Oh no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wee Cal is watching the recent special features DVD that comes with the first Batman movie out of the box set. It's got all these DC people and other experts taking comic books very seriously... there's big smug Harlan Ellison... I suddenly feel a nausea creeping over me at the thought that I have become one of these people. Quick! Change the subject! There's a gecko running across my window!
Labels: geckos running across windows
posted by Eddie Campbell at
02:46
26 Comments:
Everything I've ever read of Harlan Ellison's has seemed to be calling me an idiot for not getting what he's telling me. Maybe I would if he'd stop cutting in on his own stories. My father-in-laws like that. Tells you where you stand, before you can open your mouth, so that what ever you say after that is dead in the watter. It's sad that it's his only way of feeling good about himself. Don't worry. You've not become one of them. They would never be seen with me at din. Hey, dose that gecko have a book? I bet I'd like it more then Ellison's. The Gecko Kid? Okay, baby's asleep at last. I'm off to my kip.
One of the things I love most about Queensland... One of the few things I actually love about it... Is when I'm sitting in my living room, and watching Geckos run along my walls. Love those little guys.
But do they have a book?
Rescued on the brink of potential pomposity by a gecko ?
Not wanting to underplay the - cute - little guy's role, but I don't think you were in real danger.
N.
(That tag has a gaimanian feel to it...)
" ...but I don't think you were in real danger."
Unless you're thinking of suing Fantagraphics.
welcome to the club eddie,
there is a gekko running across my window too,
mine has a book, not the good book, maybe a good book, a gekko tho'.....to be sure.
Read Harlan for his great short stories, not his vociferations.
Mmm, Asian House Geckos.
I love'em. They're so angry.
Plus, they can walk on walls like ninjas.
Ah! I love those wee fellows. Do you remember Eddie Lizzard and his tragic death in the pantry door?
OK, so there are some Australian crawlies that are cute and non-lethal.
The spiders still terrify me, though, and I'm the other side of the world from them. Nothing that small should be that deadly.
Marcus
They're especially cool when they're on the window. If you position yourself so that the light is shining through them you can see their beating heart and pulsating squidgy insides on account of their skin is largely transparent.
Speaking of insides, the man selling incense outside the Brixton tube the other day was yelling "INSIDES! 10P! INSIDES!"
I had a giggle with a complete stranger who quietly said to me he'd have a new liver for 10p, please.
Hi Maestro,
Nope, you haven't ossified into a comics icon. Maybe, a gadfly or raconteur but not an icon. You'd have to be dead to be one, so people would have to stopped disagreeing with you, right?
Come visit me and my pals at my new pub (blog@Newsrama) sometime...
Cheers,
Wayne
Which first Batman movie?
The original 40's movie serial?
The Adam West/Burt Ward version with all the villains?
The Tim Burton atrocity?
In Australia, that gecko probably exudes some poison that will kill you if it gets on your skin.
No the only thing they exude is cuteness.
Had two tiny ones ( oo-er ) running across my wall the other nite, when from out of nowhere a bigger one came out and grabbed one of the smaller ones in its mouth and disappeared behind a picture.
"Oh", thought I " that must be the mother one picking up her young and taking him home because he's late for his dinner".
It wasn't until much later that I realsised that he was in fact probably the dinner.
I'm surprised that I survive in the outside world sometimes... Let alone the geckos.
Damn, it's geckos. I've been busy elsewhere and just catching up on two months of Campbell, so no offence to the gecko or the photographer, I just thought it was big hands. Bleh, Shouldn't be here, I'm buzzing of a bottle of wine and have to be up to stack shelves in Sainsburys in six hours. The lengths you drive some of us readers to earn the bread to buy your art and books, you should feel guilty.
This is all mad and I'm not sure it's all relevant in a gecko comment, but then maybe that's what geckos like?
God, what have I learnt in two months/hours?
Oh, Hogarth. This review might offer something, discussing the typographical nature of his work. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/observer/story/0,,2010313,00.html
"few artists better reveal the difference between drawing and painting. Horace Walpole surely had it right when he praised Hogarth as 'a writer of comedy with a pencil'; and one would not want to downplay the brilliance of the prints with inflated claims about Hogarth being more important than Stubbs, Gainsborough or anyone else as a painter."
Me, I always see a link to Baxendale from Hogarth, that manic energy in the background, what do they say in that review, "bursting with the sight gags - the unravelling corsets, impish dogs and brimming chamber pots". I don't know what he did for the sequencing of art, but the comicality of art owes him something, surely?
On Lichtenstein, I saw his George Washington in San Francisco a few years back, thanks to the wife's Christmas raffle, and I could give two shits about plagiarism. That work took balls. We all steal all the time. I'm reminded of the George Harrison plagiarism case which saw Harrison done for unconscious theft.
http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/law/library/cases/case_brightharrisongs.html
God help us all.
