blog Now that I have been doing this daily drawing experiment for a week I thought it might be a good idea to take stock. The first thing that is clear to me is that I am not very good at drawing. The second is that I haven’t got the inclination to make much the drawings I do any better. The longest I’ve taken on these drawings is five minutes and I rarely correct anything I do. Like fellow Oadbyite Glaswegian David Shrigley I prefer to be playful and amateurish rather than serious and professional. If I had unlimited time to work on all the details I would probably do something else, but I will carry on in order to fulfill my daily obligation.
What most surprised me is that despite being conceptually poor and terribly executed, I am still finding them quite difficult, a lot more difficult than I anticipated. I thought that it was going to be a doss, but it it isn’t. Maybe it gets easier at some point, presumably when you have a style and your simple cartoon is syndicated around the world. Maybe not.
We saw Nicky Bird on the train from Newcastle on Saturday and she gave us a Keith Haring calendar. Haring, who was associated with Basquiat in New York, produced great but incredibly simplistic and ugly paintings. Perhaps I could do things like that?
Anyway, I hope you find some pleasure in these drawings, even if it is only the pleasure of being able to have a good long sneer.
Flash is the best drawing package I’ve ever used, great brushes, great straightening. Illustrator, a bit of a pain.
07 Feb 2009
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I got tagged on Facebook to complete a meme where you list 25 things about you that people may not know. The results of other people’s were fascinating but I couldn’t think of anything interesting. So I forced myself to write something by using the alphabet as stick to prod myself with.
A is for A rush
The first short story I ever wrote was in 1997 and was called A Rush. It was about a man who stopped time when he had a panic attack. Thinking about it makes me want to start writing them again — it was so liberating, like a whole new area of consciousness had been openend up.
B is for Ballyhoo
The worst haircut I ever had was copied from Ian McCulloch: it had spikey on top with a fringe. Ugh, what was I thinking.
C is for Cup
I always buy a new mug when I go abroad and need tea. I love tea more than any other drink.
D is for Dawdling
I often make my wife stumble, by pulling her when she is dawdling.
E is for Entropy
I want to reduce the amount of entropy in my life but I’m not sure how to go about it.
F is for Facebook
I don’t really like Facebook, thinking that everyone should have to have their own site on their own domain and display everything there rather than relying on these corporations that want to sell you rubbish.
G is for Games
I have to force myself not to waste my whole life playing computer games.
H is for Horripilating
I don’t seem to do much horripilating nowadays. I wonder why. Perhaps I am immune to cold.
I is for Impetigo
The first song I ever wrote was about impetigo. I wrote it whilst in the bath when my sister suffered from it.
J is for Jail
I used to fantasize about committing a minor crime that was serious enough to be put in prison for a year in order to avoid taking responsibility for myself.
K is for K-Punk
K-Punk doesn’t appear to blog much anymore, but his essays on popular cinema are among some of the most invigorating blog posts I’ve read.
L is for List Posts
I know that it is vulgar to have to divide your thoughts into numbered chunks but considering the standard of writing on the internet it is probably for the best that the habit has become popularized.
M is for Middle names
I haven’t got one a middle name, although I did invent one once — Geoffrey, which was kind of a joke — less funny when Midland Bank unquestioningly allowed me to open a bank account with it. Changing identity is easy, really.
N is for Neil.
I still haven’t grown into my name, but I’m getting there.
O is for Oran Haut-Ton
Sir Oran Haut-Ton is the hero of Melincourt, Thomas Love Peacock’s witty philosophical novel about an orangutan who becomes an MP. It is as funny as Wodehouse.
P is for Philishave
Despite extolling the virtues of Gillette’s six blade fusion, I have recently started using an electric razor, allowing me to be neat and tidy every day rather than twice a week.
R is for Richard III.
If you want to understand how films like The Godfather and Casino have mythic status then read Richard III (as I did last week), in which the title character’s duplicity, will to power, and downfall provide the template.
S is for Simplicity.
If I feel overwhelmed, I always do something that will make my life more simple. I am worried that I will run out of things to simplify.
T is for Tea.
Every day I currently drink puer, rooibos, peppermint, green, camomile, jasmine, and lemon and ginger. My current favourite though is Oolong.
U is for unheimlich
And other German words that are untranslatable, like Verfremdungseffekt.
V is for vacillation.
Vacillation is the cause of much modern stress. I constantly have to tell myself: just do one thing at a time and make a decision.
