Do Non-Smokers Really Play The World’s Smallest Violin?

A comment on the blog last night left me thinking. Not all of them do but this was a good comment and began with a quote from my previous post.

"And I’m tired of being forced to breathe in second-hand smoke,’ I said"

It appears you're happy to drive past, and close, to hundreds of cars pumping out carcinogenic fumes, however, the smell of a single burning leaf is enough to near kill you!

*plays worlds tiniest violin*

It’s a good reply but doesn’t apply to me or to what I’d written. The comment presupposed a few things about me that aren’t actually true. For example, as a small town cyclist, I don’t come into contact with hundreds of cars. Mainly out of cowardice, I generally avoid traffic by taking empty residential streets, paths through parkland, a road through a largely quiet industrial estate, and I very rarely spend any time sitting in traffic smelling engine fumes. The second mistake is to assume that my objection to cigarettes is based on their perceived harm. It’s not. I object to having smoke blown in my face because I find that the fetid hot breath of wizened nicotine addicts sickens me to my stomach. My argument would be the same if I was forced to smell raw effluent or the rotting carcass of a feral dog left tied to the bike stands.

Despite my primary objections to the comment, at the heart of the argument there was still a good point that needed exploring. Why should cyclists have a problem with smokers given the pollution they’re exposed to in the average cycle journey?

That question intrigued me, though I knew immediately that my reply would take me into morally dark waters. Having an opinion about smoking is like holding a position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. There is no position from which you won’t annoy somebody and possibly need a deep bunker.

Yet I’ve never seen myself as a real anti-smoker. I don’t agree with pressure groups that turn these issues into territorial disputes so badge wearers can shake their fists at the rival camp. I like to think I’d defend people’s right to do whatever they want with their bodies, their lives, and their actions. My only restriction is that those choices can’t intrude on the rights of others to do what they want with their bodies, lives and actions.

Naturally, this tolerant approach leads me into some problematic areas, such as my belief that it’s wrong to outlaw any form of speech. Censorship of thoughts, however repellent, merely pushes people with extremist sentiments into the shadows where they eventually do more harm. Let the hate-filled bigots stand in the open where they can be addressed through rational argument, humiliated through ridicule, and revealed for the true louses these people are. Political Correctness, though noble in its aim, merely turns bigots into quiet hypocrites. Silencing people doesn’t make them change their attitudes but it can harden a prejudice into hatred.

I’m not denying that this liberal attitude doesn’t sometimes leave me gritting my teeth when I find myself defending the rights of people I find deeply repellent. Yet it also allows me to retain a defence for satire. Freedom of expression means that I also reserve the right to argue that the choices people make are dumb and where appropriate, mock them savagely for that, as I too can be mocked for the dumb choices I make and opinions I express.

So, although I’m not a smoker, I wouldn’t ban tobacco, as I wouldn’t ban alcohol or even drugs (again, this slides into difficult areas but I’d like to think that arguments against those perils outweigh any argument in their favour). It comes down to a matter of personal choice provided the context allows those individual choices to be made whilst not impacting on the identical rights of others.

Smokers rightly defend their activity by saying they have made a choice as individuals and the rest of us have no right to curtail their activities. And they are absolutely right. Yet the problem that smokers repeatedly fail to acknowledge is that this individual freedom/personal choice argument also works the other way around.

Again, my own objection towards smoking has nothing to do with the harm it might cause. If smoking were good for you, my argument would be exactly the same and it’s this: I have made a choice not to smell something I find repellent. Smokers believe that they’re victimised because they smoke. That’s wrong. They are only victimised when they take away other people’s right to choose and force them to share the consequences of their personal choice. It’s this that lies at the heart of the great Steve Martin joke that has one person ask ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ and the other reply ‘No but do you mind if I fart?’

Would smokers complain if a large section of the public, gifted with highly pungent arseholes, spent large portions of their day stinking out the entrances to every mainline station, bus stop, or, in the case of my post yesterday, supermarket? What about people who might enjoy standing in a bus queue making a high pitched whining noise? What about people who might have a passion for hosepipes or water guns? What if every time we walked through town we were suddenly doused with harmless water? What if it was tear gas? What if it was raw sewage?

My examples are ridiculous but no more ridiculous, to my mind, than people burning dried leaves and blowing the smoke into another person’s face. And this brings me to the difference between cyclists exposed to smokers and cyclists exposed to pollution: there is no difference except you don’t choose to be a cyclist so you can expose yourself to car emissions in the same way that you don’t choose to be a non-smoker in order to expose yourself to smoke. We can, however, we can do something about the former in the short term, whilst working to solve the problem of the latter.

And we definitely have the right to do something. It’s true that I could endure them like I’ve endured them for years. Perhaps I’m even making a big thing out of a very petty quibble. But don’t I have as much right to choose to avoid the stench of cigarettes as those people have the right to feed their craving? I’m not saying that I’m any better or worse than they are. I’m just saying that I’m different and I would expect others to respect my choice.

The world’s smallest violin? It’s only small if you perceive it as small.

A Small Town Cyclist Going Green At Tesco

There’s nothing glamorous about being a small town cyclist. There’s no talk about carbon alloy frames, cadence, or even how great my buttocks look in Lycra. I don’t wear Lycra. I cycle in my jeans, wear an old coat, a rucksack and a shabby NY Giant’s baseball cap. I have an old bike with twenty four gears but only sixteen that work. I don’t clean the bike as often as I should yet it can go at a good rate, climb some pretty steep hills, and occasionally overtake some recent convert to cycling dressed as a Wiggins and riding some spank shining new Claude Butler racer.

I’m the sort of cyclist that rarely gets talked about when people talk about cycling. I don’t cycle into cities and I don’t jump red lights or make taxi drivers shout obscenities about the Lib Dems. I don’t ride hundreds of miles a week, though I do cycle a few miles most days. I’m not a cyclist who wears a camera on his head and then gets featured on the BBC news moments before he goes under a cement wagon. I don’t have my articles published as part of the The Times’s 'Cities Fit For Cycling' campaign explaining why cyclists are victimised and how government transport policy is misguided. I think those things and believe The Times’s campaign one of the best things done by a major newspaper in a very long time but I don't live in a city. I also don’t have a bell on my bike and would feel too much of an enthusiast if I wore a helmet.

I’m just a small town cyclist, one of many you might recognise but not really notice. We don’t protest that we want more cycle lanes. We’d be happy if the local council gave us just one. Our concerns tend to be so meagre that they’re not considered newsworthy: less glass on roads, fewer dead hedgehogs by the curb. I’d like my council to leave decent gaps beside speed bumps and people to stop hanging plastic bags filled with dog shit from the trees and bushes along the routes I take. I’d like wide T-junctions to be properly marked for the safety of cyclists who are too often forced to stand in the middle of the road and are liable to be hit by the lazy bastards who confuse Murray Walker with the Highway Code and think they have his permission to clip the apex of every corner.

Most of all, I’d just like a safe place to leave my bike when I’m shopping at my local supermarket. And if this last thing sounds trivial, it’s also this crazy dream that has recently caused me to put in some serious miles on my keyboard.

If Tesco has perhaps unfairly gained a bad reputation for some things, then it’s probably equally true that we don’t give them credit for other things they do so well. Irrespective of what grievances we might have, Tesco’s dominance in the market is a sign that lots of people like the services they provide. I’ve always been of that mind myself. Like they do in many small towns across the country, Tesco own and run our main local supermarket. Even though we do have a small Morrissons, Tesco is where most people do their shopping. It’s ideal for those of us without a car, especially when I can go and pick up most things we need on my bike. I can cycle there three, four or five times a week and keep the cupboards reasonably well stocked.

Yet my local Tesco really hates cyclists or, at least, probably think we’re some kind of inconvenience. I suspect their local management think we’re overly demanding, indicative of a middle class attitude in this staunchly working class town.

At the front of our Tesco, benches line the taxi pick-up point. Most days, the benches are full of customers waiting for their rides and most of these customers are smokers sucking on tar-heavy cigarettes. Dead tabs lie at the feet of these people with their corrugated skin and voices like smashed accordions. And this wouldn’t concern me too much except Tesco, in their wisdom, chose this very same spot to put their bike stands.

Locking my bike usually involves a fair degree of second-hand smoke and my overhearing more than a few grisly tales of medical procedures. I got rid of my old combination lock so I could shave seconds off the time I have to spend listening to these old croaks explaining their last lung op. Packing my bags is the worst part. Ever listened to a lifelong smoker describe the variety of their morning mucus when you’re trying to stuff a loaf into an overfull pannier? It’s rare these days that I get to eat bread that hasn’t been hammered into a bag just so I get away from the gorier details.

If locating the bike stands next to the smokers wasn’t bad enough, Tesco have another way of showing their disdain towards cyclists. They don’t provide adequate cycle stands.

A year ago, my local store had three cycle stands. Three stands meant room for six bikes. That was just about adequate and you’d be unlucky to turn up and find all six slots being used. But then, without apparent reason or explanation, one of the stands disappeared. There was then only room for four bikes and most days it was a fifty/fifty chance if you’d have somewhere to leave your ride.

