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. 

fishermans bend

The weather on my phone said it was not going to rain this morning (also the Bureau of Meteorology's website showed precisely not any rainclouds at all) so Perry and I went to Fishermans Bend mainly with the intention of visiting Westgate Park but it rained heavily on the way there and when it stopped we were just passing Salmon St so I thought whatever let's have a little moment here and we walked around not just Salmon St but by accident we found ourselves in a massive open space.

It's funny to think all this is just existing there, isn't it. When I was born this terrain was easternmost point of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation runways - the western half of which is now Westgate Park. But between when I was born and now it has also been the site of a cluster of large buildings, I am not sure what they were. 

Anyway so, Perry and I were heading back to the car (along the way I insisted he have his photo taken) when it started raining heavily again, and I just thought, fuck it, we'll cut our losses so we came back. That's my/our story. 

In the car I was listening to a podcast in the Discord and Rhyme series, about the Wire album Pink Flag. As you know, podcasts are just distractions for me and I tend not to want to learn anything from them though in this case I sort of did. Nothing I needed much less wanted to know - mainly the ways in which Pink Flag tracks sound a bit like REM (who of course completely postdate it) or the Minutemen (ditto). Anyway, I was fine with it.  

outré

I stole this picture of the Young Marble Giants because I think a blog post looks better with a picture. It was either this, or a picture of Nancy sitting on a cutting board. 

'Instead, the former president has launched a personal “communications platform,” otherwise known as a blog—a throwback to the style of pre-Instagram personal websites that celebrities once used to share their daily goings-on with fans.'

I'm not 100% certain whether this is Vanity Fair actually explaining the concept of 'blog' to its readers or whether it is hedging its bets - or even poking fun at the idea of 'communications platform' - ??? Anyway it sort of drives home to me the reality that blogging is a little outré or should I say it took me from knowing it 'intellectually' (to the extent I know or appreciate anything intellectually - you know what I mean) to knowing it in my heart 'where I live'. Well, that's OK. I am fine with it. 

Do you know what I did the other day, I played not one but two CDs.* In fact, after rescuing another box of crap from under the house at Lorraine I discovered quite a lot of CDs of albums that I have more recently bought on vinyl in a 'wow, I love this album, why don't I have it' moment not realising that I actually did have that album, just, on CD (the albums I'm thinking of were Wire's Pink Flag and the Young Marble Giants album, though boring detail, the YMG album I bought on vinyl has a whole extra LP of everything else they did, notwithstanding I never really understood why the Testcard EP was by YMG given that it didn't have Alison Statton on it, but let's not go there**). CDs are actually pretty good you know. They take up less space, they don't get scratched (yeah, I know, they do skip annoyingly if you don't look after them) and often they have bonus tracks on them that you didn't get on the original record. 

I know you know all this. I'm just recounting it as if I woke from a dream, that's all, or as if I travelled into 1995 from 1985*** and had to ask someone why they listened to music on little shiny discs not bigger black ones. 

The great/weird thing about the CD stash is that it'll be a bit of an archive particularly of Melbourne indie music (or indie music that visited Melbourne) in the 90s. Mia also told me recently that there's at least four other big fat repositories of four other people's junk under the house at Lorraine, lol. Two of those people are overseas apparently permanently, and the material is more in the realm of abandoned snakeskin or vomit the dog will not return to than I-can't-wait-to-get-back-to-my-beloved-possessions, it's probably all mouldy and full of dirt too. I guess she told it to me in the spirit of I had more right to store my stuff under there but now she's the sole owner of that house, that's probably not really true anymore! It's a surprise to discover as well that those plastic bins that are still sold by the stacked pile as storage solutions? The plastic gets really brittle really fast and breaks into long, sharp bits. I threw the lid away on the current box of crap already (I 'recycled' it but the only recycling I can see for that shit is as weapons, the 21st century version of the broken bottle). 

Anyway this is diversion, I've spent four days trying to write a promotion application and I'm at that point where I've nearly reached the word limit and it's time to refine, which is anathema. But it is intriguing of course to have this blog at my fingertips, so I can remind myself of the post from a decade ago where I talked about 'the necessity of applying for promotion... which has essentially got me nowhere'. Some would see this as a reminder that one can be dispirited and yet succeed in spite of oneself, actually for me it just causes more anxiety (apart from anything else - the pandemic has dulled me a bit I think, at least, I hope it's the pandemic). Anyway back to the grind. 

*Scott 3 and Next Stop... Soweto

** Also most of the other stuff is substandard tbh. And I will never listen to it. 

*** Which by the way I did. It took ten years.