W is for work.
Sometimes, especially when I feel I can really get into the flow, I really love working.
X is for Xavior Roide
I don’t know him but I think he is a Basque dandy who used to be in RoMo band DexDexter. Sounds interesting.
Y is for yo-yos.
When Rob got a yo-yo to help him to keep busy in order to stop smoking, I had a go and realised that there is something quite isolating about a toy which can have someone’s eye out.
Z is for Zizek.
The other day I bought the Essential Zizek for just £12.99 from Eden Books, saving about £26.01 on the RRP! God old Christians!
06 Feb 2009
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Like Waiting for Godot — in which nothing happens, twice — Bombon el Perro is without event or significant drama. Unlike Waiting for Godot, Bombon el Perro doesn’t make you think about the futility of all endeavour. The film isn’t egotistical enough to want to tell you any truths about the human condition.
Instead, it tells the story of a man who is given a pedigree dogo after performing a kind deed and how that changes his luck (he had been sacked previously) and leads him into the world of dog exhibiting and stud farming. This is done realistically, like Ken Loach, but it doesn’t adhere to the conventions of realist cinema where something awful must happen to nice people. After having watched the half-baked trash of Role Models, I found it incredibly cleansing to watch a film which doesn’t accord to any cinematic conventions.
Role Models, the new film with Paul Rubb and Stiffler from American Pie isn’t awful, indeed, it fulfills the contract it makes with the audience relatively well, providing a few funny jokes, some misogyny, and a heartwarming ending, but it is unbelievably formulaic. From the first scene, you know exactly what is going to happen: Rudd is a malcontent in a banal job who wants to find meaning but won’t do anything about it. When his girlfriend leaves him, he gets into a scrape is colleague, Stiffler (playing exactly the same role as always), and they are forced to do 150 hours of community service or go to prison. They reluctantly do the community service with troubled children (one is racist caricature of a smart alec black kid, the other McLovin from Superbad) and, what do you know, learn trite lessons about being nice and stuff.
Bombon el Perro, by contrast, refuses to play along to any formula. There is no judgemental moralizing about characters, instead we see people as they are.
05 Feb 2009
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A trip to The Baltic, where we find Bob Newart, Momus‘s roaming performance art creation, performed here by a young stuttering gallery attendant.
05 Feb 2009
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Talking to Wringham on Friday, I mentioned how I saw 2009 as the year in which to exercise my creative muscles rather than use them in any serious way. 2010 that would be the year I got down business! He questioned whether I hadn’t done enough exercising in the last ten years: when was I ever going to leave the sandbox?
It is true. I am much happier playing than being serious; and the idea that I will suddenly emerge from this year of training fully formed on the 1st of January 2010 (to do what, I don’t know) is somewhat unrealistic.
Dickon Edwards often writes about how he ought to be doing something more than diary writing, whether it be marketing himself to editors or simply being externally validated in some way. But surely it is in the nature of dandyism to do things on your own terms, rather than being swayed by other opinions. For the dandy, it is always better to reign in the sandbox than to serve in the world.
Of course, if you are especially bold, you can make the world come to your sandbox and never have to leave it at all. This was the heartening message that I got from going to see the Baltic’s sublime exhibition of Fluxus works on Saturday. It was so playful and inconsequential — art in the service of life and pleasure rather than posterity and worthiness.
More on this soon.
04 Feb 2009
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I had a drink last night — two glasses of rioja — and am still alive. The Faustian pact I had made (exquisite clarity in exchange for never drinking exquisite claret) was broken without any Mephistophelian consequences. Indeed, the only effects I felt at the time were dehydration and bonhomie.
The day after, I am sluggish and undisciplined. I haven’t quite gone to seed, but I am eating a lot of nuts. Overall, I think I am probably better off alcohol because it gets in the way of flow experience, which is a greater pleasure than the light head of the drunkard, but it is nice as an occasional indulgence.
After a month of soft drinks, the taste of wine was like nothing else — so varied and complex — only a great cup of tea or single malt whisky can in any way compare. I have never understood those people who don’t drink alcohol because they “don’t like the taste.” What fools! Don’t they know that the best tastes in life are acquired tastes? An acquired taste is best because it expands your palate, forcing you to endure and adapt rather than mewl like a baby because you don’t like the immediate sensation.
