Jim Baikie

As mentioned elsewhere, my entry point into 2000AD prog-wise was the early 300s, and in those initial issues a short-lived strip was begining to wind down.

Skizz, by Alan Moore, was the story of an alien interpreter from Tau Ceti crashing to Earth and evading the Authorities with the help of a local kid. It was E.T, I knew, but I also recognised that Moore had other things to throw into the mix: this wasn't the autumnal suburban hills of California that Interpreter Zhcchz was dragged into, but central Birmingham amid the bleak early 80s winter of Thatcherism, record unemployment and bleak opportunity Its human protagonist is Roxy, a girl - still a newish thing for 2000AD and in retrospect predicting Moore's realisation of the same in Halo Jones.  In short, it's E.T meets Boys from the Blackstuff by way of a little bit of contemporary TV (Philip Sandifer nods towards the likes of Minder and Grange Hill, but therese are minor influences at best), and while the clash of realism and fantasy would recur in the years that followed in the comic, this was the first roll off the slipway, and one of the best-remembered.

Key to me is Moore's script alongside the art of Jim Baikie, whose time at 2000AD was just beginning, Baikie had come from a variety of UK illustration jobs, often working on various licensed products and titles (Monkees, Star Trek, Hammer House of Horror, Look In and Countdown, for which he provided some Doctor Who art) plus forays into TV spin-offs such as Charlie's Angels, The Fall Guy, and more recently, Terrahawks. Like Moore he had a previous association with Warrior magazine, and was imported into Tharg's team from there. Baikie has a pen-based apporach, with  nice heavy brush on shading anfd a flowing approach to his linework. I can see a lot of contemporaries in his work - Jim Burns and Steve Parkhouse in particular. He likely co-created the look of the kangaroo-like Skizz with Moore, but he could do fantasy well enough - although it's the realism in his work which sells Skizz and becomes a recognisable trait in his work. Baikie's humans arent the elongated strips of sinew that Mick McMahon rendered the likes of Dredd and Slaine, nor the beefcake slabs of muscle under Bisley's tenure, but realistic, unexaggerated forms. His Dredd looks harder for this, and importantly for Skizz, his Lol,Roxy, and tragic no-hoper Clarence Cardew look as though they've come off a Birmingham high street - their fates accrus a pathos because of their recognisability.

Outside of Skizz Baikie also turned his hand to Dredd, helping out with the mega epic Oz, and providing some memorable shot stories and one-shots - in particular the three-part Hitman with its loathsome, toad-like human assassin, and the classic In the Bath which features early 90s cranky Joe Dredd doing what he does best... well,that would be telling.

Baikie went beyond the parent comic to work on spin-off Crisis, where he collaborated with John Smith on the action-oriented New Statesman, as well as turning up Stateside for a brief run on Star Wars. The relaunched Eagle magazine saw him team up with fellow Scot John Wagner for their dinosaur romp Bloodfang, which I look forward to covering in a future instalment of Where Eagles Dare.

In the early Nineties he returned to Skizz for the second series as an artist-writer, giving the story a more satirical edge, but the first story remains the superior, and I'd say so because of its more worldly elements. 'Reliable' is an epithet I apply to a lot of artists who turn in just that sort of work - consistent, faithful, relatable, and it's no dismissal agaist the likes of innovative artists like those above. Blaikie's work remained no less recognisable and was always faithful to its subject. Those first few encounters with his work in Skizz made a big impression on me, and no doubt will remain for some time.

Rest in peace, sir.

Jim Baikie 28 February 1940 – 29 December 2017

Christmas 1987. Respect!

2017 is guttering its last light, and to many I'd imagine it's goodbye and good riddance. But before we leave it all behind and ride the shopping trolley into oblivion, let's enjoy this moment in which, at the Monkeyhouse at least, a real sense of Christmas cheer has genuinely descended.

Your writer, once a few days of non-work had passed, finaly shucked off a year's work worries and just learned to enjoy the brief time off. His wife of now sixteen years (for whom he is eternally grateful) found her groove in seasonal craft and no wooden clothespeg is safe. Meanwhile, Jet Jr has 'clicked' with Christmas, his days filled with revised wish lists and enquiries about the physics of Santa's chimney-related speliology.

It would be ill-fitting, therefore, to select a Christmas song which is anything but traditional, and so in 2017 I'm going back to the classics. Thirty years ago to 1987, in fact, where an SAW-revived Kim Wilde and a peak-powered, late lamented Mel Smith have joined forces to squeeze out a cheesy hit for Comic Relief. Here's the other Mel & Kim with a distinctly Eighties' take on the Brenda Lee yuletide belter:


Look at that. Look at it! So Eighties with the big hair, the obligatory Ray Bans, Curiosity Killed the Cat, random video effects and the quaint 50s nostaliga of it all - including the Mekon! I've just watched it with the sound down and it's still watchable for one key ingredient: Melvin Kenneth Smith, one of my favourite UK comedians and his marvellous ability to mug his way out of any situation, however ridiculous.

Sure, his erstwhile comedy partner Griff Rhys Jones is in the mix, but for me Mel was the greater talent, his presence a mark of quality on many projects outside their combined efforts Not the Nine O'Clock News and Alas Smith and Jones. One of the things I want to do in 2018 is reacquaint myself with his short-lived sitcom Colin's Sandwich, featuring Smith as the titular sandwich would-be horror writer and his take on British comedy's most enduring couple: the middle-aged man and his neuroses.

