Hungry Hungry Harpies

  

 

 "Gods, Men, and Monsters"... I'm still thinking about that title.

 Of all the monstered women of Greek Mythology the most referenced is probably the harpy. There are no drawings of harpies in my old Greek Mythology notebook however, so here instead is Raoul Servais's Harpya, a cracking interpretation, funny in a way that makes it hard to see how one could faithfully depict the myth of a lady with the body of a large bird who repeatedly steals food without being funny. Her gender here is a default rather than a dig though, and her modestly civilized Phineas an identifiably unsustainable sap. Originally recommended by David Cairns here, I came across it again looking through the same unposted, old drafts from 2015 in which I'd found my David Icke notes. The draft began: "I was thinking about monsters," - so, not as new an activity as I thought then - "and who to make the baddies. Binge-watching Buffy and thinking about how, growing up, the monsters don't actually appear to go away..." then there's some stuff about the House of Lords. No idea. Let's just watch the cartoon. They don't give out Palme D'Ors to any old rubbish, you know.

 

 

 (Having never drawn a harpy at school, my first attempt at depicting one must have been at University, sellotaping bamboo canes to my sister's fingers for a film of The Tempest that she'd come down to help with only to end up being cast as Ariel. She was excellent, and looked nothing the Harpy above. Tom Lyall's Caliban on the other hand...)

 

It Seems I Remain Serious In My Belief that Shakespeare's As Good As Alan Moore.

Nice to see this all set out.

 I'd forgotten how intertwined my love of Shakespeare was with my love of Alan Moore. I fell in love with the both at about the same time, when I was thirteen, and coming back to the full works of Shakespeare now, I'm struck again by how many strengths I see him sharing with Moore's eighties output. Both writers moved from working in slaughter-houses to working in a popular medium derided as poisonous trash. Both took the plots and themes of contemporaraneous fantasies – chivalric love in Shakespeare's case, super-heroes in Moore's – and tested them in a real world populated by knowable characters, with often distressing consequences. Neither seemed particularly interested in heroes either, yet both seemed to believe heartily in sociopathic villains, to the point where they becoming the most fully rounded characters in any story would be a given.

 

 None of this has anything to do with the fact Moore gave his final comic the same name as Shakespeare's swansong, by the way. I've only just realised that.

 Both love words, and use loads of them, and equate writing with magic and magic with world domination, producing not just genre-defining but medium-defining works of cosmic ambition, beauty, and fun, never forget fun – works full of lines I wanted and still want to say, and references I didn't and still don't get. But also, ultimately, merciless works, unmistakably angry that fantasy isn't realisable. Angry, and basically frightened. Still, it didn't occur to me that Shakespeare's first comedy might prove a more disturbing read than Defoe's account of London in the Plague, but that's because I'd forgotten why I loved Shakespeare so much. Here's today's bit then, and after that you'll probably wonder what the fuss was all about. Soho takes its name from the hunting cry used here by Lance by the way. (And, like Lance, I also love crusts.)

Station to Station with Buster Keaton

He's standing in the wrong place!
Speaking of obvious Mirrorboy influences, seeing this image from The General recently, made me realise how much of Buster Keaton's comedy (and influence) can be derived from that one statement: he's in the wrong place. It's character comedy of a sort, but a classical figure in a non-classical landscape that's modern and breaking down and falling apart and moving differently to what you've braced yourself for is also pleasing just visually. You could say it predicted surrealism if Keaton didn't normally like people so much.
"The Frozen North" is an exception...

A complete break in character: here the Great Stone Face snarls, robs, murders the innocent, and incorporates a giant comedy beard into a rape scene in a way that had me genuinely gasping with laughter. It's alright though because it all turns out to be a dream or a film, or a dream in front of a film. I first watched it with the sound down, bewitched. It was only watching it the second time with the piano accompaniment up that I recoiled: this isn't a story that benefits from being buoyed up by ragtime, it needs music from the abyss, something that could sell a burning rose. Looking for a better accompaniment I went to Ralfe Bande's (the Ralfe Bande's?) fab absurdist-friendly score for Paul King's film "Bunny and the Bull", but reviewing the resultant mash-up I think it turned out a little joyless. Then I saw the photograph below, and went to Bowie. "Station to Station" is nice and long (if not long enough), but it's also fierce and I think it fits. See what you think. I'm going to pretend that this is Keaton's Bowie tribute.

On the subject of thin white dukes, David Cairns' blog introduced me to the film and explains here how the whole thing was actually a satire on a peculiarly gaunt contemporary - the unfortunately named William S. Hart - a star of the silent western who'd kicked Buster's friend and mentor Fatty Arbuckle when he was down. So much surrealism, it turns out, is just spoofs of things I haven't seen. (By the way the other name above the title - Eddie Cline - went on to direct most of W.C, Fields' features. His last, "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break", features Fields chasing a bottle of whiskey off the observation deck of an airplane only to land in a screwball interpretation of The Tempest, a mountain nest occupied by Margaret Dumont, her virgin daughter, and a gorilla. Recommended obvs.)

Extra-curricular use of th3 white base and top hat

(originally posted on myspace here)

 

... wwwwwas made on Monday evening in the insensitively well-lit Crypt of Saint-Martin's-in-the-Field - Saint-Martin-in-the-Field's - Saint's-Martin's-in-the's-Fields's-whatever it is. Time was, I remember, you could pop down there for a coffee and barely see who you were talking to, but now it's lit like a prison. Or Ikea. Perhaps nobody had told that to the people at Bloomsbury when they chose it as the location for the launch of Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, hiring a couple of actors to drift eerily past disguised as Victorian ghouls. Still it was packed. A bit too packed as my opposite undead number Alice (who actually did look great in her sulky cowl despite the absence of candle light) pointed out. You couldn't really "drift" anywhere, you had to more, kind of, "barge" eerily. So mainly we stood still and I decided to look a bit lost and pensive and hanger-onnish (I'd been generously invited that day to the Evening Standard Theatre Awards by Ella who'd just been nominated best newcomer - YAY - and guessed I'd be adopting much the same attitude) and I attempted to hold my hands in the manner of a Chris Riddell illustration. And below is a lovely little film by one of the greatest illustrators ever to work in comics, Dave McKean, who was also at the launch which made me very excited. And above is a little image from The Tempest film I made eleven willion years ago which I realize now shows his influence puh-retty clearly. In the flesh Dave McKean looks like some extraordinary household spirit, or the patriarch and sole beard-owner of an arboreal race visible only to the drinkers of neat willow hooch. Also a lot like a trimmed Arvo Part. His son and I had a staring contest. And I got him and Neil Gaiman to sign the inside of my battered dungeon topper. I'm getting paid in books. Not a bad gig really.

(I think that last caption reads "God finds an important use for the third, and previously spare dimension".)