The Bed-Daughter and Some Messy Artists

 from Notebookery 1, where you'll also find the Artist and the Exterminator

 Here's another record of a stepladder-set tale told in my dyed-black days of 2000 or so, this time at shunt's cabaret in its original venue of Arch 12A Bethnal Green, and accompanied by Jeremy Hardingham. I'm so happy to have any record at all of anything Jeremy's done, and of the messes we made in those days. His approach to physical illustration looks – at least from what can be made out in this video – more chaotic than Tom's work on Phonella's Shopping, but no less precise. I also included a tiny bit of footage he took of his flat with my Hi-8 camera as prelude, because I liked the pull out and reveal. 

 Inspiration for The Bed-Daughter probably came from the idea a myth is a real person's life mangled beyond recognition, in this case: the biographies of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – a potentially souring insight I share only because the floppy-haired twenty-something who originally wrote this would want you to know. The music is by Mouse On Mars.

 Content warning: tobacco use, live flames, hair othering, face shaming, insect powder, mention of nails through extremities, an almost entirely passive female protagonist, and David Rosenberg in a vest. 

 

 

UPDATE: As with the Phonella's Shopping video, I added a transcription to run as subtitles because the sound isn't great, but for some reason both still just play the auto-generated captions when I hit CC. Does anyone have a clue what I'm doing wrong?

Simon and Tom do Phonella's Shopping

from Notebookery 1

 

 Sometime in late 2000 or early 2001 going by my dye job (open auditions were being held for The Pianist) Tom Lyall and I staged one of the stories I'd written in the mountains of Bajardo at a cabaret at Chat's Palace, Hackney. I originally did these storytelling "acts" at Shunt's arch in Bethnal Green, and I might put one or two of those up as well now I'm finally digitising my VHS's. The scare quotes around "act" are just a reaction to my louche mumbling here. No level of video degradation can dim the splendour of Tom's work, even if the capture does little justice to his makeup choices as Phonella. Speaking of degradation, I thought I'd parcel this in a little Hi-8 footage of the region whose actual walk to the shops had inspired it, and I'm very grateful to Kane Parsons' Backrooms for cementing ageing VHS as a now legitimate liminal aesthetic. Enjoy (possibly with subtitles).

The Evil Lord Such-and-Such Round

 Ahh, Star Wars. 

 All the Star Wars...

 Because, of course, there wasn't just the Star Wars, but all the Star Warses they made as well as the Star Wars! Yes, the success of that first "Episode IV" meant I grew up in a cinematic landscape silly with fantasy, and never had to make do with westerns – whatever westerns were – or, I don't know, kids solving crimes? Knights? What did children get out on video before Star Wars? Did children even get out videos? No, I don't want to have to think about it. Here are pictures from just the tiniest fraction of those other Star Warses, and all you need to do is match – pitch, if you will – these ten baddies...

1.

 

2.

 

3.

 

4.

 

5. 

 

6.

7.

8.

 9.

 10.

 ... to their relevant motley band of heroes. Here's this post again if you think setting them side by side might help. The answers, as ever, will be posted in the comments. And may the path be kind to your protons...

A.

 

B.

C.

D.

 

E.

 

F.

 

G.

 

H.

 

I.

 

J.

Taking A Page or Two From Angela Carter's Book

This cover's a bit "Run For Your Wife", isn't it? 

What's that coming put of her stomach, a leg? No I don't like this.

 

 Re-reading Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber I kept trying to remember how old I was when I'd first read it, or more specifically, how much I already knew about - you know - sex. I'd certainly gone through something of a Fay Weldon phase after my A-levels, devouring She-Devil, Praxis, Life Force and Joanna May in a bed-sit in Battersea before I'd ever so much as kissed a girl offstage, but I'm pretty sure Bloody Chamber was after that.

 

 I sort of knew what to expect though, having grown up with films of both The Magic Toyshop and The Company of Wolves on VHS, but there's more to Angela Carter's writing than the subject matter - to quote Helen Simpson's introduction: "To say she is wonderful at surfaces sounds a little disparaging, as if to say she is superficial. No; she is good at surfaces as the Gawain poet is good at surfaces." Or, to put it another way, sexy. 