But I'm drifting. Outside it's a balmy 25 degrees, the hills are scorched and water restrictions loom for Wellington, but inside this house there's a little piece of northern hemisphere tat to mark the occasion and see us through. So Season's Greetings from Jetsam and the Simian family, and here's to a wonderful 2018.

'Evil' Lies Below

Waihinahina Park is a serene spot, located behind Woodridge and skimming the Horokiwi skyline. It commands gorgeous views of Wellington harbour, and is a lovely (if frequently windy) spot to exercise your dog, take in the scenery or just park and rest.

There's still a good standing of juvenile native bush about the spot, and a good amount of birdlife has taken to the area for its wetland look (there's even a hidden waterfall visible from the Hutt Road) The great thing is, there's little chance of it being developed in the near future, thankfully, because in its former life it was a landfill.

Yes, readers. And what's more, quite possibly under this spot likely lie the mouldering remains of a good number of  vintage TV, local and international, Doctor Who included. New Zealand often being the end of the line for 'bicycled' BBC programmes around the colonies. No longer required back home and with storage space also in limited supply at the old Broadcasting House, many now-lost episodes including, notoriously, Evil of the Daleks were bandsawed and thrown in the tip. It was a different time.

The hunt for lost and missing-thought-destroyed episodes of Doctor Who continues to this day, although it's ben  quiet activity of one man and a small army of helpers at this stage. This year there was even serious talk of diggers being used to unearth known locations for dumps containing cans and film. The old Johnsonvile tip is, apparently, a known location - though one assumes it's way down the list and, if the tip in question did become Waihinahina Park, then maybe it might be best for those concerned to leave the keys to the JCB at the depot and just enjoy the drive to this damp, green spot and its abundance of fresh air.

Steve Dillon

Just bloody gutted to read this this morning. 

Steve Dillon was one of my early art heroes. Coming into the world of Eagle's second generation return, and then into 2000AD meant that a banquet of inspirtional art was suddenly opened to me after childhood years of rote caricatures and established characters through Disney comics and UK kids' titles. I've not thought until now just how immediate the variety of styles and techniques hit me. There was no way any of these guys - the O'Neil's, Ezquerras, Kennedy's and especially McMahons would ever be mistaken for something from Key Comics. As I got older these stylistic and idiosyncratic outings became more and more intimidating as I vainly tried to copy them and develop my own confidence in drawing.

Cry of the Werewolf

Fortunately, among these artists was a younger name, only eight years older than me, whose style was more relateable. Assured, yes, but solid - really solid, well-defined and very 'readable'. Steve Dillon's  art was easy to aspire to, but reliably more complex than its his clean lines and nice black and white balancing suggested. That said, though, if there's a style that I took to most readily, it was Steve Dillon's. I mean this as no damped-down praise - Dillon was a master of ink, confident in every line, especially given his young age, and I've no doubt that I'm not the only young artist who ran to his deceptively-effortless work as a masterclass (paging Guanolad...)

City of the Damned

The rest, for Dillon at least, is history. Some early Doctor Who Magazine work, initially as a backup artists, but later to provide the work for Steve Parkhouse's last regular story The Moderator in which both Parkhouse and Dillon combine two then near-inconcievable Doctor actions - the Time Lord crying and shooting a gun, and turn the result into something very Doctorish indeed.   Lots of 2000AD, including three of the big hitters in the Eighties - Judge Dredd (the momentous death of series regular Judge Giant is pictured here, from Block Wars), Rogue Trooper and ABC Warriors plus some lovely covers for Zenith), and then, into the Nineties and more recent years, Transatlantic success, the most notable being Preacher, which he co-created with fellow 2000AD alumnus Garth Ennis. His line of stories for The Punisher has already been credited on several comic boards as being the reason some readers returned to the series, Dillon was that effective, that readable.

54 is no great age to depart this earth, though the very young age at which Dillon started his career (drawing Nick Fury and the Hulk at sixteen! And thanks to the keen foresight of Dez Skinn) means there are decades of his work to see, and a mighty field of followers who saw and were inspired by his instantly recognisable style, an who went on to draw for 2000AD, DWM, Marvel and DC. With the late Brett Ewins he co-created the influential breakaway pop-culture comic  Deadline and from that venture we have Peter Milligan, Jamie Hewlett and Tank Girl among others. The comics world has indeed lost a great storyteller.

As others have said already, completely unexpected. Thank God his prodigious start and global success means his talents and influence won't be forgotten.

 RIP.

The Moderator, Doctor Who Magazine

In the Years of the Scavenger.

"I do get the feeling that by listening to the album we can kind of get closer to you than we have for many years, in terms of knowing who you are and where you are at?"

[Pause]

"You know, Jonathan, that'll never happen."

Bowie on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, 2002.

I first discovered David Bowie in the early Seventies as a young child, listening to The Laughing Gnome played on the Sunday morning children's show on an orange Aztec radio in my room. I can't remember what I thought of the song - I think I liked the sped-up voices.

I first discovered David Bowie in 1979, in television advertisements for the Australasian collection 'David Bowie! Chameleon'. Snatches of songs - 1984, Sorrow, over the top of weird and jarring images from his music videos lingering in my young mind. DJ featured heavily; Venetian blinds, mixing desks, a gas mask and boiler suit.

