The idea of Art in our times is changing radically. All of the desperate defining and containing that is much mocked in this blog is the vain effort to medicate the metaphysical nausea we experience upon finding ourselves on a shifting funhouse floor. This brilliant interview with Cory Doctorow by Joel Turnipseed pins down a few of the facts we need to accept: (read the whole thing, but by its nature I shouldn't feel guilty about stealing a large chunk)

We live in a century in which copying is only going to get easier. It's the 21st century, there's not going to be a year in which it's harder to copy than this year; there's not going to be a day in which it's harder to copy than this day; from now on. Right? If copying gets harder, it's because of a nuclear holocaust. There's nothing else that's going to make copying harder from now on. And so, if your business model and your aesthetic effect in your literature and your work is intended not to be copied, you're fundamentally not making art for the 21st century. It might be quaint, it might be interesting, but it's not particularly contemporary to produce art that demands these constraints from a bygone era. You might as well be writing 15-hour Ring Cycle knock-offs and hoping that they'll be performed at the local opera. I mean, yes, there's a tiny market for that, but it's hardly what you'd call contemporary art.

So that's the artistic reason. Finally, there's the ethical reason. And the ethical reason is that the alternative is that we chide, criminalize, sue, damn our readers for doing what readers have always done, which is sharing books they love—only now they're doing it electronically. You know, there's no solution that arises from telling people to stop using computers in the way that computers were intended to be used. They're copying machines. So telling the audience for art, telling 70 million American file-sharers that they're all crooks, and none of them have the right to due process, none of them have the right to privacy, we need to wire-tap all of them, we need to shut down their network connections without notice in order to preserve the anti-copying business model: that's a deeply unethical position. It puts us in a world in which we are criminalizing average people for participating in their culture.

(Link via Journalista)

"Michigan Water tastes like Sherry Wine"

This one's for my pal Pam Noles.

I was listening, while working, to the tv playing in another room when I heard a current ad for babies' nappies, or diapers as they say in USA, using the old song Pretty Baby, and I got to thinking about how that must be one of the most enduring of 20th century songs.
Dean Martin recorded it,and sings it here, in case you just flew in from Uranus don't know the number.
It was written by a New Orleans pianist named Tony Jackson (pictured left in the only circulated photo) sometime before 1916, which is the date it was published.
Tony Jackson was born to a poor African American family in Uptown New Orleans, Louisiana on June 5, 1876. Fellow musicians and singers were universal in their praise of Jackson, most calling him "the greatest". Jackson also wrote many original tunes, a number of which he sold rights to for a few dollars or were simply stolen from him; some of the old time New Orleans musicians said that some well known Tin Pan Alley pop tunes of the era were actually written by Jackson. Jackson dressed himself with a pearl gray derby, checkered vest, ascot tie with a diamond stickpin, with sleeve garters on his arms to hold up his cuffs as he played. This became a standard outfit for ragtime and barrelhouse pianists; as one commented "If you can't play like Tony Jackson, at least you can look like him". One of the few tunes published with Jackson's name on it, "Pretty Baby" came out in 1916, although he was remembered performing the song before he left New Orleans. The original lyrics of "Pretty Baby" were said to refer to his male lover of the time. Jackson unfortunately never recorded.

That's a shortened version of the Wikipedia entry. It doesn't say much more than that. There's a separate entry for Pretty baby, and a history of the song here (scroll down), with particular reference to how the names of others got on the credits but apparently don't really belong there.


Finding more info about Tony Jackson and any other songs he wrote isn't easy. I found this great image of a piece of sheet music, I believe from the same year as Pretty Baby, 1916, with lovely cover illo currently at an online Antique sale..


The most comprehensive account of the man I know of is Martin Williams' three pages on him in Jazz masters of New Orleans, 1967, which at least gives us a few other song titles: Baby, I'd love to steal you, When Your troubles will be mine, Some sweet day (louis Armstrong recorded this in 1933, but retrieving a lyric from a Satchmo performance is often impossible; he scats through at least one verse), Such a Pretty thing, and The Naked Dance (a bagnio specialty remembered and played by Jelly Roll Morton during his Library of Congress recordings)

There's also Michigan Water Blues, which has been recorded by several performers of late I think (Michigan water tastes like sherry wine, Misissippi water tastes like turpentine,) and the anecdote about politician Kenneth Keating who said (1959) 'Mr President, i should like to offer a small historical footnote to the current debate with respect to the Lake Michigan water-diversion bill. Frankly, I do not know at this point whether Michigan water tastes like sherry wine, but even if it should, that would still be no justification for diverting it to the Chicago sewer system'

Long time readers of this blog will smirk with amusement as I include this last bit, history's inevitable mockery appended to an obscure artist's meagre biography, "Jackson's death at forty-five in april 1921 was rather bizarre, the result of a seizure of eight weeks of the hiccups which the efforts of doctors could not relieve."