After the third stand disappeared, complaints were made. My sister was the first person I know to take the bull by the horns and send an email asking if we could have more bike stands. She was told that Tesco themselves agreed that the bike stands were insufficient and that the problem would be addressed at the store upgrade in July. So we waited and when June arrived, just to be certain, she emailed again. Yes, she was told. The bike stands would be improved.

Then it’s July and the store upgrade begins. On Monday, the store upgrade was complete.

I arrived there on Tuesday and discovered that little had changed. The same two inadequate bike stands were still in the same place but a new bench has been situated to the left of the bike stands, providing room for up to four additional smokers. On Tuesday there were only two women sitting there but hawking enough phlegm for four and puffing away between Eastenders gossip. They didn’t move when I tried to put my bike in the stand and they laughed as I cursed when I realised that the bench was about three inches from the stand and the gap too narrow for my wheel.

I hate confrontation and I rarely complain in person about anything. Yet, Tuesday, I found myself standing at the Tesco customer service desk explaining all this to a woman who was wonderful: helpful, polite, and sympathetic. She was exactly the kind of person you think should be working at a customer service desk. I’d nominate her for an MBE if I could.

I explained about the lack of stands. She nodded and noted the problem. ‘And I’m tired of being forced to breathe in second-hand smoke,’ I said. She looked aghast. ‘Then that’s a legitimate complaint right there,’ she said. I felt lifted. My complaint was being taken serious. She thought for a moment and said she’d go see if the person in charge of the upgrade could talk to me. She disappeared for a few minutes. When she came back, she looked deflated. She had a message from the guy in charge. The bike stands weren’t going to be changed. I would have to learn to put up with them. End of story.

I couldn’t have had a more indifferent response. The guy couldn’t even come out and tell me that himself.

The whole thing is now descending into farce. I complained by email and was told I’d get a reply by Wednesday evening. Wednesday evening came and went without hearing anything.

I emailed for an update again yesterday and received an apology but little by way of understanding of the situation. Every time I email, a new person replies. One reply implied that I’d misled them. They said I’d suggested there was only one bike stand when I’d actually said there were two but with only three usable spaces. More emails were exchanged and we are now on amicable terms again but I’m still left waiting to hear if anything will be done.

Yet isn’t this how it always goes? It’s not the customer service people in the middle I’m angry with. It’s the local store who make feel like I’m in the wrong asking them to move their bike stands out of the designated area for smokers and to provide enough stands so I can actually go into their shop and spend the small fortune I spend there every a month on behalf of myself and others.

It’s a typical trivial matter faced by small town cyclists everywhere. There’s no inherent drama in it. You couldn’t interest a newspaper in a story this boring. Yet the green agenda is too often about the huge world changing events: power stations in China and flatulent cattle. The green agenda should really be about quality of life. We shouldn’t pollute because it makes our surroundings unpleasant, not because science is having a high-level debate about consequences. We should be driven as much by common sense as by science.

I live in an area that is routinely listed as one of the UK’s worst areas for quality of life. In 2009, a nearby town, Warrington, was named in a government report as having the worst quality of life in the country. That was news to me. In these parts, Warrington has always been considered a classy place to go, with the best shopping (it has book shops!), a big library, museum, a rugby ground, and even (hold your breath) cycle lanes. If that was the worst place to live, I don’t know what government inspectors had made of my home county of St Helens, which has always been one of those grim examples of northern life.

And that’s why Tesco’s attitude is so galling about the bike stands. It’s these small things that can change the underlying nature of a town and help establish a better ethos and quality of life. Good bike stands encourage more people to cycle. Cycling promotes health. It takes cars off the roads. It encourages people to use the countryside and the council to improve cycle routes. I’ve seen more people cycling this year than I’ve ever seen cycling in my life. It’s probably why there are never enough cycle stands. I’ve even noticed the council making some small changes to help cyclists. In parts of the town, they have even painted whilst bicycles on the floor amid all the crushed glass. It’s almost like cyclists are welcome.

Welcome everywhere, that is, except at Tesco, where going green takes on a quite different meaning when some ancient shrew is blowing smoke in your face and cackling at your through walnut teeth because you didn’t think it funny that she tied her dog to your bike so she could enjoy a quick fag. Most days I’d laugh something like that off. Other days you just see it as symptomatic of a bigger problem that everybody recognises but nobody does anything about.

A Cheerful Cartoon For A Thursday Afternoon

Just a quickly doodled cartoon while I get to work on two comic strips...

The Wednesday Doodle

Getting into Gaga: An Old Fart’s Guide to Loving the Lady

The Lady Gaga phenomenon sadly passed me by. I don’t know why or when or even what I was doing at the time. I was possibly clipping my toenails or buying new underpants and I just didn’t notice the world go crazy about this supremely gifted young woman and her music.

Now I think about it, I do recall seeing some pictures of her in the nude, though I don’t remember why I was nude. Probably something to do with my needing new underpants… I was, however, struck by her unusual fashion sense. In days of bland talent, Gaga seemed particularly spikey, though that was in no small part due to the enormous spikes she was wearing at the time, along with a bin bag, rubber talons, and fetishist’s rider’s crop with feather tickler.

That was as far as my interest went until now... The imminent release of Gaga’s new album, Popart, means that I finally have chance and reason to catch up with the rest of the world in appreciating this unique talent. I expect I’m not alone. There must be many of you out there in similar positions: intrigued by the enigma, wanting to know more, but unsure where to start. Well, worry no longer, my friends. I’m here to help. Grab my muscular arm (not the withered one!) and let me bring you up to speed on the phenomenon known affectionately to her fans as ‘the velvet aardvark’.

Let me just preface the following by saying that before I did my extensive research, I knew almost nothing about Lady Gaga. Thankfully, the internet came to my rescue. I now consider myself an expert in all things Gaga based on that impeccable source of information.

So, let’s begin our story at the beginning. It was March 28, 1986, one month before Chernobyl let off its radioactive poison cloud, when Lady Gaga was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta in the back of a high class New York taxi cab. Her initials SJAG, honour the S-type Jag in which she took her first lungful of air and let out a caterwaul. Like Chernobyl, little is known about her life for the next eighteen years but she did attend Catholic school which inevitably led to her career as a barroom stripper. Working in burlesque, the young Gaga was exposed to many musical influences. Her precise dance moves she often attributes to the years she spent learning to kick her knickers across a crowded room without taking out somebody's eye. It was in the strip joint that she was first taught to play the harmonica by a one-eyed table dancer call Chloe. It was there that she wrote her first song ‘Poker Face’ about an old tassel hoofer whose facial nerves had withered after losing a bet in an illicit lemon sucking den in Harlem. Yet the event that changed her life and the course of human history happened one night in 2007. During a particularly nimble strip, her right suspender got stuck. Filling the time as she tried to unhook the clasp, she started to sing and that’s when famed record producer, Herb Spanish, heard her powerful baritone for the very first time. ‘It was like a visit to my proctologist,’ he later said. ‘That voice was both familiar and yet so very strange. I couldn’t sit down for a week after hearing it.’

A record contract soon followed and the Lady Gaga phenomenon quickly spread further than she could kick off her underwear, which is to say, a pretty long way.

But that was nearly seven long years ago. We are now about to embark on the next phase of her musical journey and her newest song provides some hints as to what we can expect. It’s called ‘Applause’ and the cover of the single is a certain giveaway as to this new direction.

[caption id="attachment_2800" align="alignright" width="361"] Click to enlarge[/caption]

The cover depicts Lady Gaga dressed as a clown whose makeup has run after what looks like a professional egging. However this modern take on the traditional commedia dell'Arte figure of Pierrot is Gaga’s way paying her debts to other musicians. Here she is clearly imitating the not-disturbing-in-the-slightest-way cover of the classic album, ‘Circus in Town’, by Merle Evans and his Circus Band. The direct gaze is reminiscent of Charlie Mingus’s clown album, whilst, perhaps the greatest debt of all is to Pavarotti’s Greatest Hits in which the great man appears on the cover striking a gong that has been cunningly disguised as a big bass drum.

In this sense, ‘Applause’ may be Gaga’s most intensely personal songs. Her debt to Pavarotti is obvious from the first line which strikes a powerful note.

‘I stand here waiting for you to bang the gong’.

What gong, you ask? The gong of public opinion, I reply. Like Pavarotti before her, Ms Gaga is using the gong-banging metaphor as a clarion call to modern youth, among whom gongs are apparently very popular since the worldwide Korean hit, Gongem Style in 2012. Go into any park on a weekend and you’ll see the youth standing around their newest gongs, made by fashionable gong companies such as Beats, Bangs, and Bongs. Yet to Gaga, the gongs are symbolic of talent shows where artists are cruelly judged on their musical ability.

‘To crash the critic saying, "is it right or is it wrong?"’