I first discovered David Bowie in 1979 on Star Trek, a compilation of Sci-Fi-themed music and songs. My brother and I had bought it for the Star Wars and War of the Worlds themes, probably, but this also featured sound-alike versions of Space Oddity, Life on Mars? and Starman alongside other knockoffs of Elton John, Boney M and The Carpenters. They were the definitive versions of the songs for me until...

I next discovered David Bowie on a three-album collection of Sixties British pop, the real Space Oddity featuring alongside the likes of The Honeydrippers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Petula Clark and Cliff Richard. The box-set collage featured Bowie in an anachronistic Ziggy guise. I wasn't taken in.

I then discovered David Bowie as a creepy, unearthly figure, the singer of the irresistible Cat People (Putting Out Fire) which loomed large in my pre-adolescent subconscious, and of Ashes to Ashes, an even freakier video in which he tiptoed around a woozy landscape dressed like a scary clown (or, as I noted mere months later, Doctor Who in 'Watcher' form), or as a thrashing astronaut brought down to a suburban nightmare. Even I knew that Major Tom was a junkie by then. 

Then I discovered David Bowie with Let's Dance and China Girl; and, inspired by information gleaned from a courtesy cousin 'enthusiast', made my own compilation of Bowie songs, one side of a C60 cassette combining the various records we had and off-air radio recordings. "That's Bowie-", the excited announcer cries out at the end of Let's Dance; an addition I'm utterly unable to edit out, but which at least convinces me that once you're on top of the world you don't need two names. Like the rest of my class I was a fan. Briefly.

Then I forgot Bowie, and found him again, and set him aside once more for other things. He did duets with Tina Turner, movies like Labyrinth and Absolute Beginners, the Glass Spider Tour, floundering fare like Tonight and Never Let Me Down, and a classmate was such an ardent fan I avoided Bowie for years.  I was done. There were more interesting and less try-hard and pretentious artists out there. Like Sting!

I discovered Bowie in the smoky, incense-fogged bedroom of a bandmate on a loose Saturday night not gigging. He played Hunky Dory and pointed out, quite rightly, that it had a lot going on over the Flying Nun stuff I was immersed in. Even Andy Warhol.

Then Bowie turned fifty and had a big party with my university favourite acts, like Robert Smith, Frank Black, Billy Corgan and Foo Fighters. He released Earthling and Little Wonder, went all drum-n-bass and jungle, and in the middle of a brief but colourful UK glam revival in the Nineties, I was intrigued. Bowie pointedly didn't do the glam bits, but he didn't need to when the likes of Suede, Babylon Zoo, Spacehog, Placebo, Nicky Wire and Todd Haynes were happy to tip their hats to the master.

I rediscovered Bowie wearing headphones in a city dentist's chair in Wellington, listening to a supplied CD (Suffragette City), one of the most exciting songs I'd ever heard the man play. And being played by a Cuba Street busker (Ziggy Stardust). He was everywhere. I bought two compilations (The Best of David Bowie 1969-1973, The Best of David Bowie 1974-1979) and listened to it - selectively.

Then Bowie came to Wellington, and on a very rainy night I went to the concert. More on that later. Graham Reid produced three excellent overviews of the man's music for Radio NZ, interspersed with some earlier interviews. It was an education, uncovering more deep cuts to my growing knowledge - The Belway Brothers, Memories of a Free Festival, It's No Game. I think I still have the tapes somewhere...

Dad Rock ensues. Nothing to see here.

Then I rediscovered David Bowie through Jet Junior, who was, like many of his generation, an early adopter of the futuristic. Bowie songs grew and grew among our bedtime song collections. I finally discovered the simple genius of Absolute Beginners and its gorgeous C#m to Gdim drop through playing it on a ukulele of all things. But then, as Jet Jr would remind you, Bowie composed Lust for Life on a ukulele, so there. Kooks was my favourite to sing to him, and still is.

I'm still discovering David Bowie.

RIP Brett Ewins

Strange Days - Ewins channels Tenniel

I was very much saddened to hear of the passing of UK comics artists Brett Ewins earlier this week.

Ewins was at his height in the pages of 2000AD just as I began to take notice of it and started collecting. Through the middle era of Rogue Trooper and then on to memorable stints on Judge Dredd and its spin-off Anderson PSI Division, Ewins’ work was rarely out of the mag for long, and in time he’d notch up another well-loved series to his belt, the quite brilliant Bad Company.

His work made an immediate impression on me, for various reasons. It was recognisable, reliable, and easy on the eye – you could admire the brilliance of artists like Mick McMahon or Carlos Ezquerra, the robust meatiness of Cam Kennedy’s brushwork or the precise lines of Brian Bolland, but Ewins seemed more accessible to the illustrator in training. This isn’t to say his work was the less, or not as sophisticated than his stable mates, but to a degree – and in particular in Ewins’ middle era of the mid-Eighties in 2000AD, there’s the ability to anatomise his work; he paints with a heavy brush, all elements on the page readily-identifiable components; his work, while dynamic and obviously influenced by US comics artists, had a layered arrangement which was easier for me to pick apart and see how he’d put everything together. To this day McMahon at his height, and Kevin O’Neill with him, seem to defy compositional analysis on my part – some panels are brilliant messes – orgies of limbs and skewed planes, but Ewins’ work, which became crisper and more stylised over time, was a great lead-in to the world of illustration. I’d say that his work, alongside his colleague and friend Steve Dillon, was the style I most frequently looked to in developing my own meagre talents.

