Unto This Last

In the news today, a Norwegian far right Christian has killed at least 84 people by dressing up as a policeman and blasting away at an island youth resort. It's beyond depressing that one person can cause that much misery. Went for a coffee in Cafe Nero - no toilets, so had to visit Liverpool Street. One of the cleaner stations. A plaque on the wall commemorates the successful refurbishment on 1992. Now the trains are hidden away (could they do without them?) and the place has become a hanging garden of commerce with pigeon skewers on all the fixtures. Toilets cost 30p. Number 25 bus to Stratford. Pass the university and a sculpture relief with a person reading a book: “Unto This Last”. It is a line from the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard: “Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee,” referring to Jesus’ equal wage policy. More likely a reference to Ruskin’s 1860 essay of the same name, which dealt with ideas like a basic living wage and the destructive effects of capitalism on the natural world. A nice segue into the utopian folly that is now Stratford Olympic Village. From the bus, we could see a huge stadium, and a spiral tower growing like a plant alongside. Stratford bus and train station are now bigger, but dwarfed, as is the Stratford shopping centre, by the new Westfield shopping complex (biggest in Europe), a giant set of monogrammed boxes (Westfield, M&S...). Iain Sinclair is right: the whole place has been given over to visionless developers to sell back and forth until the land price bears no relation to its value, and noone can afford to live on it any more. That’s the long-term plan anyway. The next stage, post Olympics, is going to be an abandoned sculpture park, with a slowly spreading contagion of graffiti tags and knotweed. Europe’s largest white elephant.

Dodgem Logic

Alan Moore's counterculture magazine, 'Dodgem Logic' has come to an untimely end, or as he puts it:

"I'm sure you'll be as astonished as I was that our initial strategy of paying contributors, high production values, no stinking capitalist advertising and an affordably low cover price seems not to have worked".

Yes, all that, and having a very vague idea of who their target audience was: judging by this issue, I'd guess they're aiming for the 'Northampton-transvestite-socialist-coprophiliac' demographic, which is a notoriously fickle one. Anyway, I'm sorry they're going, without even publishing an interview with Jeff Lint. Nice picture here though, by Alex Musson after someone or other. So long, Dodgem Logic, you mad bastard, you...

Displacement Activity No. 2746

Symposium Response: I Buy to Belong

La Danse d'Argent

I don't know why I bother

EC War Comic Pastiche

Here's my somewhat sardonic pastiche of a 1950s EC 'new wave' war comic. 'Two-Fisted Tales' and 'Frontline Combat' were two war titles edited, written and given layouts by Harvey Kurtzman, one of the few outstanding talents in comics history. The stories range from straight out heroism to more thoughtful tales which far from glorify combat. They were way ahead of their time both in their message, which was that war ain't that great, and in their technical achievements, which have arguably yet to be surpassed. EC were the first comics to allow artists to draw as themselves, rather than in the 'house style'. This approach allowed creators to create their own fanbases, and meant the EC artists vied to outdo each other in artistic excellence. The style I'm going for here is obviously modelled on Harvey Kurtzman himself, though I would need a few more years practice to match his skill with a brush. The fact that I'm working in the computer age means that I could apply zipatone (dots) effect with photoshop and do the lettering very quickly.

Mid Point Review (Part Time Group)

1. Evaluation of my project proposal as part of a self directed programme of study.

I think my project proposal has been a good starting point for my work, but it has changed quite a lot. Originally I wanted to do work which related to immigration detention. As I was doing work which was based on comics, I wanted to see how these could intersect. I later found this idea a bit prescriptive, so I took the ideas that came out of the concept of detention: borders, being stuck, frustration and confusion, and started doing some work around this. This has proved a lot more fruitful for me.

2. Where I need to develop study plans in relation to the Unit 1 learning outcomes

I think I could pin my proposal down a bit more and make it more specific. I'm also interested in being more experimental in my use of materials and presentation. I think before I used to think of presentation as a kind of step that I would take after I finished working, and not a very interesting one. Now I am interested in creating a finished thing, and making the form of that thing influence the content in some way.

Work in Progress

I'm preparing a short book for an alternative press fair at the end of the month. Here's some stuff I'm working on. Any comments would be welcome!