Old photos

I came across this old photo the other day. It's of me and Pete Mullins and was taken by Randy Stradley at a Sydney convention fourteen years ago in 1993, around the the time Pete started working with me regularly.


Pete had been picking up a few art jobs around the place including drawing a few books for Revolutionary comics such as this one:


The Revolutionary story is more interesting than any of their actual books, and you can find the short version here and here. Even shorter, Publisher Todd Loren put out unofficial biographies of famous individuals and rock bands and got sued every which way by the likes of Bon Jovi and Motley Crue.
I remember quite well the day Pete came round and said he thought he was going to have trouble getting paid for a certain job, perhaps the one above. And I said, give me the details and we'll see what we can do, as I liked to pass myself off as somebody who knew a thing or two. He said 'my publisher just got murdered.'
I had no answer.
Even the FBI had no answers: In June 1992, at the age of 32, Loren was found stabbed to death in his San Diego condo. The case remains unsolved, although some people suspect spree killer Andrew Cunanan. The FBI later investigated and ruled out Cunanan's involvement.
Here's another cover by Pete. This one is dated Sept 1993.


Lots more by me and Pete under the label Bacchus.

HAPPY 86th BIRTHDAY

to Eddie Campbell senior.

seen here in a story from 1985 long out of print.

However the words have become a catchphrase in this house and at least once a week somebody says "who's been swipin' lumps aff the cheese" in the best Scottish accent they can muster, which is usually as good as the real thing.

borrowed by a bunch of boobs

Tim Hodler at Comics Comics made me laugh. He quotes from this short review by Elizabeth Ward in tomorrow's Washington Post- nov 4-

Don't mistake this astonishing work by Australia's Shaun Tan for a picture book, even though it consists of nothing but pictures. At 128 pages, it's what could be called a pictorial novel, since the usual label -- graphic novel -- suggests more of a manga- or comic-style book, bristling with text...

Then he writes: Where's Eddie Campbell?
'Eddie Campbell, semantic troubleshooter,' it says on my business card. In truth, I have unfortunately obtained for myself the reputation of a nitpicker who doesn't like the phrase 'graphic novel'. Nothing could be further from the truth. My dislike has always been for most of the boobs who use the phrase, most memorably the boob I saw recently in a store who referred to two copies of the same book as 'these two graphic novels.' My 'terminological madness' as Neil Gaiman called it is largely due to the fact that half of the people reading this are thinking 'and what's wrong with that?' I have for a long time maintained that most of the confusion we get from the mainstream media is not the result of them being 'clueless critics' as Tim labelled his post, but the result of us feeding them confusion by the bucketload. I recall and still have in my files a mainstream review that begins "Jimmy Corrigan may not be sequential art, but it sure is comics," and another review that begins "The Fate of the Artist is not a graphic novel per se." Then there is the line from the intro to Graphic Witness which I quoted here recently: "Although neither (A Contract With God and Maus) is a comic book - and the themes of both are closer to tragedy than comedy - Eisner and Spiegelman are considered by some to be comic book artists." But for every one of those I could name two from the comic book community, such as the review of The Arrival that began "THE ARRIVAL is in a format maybe more reminiscent of a children's book than a graphic novel or comic... but if Eddie Campbell says it's a graphic novel then that's good enough for me."

This goes way above and beyond semantic nitpicking. Any term is only useful so long as it communicates meaning, and I have no hesitation about ditching one as soon as it loses that value. A phrase can flourish while holding more than one meaning, indeed it's almost obligatory in a living and thriving language. However, in the kind of examples I quote above we're seeing missed and bungled opportunities and considering our medium's ongoing difficulties in interfacing with the general bookstore and the mainstream media, there is much at stake. The 'idea' of the 'graphic novel' as an independent art came off badly in the above review. Elizabeth Ward is quite right in thinking that 'graphic novel' is not the phrase she needed to describe The Arrival. BUT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN. It was coined to perform that very task. Then it got borrowed by a bunch of boobs and it came back busted.

Ladies, have you met:

I'm working on the final presentation of The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard. I'm way past the stage where by innumerable successive revisions the work ceases to have all meaning and becomes a kind mandelbrot set, in which I zoom closer and closer in the hope of finding surprising and unexpected configurations. Today I've blown up some of the little faces in the audience at the moment the monstrous ti-lion suddenly gets loose and runs amuck:


P.s. the original painted pages of my book from earlier this year, The Black Diamond Detective Agency are for sale at The Beguiling.
**************
In the town where I was born:
A Scottish woman has avoided a prison sentence after she admitted putting dog excrement in her husband's curry. Jill Martin, 47, took drastic action after her marriage broke down and burst out laughing when her husband Donald started eating the dish at their home in Newton Mearns, Glasgow, Paisley Sheriff Court in central Scotland heard.