Judge Gellar, one of three Ewins covers for HoSH9

Personal favourites of mine seem to echo those of a lot of others from Ewins' portfolio – the psionic thriller The Haunting of Sector House 9 is regarded as a bit of a throwaway Dredd story, but it introduced some great characters in PSI Chief Judge Omar, and my favourite male PSI Judge the never-seen-again Judge Gellar, whose half-head of hair standing on end made for such an attractive prog cover. Maybe it was the fact that for such a short story Ewins provided no fewer than three covers for Sector House, but it with its spectral terrors, heavy line work and fun script, it was an early highlight in my collection.

The Possessed - Ewins channels Polanski!

Ewins also seemed the natural successor to Bolland in depicting Judge Anderson – other reliable hands like Cliff Robinson and Robin Smith had drawn her, too, but Ewins’ outing on the classic The Possessed cements the Eighties Anderson entirely – all bubblegum curves and Debbie Harry hair combined. Added to that his off-the-leash body horror panels and quirky design choices (Exorcist Judges!) made for a really fun strip. That same approach to the phantasmagorical led to Ewins and past co-creators Jim McCarthy and Pete Milligan working on the mad and memorable Bad Company, a SF Vietnam allegory on a heaving alien jungle world detailing the descent of a band of misfit soldiers into hell, led by their Karloffian sergeant Kano.

Looking back, I think Bad Company was Brett Ewins' peak at The Galaxy's Greatest Comic; despite being the first artist to draw ABC Warriors' Deadlock in strip form, despite Ewins' involvement in Dredd's The Day the Law Died, and visualising the Wally Squad, perhaps it's the unity of having one artistic team in  Ewins and McCarthy that makes the later series the most visually memorable.

After Bad Company came Deadline, Ewins' own title with Steve Dillon which introduced readers to Jamie Hewitt and combined Ewins' two loves of music and comics, being the mature readers' pop culture magazine that 2000AD couldn't yet manage to be. Though short-lived and seemingly doomed by the fate of its greatest character's movie adaptation, Deadline gave the world Tank Girl, and arguably in Ewins and Dillon Tank Girl has two godfathers.

Unfortunately the pressure of real-life deadlines and multiple commitments seem to have had a deleterious effect on Ewins' mental health, and as commissions suffered and dried up, the artist went into a long period of illness against which he fought to the endwhich contributed to his all-but disappearing from the industry. I remember seeing his work in 2000AD around 1992 - pretty much the last work he did for the title, and how it had diminished, becoming even more stylised, less textured, relying on tricks like duplicate panels and close ups, seemingly to cut corners - the whole effect was only increased by the early, flat computer colouring of the time. Not knowing the story behind the pictures, I was perhaps too dismissive. 

Like a blue Wendy O Williams: Venus Bluegenes

There's still a huge amount I love about Ewins' work for 2000AD. Much of it is of its time, a sort of Eighties Noir with Dutch angles and swimming in shadow. Also, it was a rare thing to see in the early years of 2000AD, but Ewins was  an artist unafraid to embrace the, er, 'cheesecake', and I'd be lying if I didn't say that his Anderson and Rogue Trooper's femme fatale Venus Bluegenes made a discreet impact on my flowering adolescence. I still reckon Ewins drew Venus best.

I hope we'll see a decent Ewins collection from Rebellion Publishing in time. For me, he is the epitome of the comic in the Eighties.

RI (P), Rik...

It's a sad day in the Simian household, with the untimely death of the great Rik Mayall announced this morning.

I'm trying to recall the first time I was exposed to Mayall's comedy - probably it was Bad News Tour, made in 1983 (contemporaneously with This is Spinal Tap, apparently) but screened here some time in 1984. The mockumentary, shot 'fly on the wall'-style was a wickedly accurate pillorying of the banal and grubby world of the titular and highly amateur NWOBHM band. Being a young heavy metal fan I lapped it up and eagerly awaited the repeat screening a few years later, in time for the sequel. In the mean-time there was of course the ubiquitous The Young Ones (mid-1985, on a deservedly and therefore very cool late Friday night slot), which informed much of my infatuation with British pop culture of the time and then the underrated Filthy Rich and Catflap, The New Staesman, and ultimately Bottom in the Nineties.

 Through the late Eighties and early Nineties Mayall was almost everywhere - more often than not with Ade Edmondson, but not always. Young Ones was very big at my school (I had a mate who looked disturbingly like Rik and once submitted to requests from some girlfriends to have his hair done in the signature style of The People's Poet. Sadly, no photographic evidence exists) and latterly Bottom also blew our pants off, the first episode's cries of "Gas Man! Gas Man!" turning into a weird shorthand among friend for anyone we met who was decidedly a little off-skew. Drop Dead Fred was what ou might call a guilty pleasure - well, I liked it.

