character to the people of his unspecified nation. They all know his voice and he also, in my conception, does the translating and has also been, pragmatically from his point of view, a mouthpiece for the propaganda of the regime under which he served most of his life. In this instance I made the nation not Poland but somewhere else eastern European in this case using the cyrillic alphabet. This allowed me to produce a bunch of jokes that only I would get, translating via google translate from different languages which use cyrillic, mainly Belorussian, simply because I got too lazy to browse languages. One of the jokes which has been snipped out is that Piotr's last name is Belorussian for 'google translate', ha, ha. One of the jokes that has been left in is that someone has confused the show title The Rest of Quiglet with The Repose of Quiglet. So not funny but that's the good thing about jokes like this - no-one even has to know about them. Anyway none of this is really important, but I was pleased with the character design (as it's known) of Piotr, who is a kind of Colonel Sanders/Yosemite Sam rabbit. I like to think he has taken on some random accoutrements of whatever he thinks the wild west is/was. But he also a very erudite, serious person and I like his ears. 

I was so taken with him that i drew his whole six pages of the graphic novel today, as well as putting in a lot of work and walking to Cheaper Buy Miles. So I feel like I have not done a bad day's work all in all. 

 

dirt cheap baci

Got some almost-out-of-date baci from Cheaper Buy Miles for $2 today and ate too many of them. This is what's left so I suppose I could have eaten more than too many... 

 

the end is in sight

To me, this is about the funniest joke in the whole book, I realise it is not at all clear why from this frame, which actually just shows that I am very uncertain how an udder works (because I drew it in after I drew the body of the cow, then I thought - well - doesn't it somehow fit to the rest of it in some way?). I still don't know, and the various google image examples I looked at had the udder in a very shadowy bit so it was hard to tell, but then you just go well, this kind of conveys an udder without it being in your face, so that's fine. I cannot tell you how hard it was to come up with anything even slightly evocative of 'cow walking away, making a comment over her shoulder', and whether this does it or not, I guess I can at least say to myself that my four or five earlier attempts did not even slightly do it. 

I really got tired of drawing these two as well. I never have to draw Tabby after this page, so I'm done with her now because I did finish it, but I do have to draw Billy (who I guess is in his late teens here) in his mid-to-late 30s, so I guess I have to figure out what is different about him as an adult cat rather than a juvenile. In my experience usually older cats just get fatter but that is not what I'm aiming for with this character. It was a good accident to give them those nasty long noses but the slack-jawed horror expressions have worn me down over time. I really just didn't want Tabby to be a 'pretty' girl cat, regardless of the fairly tawdry device that you know her face is that of a girl because of her eyelashes (not evident in this pencil sketch except the shorthand in frame four to remind me in case I get forgetful when drawing them in with a pen). 

Basically I have forty more pages to draw, though I have only run about 1/20 (probably) of the whole through photoshop, but that's slightly more like grunt work (process is draw the page>tart it up in photoshop and add in various greys, erase residual pencil marks etc>save as jpg). The ending is still bothering me because I guess while I am used to writing narrative, my narrative is always nonfiction narrative. So when I finally came up with something I was (and am) bothered about it being too 'neat' (although I know fiction is usually in some sense 'neat' - at least - it has to have an ending of some sort). The ending as it is currently planned hedges its bets; it is partly a callback to an earlier parody of fictionalised, romantic (in both senses) endings, but it has a frisson of perverse 'reality check' to it. But I am still bothered that it raises more questions, but also I am aware that it's OK for an ending to raise some questions. You don't know what I'm talking about and indeed I may even change the ending and pretty soon, me being so forgetful, I won't remember either. 

The main practical problem I'm having now is that I think Officeworks has closed, despite their website giving no indication of this - at least - they're open 'for printing' but I don't know whether this means self-service scanning or take your stuff to the counter and get it scanned/printed. I suppose if I can get the stuff scanned that's all that ultimately matters (in terms of meeting my end-September deadline). 

The next section I have to draw is dialogue between two characters, it goes for six pages and will most likely just be character 1, character 2, sometimes the two in the one frame just so you don't think either of them is talking to themselves, but in the main, it's going to be a bit of a slog. I have to remind myself that all of these frames are going to be super small, so that's one saving grace of the basic nature of the drawings - there's not much room for anything but hieroglyphs really. 

august gurlz

One of the reasons I wanted to get Helmi was that I wanted Nancy to have a more interesting life than just sleeping. To be honest I feel like she might have retreated further into sleeping through her fear and resentment of Helmi... which is all a bit shit really. Every time they interact I feel a little more positive about things, although it's usually a fight of some sort. Let's face it I do really just enjoy the fact that these two interesting and attractive creatures are fighting for my attention all day long. What more could a man want. 

casey kasem

In the script I wrote that the DJ here was Casey Kasem, but I didn't bother trying to make him look like CK, who actually wasn't a really distinctive looking guy in my opinion, though pretty fascinating life. I remember first encountering CK in, I guess, the mid-70s during summer when some pop radio station - played a long series he did on the Beach Boys. It's funny I really don't remember any 'take-home' from that as a story, although it was probably the first time I heard a long story about a pop group, with the usual art vs commerce narrative that would later become very familiar. I just remember thinking, 'hm, I don't mind the Beach Boys'. 

Then later of course I did listen to the American Top 40 which I guess was on 3KZ when I was listening to it (it started there in '71) though by the late 70s it had moved to 3DB. 

I am reasonably pleased with my picture of Elyse writing her PhD on an electric typewriter in what I guess is a kind of bedsit or something. 

We never see the DJ again in the graphic novel. 

I am slightly bothered that Elyse is kind of vapid looking as an adult although those nostrils without an actual nose are pretty horrendous. That's just how it turned out. 

i had a dream

I had a dream that I was temporarily living in a house in Camberwell (airbnb?) and Helmi was jumping around me trying to wake me up (that much of the dream was based in reality, she really was) and then I woke up (in the dream) and realised I had been burgled, and left the bedroom, and I was trying to find my phone to call the police, but I thought it was by my bed, but I didn't want to go back to the bed because the burglar might still be in the house and get away (I wasn't scared - I wanted to catch them) and then I went into the living room and the burglar was there, he was a young man a bit shorter than me in a dark grey top, wiry curly hair, and facing away from me, and I yelled at him and he disappeared and I went out into the street, which was very wide, with huge trees either side and it was a nice, sunny day with people around, and the burglar was nowhere to be seen but I looked back and there was a much grander house next door to the one I was living in, and it was a national Danish day, and all these people were in 18th century clothes, and a woman in a big pink dress came up to me and said, are you here for the celebrations (or something like that) and I said no, I live in that house and I've been burgled and she said, oh no, that's not possible (reassuring me condescendingly) and I thought she had a skin condition then I realised she had sugar all over her face, she'd been eating some kind of sugary cake. It was one of those dreams where I had to really talk myself into waking up for real.

sad but true

This page, I decided, was superfluous and annoying, so I have decided to eliminate it. You can have it if you want. 

The horn section in action. This was hard but I'm less disappointed with it as a picture than I might be. 

The french horn was a nightmare of course and I won't say for certain but I think that probably a la Ernie Bushmiller my picture of a french horn is more indicative than a real illustration. 

Anyway nearly done. All up this took about two hours to do ffs!!! And it's not even finished!