There’s no beating about the bush or, indeed, about the gong! We’re straight into the moral relativism that’s so clearly close to the Gaga heart. It reminds me of Nietzsche who first asked what is beyond good and evil? Well, Gaga is here to tell you…

‘If only fame had an IV, baby could I bear
Being away from you, I found the vein, put it in here’

What lies beyond good evil? Now you know. It’s contorted syntax and half-rhymes. But let’s try to unwrap this wayward beast of a line and see what Gaga is really saying because she certainly doesn’t mean that fame itself would take its nutrients through a vein. Rather, she’s saying that she wishes that fame could be applied intravenously, because, if it could, she would plunge it into her arm so she wouldn’t need to go to the effort of entertaining people to make them laud her.

It is, I admit, a chilling confession, brought into sharp focus by the lyrics of the chorus.

‘I live for the applause, applause, applause […]
Live for the way that you cheer and scream for me’.

What we have here is old school narcissism and it’s admirable that her Ladyship should share this with the world. It’s rare that people are honest enough to reveal their darker sides, even at the risk of their appearing utterly dislikeable. However, Gaga is apparently confessing the grubby truth that her art is less important than the fame. The music is merely the means to an end and she will do anything to get the affirmation of her adoring crowd.

Let’s skip a few lines which repeat the same things and look at the second verse. What psychological horrors honesty might that reveal?

‘I've overheard your theory / "Nostalgia's for geeks"’

I’ll be honest and admit that this takes the ring round around my comprehension. Why might nostalgia be for geeks? Aren’t geeks forward looking and excited by the future? Unless Gaga is hereby offering a new geekdom! Ah, perhaps that’s what it is… We’re not just looking beyond good and evil. We’re looking beyond geekdom too! She has become the Übergeek! The geek of all geeks!

‘I guess sir, if you say so / Some of us just like to read’.

It’s admirable that she’s promoting literacy give her evident difficulties with the written word…

‘One second I'm a kunst’

A ‘kunst’?

‘Then suddenly the kunst is me’

Like some staggering bilious drunk emerging suddenly from the gloom, the meaning now becomes clear! She does indeed love to read and having read the German word for ‘art’, she has also spotted an elaborate pun too filthy to explain. However, this is taking us straight into the meat of this ugly business…

‘Pop culture was in art
Now, art's in pop culture in me’.

It’s a magnificent observation, contracting all the themes of the song into one memorably image. Where previously pop culture had made inroads into the world of art, art is now a subset of pop culture. Yet Gaga also realises that the entirety of pop culture is represented by Lady Gaga herself. She might as well cry, ‘my name is Legion: for we are many’! Lady Gaga is pop culture but, moreover, all art is raised in her image and to glorify her being.

Is there no clearer meaning behind this song? In her pursuit of fame and applause, Lady Gaga no longer cares about the music. The arrangement of programmed beats and autotuned vocal meddling are a brilliant way of conveying the attitude of a singer completely indifferent to the business of making meaningful art. What we have, then, is merely an audio jingle for the cloth eared. It is music made by an already jaundiced system where expensive promotion can still indoctrinate shallow youth with a message that takes sexuality and turns it into a form of camp theatre, art into faux outrage, and fame into gaudy bubble, expensive to view but ultimately a shell encompassing the sheer banality of nothing.

Here, then, you have understanding. You have now graduated with honours in Gaga. Look forward to the album with this new knowledge. If you can, send her money without even buying the album. It’s what she’d prefer. Then laud her but don’t make her have to do anything.

Laud her loudly and long because, don’t you know, she lives for your applause.

Last night I sat down and listened to an entire Jonathan Coulton album

This whole complicated business began with the cricket. I’d logged onto The Guardian’s website to see if we’d won The Ashes. We hadn’t. Not yet, at least. In my disappointment, I suppose I lingered and… Well, I swear I don’t know how it happened. It must have jumped out when I wasn’t looking. One minute I was reading about Prince Charles’ political meddling, the next I was listening to Lady Gaga’s new single. In fact, I listened to it twice just in case I’d missed something like my sanity medication. Then I wrote the following comment.

Not made for me, not aimed at me, and won’t make a difference what I say. Therefore: polished, predictable, and completely lacking heart. An old sock hanging from iron railings has more artistic depth that this vacuous jingle for the drone army in control of this corporately controlled dehumanised world.

The last bit was probably laying it on a bit thick but I didn’t have time to make it pithy. Not that I really needed to. As is always the case: some people liked the comment and others hated it. One even put their grievance into words:

I think that's just the standard Guardian-reader response to something they can't be bothered to understand just because it's 'popular'. And i'd love to hear the music aimed at you, since you clearly know what music should sound like. Yawn.

The comment stirred some thoughts, not all of them to my credit, but I did wonder if I listen to too much of the same kind of music. I’d intended to spend the evening in comfort, drawing cartoons, and, as is my usual way, I was planning to plug in my iPad and listen to music as I worked.

My tastes are fairly varied but I am the kind of person who’ll listen to the same album a hundred times before I change it. Lately, it’s been Sparks on constant loop but tonight the comment put in the mind to try something else. My usual listening can be anything from Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, through folky territory with Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Suzanne Vega, Neil Young walking me into grunge and punk, so there’s also The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Talking Heads… That’s off the top of my head but there’s also Ry Cooder, Serge Gainsbourg, The White Stipes/Jack White, The XX, Frank Zappa, The Doors (especially ‘LA Woman’ which is my favourite album and song), David Bowie, Philip Glass, Jean Michel Jarre, Bach, The B52s… Okay, I’m now cheating. I’m just scrolling through my iTunes library but I could carry on like this for hours and no real pattern would emerge except you might notice that I don't like jazz and I’ve never bought into packaged pop. Whatever that ‘popular’ thing is, I’ve never been into it.

Not that I wanted to get into it last night. Lady Gaga: not now, not ever. I did, however, want to listen to something new and there was one obvious choice…

I’ve been meaning to listen to Jonthan Coulton for a very long time. He’s been lingering in the corner of musical periphery for years but something has always got in the way of my trying out the live album I’d been given a while ago. Sometimes being smart can work against a person and Coulton, I think, suffers more than most due to his association with a certain fan base.

Like many people, the first time I head his music was in the context of a computer game. Some years ago, I was hooked on a game called Half Life 2 on the PC. The end of the game involved a fight with a artificial intelligence which had achieved sentience. The masterful finale, now remembered as one of the high points of gaming, involved the defeated computer singing a song about cake. The song was called ‘Still Alive’ and remains much loved among geeks. This Youtube recording of the game’s closing credits has been watched over 18 million times. That’s eighteen million voices squeaking along to ‘aperture science…’



Even outside the context of the game, the song deserved to be a hit and still deserves to be better known. I remember researching the song at the time and discovering that it was written by a very well established musician called Jonathan Coulton. Yet something stopped me from going on and listening to more of his work. I like to think it was a lack of availability here in the UK but I think what really dissuaded me was that his songs were loved by a certain kind of American hipster, a rare and noble breed of geek that lacks the social awkwardness of their British counterparts. These American geeks had embraced their difference, formed themselves into huge communities in places like San Francisco, where they ran the entire internet whilst listening to Coulton. Actually, forget I said San Francisco. Coulton fans remind me of this great opening to the comedy series, Portlandia…



Coulton seems to write, exist, and find his audience within that very specific subculture. Even the live album’s title (‘Best. Concert. Ever’) conveys Coulton’s spiritual debt to his audience and their idiom. Songs like ‘Code Monkey’ and ‘Mandelbrot Set’ aren’t something you’d find on even the most highbrow band’s album but Coulton is of that geek world and you sense that he really understands it. ‘Code Monkey’ may enjoy playing with the clichés of the programmer but he captures the nuances too.

Code Monkey get up get coffee
Code Monkey go to job
Code Monkey have boring meeting
With boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
But his output stink
His code not "functional" or "elegant"
What do Code Monkey think?
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy, just proud

Confession time. I was once a code monkey and my manager in my second job was called ‘Rob’. The only difference is that I enjoyed writing login pages. It was where I could stick all my silly easter eggs. The boring part was coding the functions that printed out reports... But I digress…

Even given my geekish background, it doesn’t make me an obvious Coulton fan. I loathe ‘funny songs’ after growing up in an era when the TV was filled with men who discovered that a failing comedy act could be rescued if they held a guitar and sang. Or they were failed singers who rescued their musical career by telling jokes badly. They were a strange hybrid capable of both sucking and blowing, perhaps years before their time, and yet to find a new life after Sir James Dyson has fitted them with plastic balls and the ability to vacuum the stairs. And Coulton might be viewed in the same light as those comic-singers except for two problems: his music is too good and his comedy is too beautifully observed.

I’m not going to review every song or quote too many long blocks of lyrics but this example from ‘Tom Cruise Crazy’ is typical.

Tom Cruise is so in love with Katie
At least all his people tell him so
And while he thinks that she's a very special lady
It's probably not the way he'd choose to go
But a lifetime of longing looks would cause too much distraction
Good thing that he's not gay anymore

The lyrics sound better on the ear than they do on the page. Coulton takes utterly bland things of everyday observations and pulls them sideways. The line ‘good thing that he’s not gay anymore’ is perfect example of his twisted wit. The common assumption is that Cruise is or was gay (not a viewpoint I share). However, Coulton is phrasing it ironically, knowing that we probably think the opposite, that Cruise is gay. However, the archness of the song comes from the delivery. This is a singer playing a role, that of the reader of tabloid gossip. It then becomes a geek’s response to banality, overlaid with wit and a kind of far seeing clarity.

