i don't know!

(Five years ago) So for no good reason I did a series of comic strips on a sort of cartoony version of Impertinu, the director/showrunner figure from Persiflage, with an unnamed woman who to me is called Kloe but who actually, as I said, is unnamed. I am mildly pleased with them, the above doesn't really give you any sense of whether they are any good or not because you have to kind of take them as a whole. I don't know! But I am kind of into it. I think if I just did nothing but comics for ten years I'd get OK at it. 
 

face pareidolia at macleod station today

 

last night we went to see the secret agent in balwyn

It's a film. We got locked in the cinema but Laura pushed a button that said 'do not push' and we got out. Then walking back to the car we saw this possum. 

streaming through a shameful window

My second graphic novel is taking me years - years! - to complete, and that metaphor about pulling teeth, well, would be too much because it's not painful exactly, for me or anyone, but it is arduous. As you can perhaps see in the above the folding table has an overly white top, that's because I turned the picture upside down while I was doing the grass to get that good grass stroke, but because it was upside down I thought the tabletop was blank space but it wasn't (so I had to use liquid paper on it). Anyway, I don't want to give away any of the salient points of the story, I will just say that one strand, which is just incidental, is the song everyone's singing here, which is called 'Monument',* which is kind of the 'radio hit' of the early-2000s band the Waving Sticks, which the novel is essentially about, only the text of the song (like, I think, all the songs) is stolen from a small press poetry magazine published in the 1950s by the grandmother of the main songwriter of the band. So he kind of 'writes' these songs, very literary, but no-one realises (or cares?) that he has purloined his material. 

Now 15 years later the drummer of the band, who was unceremoniously ejected from it but for some reason holds no grudge on that front, periodically has parties where she plays the song on her ghetto blaster and makes her friends sing along to it. I suppose that sounds a bit dictatorial - I don't know anymore. I must have written the script for this years ago, though I'm still tweaking it as I go. The above picture was drawn this afternoon and I am not unpleased with it, though it could have been better (everything can always be so). 

It is not the case that I have only drawn 31 pages of the book, of which there are to be 200, as there are some other sections I've completed, ages ago, but also, though I have done most pages up to p. 31 there are still a few I haven't done yet for various reasons. One is that the script has called for two characters to kiss passionately and their head shapes just don't seem appropriate for kissing anything, though I am hoping that I can convey at least the impossibility/improbability/difficulty of the action. 

The Waving Sticks was a name I made up in the mid-80s when I was living in London and I was really irritated by the habit of London scenesters of claiming new bands, who had barely done anything, as the greatest thing ever. I published a fake fanzine making a big thing of the Waving Sticks. To my great pleasure towards the end of my time in London one of my friends came over to me at a Wire show at Hammersmith... Hammersmith something, and said 'theres's someone here with a Waving Sticks t-shirt' - actually, it wasn't. They were wearing a Big Stick t-shirt with a jacket so you could only see the 'G STICK' part of it. Great accidental illusion. 

* This is about all we get to read of the actual poem 'Monument', though it is apparently very daring if not obscene. One reader finds it extraordinariliy liberating. 

a small modern home

 

 Construction 16 May 1945  p.2

What I don't understand is why people don't fall in love with hypothetical buildings like these and use the plans to build them now? Because they never do, do they.

reasons to be sneerful

I don't care about national flags, except I care that the intensely embarrassing one this country presently has, appears unlikely to ever be changed in my lifetime. FFS. I will never feel pride when seeing a flag but it would be nice not to feel shame, even though it's not my fault at all. 

Speaking of grossitude, I thought I'd just record a moment just before Kyle and Jackie O were yanked off the air and the organisation which broadcasts them to a decreasing audience itself disappears. 

Here are some reasons to be cheerful: Nancy is now as big as Perry, or to be precise, Perry is now as small as Nancy.

 Monsieur Fancygestures. Get a cigarette holder you. 

fuck you true crime

True crime (podcasts, tv, bad AI youtube videos) are just a way to escape the fact that around the world as I type this or at any moment there are real true crimes going on, be they invasion of countries, governments suppressing their citizens, people being shot in the face by putative law officers (or their husbands) and the general low-grade suppression of thought and feeling by institutions founded for this purpose. 

So, true crime is not the friggin' Wanda Beach murders, or at least, they were truly a crime but let's get the frisson of nostalgia off crime and concentrate on current real authentic right-now up-to-date of-the-moment crime, where a rapist being called 'pedophile protector' by a rando gives them the finger and says 'fuck you', twice. 

just a fabulous looking house in preston on the weekend

 

a city's child - burial scene

Next time Perry and I go to the Melbourne General Cemetery we'll make sure to track down where this scene was shot which comes just before the opening credits to A City's Child, Brian Kavanaugh's 1972 film starring Monica Maughan as 'the woman'. It's a very good film, by the way. 

david bowie