"Pooper Man" by Simon, aged 6 or 7

 As with yesterday's untitled Jaws parody, I start out with a straight steal, this time from Mad's "Superduperman!" (viewable here, although our paperback version at home was in black and white, making Lois Pain – far right - far more prominent in the opening splash)...

 

 ... and then I wander off. It's possible nevertheless I was at the height of my creative powers here. I would have had to come up with my own solutions to depicting stuff before I was proficient enough to start copying styles, and both the grizzly robot/monster hybrid and the balding, pot-bellied editor are surprisingly elegant, I think, considering – like the ripples yesterday. I'm also reminded of these fish I drew...

 

 I'm not sure I could design anything so simple and effective now.

 The Tarzan's just background, I think. I still don't really understand muscles. Sorry there was so little poop.

Untitled "Jaws" parody by Simon, aged 6

 Or maybe seven. That's my excuse for the "you're"/"your" confusion. The first page is missing, as you can see, so I don't know now what pun on Jaws I used as a title. The layout's based on paperback reprints of EC's "Mad" which we had around the house, as are some of the panels:

 

  Characters in Mad parodies would occasionally break character to ask "How's your mom, Ed?" I didn't know why*, but it hopefully explains some of what follows. I hadn't seen Jaws, obviously, but I assumed the film followed the plot of King Kong, which Mad had also parodied, (source):

 

 I didn't follow the plot of King Kong either though, because I was six. Clearly I stuff every frame with as much extraneous detail as my felt tips would let me, in the Mad style, but the way I depict things emerging from the water is actually quite minimalist and, I'd even go so far as to say, elegant. I'm pleased. Minimalism and elegance were big in 1980, as were were sharks. I remember, I had a big book that taught me how to draw "sea monsters" in four steps. A shark was a cone with two eyes and gills. It's all coming back now.

 This is too long an introduction for what follows though. Sorry.

 

 

 Did you guess the twist?!

* I've only just now looked up what the line refers to, and it's perfect.

Someone Can Represent Something To You Without You Noticing

Bye bye, nice face man. (Source) 

 Tears, weirdly, on and off all evening, as soon as I found out that Christopher Plummer was dead. He seemed to be working harder and harder over the last fifteen years, was that it? He always seemed part of a team, too. This evening, I'd seen Ana de Armas sharing beautiful pictures of the two of them working together on Knives Out on instagram, but hadn't bothered to read why. Don't watch the clip below if you don't want spoilers, but know it's one of the first three things I think of now when I think of Christopher Plummer.

 

 An actor is said to "hold their own" when sharing a screen with a legend like him, as if acting is a zero sum game of attention, which for some actors I suppose it is, but not Plummer. Nobody's good on their own, and I've seen Verne Troyer "hold his own" with Plummer. I can think of no other film star over eighty so regularly – and successfully – employed to show love towards those he played opposite. He might prove irreplaceable. 

 This is the second thing I think of when I think of Christopher Plummer: my DVD of Beginners.

 

 

 I'm not scared of dying, I don't think, and I'm not scared of aging. But I am scared getting older will make be me crueller and more dull. It's harder to meet different people when you're older – not just new people, different people, which, I think, keeps you kind. But in his final years, there's nowhere Christopher Plummer looked out of place. So this might be what he represents. He reminds me that I chose to be an actor, and he reminds me why. Because I thought it might be a way to see the world, and a way to stay young. 

 We'll see.

 This is the third thing I think of:

 

The actual Imaganarium of Dr. Parnassus, whose full build you can see documented here. 

Egbert van Heemskerck's Animal Sketches

 ... are even more horrifying than Cornelis Saftleven's. Having said last Thursday how rare it was to see seventeenth-century Dutch artists tackle medieval demons and animal allegories, I notice this week that "Monster Brains" has put up another one, so maybe it's not. Egbert van Heemskerck's style – or styles in fact, because there were two painters called Egbert van Heemskerck around at the time, apparently unrelated, maybe even three according to wikipedia, and noone knows who painted what – anyway, his/their style is far less photo-realistic than Saftleven's, and I don't just mean worse – maybe cruder, but that's part of its terrifying power, and I'm pretty sure the pictures are meant to terrify. One picture is anyway. Not the sketch above, that's just a bit of fun (apparently satirising the British Navy). The harder stuff I've decided to spare you, unless you're absolutely sure you want to see a painting called "The Monkey Surgeon". 