And that is the cleverness of his writing that can be a problem. Is it too pleased with its intelligence or is he merely providing a recognisable voice for a generation that have removed themselves from that world? Before last night, I might have said the former. Now, I’m converted. The solo acoustic performance threw the emphasis on the lyrics. The entire album is filled with strong songs, best when they’re commentating on the banalities of life. These are outsider songs, reminding his faithful why they chose to be different. Highlights include the song ‘Ikea’, a hymn to perkily named furniture, and Coulton’s reinventing the Sir Mix-a-Lot song ‘Baby Got Back’, the lyrics given an additional twist coming from the mouth of singer who more likely to sing about the Madelbrot set than his love for the juicier rear.

It’s when he is singing about computers, though, that I begin to feel so oddly at home that I wonder why I never listened to him sooner. As a teenager, I tried to write code that could draw the Madelbrot set. I never managed it. I was lousy at maths and, even if I’d figured it out, the computers were far too slow. Or perhaps I didn’t have somebody to provide a better role model. Music was obsessed with singing about that simple thing called love. Perhaps I needed Coulton back then to explain things to me. Perhaps if I had, I’d have been a better programmer, living in Portland, and washing my yogurt maker whilst singing this algorithm from memory…

Take a point called Z in the complex plane
Let Z1 be Z squared plus C
And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C
And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on
If the series of Z's should always stay
Close to Z and never trend away
That point is in the Mandelbrot Set

 

Done

I didn't think I'd finish my little project today, four days earlier than expected, but last night, I worked into the early hours and realised around 1am that it was going to take me more than a week to finish the ambitious animation I had in mind. It was time for a rethink and a little sobbing into my pillow.

I decided to make a radical change, ditch what I’d worked so tirelessly to produce and to lower the technical difficulty. After about two hours, I had what looked like a pretty good 30 second promotional video that avoided the need for hand animation by employing a little more design. More tweaks this morning finished it and it now out of my hands.

It’s nice to be back to the blog and to see the first search term in my stats was ‘Chris Tarrant wig’. Does he wear a wig? Well, I guess you learn something new every day.

I’m now going to see if I can draw cartoon or two, so tomorrow I can get back to the hard work of trying to make the internet smile, or at least, look completely baffled.

Busy...

I’ve been asked to produce a small animation to demonstrate my computer skills, so it means the smallest blog update for today.

Working on a new animation after all these months reminds me why I never made any film longer than the few tests I uploaded here. I admire people who can do it alone, not simply because any team effort divides the labour but also because working with people provides a shared enthusiasm and a shared will to keep going. Alone, you have to find pleasure where you can in the smallest achievement.

The way I work is to think of the script/idea and find some music to hang it on. I upload the music into the video editing software I’ll use and then draw out the main scenes on paper. Scan then in and place them in the video editor and it produces a kind of storyboard set to music. Then it’s a matter of replacing those individual storyboards with animated versions either in 2D or 3D. Sound easier than it is. The music I’ve chosen is about one and a half minutes long, edited down from about three. I'm also working in 2D but the amount of work I’ll have to do to fill those ninety seconds is shocking compared to the effort it takes to draw even the most complex comic strip.

Yet at the same time, it’s quite fun. It makes a nice change from the comic strips and one panel cartoons, even if it means I haven’t got anything great to post here today. I hope the film will be finished in just a couple of days and then, hopefully, normal business will resume...

What Reason To Believe The Frackers?

If you travel down the west coast of England, on the rail line running from Manchester to North Wales, you’ll eventually pass through a long tunnel just beyond Runcorn East. I suppose in European and World terms, it’s a very short tunnel. Yet it’s uniquely a long tunnel in an otherwise flat part of the country and has the novelty of making your ears go pop. Travel through the tunnel lasts a minute or so and you emerge just before Frodsham where a view to the Mersey Estuary opens up on the right and stretches for miles across the sand banks that fill the wide mouth of the river to the point where the brown fresh waters meet the grey brine of the Irish Sea.

In the distant past, I worked a year at the cable company, BICC, in Helsby, one stop beyond Frodsham. When I was travelling there each day, Helsby station had just won some national awards for being the best kept station in the country and, to my eyes, it deserved the accolades. It was beautifully maintained with richly coloured abundant flower beds and old style railway buildings that looked like they'd been plucked from some episode of Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. Since then, it’s become unstaffed and much of it is boarded up; no doubt a  little money saved but for an incalculable loss of value…

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="384"] Helsby Hill (Wikipedia)[/caption]

Yet Helsby village itself still sits perched on the side of one of the few proper highpoints in the area, rising 370 feet over the surrounding land. Looking up the sheer rock face is dizzying, especially when it’s being climbed as it often is by people providing points of Lyrcra colour against the reddish grey rock. Walk to the top and the view is magnificent, with the misted mountains of Wales visible through the clouds to the west and Liverpool in the distant northwest where the Liver Building stands distinct and often glitters in the sun against the banks of the brown river. Directly to the north, you look across the runways of John Lennon Airport and the movements of planes make if feel like you’re watching a diorama of a functioning airport, perfect down to the infinitesimal scale. On a clear day, it’s an uplifting view and quite unique in that it gives a view of a huge swathe of the north, filled with remarkable things to see. Yet perhaps the most telling view is to be seen if you turn your eyes to the northeast and look at the eyesore of the petro-chemical industry that’s built up around Runcorn and Widnes.

The scale of the chemical works is something to behold and locals I knew would often talk about the problems they’d experienced living near such concentrated industry. I don’t know how true this is but I was told that one leak (chlorine, I think it was) meant the police ordered the residents to stay indoors. It was wise they did. Apparently, the leak even changed the colour of their windows and walls.

I always found it hard to believe that people could live happily with dangerous chemicals just a few gusts away, but then, closer to home, there was Warrington where climbing off the train at Bank Quay station, you would often be subjected to the smell of the soap works, the taste of washing powder on your tongue, and, at its worst, a mild burning sensation in your eyes and nostrils. I grew up in the shadow of a gasholder, when the full tank would block our TV reception, and I played for hours on the local ‘mountains’ which were actually industrial waste from the local vitriol industry which had dump its spoil there. I’m also far more used to the problems of subsidence, being born, raised, and living in one of the most heavily mined areas of the country. There are old local tales of houses being swallowed up in sink holes and my old school was eventually demolished because of subsidence but I remember its later years when the second floor listed so heavily to one side that it made it difficult to walk down parts of the corridor. Of course, as a child, you find that sort of thing funny, walking on something that resembled the walkway into a funhouse. As an adult you realise that the whole place was literally falling down around our ears.

Although tighter environmental laws mean that things have improved dramatically in recent years, having lived or worked in proximity to the chemical industry and mining subsidence, I’m wary of the promises made by the fracking industry and the assurances they give people about its safety. I worry when I hear another high profile head in the fracking debate suggest that shale fracking should be done in the north to save the industry from the kind of protests they’ve seen in the south. Up here, apparently, things are desolate and there isn’t as much to go wrong should deep fracking cause problems at the surface.

It’s odd that southern politicians and business men should talk like this, almost as though repetition of disputed facts make them more likely to be true. Perhaps they mean that protests will be ignored by the southern based media, which is certainly likely and, indeed, probable. The Times recently sacked their northern correspondent as part of cuts. That is clearly what we mean to those in London.

Perhaps they also mean that influential people won’t stand in their way if drilling is conducted beneath the homes of people with less political sway. That is also true. There aren’t that many rich influential land owners with connections to politicians living in these parts. That’s why the landscape around here is littered with examples of what happens when industry is left to tend to its own affairs.

Yet the perception that the north is desolate is one I don’t recognise at all. My experience of travelling between the north and south is that, except for the densely built area around London, there’s far more empty space in the south than there is anywhere in the North West. High up beyond Blackburn and heading towards the Lake District, things might get more desolate but there are huge swathes of southern England where you can also look from the horizon to horizon without seeing more than a few buildings. In the North West, there aren’t that many times you can look to the horizon and see only green. Industrial estates, new housing developments, towns, and villages seem to spread from Blackpool down to Southport, across to Preston, and down to the densely built belt running across the country from Liverpool in the West, through to Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield.

Energy independence is to be welcomed but while I’m not sure we need yet another dirty form of energy, I am positive that if this industry isn’t suitable for the fields of Sussex and the South Downs, then it shouldn’t be suitable for Merseyside, Cheshire,  Lancashire, and Yorkshire, where more than just a few people happen to live. The only case the government could make is that we really are the second class citizens they seem to believe we are.