I don't exaggerate when I say that Mayall was seemingly everywhere - my first year at university had a Young Ones themed Orientation and I seized a poster for my wall. He was eminently spottable, whether cameoing in An American Werewolf in London and semi-regularly in Blackadder, co-starring in various Comic Strip productions (personal favourite appearances outside the Bad News stories: Consuela, Dirty Movie, Mister Jolly Lives Next Door and A Fistful of Traveller's Cheques) or on his tod, notably in a one-off screening of Weekend in Wallop, which introduced me to Mayall's early creation, the fantasist Colin Turvey:

Turvey seems to be a variation on many of Mayall's own creations - the tragically unhip outsider with delusions of popularity, talent or wit. Rik the Poet, Catflap's Richey Rich, Bad News' would-be dilletante Colin Grigson, and even Richard Richard, the frustrated middle-aged bludger of Bottom. Little wonder that he sought other roles to expand his repertoire, even when the old stand-bys never really left him. I did, however, really enjoy Rik Mayall Presents, with his episodes opposite Helena Bonham Carter (Dancing Queen) and Alan Cumming (Micky Love) being clear highlights. And off-screen a 'straight' production of Waiting for Godot, reuniting Mayall with Edmondson. I'd only read about this in The New Satesman, and for years wondered what the production would have been like - it sounded fantastic, but possibly misjudged. Did they pull it off? There only seems to be this news footage surviving as any indication:

Which isn't to discount his other collaborations with Edmondson - Twentieth Century Coyote's Dangerous Brothers which seemed incredibly anarchic when my flat watched it on off-air video. And of course, Bottom again, quite possibly the pinnacle of the pair's career where their writing and chemistry was absolutely top notch, even when corpsing live on stage in Southhampton:

 

My God but did we used to rewind that bit until the tape went speckly. And now it's set me off again. Rest in Peace, Mr Mayall, and thanks for all the laughter.

Doodle a Day: 24/10/2013

Another quick one, today. This is a straightforward pen piece worked from an earlier pencil sketch. How early? Well, I first drew it in 2005, and found it today in a notebook.

This is a view out of a hospital room window, looking out onto the roof of what was the Middle School in Oamaru, a school which my Mum attended as a girl, but which was for many years of my life employed variously as a band hall, clubrooms and costume wardrobe space, before finally being restored and re-purposed as part of the new Oamaru Hospital. I drew it while visiting that Labour Weekend, sitting idly at a bedside, because my mind was wandering but I didn't want to be anywhere else, especially. I remember at the time feeling a little guilty that I'd taken my attention away from the person sleeping in that room, but at the same time I knew I wanted something to look back at and remind me of that time in times to come; so here it is.

The Captain Cook: My Part in its History.

Tonight Dunedin’s Captain Cook Tavern closes its doors for quite possibly the final time as one of the longest running and most famous (and infamous) student drinking halls.

The Cook in 2006. It wasn't a Tui pub in my day.

 Nudging Otago University campus for decades, the Cook has in recent years been all but swallowed by the still-growing academic quarter. In recent years its fellow Scarfie pubs The Gardens and The Bowling Green (The Bowler) were in turn closed and purchased by the University, their sites put to better use than watering the throats of their respective student neighbours. I have no sentimental memories of either pubs, miserable boorish concrete booze barns that they were. Both claimed a student relevance that was questionable – The Gardens held its corner longer due to being in Castle Street, but its claim to a garden bar was laughable unless you liked prison yard chic, and The Bowler’s increasingly tragic attempts to mine the ‘Scarfie’ identity with further questionable themes ‘Wife-beater Wednesday’ and couch burning competitions. It earned no sympathy from me when that particular noisy dive was deep-sixed by the modern trend of pre-loading back at the flat. Good riddance.

The Cook was no blushing innocent of course, and at its age could never claim to be. Cookathons, Bladder-bursts, Drink the Pub Dry nights – all got a look in from time to time, and in my first year I’d grimly joke that the easiest way to find my way into town was to trace the puddles of vomit from my hall of residence to the Cook, then the blood spatters to the Hospital A + E before turning a quick right into Hanover Street. Sunday morning walks past would inevitably be met nodding g’day to the downstairs barman Big Merv from as he stood hose in hand, stoically washing down the car park walls from the night before (and in the mid-Nineties, the early mornings also.) I’d scoot past it on weekend nights, its jukebox blaring out the windows the leery ruggerhead anthems of Th’ Dudes, and The Exponents, as swaying ‘boys’ queued loosely outside to get in, prepping the car park wall for Norm the next morning while they waited. Not my tribe, mate, and I wouldn’t be seen dead in that queue.

My local was for most of my time The Oriental, on the other side of campus and opposite the Pink Flat. It was quieter, a little less student-filled, had a sort of old-days character, and was easier to get into on a Friday afternoon, which is invariably when I and my flatmates and fellow band members would gather, often staying for a solid steak meal before mounting the foot assault up half of North East Valley to my flat. Sometimes we stayed longer and we, and it, got rowdier. The ‘Ori’ was my bar of choice for three years, even after I’d moved to the other side of the Octagon, but that said, I regret to admit that I never played live there. There wasn’t much choice, truth be told, because it wasn’t a band venue, and I think I only saw two gigs there in my whole Uni years (although one was a particularly excellent Verlaines performance.) At the same time I can admit with some quiet pride that we did play The Cook, supporting Death Ray Café one summer evening in late 1990. It was probably a Thursday, the weekend nights being otherwise reserved for the jukebox and dance floor scene; but a gig’s a gig, and knowing that the host band had some Flying Nun pedigree (David Pine from Sneaky Feelings) and that this was the same pub that younger Chills, Bored Games and Verlaines members had set up deck chairs on the outside lawns over the road to hear early Enemy and Toy Love performances, just cemented the significance of what was otherwise a modest and short set. More importantly, it enabled me to catch up with an old school acquaintance, Jac, who was at first to connect us with another ex-schoolmate with a four-track studio, and then later to properly join the band.