 Let me describe "The Monkey Surgeon". It looks like it could have been painted in a single night, or maybe even a minute: It shows a darkened operating room lit by a single, smoking brazier, crowded with braying, misshapen animals, eys and teeth glinting in the murk. A pig's head and other offal fill two buckets on the floor, while a split ox's carcass and other, less identifiable animal shreds hang from the ceiling. In the centre, its muzzle hidden beneath a blood-stained turban, something pulls the entrails from a kitten. 

 So if you want to see that, it's HERE.

The Joke Not Gotten

 

The poet Robert Frost on his eighth brirthday. (Source.)

 

 I can't believe I was up until 4 in the morning, rhyming. I've enjoyed writing up my walks, but less so last night. It turns out, trying to pastiche Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken", just because there's something or other you might have wanted to say about a specific set of crossroads, is not the best way of working out what that something actually is, and I realised today one of the problems might have been that, while I know the poem, I wasn't entirely sure what it was about, and so I didn't know what I was I playing off. I did a little research then, and was relieved to discover I wasn't alone: According to this article, Frost in fact had written one of the most quoted poems in the English language as a mock-heroic joke for his friend Edward Thomas, but it had fallen completely flat, prompting Thomas to finally write back “I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them & advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.” The misunderstanding would rankle Frost for the rest of his life.

 This made me feel a lot better. And if you're reading this, the late Robert Frost, then hey, I know just how you feel, I've been where you are. I was there last night, mate. I cut a whole stanza out just before publishing it. Do you want to read– I'll get it–

 

    But then why the divergence? To walk through a wood?

    It wasn't a wood, it was five metres wide.

    You could hardly get lost, and so what was the good?

    I supposed, if you're feeling adventurous, you could

    At least have the trees either side.

 

 So, this was going to come after the first verse, then I realised it was basically filler – Is it a joke? Who knows, right? – I mean, my whole poem's basically filler, but I put the hours in, and it rhymes. So have this one on me, Bob. I feel so much closer to you right now.

This was Regent's Canal on Tuesday afternoon at 4pm

 Two roads diverged by London Zoo,

 Along the canal and the undergrowth

 Where I found out in Summer that raspberries grew.

 One up to the main road, so far as I knew.

 Or either one took you the same way as both.

 

 I headed uphill, for two metres or so,

 But the path didn't lead to the road. It just ran

 Parallel to the towpath two metres below,

 With a slightly more foresty vibe to it though,

 Of which, I admit, I'm a fan.

 The paving was cracked and the brambles were cute

 And the branches were dense, and it rose and it sank

 But the road was quite long, and if this did not suit,

 The smoother and wider, more sociable route

 Was still six feet away on the bank.

 

 "Desire paths" – or at least absence of grass –

 Had therefore been worn out at breaks in the fence,

 Perhaps by those finding the towpath too sparse,

 Perhaps to protest the conceptual farce

 Of crossroads that make no difference.

Untitled ContraPoints Share

  

"who'll have you."

 

 

 I have so many takeaways from this video – I always have takeaways from Natalie Wynn's work, they're more like solo shows than youtube videos, a full evening's watch requiring a wind-down – but trying to express those takeways in neat little titles, like most bigotry is actually backlash, or projection isn't empathy, won't do this fantastic piece justice, because the reason ContraPoints' pieces are so long is Wynn refuses to pretend anything is simple, or anyone an abstract. Also she likes to bathe in milk and take cocktail breaks, but that's all part of the care package. Backlash is always making a push for respectability, in the guise of "debate", but the idea that liberation must be earnt by argument, rather than simply granted, is surely one of the crappiest our culture has clung to. Argument's not how you understand something, understanding requires love and study. Not that love and understanding need go hand in hand; if you don't understand something, just send love on ahead. But Wynn – both a trans woman, and the receiver of sustained abuse from trans twitter herself – tries harder than most to understand, and she does it with love and opulence.

  

"When you dehumanise the villains, you become unable... to recognise... the villain... within...

How is she though? She needs a hot toddy is what she needs." 

 

 P.S. You might want to help out with this.