Not that I suppose our protests would amount to anything. Not give the kind of casual ignorance demonstrated by those in power. Government thinking is rank with easy stereotypes, from their assumptions about immigration, the poor, the unemployed, all the way to their belief that bankers are victimised and underpaid. Or at least that’s how it appears when Lord Howell, George Osborne’s father in law, explained that he didn’t mean to insult the North East by suggesting it was desolate when, in fact, he actually meant to say the North West.

Given he represents a North West constituency, George Osborne’s recent encouragement to the fracking industry might have been a little surprising had he not already demonstrated a wilful disregard for the north. I just hope his constituents remember this the next time they have chance to stick a cross beside to his name as Member of Parliament for Tatton. Wilmslow, within his constituency, is one of the richer areas of the region, home to Alex Ferguson and many top Premiership footballers from City and United. It's strange how all those golf courses were never thought the obvious place to start the search for shale gas...

 

 

 

It's A Sparks Show: Episode 8

Here’s a very hastily doodled adventure of Ron and Russell Mael, or at least, my imaginary versions of them. And yes, you might say that I’m still peeved that they’re coming to the UK but not playing a venue within 200 miles of where I live. I’m having very little luck at the moment. The job hunt is soul destroying, I’ve now run out of Bristol Board, and like the Ralph Steadman exhibition and Baconface’s stand-up before them, Sparks have chosen to ignore the north west of England. It’s also quite surprising. After their last Manchester gig, I thought they’d definitely return, especially given that their live Two Hands One Mouth album ends with the rousing Manchester finale. That they’re playing three nights in London was also a surprise and adds to the sense of grim futility that pervades everything at the moment. Needless to say, I won't get to see the perform this year.

But enough glum talk… This cartoon strip is thanks to Virginia, who told me that Sparks fans have been enjoying these highly unauthorised shows. I hope they have. I’m currently spending my days with the album The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman looping as I work, so no doubt there’ll be another Sparks strip at some point, perhaps in Swedish just for you, but then again, perhaps not.

Why I Love Canadians

The great virtue of Canadians is that they have a wilderness approach to living. Only sexually active when adjacent to permafrost, they mate like the hoary marmot of their Northwest Territories: once a year their hind quarters quiver quite visibly and they then enjoy a long period of hibernation as they dream about moose. It means that they’re an affable and honest nation. Canadians have that wipe-its-ass-and-pass-me-the-mustard attitude towards eating and they don’t consider a walk healthy unless it involves a couple of mountains and fording a raging stream with a length of hemp rope and flying squirrel.

Their attitude to comedy is equally liberal and involves nothing more sophisticated than pointing at something and laughing as hard as you can until you puncture a lung. It means they have a healthy attitude to promoting themselves. I was gratified to see that my work has now achieved some degree of fame by appearing on Baconface’s website. Is this is an honour to rival my appearance on the Sparks Facebook page? You bet it is, though like Ron and Russell Mael, Baconface is another conspicuously avoiding a visit to the north west of England this year. I won’t get to see him and that is sad because, as a northerner, I feel a great affinity towards Canadians. In many respect, we northerners are the Canadians of England, very similar in outlook and spirit but lacking the vole fixation.

Saying all this in praise of Canadians, I do have to ask you: what kind of operation takes another man’s work without even providing a backlink? Not that I blame the crack team of social engineers working on Baconface’s behalf. They’re probably Canadians too, with the mentality of outlaws and bodies like Newfoundland fisherman brought up on walrus fins and woodchuck. Backlinks won’t be invented in Canada for another ninety years. It will help them retain their innocence whilst the rest of the world descends into anarchy and wingding porn.

After yesterday’s news, it was also gratifying to see that Baconface has not shied away from also publishing The Guardian review that so offended me. That takes some hutzpah, which, as you know, is a good old Canadian word meaning ‘porpoise testicles in brine’. To tackle your severest critics head on is the way to be. So, have at them, Baconface, and long may your perishable meat remain free of brain parasites!

My Penis Writes...

I was going to write something else this morning but found myself absorbed in writing this response to yet another miserable man-hating article by Suzanne Moore over at The Guardian. In many respects, I still prefer The Guardian to other newspapers but lately it has been testing my patience and I do find myself reading it less than I used to. Its feminist agenda has become quite virulent over the summer and probably needs to be pruned back to let in a little daylight and some rational thought. 

Another day and another nasty man-baiting article on the front page of The Guardian… Congratulations, you rich London middle class liberals. I find myself reading your newspaper less each day. Your tedious feminist agenda might be attracting the audience demographic you crave but you’re losing the one you already have. Perhaps your new North American readership loves this new direction. Yee haw! I’m just from the North of England, where this newspaper once originated, and you are increasingly less relevant to my life. Up here, having a penis doesn’t seem that significant even when we are sticking them in toasters or forgetting to wash them. We have other fun games to play such as dealing with government cuts (remember them?) and the increasingly brazen divide between the north and the south.

And to think I used to send my articles to The Guardian with the hope of publication. Oh, such typical naïve penis-led optimism! It never happened so I thought my comic prose might be at fault. Now I see it was my comic penis. There it limply hangs, ready to be ridiculed because obviously that’s all I am, all I amount to. You say The Sun demeans women by publishing Page 3 but, if I’m honest, I can’t see much difference to the way you routinely demean those of us damned by the meat. Whatever abilities I bring to this world mean nothing because of this precious piece of nothing between my thighs. My entire being is routinely reduced to the worst stereotype. Yesterday Polly Toynbee implied that because I’m a man, I’m part of that misogynistic culture that apparently pervades our country. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I have no right to reply. I’m just another of those slobbering would-be rapists, Twitter abusers, craven women haters in that big solid ball of ugliness you’ve created and labelled ‘men’.

So, thank you Guardian. You’ve put me off reading anything else here today. And thank you Suzanne Moore. You’ve earned your monthly stipend by again lowering the standards of a once great newspaper and proving that in an already shallow world there is always room for a little more crass vulgarity.

I would say more but I must stop typing. My penis is getting very sore from hitting all these keys.

The Neil Gaiman Cartoon

Minimalist Cartoon

 

In my efforts to draw something in a minimal style, I came up with this one yesterday. It is, however, probably too minimal.

Big Breasts and Foot Fetishists: The joys of looking for work on Craigslist

I failed my first test. It’s probably not a good sign.

As you might know, I face an on-going struggle to find work. Today I’ve been trawling through the usual freelance opportunities hoping to find something I can do remotely. By remotely, I mean working from home, though I guess I also mean something in which I might have some remote competence. Working from home would be my ideal job: able to work longer hours undistracted by office chatter and without a long flu-dosed commute into Liverpool or Manchester. I’d also have my own equipment and software arranged just as I like it and a chair that can handle my lanky frame and doesn’t give me back ache. The thought excited me so much that I was wide awake at six this morning searching for opportunities. I even went so far as to set up an account at one of the bigger freelancing sites.

By 9am I'd already failed the first test they set to see if I’d absorbed all the guff they sent about their company and the freelancing processes. I admit I’m terrible with bureaucracy. My rebellious instincts take over. I’m like this when I’m putting up IKEA shelves: I’d much rather just get on with it and figure it out as I go along than read the instructions. I’m the same with multiple choice questions which appear to insult my intelligence… Well, okay, I probably shouldn’t have clicked on ‘all of the above’ for every answer but I thought I’d spotted a pattern… I guess hubris is another of my more developed skills.

Since I’d failed the test and have to wait days to try again, I made my usual trawl through Gumtree and then, in desperation, turned my attention to Craigslist.

The first thing I discovered is that busty blondes are desperately needed in the Warrington area and they will be paid good money. Sadly, my hair is brown even if my breasts do seem to get bigger with each passing year. Busty? Not yet but one day! Oh, boy! One day!

Putting the disappointment of my breasts to one side (or both sides, given how they lie), I then noticed that a foot model can earn £2000 in Manchester. That’s good money but my hairy feet probably won’t get pass the interview stage and I’m dubious that feet can really earn that much without having to get naked with other feet…

More in my line of work was the ad for a new magazine wanting writers. Intrigued, I followed the link which took me to a Wordpress installation much worse than this one and with all manner of terribly written content produced by desperate people working for nothing. I’d never realised it was so easy to launch a blog and get other poor saps to fill it for you. I might have to call this blog a magazine and me a magazine publisher. Just look at my cigar and zero penny rates for paid content…

The last ad to intrigue me was by one of my fellow job hunters. A Dutch woman in Turkey is looking for work writing English content. She claimed she was ‘near native’ in the language and included this little example of her near native English: ‘I have done editing for different projects, last work I have done was for a Turkish children movie called Hititya.’

Now, I point this out not to demean the woman's skills when she is clearly a gifted linguist. Her four languages far outstrips anything I’ve ever managed and deserve to be put to better use than having to advertise on Craigspace among the breasts and feet. But ‘near native’? In my best Larry David voice: that’s where we have a little little problem…

It’s clearly an interesting world I’m entering, where levels of ability are wildly overstated. Freelancing appears to require confidence, self-belief, and a degree of what we might call 'creative elaboration'. Look on the freelancing websites and you’ll see all the smiling faces of hipster Americans who you know are just great at their jobs. I don’t know how I could compete. They say that people who upload their photo gets five times the work than those without. I doubt if I could even get myself to pose of a photo, let alone upload it, and I think that’s the whole of my problem.