 In the end for me The Cook’s best moments were those quiet times of fellowship. Meeting old friends, enjoying the wee miracle of the garden bar outside term time, wolfing down the occasional wet lunch on a weekday with a workmate before slipping tipsily back to work at the University Library for the afternoon (a trick I only attempted once or twice), and in my second to last year, frequenting its downstairs corner bar, where I discovered the Cook’s other open secret – a common place for Arts post-grads and die-hard ‘dependent’ staff that was quieter than the main and garden bars, and a little less salubrious than the staff club, but with a much better jukebox.

I hope that in whatever incarnation the Cook continues, there’s room at least for that sort of Scarfie tradition

Ray Harryhausen

Stop motion was a dominant form of animation when I was growing up. It infiltrated so many shows and movies of my childhood in large and small ways - Star Wars, Vision On, Sesame Street, Land of the Lost, and ultimately Clash of the Titans, the final great show reel of the movie making genius of Ray Harryhausen. My first encounter with Harryhausen's work had been a TV clip of Jason and the Argonauts' famous skeleton fight - still an effective and masterfully-choreographed mix of live action and animation. You've seen it - of course you have. Let's all watch it again:




Classic work, with some assured, slight, genius touches 'humanising' the bony killers - I love the occasional cutaway to those oddly expressive and malevolent grinning skulls, the deft wall vault one makes around the 2:45 mark, and of course that initial baleful scream - in my opinion much mimicked (on more than one occasion by Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and Xena franchises) but never equaled.

Of course Ray Harryhausen's work amounts to more than a standard Basic D&D level party melee, although you can be sure that a fair few skeleton encounters in my D&D playing games were based on that encounter and replayed in my head as a variation thereof. Surely that scene is why living skeletons are in the game to begin with? Speaking of which, surely, once again, there is a causal link between Golden Voyage of Sinbad's animated murderous ship figurehead and a similar murderous ship's figurehead in (SPOILERS!) AD&D Adventure Vault of the Drow. Even in my teens and pre-Jurassic Park the dinosaurs we encountered in our games were the stop motion monsters of Valley of Gwanji (still a favourite - somebody remake it. No, on second thoughts don't!), and though my adolescent adventurers never encountered a colossal Iron Golem, you can bet I'd have visualised it as Talos.

There are a lot of posts on the Internet about Harryhausen's effect as a movie pioneer and the filmmakers he inspired. I don't think there are as many championing his ability to penetrate the imagination. His work could amuse, enthrall, emote and horrify - the latter being ably exemplified in this sequence from my only big screen Harryhausen viewing (but it was a good one), 1982's Clash of the Titans' Medusa battle:


Probably a good ten years ago some friends and I revisited and experienced again Ray Harryhausen's entire oeuvre. Great early evenings of a mad scrabble from the office to the cable car and up to a viewing at VUW's AV suite. The movies were old and increasingly cheesy (particularly the Sinbad series), but made all the more enjoyable - the best viewing yet, in the company of friends.

Thanks for the thrills, Ray.

Tuwhare / Hotere

Back when I first launched Jetsam my plan was to begin proceedings with a post about the then-recent passing of Hone Tuwhare. The content of the post would have been brief, unfamiliar as I was and still am, relatively, to Tuwhare’s work. With the death this week of collaborating artist Ralph Hotere it therefore seems fitting that I revisit that early draft, concerned as it was with one of their better-known joint works. As a young Simian I entered Otago University without a firm geographic compass point. When you are new to a large space of buildings, concourses and hallways you make do with what you recognise and stick around with familiar spots, even if you’ve no business being there study-wise. Otago University’s then Hocken Building, monolithic and shaped like two great Brutalist stereo speakers amid bluestone and concrete precincts, was one such place, and indeed in my first year, apart from the odd exhibition at the small Hocken Gallery and foray into the library of the same name, there wasn’t much reason for me to be there. It was an effective short-cut from the banks of the Leith to the Student Union lawn, though, and on rainy days it was a decent enough, if echoing dry spot. On Fridays I’d go there to take a lift to my doomed Anthropology and History tutorials, and visit the gallery on the way out. For the rest of the week I’d be elsewhere. Easily the most box-like of all the building on campus, it seemed especially closed-off and sequestered, and not in the charming way of the university’s other, older buildings and theatres. I never really warmed to it.

 But what I did like, my favourite part of the building in fact, was the triptych hanging in its ground floor entrance; three canvas strips of speckled grey, white and black, like a Dunedin footpath in a February sun shower. At the foot of each banner in the painterly hand of its artist Hotere were the words of Tuwhare’s Rain. As an artist Hotere’s also work never really struck home with me. I used to find him a bit suspect, unnecessarily derivative of ‘better’ artists like Colin McCahon. If that’s a short-sighted judgement then maybe I was jaded at the same time, Hotere’s work being in the late 80s and early 90s as ubiquitous as his presence in the Otago artist community. So familiar as to be taken for granted. I would walk past a lot of his work seeing instead aspects of other artists in the bold streaks of red and white against deep fields of black and brown. Expressions and political concepts condensed into stencilled letters and numerals, spatters of that same palette on vast canvases creating a spectacle, but not really saying anything to me.