Brunetti: "...you have that consistency of scale and they start to have life of their own because of that. They really become symbols. I don't know how to describe it, but they pop out as being alive a lot more, to me, than when you don't do that." there's more, but your memory of it might be better than what he really said. I might be drunk so I'm not sure I get the point of rule number two, which seems to be that how an artist frames the work is important. Rule one seems muddy as well, from this drunken position. I take it to mean just get on with it and tell it like it is.
I have to agree with the soap opera stuff. Occasionally I glance at George and Lynne in someone's Sun at work, and although all they have in that is Lynne's tits spilling out, they work the characters around the frame to get them spilling. Why is she always topless?
It's funny cos that Brunetti interview they discuss movies, and that touches on the first rule. Groth seems to be into movies now, I guess music and comics have run their course, and at some point he'll discover opera and you'll get him challenging artists on how they feel they compare to Wagner, but at the minute he was pushing movies with Brunetti, and I guess they retrod what you said on the rule one. You sort of come at it like "Get all those cameramen and equipment, and the director and the sound engineer and the continuity girl and the boy with the clapperboard, out of that tight space and focus on the humanity."
And Brunetti is "Movies are just much more complicated, I think."
I think this is why I declare you a genius in drunken moments, because you remember the humanity of it all.
Damn, what else was there. 60 days of Campbell just turns ones head somewhat. The new book looks interesting, can't say I know much about Westerns beyond Clint Eastwood and Kirk Douglas. My nan was a Douglas fan, she just died on us. He always wore black she'd say, and her eyes would light up and you'd do your best not to think about what else was lighting up, it was that sort of look. Lust in an 80 year old, we should get it so good.
A new dee vee, blimey. I have some of them in the loft somewhere, weren't you doing something with White in one of the old ones?
Oh, I remember what I had to tell you. Manet. I'm sure you turned me onto Manet when I was but a callow youth, did Simpson ever lecture on him? http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,1983602,00.html
It's about Manet's paintings of the execution of emperor Maximilian of Mexico, and is related to political art which you were banging on about a couple of hours/months ago depending upon where you sit.
And the same issue of the Guardian Review had a piece on writing in instalments, which I didn't know if you'd get a kick out of, I figure you did a bit of that, especially when no-one was looking, with the 1,001 nights of Bacchus, was it?
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1983050,00.html
Christ, I have to go to bed. Think of me, stacking cornflakes and suddenly realising I've posted mad gubbins to your blog.
HemlockMan:
The Geckos we're discussing aren't natives, they're from Asia. They came in about 15 years ago, and have spread through the sub-tropics here. They can't cope with the cold, so they're unlike to spread much farther south than they already have.
I think they survive because, lacking poison or venom, they compensate by being Angry.
Ah yes, Eddie Campbell®. He used to be cool.
You are nothing like those plump, smug, self righteous "novelists" Campbell.
You will be a skinny bastard until the day you die no matter how many free chips you eat.
On Geckos, do you ever get the feeling the are just waiting for the mother ship to arrive and then they will "war of the worlds" our arses all the way to lizard world?
I was once jumped by a gecko in Hawii. As far as I know, he has never been to press.
I'm quite aware that geckos aren't poisonous.
That was, I say, that was a joke, son!
WHA!??
all these comments!
the gecko was an act of desperation because my regular thing wasn't ready...
Eddie
Steve
checking through your points
yes, i may be expressing Ivan's point better than he did, and he may reject my interpretation for all i know.
i remember phil elliott once asked me to write an intro to his book and after I'd done it he charged me with not knowing what he awas attempting at all...
george and Lynne still going?
still by Burns... or whom?
right, i'll go and look at those links
Eddie
the one on serial writing i'll use later
thanks
God bless Phil Elliott. Did he use it? George and Lynne is still going, but looks as if it may be a gag strip now, rather than a cheesecake one. You can click the pic at The Sun to see one. Drawn by Gual now, if I remember the naming order on strips right. Can't turn up who Gual is really, based on that. George seems to have developed some quiff.
Burns is off doing painted art for 2000AD, although I'll never forget his art on The Fists of Danny Pike for the relaunched Eagle, if ever anyone was suited to a boxing strip it was Burns.
You can see his painted art at, um, wikipedia, reminds me of the first volume of The Eagle, the colours and poses seem to be similar to the Christian stuff they used to run, very biblical.
I think you put across what Brunetti was saying, sorry, I was slightly worse for wear there, and couldn't be arsed to transcribe it all, and took an easy way out of doing it all. It certainly backed up your memory of it, but your memory of it was less stuttering than the interview transcript allowed Brunetti to be.
Glad you liked one link. Something that occurred to me whilst remembering that post during the shelf-stacking, although I'm not sure how to phrase it. Would any similarities between Simpson and The Man at the Crossroads be all in my mind? It's just the way they both look and read in your stuff that made the thought occur.
steve
yes, Phil used it, grumblingly... he's probably reading this and ahas forgotten all about it and is wondering what the hell i'm talking about...
George and Lynne looks as I remember it. Now those word balloons are the worst!
Simpson and paul G. ? never.... nope.
Eddie
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