I’m a fanatically hard worker and I like to think a reasonably bright guy with a good sense of humour. But I always fail the professional bullshit test. I couldn’t bullshit or misrepresent myself to save my life. I can never forget that I’m a pale English bloke from the North who sometimes laughs and sometimes frowns. I don’t enjoy snowboarding when I’m not coding PHP. I don’t even consider myself an expert in anything in which I’m supposedly an expert. I have a degree in computing but what does that measure? I taught myself all the HTML I know. The same with CSS, Java, and PHP. I taught myself assembly language as a teenager and was more advanced when I started my woeful degree course than when I finished it. It probably stunted my growth as a programmer by forcing me to learn high level languages which were becoming obsolete as we learnt them. Where are all the Pascal programmers these days?

These days I don’t bother with courses. If I need something doing, I teach myself and figure it out as I’m going along. I don’t have my skillset listed like an Excel table. I’m an organic mess of things I can do well, things I can figure out if I need them doing, and things I’d probably fail at no matter how many times I try. As for my Ph.D, what does it mean? I can talk off the top of my head about eighteenth century poetry? Well, perhaps but I don’t know how long I could talk before I’d start to repeat myself. Some of that knowledge is still there but much of it is lost. So what does the PhD represent? That I was once considered bright enough to do a doctorate? That I was naïve enough to think that it would actually help my chances of finding work? If I lived in London, a doctorate might make a difference. Around here: I’d be better off having my neck tattooed and my bollocks pierced (pardon the French).

The main difficulty I face is that a website asks me: how competent is your written English? I pick the answer 'somewhat'. Somewhat! But that’s because I believe in the old saying that the more I know the more I realise the less I know. It’s probably not the ideal mindset for entering into the business of selling yourself on the internet. Probably not an ideal way to getting a job anywhere except one of those supremely enlightened and creative companies that want unique individuals. I’m always reading about them in papers and they sound great. It's just a shame they only exist like pots of gold at the end of every rainbow and I've not seen a rainbow for months.

R Crumb: Stuntman

I don't normally post other people's work on this blog but I like to make the odd exception, especially when that exception is a video of Robert Crumb doing backflips and pratfalls to a woman playing the kazoo. Crumb's been very quiet of late but I noticed him among the page of 'selfies' (mobile phone self portraits) posted at the The Guardian the other day. I hope this video is a sign of him returning from his brief exile. A new comic or book would be great but in the meantime I'll make do with his guest appearance on this album. Credit to Mike Lynch for bringing this video to my attention.

De-Crumbing Myself

In a different post, a different David kindly offered some cartooning tips to this David. The main suggestion was that I should try to reduce the detail in my cartoons and make them less like illustrations. Armed with this good advice, I hit the drawing desk this afternoon and produced two of the worst cartoons I’ve ever drawn. However, the third seemed a bit better and I’m posting the very rough and ready version here. To be honest, reducing my style felt much more difficult than the previous way I was working. More is less, as they say, but less certainly takes far more effort.

I guess the same is true of written prose. I forget which writer once opened a letter apologising to the recipient by admitting that they hadn’t had enough time to write less. I definitely find that my longer blog posts are certainly indicative of my having worked less to reduce the word count.

Will this new style work for me? I feel like it’s the first step of a new challenge. The way I originally taught myself to draw was to study the work of Robert Crumb. It accounts for my love of crosshatching, even if I haven't got any part of that mastered. Perhaps David is right. Perhaps the Crumb style doesn't work with gag cartoons. I was looking at the work of Tony Husband, whose style is about as reductive as you can get. It is deceptively difficult to draw less but keep the same gag. I hope my next efforts are better...

The What of Who

So Peter Capaldi becomes the new Doctor Who and not long after Malcolm Tucker departed from our screens, he now returns in the guise of a family friendly Time Lord.

I’m not overly excited by the news which only tangentially glances off my interest because of Capaldi’s involvement. I’ve never been a Doctor Who fan and as much as I love science fiction (Oblivion is my film of the year so far), I’ve never caught the Doctor Who bug. I don’t even really know what to call it. Is it Doctor Who or Dr Who? I always thought the latter but IMDB now suggests the former. But the problem of the name aside, I’ve had even bigger problems with the show.

Even as a child I probably realised it contained too little science fiction and too much hammy acting for my tastes. I have a similar problem with most of the superheroes that are now appearing in the big film franchises. In many respects, I should be perfect fodder for buying into the genre. I’m interested in comics and genuinely enjoy science fiction, yet films like The Avengers, The Fantastic Five, and The Green Lantern leave me cold. In fact, I find the majority of Stan Lee’s superheroes ultimately quite boring. It’s the Doctor Who problem, I think: science fiction as imagined by people who don’t like science fiction but have their own ideas what science fiction should be. And that was the overriding sense that emerged watching the show last night. Apart from Stephen Hawking and that Mancunian star gazer with the funny voice, the guests talking about Doctor Who were not how I imagine science fiction fans.

It was also noticeable on last night’s ‘big reveal’ that they had the great Bernard Cribbins in the studio. They mentioned his long career in TV, including his recent appearance as Wilfred Mott in the new Doctor Who. What they didn’t mention was that he’d appeared opposite Peter Cushion in the 1966 film, Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., which is probably the only Doctor Who I’ve ever enjoyed. Or I assume it was that film. There was another, made a year earlier, called Dr. Who and the Daleks. Occasionally I come across one or the other on TV and find myself being drawn into its post-apocalyptic vision of London long before London became people’s post-apocalyptic setting of choice.

That the BBC ignored Cushing’s films is disappointing but obviously part of their attempts to portray the franchise as the jewel in the BBC crown, the years between 1985 and 2005 when it languished in production limbo now long forgotten. Doctor Who has become one of the BBC’s cash cows, played to a new audience of fans via BBC America. That success I can only attribute to its appealing to audiences very different to yours truly.

The question I have to ask myself is: can Capaldi encourage me to watch the next series? That I very much doubt. The problem I have with the show is precisely the problem I have with amateur theatrical productions. It has the pretense that it’s real theatre but there’s no overcoming the presence of the large woman in the wig pretending to be Doris Day circa Calamity Jane. The same is true of Who. When it was relaunched it was quickly  swamped by minor celebrities hiding behind latex and daft names. It’s not the Doctor himself who I ever thought they needed to change. It was just everything else about the show.

 

So has Twitter finally shown the middle classes that the world is ugly?

Back when I was still one of those blue-skied optimists who smiled at kittens and sang Abba hits when walking jauntily down the road, I used to enjoy Twitter as an intellectual game. Writing a funny one liner in 140 characters or less was an enjoyable routine for a year or so. It was akin to doing the daily Sudoku but with a generally funnier outcome. Then the celebrities took over. Twitter was suddenly full of every hacking newspaper columnist, unfunny comedian, and chirpy radio DJ filling the timelines with their awfully privileged banter.

With the arrival of the celebrities, Twitter lost its largely formless state. Before it hit the mainstream, Twitter was like a page of blank paper sprinkled with iron filings. There was still a sense of equality across the Twittersphere. Quality tweeting could attract an audience. After the celebrities landed with their marketing people, PR consultants, and professional social media teams, the situation was magnetised and every individual aligned themselves towards these powerful points of attraction. Twitter was suddenly another version of the real world. There were those people with power and those without and the popularity of the former had nothing to do with the quality of their tweets. Katie Price (aka Jordan) demonstrated that and still does. Her Twitter account is hugely popular, currently approaching two million followers, all waiting for her gems of wisdom such as ‘Yummie full fat milk and cornflakes 3 bowls can't be normal lol but lasts me till lunch time’ (© 2013 Katie Price).

I understand the attraction of celebrity and I guess I’m as susceptible to it as anybody, even if I like to think the people I admire have more about them than plasticised glands and ghost writers. That’s why I also understand the frustration and urge to write something biting towards celebrities I dislike. I would occasionally launch a sharp taunt towards a celebrity such as Peter Andre. Was I trolling? I never saw it that way and if my barbs were sharp they were never needlessly cruel. Yet I can see (and saw) how some unstable characters out there lacked the wits to engage in humorous taunting and took things to an extreme. For some people, violence, threats and intimidation are the only way they can express themselves. I’ve been victim to that plenty of times myself. Comments coming to me through this blog have often been foul, spiteful, and distressing but after a while I guess you become somewhat immune to them.

You might guess, then, that the current furore over Twitter doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Before Twitter got rid of the ability to watch the public Twitter timeline, I’d often sit and gaze the world’s tweets in real time. It’s no wonder they disabled that function because it didn’t take long before you would see how truly bestial we are as a species. I don’t even mean that small percentage of people who are, for want of a better word, ‘bad’. I mean huge segments of our population who demonstrated how illiteracy and stupidity prevail. I began using Twitter believing it a novel way to confine language, encourage pithy expression. I grew to realise that it’s actually the perfect way of expressing our piggish grunts, our infantile nature, our utter slavery to branding, marketing, and celebrity. Reading Twitter’s public timeline was like being trapped inside the mind of one enormous planet-sized imbecile.