 Even if I didn't find the writing itself sexy, at least the first time around, I found the possibility it was intended to be sexy sexy, and that's probably what strikes me most re-reading it: the realisation that, as someone who grew up finding boys talking about sex unpleasant, what attracted me most to the work of these Second-Wave Feminist Magical Realists may simply have been the promise of a good sexual education. and given these were fantasies, and the men in them often literally beasts, that's a potentially awkward realisation. These pictures are from the pages of Angela Carter's journal, which turns up in the BBC's excellent Of Wolves and Women here.

"If you're issued with something as hideous as a zimmer frame, you do do something about it."

 Corinna Sargood's clockwork commedia walking-frame is just one of the great takeaways from the beautiful-looking Angela Carter documentary posted below. I've just re-read The Bloody Chamber, and the influence of that book on not just the writing that would inspire me, but also probably much of the décor, has struck me with the full whack of a box's four sides collapsing outwards, but I'll air further ponderings on that in the next post, and just leave Of Wolves and Women here. That's probably easiest. Enjoy.

"Gruff voices come from inside" (A Nod to John Blanche)

 Thirty-seven years after the publication of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! the townspeople of Kristatanti still wear their hair high on their heads. John Blanche's illustrations are nothing like the meticulously researched environments you'll find in Skyrim or other first-person Fantasy walking simulators, they're actual folk art, immersing you in not a tangible landscape but an eccentrically embellished personal mythology, which is probably, really, what you want to be immersed in when you fantasy role play. Here, for example, is the guard who sees you off on your adventure:

  Now you'd never see that in a video game. There would be too many questions. And no answers because there's no reason for any of this, other than Blanche's joy in making stuff up. They say a camel is a horse designed by a committee, but actually it looks far more like the pet project of someone who worked on the committee that brought out the horse. And pet projects are the substance of fantasy. We associate the genre with mythology, and we're right to, but mythologies are the product of a people, not a hive. Just bunch of people. There's no way to synthesise their differing accounts - mythology is not synthetic - nor any way of extrapolating what actually happened. Someone simply made something up and that happened lots of times, and I think Blanche's work expresses those instances perfectly.

 I mean, what's this? Doesn't matter. You encountered it. Or this is how you remember it. I think I enjoyed reading, or playing, The Shamutanti Hills this week even more than I had as a child. Video games in the interim had probably conditioned me a little better for all the keeping track one has to do, and I bothered learning the spells this time too, which came in very handy when I lost my sword halfway through the book. I also took time to make a map, something I'd always written off as a chore before, but it turns out it's a creative act, part of the game: you can draw a small crow where you saw a crow for example, or rolling hills, or heads on spikes when you encounter heads on spikes, a classic shorthand for the outskirts of sub-human savagery despite heads on spikes marking the boundaries of the City of London well into the seventeenth century. Talk about projection.

Unfinished in '87: SIMON KANE'S HERACLES

 To celebrate the book that actually got me reading again this past fortnight - Natalie Haynes' brilliant Theban novel The Children of Jocasta - here is a classical adaptation of my own from 1987. Consider it an accompaniment to the similarly unfinished super hero comic and bivalve samurai epic from the same year, the year I met my mate Tom in fact. He didn't finish his comic of the Odyssey either. I went for Heracles, the original Greek name of Hercules, and a subject I'd visited before, back when I was eight. Thinking about it, it's surprising I didn't visit him more often; he was big, dumb, super-strong and fought monsters, the perfect subject for a comic book. His newly nobbly nose is proof I was by now healthily into Sergio Aragonés' Groo the Wanderer, a pre-Homer-Simpson comedy barbarian, and I can also spot the influence of airbrush fantasist Rodney Matthews in the thorniness of my monsters. 

 

 In keeping with my previous treatment of this material (particularly here) I have not shied away from the more tragic elements of Heracles' story, although I do now take the piss. And profuse apologies for my depiction of Tiresias; my only reference material for gender studies at the time was Mad Magazine.

... and that's as far as I got. (Why have I made all the sexy women look like Garfield?)

Notebookery 3 (2003ish)

 We're jumping around chronologically. I reckon this was a birthday present from 2002, (the opening inscripition is from my housemate Jamie Wood) and much of its filling comes from the following two years. I really wanted this one to be a thing. There are overlaps with Notebookery 1: more Dance Bear Dance notes and sketches, and more illustrations to Fish-head and the Sibyl, and some accounts of work in the Middle East and Cairo. I had a lot of fun in this book, it's one of the things that inspired me to start the blog, and bits of it have appeared on here from day one. I haven't bothered to read any of this through since. It might be shocking. (Click to enlarge.)