 My first encounter with the Hocken building was my first encounter with the poem and the artwork, and for an even younger would-be student fumbling his way through the campus on a day-visit for my final year of school, the encounter resonated fully. I don’t remember much of my seventh form year’s studies – just English (which I’d continue with at Otago) and Art. I still fumble with verse to this day, to be honest, but there in that triptych was for me a perfect and seamless melding of the visual and the figurative; Tuwhare’s raindrops realised in Hotere’s long dappled banners, the verse scrawled as though committed quickly in a stream of senses. That year I’d learned the power of negative space in painting, and though Hotere’s Rain afforded none in its canvas borders, to a small onlooker in a gargantuan concrete building in a new and fascinating place, that space found me. Many times I’d return to that triptych in my time as a student and look up at the hanging above me, and on each viewing, like Tuwhare's voice in the rain, I’d find it again.

I can hear you
making small holes
in the silence
rain

If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut

And I
should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind

the something
special smell of you
when the sun cakes
the ground

the steady
drum-roll sound
you make
when the wind drops

But if I
should not hear
smell or feel or see
you

you would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me
rain.

Hone Tuwhare 1922-2008
Ralph Hotere 1931 - 2013

Jet and Gerry

In a small and recent series of strange coincidences, the delivery of some of my old toys to the Monkeyhouse has led me to posting these images of a model I once had.

This is labelled simply "Command Module" and is, to my recollection, the last remnant of a larger model I once had - one of the first I made myself (including decals and painting, mind!), aside from the odd ham-fisted collaborative attempt on fighter planes with my brother, and some snap-together Star Trek models (Enterprise, Klingon Warbird, Vulcan... thing) I also had and am only now remembering I gave away, along with a small Wrath of Khan poster, to a Trek-loving friend. No loss to me at the time, but still. Oh, and now I'm remembering that I also had an Apollo 11 lunar module in 1:100 scale, complete with astronauts and Moon surface. I wonder what became of that...?

I digress. I was all ready to post this with the request that if any readers knew what it was and who made it, could drop me a line; only, in a last-minute Googling I found the answer - it's a Martin Bower-designed Gerry Anderson model. See how the pilot, loose from his chair seems to show his scorn for my poor memory in time-honoured style:

In fact, its proper name is Starcruiser1, as detailed further here, and as seen on the box below:

And yes, I did have the rest of the model, though I'm guessing it got lost, snapped off through months of use and positioning around a steadily cluttering late childhood room (I'd have been maybe ten when I bought it?)
I wasn't what you'd call a Gerry Anderson fan, though I did watch my share of Stingray and Thunderbirds, and even a bit of Captain Scarlet as a student,catching up on some furtive childhood viewing. It was bleak stuff, and like UFO perhaps a little beyond my usual viewing tastes (I also found Blake's 7 similarly moribund). But Gerry's works definitely sunk in, becoming part of the background noise of my teen geekdom that, maybe Doctor Who did for others. And so the news that Gerry Anderson died today still saddens me. Supermarionation aside, the model work in his later series was never anything less than excellent for it production values, and I think that Anderson deserves to be placed alongside Ray Harryhausen as a master of bringing the world in miniature alive on our screens.  His shows were fun, moralistic, and for the most part optimistic ventures, and his heroes were not hard to cheer on at all. I feel we may not see much of their like now in a more 'three-dimensional' age of storytelling and programming.

Rest in Peace, sir.

Harry Harrison

2012 is turning out to be a really rotten year. Following the recent deaths of Ray Bradbury and Margaret Mahy, this week saw the passing of Harry Harrison, one of the greats, and a real name from the Golden Age of popular SF. Harrison is unique among the writers I discovered by virtue of first coming to my attention through comics. 2000AD ran a series of adaptations of Harrison's celebrated Stainless Steel Rat books through to around 1984's Stainless Steel Rat for President and, as it turned out, the first year of my collecting the comic full-time. In the pages of 2000AD Slippery Jim DiGriz was in the reliable hands of Dredd/Strontium Dog artist Carlos Ezquerra, and so it's his version of the silver-haired rogue that stays with me even now.

In those same pages the letters column would regularly be filled with readers speculating on how they'd cast movie versions of the comic's strips. You could rely on Joe Dredd's tight boots being filled by Clint Eastwood, and for DiGriz the actor of choice was invariably James Coburn, which worked for me after I saw him in The President's Analyst. Nowadays, maybe Clooney?

The role of the Rat definitely needs a light touch, and it seems that this sort of character was what Harrison really specialised in. You can't help but side with this crook, no doubt seduced as you were by the first-person narrative. I definitely was - even seeking out the novel of SSRFP at the local library to check how faithful the adaptation was (pretty much, I concluded), and then following it with the original novel. Perhaps the Silver one will finally reach the silver screen? It's a shame Harrison never saw it happen, I guess.

To my shame, that's almost all I read of Harry Harrison's work, save for another one of his best, Make Room! Make Room! - almost the opposite to the Rat stories. A future dystopia (a friend once observed that there are no future utopian fiction, and I haven't seen anything to prove otherwise) of an overcrowded planet and a desperate and awful solution to world hunger, filmed of course as Soylent Green (I didn't care for the adaptation this time), and of course somewhat diminished by being one of the most spoiled endings of modern SF because of it. The novel is the superior, and I remember how much it affected me, even though a few years' worth of similar stuff in 2000AD should have prepared me well enough.