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Last night I had the brilliant idea of a Shazam but for films. The idea is that via keywords and questions, this service would work out what film it is that you’re trying to remember. As it is, I haven’t got time to develop the idea but am happy for someone else to become rich with it so long as you can tell me what these two films are whose titles I have forgotten:
The first one depicts life after a plane crash (?), which has left several men and two women (one young, one old) on a paradisal desert island. The key scene (the one that made me remember it) is where one of the men gets bitten on his hand by a snake and a survivalist character takes his arm and chops it off with an axe. This is bad enough, but the next twenty minutes have this guy wailing in agony as he slowly dies without painkillers or antibiotics.
The second is about a social worker whose case involves a forty year old man with the mental age of a baby whose mother has made it her mission to stop him from growing up, beating him if he shows any mental aptitude. At the end of the film, it looks as though he’ll be rescued and allowed to live freely with the social worker, but it turns out that she also keeps a man as a baby!
Any ideas of what these are called? I don’t think they are just bad dreams I once had.
03 Feb 2009
blog Of all the books I own, there are few more beautiful than Mesmerization by Gee Thomson. Printed on substantial matte paper, it stinks of the ink that gives it so much colour and the love that Why Not Associates put into its design.
Subtitled ‘why we are losing our minds to global culture’, the book is a key to all contemporary mythologies — from consumer society to political ideology. Each “spell” (the word that Thomson uses to denote the malignity in today’s memes) is given individual design treatment and the result is a compendium of modern graphic design trends.
The spells all follow the same logic — they convey values, target certain people, evoke fears and emotions, seduce with certain promises, and then reward. Sometimes this structure works brilliantly, as with the dissection of Cool, which punctures the rock ‘n’ roll myths marketed by Top Shop and other high street shops. Other times it feels a bit forced; for instance, the chapter on Comfort makes it sound as if the idea of staying in to watch telly was invented on 9/11.
Thomson’s stated aim is to inoculate us against these negative spells and to encourage us to produce more benign ones. As such, each one has a “reality check” at the end of it, like this one on Girl Power, which sounds a bit too much like the conclusion to a crap episode of Kilroy:
Exploitation or empowerment? Girl Power thrives on such contradictions. But the central question remains: Is the new pole dancing, porn star chic, real liberation, or a cynical con created by big business (from magazine publishing, TV, fashion, and music) to co-opt the whole idea of empowerment for commercial gain?
Nevertheless, it is beautifully designed, full of vernacular typography, contemporary layouts, and Barbara Kruger-style section headings. If you want to understand contemporary graphics look no further, it is much better than a compilation of actual contemporary design because it is parodic.
In the same vein, it is perhaps better to read the book as a catalogue of cliches rather than a work of cultural critique. As cultural critique, Mesmerization seems like an attempt to revive postmodernism and in an age of ideology. Alas, postmodernists are too decadent, too cynical, and too uncertain in their conclusions to be of much use.
However, as a catalogue of cliches, it is a fresh and exciting corrective to cultural laziness. The thing about cliches is that however fresh and original they began, they soon congeal into dead words and dead attitudes. To avoid becoming a cliche, we just need to be more mindful — thinking about why we adhere to certain cultural memes rather than blindly embracing them. So I recommend you read it, before it becomes congealed.
02 Feb 2009
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01 Feb 2009
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Looking through some of my high school reports yesterday and the one subject that I consistently got terrible marks in was art. Apparently I didn’t try and had extremely low-expectations of my own abilities. All I remember is that Mrs. Layfield told me that my painting of a jungle scene was wonderful and would win the monthly school art prize if I just tidied it up a little. I took this to mean that I should add a cartoon tiger, a la Henri Rousseau. She told me that I had ruined it: it was awful now and impossible to put right.
Partly to exorcise the ghost of this memory, my experiment in living for February is to do one drawing everyday to illustrate my blog posts here. They are going to be simple, naive, and essentially mediocre, but I hope that I will get better and more confident each day.
My drawing inspirations are Rob Ryan, Gwyn, the London 2012 logo, and Aubrey Beardsley. I like simplicity, humour, white space, and a lot of contrast.
I did think about doing an hour a day of Spanish, but I might leave that for March as my in-laws arrive on the 1st April and I want my language learning to be fresh in the mind so that I can converse with them (“Which direction is the library?”). Also, learning Spanish feels a lot like hard work, whereas drawing is play.
By the way, if I go to Spain this year I definitely want to see Andalucia: the architecture is so moorish.
01 Feb 2009