Certain self-satisfied middle class commentators now want to censor Twitter because they don’t agree with what Twitter allows people to say. They are suddenly shocked about the world and our human nature which they, as columinists, are supposed to understand better than the rest of us. The debate has quite prominently been about threats of rape, which is understandable. The threats were clearly distressing for the victims. Yet these rape threats have channelled the nature of the debate into a familiar and not so helpful territory. Over at The Guardian, it’s turned into the familiar feminist bell ringing as the usual cowled figures wander the streets crying ‘bring out your misogynists’. The arguments sound tired and familiar. There’s barely an acknowledgement that men find these comments as offensive as women and that women are sometimes as guilty of posting ill-considered and sometimes offensive tweets themselves. (As an aside: the offensive comments left for me on this blog were mainly from women who wished me dead in a variety of unpleasant but imaginative ways. Hard lesson learned: never make jokes about Daniel Radcliffe.)

And that’s the point I wanted to make in my slightly rambling way. This debate shouldn’t be about gender. It’s about who we are as individuals and what we become in that silent inner world we inhabit when we’re sitting at our keyboards and are annoyed by something we read. Twitter is a pure expression of humanity at its very worst. It is the world’s inner monologue in written form: a shameful indictment of what we can be and what we’ve become.

I'm Not Feeling Very Brian Tong Today...

No cartoons. No new comic strips. No meaningful writing other than this piece of uplifting joy which has all the frivolity of a pig carcass being dragged through the streets.

I just couldn’t be bothered to work last night and I couldn’t be bothered to get up this morning. I rolled my grumbling pale mess of a body from its pit at eleven thirty which is always a sign that my mood chemistry is in a bad way. It’s not lethargy affecting me as much as a feeling of inchoate despair. A bit of good news would cheer me up immeasurably, send me into a new period of productivity. But good news rarely comes my way. Confidence breeds confidence, they say, but I’m low on both the capitalised and non-capitalised forms. Instead, I had to face the usual SPAM repeated tenfold in in my inboxes, the same emails full of bouncing enthusiasm from Youtube about young Americans with their tattoos and cretinous tastes and vile music. I just guess I’m in no mood for Brian Tong.

Brian Tong?

Brian Tong is big cheddar over at the CNET website where I often go to get my tech news. He’s also become in my mind the personification of a kind of global hipsterdom that now prevails of incoherent slang, preening ego, and every shallow mannerism in the ‘Idiot’s Guide to Looking Like an Idiot’. Depending on your point of view, he is either a lion among men or a jester among fools. He’s at the forefront of that generation that tore the world from the grasp of the old elite of bow-tied academics and serious men of letters. These are the mystic shamen of our times who have explored the shallower caves and came back knowing that the secret of the modern world is spin, marketing, big smiles and ever bigger medallions.

Perhaps I’m just tired. I slept poorly the night before last. Before I’d gone to bed, I’d written a snarling comment at the Telegraph in defence of Clive James. That I’d had to defend him was bad enough but I then dreamt about Clive James and it had been one of those horribly vivid dreams in which you meet your heroes. Not in the way I met Ralph Steadman, standing in a queue and with no time to talk and feeling a northern fool. But in that way the world would be if it wasn’t for men like Brian Tong telling us that we should care more about our gadgets than we care about people.

Perhaps it’s just an Englishman’s reaction to an American but I’ve known plenty of Americans who aren’t like Brian Tong. Yet perhaps it’s just me. This morning, I didn’t want to face the usual dozen emails to my various accounts, all of them from Twitter telling me what really well connected but abysmal people are doing. Save me the hand-clasping sincerity of London types with their full social diaries and the interesting things they can do. Here in the north, it’s the weekend of the local town show. It’s a good place to be if you enjoy freakshows and a carnival of the underclass. And perhaps that lies at the heart of this grim matter. I gaze out of the window and I don’t see Clive James or Will Self or Ralph Steadman walking past. I see Brian Tong sitting on the wall. I see Brian Tong walking out of the off license. Brian Tong is sitting outside Wilko. Brian Tong is everywhere and I suddenly feel old and English and so very foolish for not being like Brian Tong at all.

Sorry About The Comic Strips...

It seems ironic that just a couple of days ago I talked about wanting more readers not visitors only for me to then posts two football comic strips which have attracted plenty of the latter and no doubt dissuaded the former from ever reading my blog again.

Even if each strip has generated ten times my usual visitors, the last two days have given me very little satisfaction. I doubt if a single one of those visitors has or will ever come back. There’s been no secondary uptake for the cartoons. No links from Facebook or Twitter. No links from blogs or forums. Nothing! I interpret that as a woeful failure. Nobody thought them good enough to pass on. They weren’t even worth a single retweet! It’s depressing.

Yet perhaps that’s what the strips are worth and reflect the fact that I drew them as an academic exercise.

I guess it was pretty dumb of me to agree to draw some football strips for the coming season before I knew whether I could draw David Moyes. I had no quick shorthand caricature of the new United boss and these strips (and another I’m working on), were an experiment before the season kicks off. Not that the traffic has given me much sense that it’s been a successful experiment. In fact, it’s been quite the opposite! Factor in the news that, two minutes ago, Private Eye rejected my traffic cone cartoon and you’ll understand why I sit here scratching my head. When I drew it two days ago, I genuinely thought the traffic cone cartoon the best gag I’d ever drawn. I still think it is but I’m now beginning to doubt my own judgement about these things. But then I was also quite pleased with the two comic strips. Perhaps my humour is too weird, too warped, too obvious, too bland, or simply not funny enough. Perhaps I can’t draw well enough. I don’t know. I’m just as confused as ever. Guess I’ll just keep plugging away on diminishing faith, fuel, and bottles of ice cold Pepsi.

Friday's Manchester United Cartoon

The First Manchester United Cartoon of the Season

The Traffic Cone Cartoon

Three Cartoons That Never Quite Worked...

Give Me Readers Not Visitors

It feels like another day of living life in lead underpants and with clipped heels. Everything seems to be running so slow: the web, the weather, and even the news. The only thing predictably regular is the arrival of people looking for 3d porn, news about Angelina Jolie’s tattoos, and pictures of Rod Stewart’s mole. Can you imagine how depressing it is to realise that those three things comprise 95% of your blog traffic?

Even if this blog has had plenty of visitors there have only been a few true readers this morning. So to those of you who are readers and have made it back: a sincere thank you. Because, otherwise, there’s something utterly dispiriting about posting something new to a blog and returning three hours later to discover that not a single pair of interested eyes have even looked at it. You begin suspecting problems in the ether but end up reaching for the bottle of ether… Just one reader makes a huge difference.

I write this blog for readers, you sometimes imaginary souls who want to come back and to follow what I write or draw. Visitors, on the other hand, arrive looking for an answer to their search. They don’t want to befriend me or know who I am. They want a cartoon depicting ‘cheese mutilations’. They want to know ‘how tall is Tom Cruise’ or ‘who was the smallest dwarf’, both of which incidentally are the same question asked two different ways. Visitors want to be entertained and the moment you fail to entertain them, they move on. They don’t want you to be a real person, who has good days and bad days and days when you work hard but things just don’t go right.

I dwell on this as I see my webstats crawl. I’m also having one of those days when I’m stuck between projects. I work out of confidence and anger and neither feel particularly strong today. I started to doodle a Ron & Russell Mael strip expressing my profound disappointment that they’re not coming back to play Manchester. I don’t know if I have the enthusiasm to finish it. Then I have my ‘Real Things People Say’ strip which I’d intended to submit to a competition. I need to finish the backgrounds but the fact that it had zero hits and zero feedback from either readers or visitors makes me feel like that too would be a mistake. Perhaps I should send the Putin strip or the Elephant in the Room… Perhaps I should try something else or just give up trying.

Late last night, I thought I’d do something different and try the Steadman approach to drawing a cartoon. I did less preparation, less cross hatching, and tried to be less restrained as I threw ink around the page. I even made use of my mouth atomizer and I think finally understood how to use it. I was quite pleased with the result but that optimism too dissipated once I’d posted it here where it almost died an ignominious death. At least a few of you looked at it.

This afternoon, I need to sit down and put in some hours of hard work. I write this blog for readers not visitors. I hope one day there will be more of you but you are such rare people. Each one of you is worth ten thousand indifferent souls. I’m lucky to call you readers.

George Osborne takes to Twitter!

Where did Johnny Depp go?

Rewatching ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ last night, I reflected on how there are great actors and there are great stars yet there are very few great acting stars but that Johnny Depp is the brightest of that few.

In fact, I would go on to say that it’s hard to think of any screen presence of the last fifty years who matches Depp in acting range and star quality. Hoffman made some memorable movies, brought life to strange roles, but his star was never as bright as Depp’s. Brad Pitt is a great movie star but even acting at his best he has never brought such personality to his roles. He’s a big star but he’s no acting great. River Phoenix was in the same mould as Depp and might have offered a challenge had drugs not robbed us of his talent. At a stretch, the closest to Depp I can think of is Richard Burton but he perhaps owed too much of his star quality to Elizabeth Taylor and his acting legacy suffered from choosing too many poor roles and sad creep of alcoholism.

