Or we could just blow up our airports

I wrestled for ages with writing a cartoon about Don Brash’s scheme for us to play catchup with Australia. This is obviously a straw man proposal. Brash gets to come in and act the heavy, and National can throw up their hands in horror and say “Oh no, reducing government spending by selling grannies for glue, reintroducing National Service and criminalizing being poor is too radical! Let’s just criminalize being poor!” And we can say “Fine, whatever, you talentless fucks” and go back to sleep for another three years while Oz gallops off into the distance like a cocky, arid racehorse.

Instead of aspiring to Australia’s standard of living (35% higher wages, a bigger sun and as much uranium as you can eat), wouldn’t it be simpler just to drag them down to our level? They already have 10% of our population. We can corrupt them from the inside.

Anyway, then Atea-1 went VROOSH!, which makes a more interesting cartoon.

Beards of Our Forefathers by David Malki

Beards of Our Forefathers: A Collection of Wondermark Comic Strips
David Malki
Dark Horse 2008

I don’t often read The Onion, so I haven’t come across Wondermark before. The premise is simple: David Malki takes Victorian illustrations and puts lots and lots of dialogue on top of them in Blambot fonts. This sort of thing is presumably funner when read once a day at the excellent website – an entire book of them gets wearying fast, unless you really dig that whole Doctor Grordbert’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory schtick.

Having said that, this handsome book (the third collection currently available) has its charms. It includes a Pocket Guide to Ancestral Beards, and has a cute feature where you hold pages up to the light to read hidden text. On the negative side, the cartoons aren’t really that funny, the extensive annotations are redundant, and basically all of the content which is in text form is boring. It also contains less than 150 comic strips, which is poor value for US$14.95.

Far more interesting is The Comic Strip Doctor archive section of the website, one of many internet columns which examines lame comics in detail and suggests improvements. Unfortunately most of these improvements involve far too much dialogue.

Of course we don’t have a problem

I was waiting for Pippa outside the Citystop at the top of Courtenay Place at two in the morning, and in twenty minutes I counted six women in their mid-to-late twenties teetering past, presumably on their way to a taxi stand.

Each of these women was completely on their own, many still wearing their work clothes. There was a remarkable uniformity in their woeful expressions, as they concentrated on not falling over, throwing up or bursting into tears.

Bowie: A Biography by Mark Spitz

Bowie: A Biography
Mark Spitz
Crown Publishers 2009

There are a lot of books about David Bowie, and this is an extremely new and up-to-date one. It even mentions Lady Gaga and the Somali pirates. Bowie’s success story involves musical talent, good looks, a reasonable amount of opportunism and an incredible amount of perseverance and hard work. He never comes over as a particularly nice person (at least not until “Post-Ambition Bowie” in the Nineties, married with a small daughter) but it’s still an inspirational story.

As well as covering each album in detail, Spitz has an interesting interview with Velvet Goldmine director Todd Haynes, a loving retelling of the Flight of the Conchord’s Bowie episode, and an account of the long-running rivalry between Bowie and Marc Bolan. Although Bolan was slightly younger and initially much more successful, his career was doomed in the mid-Seventies by his refusal to evolve past glitter rock, whereas Bowie had gone through half-a-dozen changes of identity in the same period.

Fittingly, the first ten years of his career is covered in 200 pages, the next thirty years in a hundred. Spitz paints a vivid picture of Bowie’s rise in the early Seventies and his subsequent claustrophobic twilight existence in American hotel rooms, surviving on a diet of cocaine, green peppers and milk, and analyses what went wrong after 1983 when commercial popularity led him to make a serious of extremely bad creative decisions. Spitz also argues for the worthiness of Outside compared to the Berlin Trilogy, and reflects on Bowie’s “incubatory state” since his 2004 heart attack.

There aren’t many photographs included, but there’s a couple from 1974-5 at the height of Bowie’s drug addiction which are frankly shocking.