And so, like Bradbury before him, I feel as though I have a lot of reading to do.  But here's to you, Mr Harrison. Here's hoping that the world you're inhabiting now is every bit as bold and exciting, human and humourous as the world of Jim DiGriz. And thanks for the great stories.

Donna Summer, Disco and Sci-Fi

"One day in Berlin ... Eno came running in and said, 'I have heard the sound of the future.' ... he puts on 'I Feel Love', by Donna Summer ... He said, 'This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.' Which was more or less right."

-David Bowie, Sound+Vision

Donna Summer died yesterday after an undisclosed battle with cancer. With her, I feel a little of my childhood is now gone. My earliest recollection of Summer's work was probably when I was nine or ten, visiting with my brother the house of one of his friends. His friend had Summer's early Best Of, 'On the Radio' and was playing it, while his Dad, the local police sergeant, came into their lounge and dismissed the singer as "a moaning cow". We thought it was pretty funny, but the song stuck with me; hearing it frequently later on, of course, the radio, it's still one of the earliest Donna Summer singles I can easily recall. The big song of Summer's earlier career though was probably always on the radio, just not one I'd associated wth her at the time - 'I Feel Love'.

'I Feel Love' owes much to Summer's voice, but for me it's the arrangement of Giorgio Moroder that sells the track; an escalating of upper register vocals gradually climbing the scales through each verse until, finally, releasing, Summer returning to a middle range and delivering the song title in a simple repeated line for the chorus. It's a killer, and it's no surprise to me that the song's been sampled and adopted by so many over the years. The chorus is what reveals Summer's presence more, almost a snarl of a delivery compared to the seemingly modulated vocals building previously. I doubt there's any more electronic trickery there than the usual production, but the way her vocals sustain the single-note "ooooh"  with every line while a flanged synthesiser wash follows further down the scale (the closest you're going to get to a bass line in this song) and Moroder's looped rhythm track repeats its own climb up the scale, turns the vocal into another synthetic trick. It's such a succesful matching that Summer's voice is less recognisable for it; for some time I though it was Debbie Harry, another of Moroder's later collaborators.

The looped rhythm is hypnotic, perfect for the dance floor and the sound of Disco, a rare movement in music for its futurism. The late Seventies saw a natural convergence of the highly-synthesised Disco sound with the ascent of popular Sci-Fi on the big and small screen, and so the likes of Moroder, Meco (who memorably Disco-fied the themes to the first two Star Wars movies), and the incorporated SF elements in the look and music of artists like Eruption, La Belle, Boney M and Earth Wind and Fire are for me intrinsically linked to the experience of watching Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica (whose chrome Cylons are the epitome of Disco-tech) and Logan's Run at the movies. Given the association it's little surprise that Beyonce would later reference the style for her own stage attire. And with her, of course, the likes of Kylie Minogue and Lady Gaga. Disco for me is the soundtrack of Seventies Sci Fi, and I haven't even mentioned the likes of Geoff Love and Jeff Wayne. Need I?

So farewell, Ms Summer. A voice destined to be with us for ages to come.

RIP Jim Marshall

If the master plan had come to fruition, there'd be a picture of a much-used, well-loved Marshall Amp here, which, given my rather timid approach to rock and/or roll at the time, would never have been turned past ten. So a sad farewell to a man whose product I always coveted, but haven't yet owned. I figure if I can make it to 88 myself, then I have a few more years yet to achieve the dream.

May the wonders of the next life go all the way to Eleven for you, sir...

[below: several Marshall amps put to good use]

Roy Skelton 1931 - 2011

One of two illustrated tributes to the modest man behind some of the most belligerent characters of Sixties and Seventies children's TV. And George the camp Hippo.



The other notable belligerents will be posted over on Zeus Blog (naturally) in the next few days.

Gary Moore

A crappy crappy way to start the week. Gary Moore is dead, aged 58.



Moore's music was a passing interest for me, and in all that interest probably didn't outlast my sixth form year. At the time though he was The Man - a very ordinary-looking bloke with a prodigious talent for guitar, evidenced by his very early career start with Thin Lizzy and later on his series of solo albums where his rather decent vocal talents were also employed. Around the time of my interest in his canon Moore shifted genres and became predominantly a blues guitarist. Blues was my brother's music, had an air of superiority and snobbishness in its audience, and so that was enough for seventeen-year old me and that was that. But Wild Frontier - some way into his solo career and perhaps not as good as earlier efforts, is still an important album for me, introducing me to a broader set of musicians after my enthusiasm for heavy metal had waned. Most importantly it introduced me to Thin Lizzy, although the Skids got a not-small look in as well, the three being roughly 'Celtic rock' and therefore to my still in-training ears, a very good thing.

Above, Moore get reacquainted with his former bandmate in a very ropey and over-earnest video for his Run for Cover album (it's Lynnott's last recording before his death the following year). Below, Moore joins erstwhile compatriots Knopfler, Gilmour - oh, and a couple of bassists, in a rather amusing Raw Sex/French and Saunders skit from a little further back in the day.



There, that's cheered me up. RIP Gary.