Yet even should you find an actor with the same range and quality, they’re probably missing that third ingredient which Depp brings to his roles and that’s a force of likability like no other.

All of which makes it sad that in recent years, the old Johnny Depp seems to have disappeared. There’s a shadow on our screens that looks and sounds like Depp but has been turned into a marionette by corporate America. He is the Disney puppet, the A list bank note that the billionaires cash in at the booth where the public buy their tickets. When his star was at its brightest, after the second or third Pirates of the Caribbean, it was rumoured that Depp wouldn’t return at Captain Jack. I rejoiced at the news but it never happened. After a couple of films that performed weakly at the box office, he’s came back as Captain Jack. Now he’s lined up to make Pirates 5, perhaps time to ask: where has the real Johnny Depp gone?

I remember discovering Johnny Depp for the first time when I saw Edward Scissorhands, a film so unusual that I thought the future of Hollywood would be so different. It was small in scale but big in ideas. Everything about the film was perfect but holding it all together was an actor who was not simply likable. He was lovable. He was the alienated kid who deserved everybody’s friendship. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that it’s that likability that Depp possesses in streaks. I think of his sublime performance in ‘Ed Wood’, making an unsympathetic character so very sympathetic. His finest moment was playing Raoul Duke in ‘Fear and Loathing’, his comic turn holding the deliberately wild mess together. Yet he has often done the same in lesser films where I grew to like his quirk, his lack of gravitas, the off centre kilter he brought to every role he played. Yet the quality of his résumé is easy to underappreciate: he was great for Polanski in ‘The Ninth Gate’ and as J.M. Barrie in ‘Finding Neverland’. ‘From Hell’ is a great adaptation of the graphic novel and then there’s ‘Donnie Brasco’, ‘Sleepy Hollow’, and the majestic ‘Sweeney Todd’.

Two of those remind us that he has always remained loyal to Burton but the under-funny ‘Dark Shadows’ was a missed open goal, a great premise but they needed somebody who could write witty one liners to cast an eye over the inadequate script. It was a reminder that somewhere Depp stopped being Depp. ‘The Tourist’ was a waste of all talents involved and ‘Alice in Wonderland’ was good but uninspired.

Yet looking down his list of films in this way, you begin to realise that Depp hasn’t gone as missing as much as we might have at first thought. Except for two years, 2010 and 2012, he has usually produced something of interest every year. If anything, this slight lapse has meant that he has simply become too synonymous with one movie franchise. In recent years, he still made ‘The Rum Diary’, based on the Thompson novel and perhaps closer to Depp’s heart. His new film, ‘The Lone Ranger’, looks loud, quirky, perhaps interesting (I’ve yet to see it), even if it seems to sit fat and heavy in the mainstream.

I think a lot rests on his next two films. He’s currently filming ‘Transcendence’, the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, better known as Christopher Nolan’s cinematographer. Then Depp is making ‘Mortdecai’ with David Koepp, who previously directed him in the underrated ‘Secret Window’ in 2004 (a great movie if you love movies about writers). These two films are chance to remind us of the old Depp before the next Pirates movie and then a rumoured sequel to 'Alice in Wonderland'.

For Depp fans, this is a key moment. I want the old Depp to come back and surprise me. I would like to see him work for Woody Allen or Scorsese, filmmakers that would let him inhabit a character in the way that became his trademark. I know that interesting Depp is still around. Perhaps his Keith Richards documentary will be the restart of his directorial career, prematurely abandoned after his one effort at the helm, 'The Brave'. That Depp took time to help make the Ralph Steadman documentary which is due out sometime this year. Perhaps these are signs that Depp is currently that rare thing in any profession: a person who can choose his destiny. If $20 million roles means that he can play games in the margins, then there might be something to be said about continuing with the Pirates films. But at the moment, I’m waiting to see that Depp re-emerge. He’s been a little too quiet recently and he’s been sorely missed.

What Jane Austen Can Teach Us About Charlie Brooker

Somebody around here has bought a clown’s horn. I keep hearing eeeee-hhoooonk every 15 minutes or so. However, I’ll press on, even if it does feel like some surreal criticism aimed my way after a night of torrential rains and furious cross-hatching.

I worked a long day drawing on Saturday. I finished two cartoon strips (three panels each) which I’ll eventually post here. I’ve agreed to draw them (and more) for the Liverpool fanzine, Red All Over The Land. I don’t know how many I’ll manage over the course of the coming season but we’ll see…

Honk! I can see this is going to drive me crazy…

This morning I noticed there’s been plenty of talk in the papers about ‘the world’s most savage TV critic’ Charlie Brooker. I don’t read his stuff but my sympathy is firmly with him if the reports are true that he’s trying to get Guardian bosses to turn off the comments beneath his articles. Of course, I understand the criticism aimed at him by those who believe in free speech. Free speech is one of the supposedly immutably good things in the world loved by people who also believe in the cleanliness of Bono’s underwear and the curative effect of Richard Branson’s chin whiskers. But elsewhere, free speech isn’t making as good a case for itself. Caroline Criado-Perez, the journalist who campaigned to get Jane Austen’s face on our banknotes, is now receiving threats of rape via Twitter. This time (rightly) there is no talk about free speech yet both stories highlight a difficult dichotomy that exists when people voice their opinions.

But first an aside: I’ve always detested Jane Austen’s novels. I had to study ‘Manfield Park’ for my English A level and, at university, we read a novel of hers every week during the first term (alongside all the other books we were studying). For six weeks, I was reading ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Mansfield Park’ (again!), ‘Emma’, ‘Northanger Abbey’ and then ‘Persuasion’. I got through them all but whilst I understood her gentle wit and I admired her prose, she was just a writer whose world didn’t sit easily with my grim working class outlook. It was like being in the company of a journalist who deliberately turns their attention away from the big issues of the day to discuss the rate at which grass grows. There aren’t many English writers whose face I wouldn’t prefer adorning our bank notes.

But how valid is my criticism?

This is the age of the internet so every response is valid (say its supporters). It is the assumption that any act of criticism is of equal importance to any act of creation. I’ve never bought into that myself and it’s partly the reason why I quit academia. I could never buy into concept of failed writers (which many academics are and I would have been myself) opining about successful writers. Nothing filled me with more hostility that witnessing some poindexter standing at the front of a lecture theatre affirming Orwell’s greatness as if Orwell needed the affirmation of a humourless freak in a black turtle neck and sandals.

In the real world, the remarks often aimed at J.K. Rowling by hacks, bloggers and literary pundits are generally about as meaningful as any snide criticism we might make aim at Jane Austen. The best critics (indeed, the only critics I try to read) produce secondary acts of creation in response to their subject. The great Clive James writes criticism infinitely better than the subjects of his criticism rightly deserved. James Wood, one of our best critics, writes as well about great literature as great literature itself speaks about our lives. Martin Amis too is a blisteringly fabulous critic; much better, I would say, than he is a novelist.

To put that differently: there is no value in my writing ‘I think Jane Austen is shit’ but there is slightly more value in my writing ‘Jane Austen gave Julian Fellowes a good career’ or ‘Jane Austen is the Jeremy Clarkson of the veiled aside’ but even these are obviously not a patch on what Austen herself might have written. And I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. If we want to go on the attack, we must raise our game.

Mark Twain probably came the closest when he said: ‘Every time I read “Pride and Prejudice,” I want to dig [Austen] up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.’

Now that is worth immortalising on our bank notes! Criticism is the act of heckling in written form. Every comedian can talk about the perfect heckle and I think they would recall them with a certain pride. Sometimes comments beneath articles can be better than the article itself. In those instances, a person has raised their game, produced something of value, and that is to be welcomed and cherished.

Yet if people can’t raise their game to Charlie Brooker’s level, then he has a right to ask for the comments to be disabled. Jane Austen belongs in my pocket until that moment I can put some suitable criticism into words as well formed and enduring as her own. In fact, the more Jane Austens in my pocket, the better…

The comments, as ever, are open and hecklers welcome.

Somebody At The Door

It's A Sparks Show: Episode 7

Sparks have filled my morning. First of all, I see that my original Sparks Show cartoon strip has been published (right) and can be found in French music magazine New Noise along with an interview with Ron and Russell Mael.

Less good news comes with the news that Sparks won’t be playing Manchester on their next tour. The UK dates have been announced and they’re limiting themselves to Glasgow, Bristol, and a few nights in London, meaning that despite my best efforts, Manchester won’t see them and, more importantly, I won’t see them. So bitterly disappointed...

Despite the absolute silence and zero feedback about my current work-in-progress (surely it’s not that bad or perhaps it is!), I’m posting the last of my Sparks strips. I didn’t post this before because I didn’t think it quite worked. Now I know that Sparks aren’t coming to Manchester, I realise that none of my strips worked how I intended so I might as well post this last one today… Naturally, click the image to view it full size.