It seems almost compulsory for Bowie biographers to include elements of their own lives, and this contains a dozen semi-interesting vignettes of Spitz’s life. He emphasizes that he’s read Hollywood Babylon twice – if only he’d read his own book! There’s several woeful proofreading errors, especially in the transcribed interviews, and other minor factual mistakes that should’ve been picked up. How much does it cost to publish a decent hardback? Tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars? Just before the presses rolled, couldn’t they get someone to sit down for a few hours and, you know, actually read the thing?

10 things I didn’t know about Apocalypse Now

1 ) Now I see what the fuss is about Martin Sheen. Despite appearing in Platoon, which apparently is almost as good, you can see why Charlie Sheen goes through the motions in Two and a Half Men with such dead eyes.

2 ) The bit where the water buffalo is slaughtered is extremely nasty.

3 ) Like many movies of the era, the genius of the film is counterbalanced by its sheer indulgence and incoherence. If it were 120 minutes long instead of 202, it would be a better movie.

4 ) Another letdown is the hideous score. Most of the moody twiddles are okay, but there’s a 1979 synthesizer on its default setting which keeps hooning in and ruining the dramatic tension. Imagine the 21st century Vangelis soundscapes of Blade Runner, but cheaper, and in the Vietnam jungle. Doesn’t work, does it?

5 ) Some of the added Redux scenes are pretty redundant, for example, the plantation scene, which features a French family arguing around a dinner table. For ten minutes. With an accordion.

6 ) I haven’t seen the Heart of Darkness documentary, but I’m guessing you don’t achieve this level of cinematic incoherence without a shitload of drugs.

7 ) Initial exposition: the first 18 minutes of the film. Arsing about with Marlon Brando: the final 48 minutes.

8 ) For some reason, Dennis Hopper’s psychotic photojournalist reminds me of Owen Wilson.

9 ) The pre-CGI battle scenes are magnificent. Another reason this film couldn’t be made now. You’d hope that eventually someone will have a crack at an Iraq-themed version, but the trope that war is hell is pretty much a cinematic cliche, despite the continued popularity of pointless wars in real life.

10 ) I’m still not quite sure why Captain Willard steals Lieutenant Kilgore’s surfboard.

The energy drink for when you feel like paying double for nothing much at all

The latest imported energy drink available at Chaffer’s Park New World is Emerge. Imported from the UK, this little tube which proudly proclaims its price to be “35p” on the can has somehow been inflated from NZ$0.80 to $1.69 on its long journey, but that’s okay, because we’re used to paying double for imported goods, aren’t we?

Waaaait… this isn’t the Seventies anymore! Someone’s ripping us off!

…Wait, everyone’s ripping us off!

That makes it okay, then. Everyone back to chewing grass.

Anyway, Emerge has nothing to distinguish it from several other energy drinks. Just another yellow fizz that tastes like battery acid.

I was thinking about energy drinks again because a few days ago I walked past a ten year-old kid in Kelburn greedily slurping Red Bull from one of the large 355ml cans, which contains as much caffeine as 1.5 espressos. Although it says ‘Not suitable for children’ on the can, there’s nothing to legally prevent them from being sold to kids. Dairies can be bloody irresponsible, can’t they?

Yesterday I saw another kid in town drinking a Mother energy drink (another 1.5 espressos) who was about eleven. This is the problem when something is advertised as being ultra-masculine and giving you instant power*. What little boy wouldn’t find that irresistible?

Manly Soundtrack:
Mister Pop ~The Clean
Metropolis: The Chase Suite EP ~Janelle Monae
Love Symbol Album ~Prince

*”By the power of Grayskull, I have the power!” I never actually watched this show as a kid, it’s something else, like rugby, that I completely missed out on growing up. Despite appearances, I’m the straightest guy I know.

