… but I still don’t have a scanner.
Here’s how things are shaping up.
- Issue 1 is out of print (I’ll pop some stories on a website one day)
- Issue 2 is ready to be scanned and printed (I’ll be sure to advertise that one)
- Issue 3 is largely pencilled, bar one story and a couple of pages. In it you will find…
- a story about two boys musing on working for a livin’
- a travelogue from Lisbon and one from Sicily
- my review of the year 2008 (I am dead up to date)
- a poem about a night I spent in Kensington
- maybe something else
- Issue 4 is also largely pencilled and is one big long rant.
- Issue 5? Your guess is as good as mine.
I’ll try and get a website up soon, but I am working very hard on working hard at my PhD and that eats a great deal of time, and even when it doesn’t, it feels as if it does.
x
When I recently attended a Mount Eerie gig in London, I approached performer Phil Elverum with the imaginative opening gambit of, “I once met you at a show in 2003!” (honestly; do the calculations. I assume Mr Elverum, who tours a great deal, has likely played 100 shows a year, over 5 years: 500 performances. Throw in at least 10 drunken revellers in search of some sort of epiphany-bringing, vicariously-revelatory conversation, and you have a conservative total of around 5,000 faces in which mine would be lost (should we ever be registered – and I’d understand if we weren’t)… and I grew a beard. Don’t blame his blank look). My second move of the night was to talk to him about how “heavy books are to carry”. I know: displaying my aptitude for playing with the English language and deep-seated sense of the splendid and sublime? Again: blank looks.
Elverum’s music has to me always been a document of the mundane in the face of the majestic, and this tendency is of particular pertinence in understanding why silly gingers like me might be inclined to try and find some commonality with a stranger and Dawn, his latest release is no exception. I think you should all go and get it, but get the book version with the CD. Thing is, it is all about context. The songs on the record detail his experiences squirreling his existential nuts away in northern Norway for a winter, and the specific explicit explication of these days that the journal provides reveals that his song-expressed wordsmithery isn’t an affected instance of convoluted posturing about ‘being in the wild’ (which would make the pretty songs standard) but that actually he was in the wild and he was mighty pissed off with his ex-girlfriend in a mighty winter of wildlife and spectacle, against the backdrop of having to still live and eat and drink coffee and break wind (which make the songs honest).
See: mundane, majestic and the bits in between.
Oh: I’ve got a new website coming (in my mind at present) and I’m working away at some more stuff. Soon.
British artist and children’s television presenter Tony Hart has died at the age of 83. The BBC reports that after suffering two strokes Hart was left unable to draw. He since described this as, “the greatest cross I have to bear”, a sadly eloquent description of the nature of such a tragedy and just what producing art can mean to someone, all pretention left at the door (please).
Visit
There is something so special about all of this (thanks to B. for the link) © someone else, not me.
Although I’ve read it before, over and over, when I got my copy of King Cat Classix back from a friend, I felt compelled to read it again, over and over. I know, I know everyone who knows knows that John Porcellino’s spare work is sad, hopeful, beautiful and all, but I can’t help wanting to say something. So I say, Balance. It’s all about Balance! Past and present, hopes and fears, lines and (white) space, inside and out - oh and of course, universiality - all in comic form, mundane and majestic, just like us, yes? Oh, stop listening to me. Go buy some (picture link below) and be inspired.
Me, I’m hard at work trying to work hard on all my more pressing responsibilities, so I have been struggling to fit in work on the comic, but BUT I have achieved some things pertaining to Smoo #3: 12 pages pencilled, and a new daily(ish) comic journal to appear online probably in November or December, along with a new website. Oh, and seeing as Smoo # 2 is (all but) ready, I really should probably publish it.
Excerpt from King Cat #63 © John Porcellino (not me)