Books • Plays • Painting

It was one of those exhausting days where I did a bunch of completely different creative things… only this time we’re talking about maintaining projects I started in 1992, 2001 and 2006 respectively. Somehow I’ve become the security guard of my own museum.

I took in a bunch of books to Graphic with the display stand and coffee. That is, I trudged in nice and early and discovered that I’d forgotten to bring the books. I walked back home and seriously considered just getting into bed and forgetting the whole thing, but then I remembered I had flat bills to pay… so I trudged in again and dropped off the books. Then I popped into Playmarket to discuss some of the contract niceties of Fitz Bunny: Lust for Glory (FB:L4G as I abbreviate it for convenience). Then I finally made it to Tasman St and spent a happy hour fixing my vet mural.

I’d brought in an anti-graffiti substance I got from the Council, which comes with gloves and an eye mask. It’s evil, evil stuff – I applied some to the graffiti hopefully and was surprised to see it eating through the paint, and then the 17-year old paint underneath it. An hour later with the original testpots and it was all fixed. It was hard matching the colours because it’s been under the sun for years, but I think it looks okay. Like the last time I fixed graffiti, I had to keep stopping because people wanted to tell me how much they loved the mural. I’m glad they assumed I was the original artist, and not the evil little dope who defaced it in the first place.

Jitterati: the book stand

I’ve always wanted to have a display stand for my books. Karl Wills made a very nice one several years out of foamboard for his Jessica comics. The tricky thing is to make them robust enough so the books don’t tip them over. I went to Warehouse Stationery to see how much their document holders were, but it must be the sort of thing design students snap up at any cost for their exhibitions – I’m not paying $30 for a lump of plastic from Illinois!

Instead I bought a $10 wire mesh desk tidier, the sort of thing you file letters in, and flattened the back divider. This means it can hold six A4 books comfortably without tipping back. I then stuck a little sign on the front, which can be changed for different books. Because the Jitterati book comes with free coffee, there’s room to stash it behind the stand.

I’ll either be asked for the original, or asked to leave the city.

Sorry, Helen, I went there.

Afterthoughts on the Jitterati book

These are all my children.

❦ I spent most of today asleep, which I think is forgivable. Having actually achieved something for a change I want to keep up this momentum, but after a bit of a rest first. Not bad for someone operating at only 20% capacity.

❦ If you added up all the time I spent drawing the cartoons and putting together the book over the past eight years, it would total about 840 hours.

❦ Although I started putting the book together in April last year, I’ve only been working solidly on it since September. I didn’t want to say anything here in case I couldn’t follow through with it, like you don’t tell people you’re going to have a baby until you’re absolutely sure.

❦ Even in a sealed box, the coffee samples Havana gave me were pungent enough to give me a caffeine headache while working in the same room. That’s bloody strong stuff.

❦ I probably won’t use that printer again. The book came out well, but he charged me an extra $15 (+GST) for work which I feel would’ve been unnecessary if he’d known how to use InDesign better. He also tried to charge me for the 80 pages in the quote instead of the 76 pages it ended up as, hoping I wouldn’t notice. That’s an extra two A3 photocopies per book. It adds up, you know.

❦ I want an American art school girlfriend. During the construction of the book I was listening to the song Psychic City by the band Yacht. Yacht (sometimes spelt as YACHT, Y△CHT or Y4CHT, which I refuse to do) are an electronica band from Portland, Oregon, who had been trundling along unexceptionally since 2003 until Claire L. Evans joined. Evans is a science writer with several blogs and although, like Bob Dylan, she can’t really sing, she added a much needed element of Annie Lennox androgynous sexiness to the affair. The song Psychic City is not one I would defend to other people as being particularly fantastic, but it’s addictive, and has a neat video which ends with her and Jona Bechtolt (the other member of the band and a lucky, lucky bastard) making out.

❦ I also listened to a nine-hour Charlie Parker boxset from the library. Never again.

❦ I haven’t sat down and actually read the book yet. I’m hoping someone can let me know how it went.