Memorial stolen

Only a few days ago I was out with my dad and took some photographs of the new statue that was part of an upgraded memorial to the miners who lost their lives in the old Auchengeigh pit. The site commemorates two disasters, from the 30s and the 50s, the latter being especially bad with a large loss of life, men lost in the cold and dark deep beneath the earth. A bloody horrible, dirty, hard, dangerous job at the best of times. The statue of the miner with his head bowed was unveiled only in September to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1959 disaster. And then the other day it was stolen. Yes, stolen. Some utter lowlife scumball bastards stole a memorial to the dead, presumably for the value of the metal.

There are still people today who remember lost loved one who were victims of that disaster, but that won't matter to these evil bastards. They must have been planning it, they would have needed heavy equipment to remove it. It was there when folks left the nearby Miner's Welfare the night before and was gone when a local drove past early next morning. I hope they catch the bastards and get the statue back, but more than likely they have some git as unscrupulous and evil as them who is prepared to melt it down for the scrap value.







It had been raining just before I took this picture and I thought the effect in the close-up was quite good, like a cross between the sweat of hard labour and tears. Its hard not to look at the miner, head bowed and not think of my papa whose body was broken from work in the mines.

A Glorious Dawn

I see that this fab remix of the late and much missed Carl Sagan's word from Cosmos that has proved popular on YouTube is getting a release as a traditional 7 inch vinyl. Funnily enough a friend sent me some music tracks he came across recently, from Cosmos, which we both remembered watching; it was instant nostalgia for me. As a boy I adored the series; I was already fascinated by astronomy and the exploration of space and this fueled it, as well as introducing me for the first time to Sagan. Years later I'd admire him for speaking out for the importance of scientific research for the sake of research and not simply for commerce, for the value of knowledge over susperstition and the need to take care of our own remarkable world, so different from the other planets we were exploring - he even publicly berated Margaret Thatcher once when she was Prime Minister, scolding her for her lack of support for pure research and environmental awareness, telling her it was shocking that someone who actually had proper scientific training could be so foolish.

Apparently the B side of the single looks like the cover of the famous gold record disc which was placed in the Voyager spacecraft, so that long after they had completed their mission of exploration (which they did so magnificently) and headed out of our solar system and into the deep, cold depths of interstellar space, should they by some remote chance be found by another civilisation they could play them and hear sounds from Planet Earth - greetings in many languages, poetry and snatches of music, which Sagan helped oversee. Carl's been gone a while now, sadly, but that gold disc is now travelling still, further than any man made object in the entire history of the world has ever travelled, waiting for the day when someone - something,perhaps - finds it and plays it. (via Third Man Records)








And while we're at it, here's a short video, the Pale Blue Dot, by Carl. As the aging Voyager reached towards the edge of our solar system he argued for NASA to turn it to face back towards us - no easy task when the vast distance meant even radio signal commands travelling at the speed of light would take some time to reach the craft, then longer for returns, assuming it even worked. But he argued and they did it and the result was 'the family portrait', a view of the worlds of our solar system as no-one else in the history of our species had ever seen it, a shot taken from the edge of what we know from a little machine about to cross that boundary, a parting gift from one of the great missions of exploration. And in that picture a tiny dot, a blue dot taking up even less than one pixel. That dot being the Earth. Everything we've ever known, every person who has ever loved and lived, every cat, every dog, every Triceratops, every dolphin, every fern, every bush, every fish, every work of art, all contained inside that tiny, tiny dot... Sagan had that wonderful gift of enthusiasm and the ability to communicate the sense of wonder to all, a great spokesman for science.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

"Do not despair

For Johnny-head-in-air;

He sleeps as sound

As Johnny underground.




Fetch out no shroud

For Johnny-in-the-cloud;

And keep your tears

For him in after years.




Better by far

For Johnny-the-bright-star,

To keep your head,

And see his children fed."

For Johnny, written by John Pudney on the back of an envelope as the bombs fell on London in 1941.







The Remembrance Garden in Princes Street Gardens, right in the shadow of the Scott Monument; in the background were some anti-war protesters, although I should say they were quiet and not at all disrespectful; in fact I saw some talking to some old veterans. I don't think they had anything against the soldiers or those paying respects to the fallen, just against the concept of war, and its hard to disagree with that.










Some of the markers in the Remembrance Garden are plain, many have names or regiments or ships or squadrons marked on them. This one touched me the most - it simply read "to dad". I have no idea if the dad in question fell in one of the recent conflicts or half a century ago; I doubt it matters, the pain and loss and grief will still hurt as much.






This one was marked to 'Uncle Alex' on HMS Hood; the Hood was a famous, huge Royal Navy battlecruiser. During a duel with the German pocket battleship Bismarck she was completely destroyed; its thought a lucky hit penetrated the weaker upper deck armour and set off a magazine. She exploded and sank almost instantly taking hundreds and hundreds of men with her to the bottom of the ocean; only three sailors from this enormous ship survived. Some say one of her turrets fired a last salvo as she sank. The comedic actor and former Doctor Who Jon Pertwee also served on the Hood and had transferred off her just shortly before the battle to train as a chief petty officer, or he may never have lived to become a famous entertainer.







Not just historical battles remembered here but also the here and now as someone marks a cross for the men and women serving in Afghanistan right now.

Guy Fawkes night

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,
Expense claims, moats and cooked books,
I see no reason, why such high spenders,
Should ever be let off their hooks.







New research by leading academics at the University of Woolamaloo's Department of Historical Thinggies & Digging Old Stuff Up has revealed that Guido Fawkes, who lends his name to the traditions carried out in these islands on this day, was not as previously thought primarily motivated by religion as a dangerous Catholic fundamentalist terrorist, but was in fact driven chiefly by outrage caused by the seamy, selfish, profligate indulgences of the MPs of his era exploiting their overly generous expenses system. Thank goodness that in our civilised, modern era our politicians are too mature and noble and the system too accountable for them to behave in such a primitive manner.

fire juggling

Now that the clocks have gone back to GMT its fully dark by the time I leave work. Coming home one evening when it was unusually mild (and dry!) I decided on a whim to take a different route and walk up the Royal Mile, digging my camera out of my bag thinking I may get a couple of street night shots; in a slice of pure lucky chance I happened on a fire juggler on the cobbled pedestrianised section of street outside the Fringe office. Obviously I've seen and taken plenty of pics of jugglers chucking around all sorts of things from knives to firesticks around this spot during the Festival, but not usually this late in the year and at night; certainly made the use of fire look far more dramatic being dark!








Of course as I was walking home from work I didn't have the tripod with me, so I had to make do; to be honest I think half the many night shots I have on my Flickr are improvised, spur of the moment affairs rather than done when I've gone out deliberately with the tripod to do some night work. One of the advantages of digital is you are willing to take chances improving a shot since you're not wasting money and film if it doesn't work. And in this case since he was moving around and the fiery ropes he was holding were also swirling around I doubt a tripod would have made much difference here, he and they would still be streaked and blurred, but even so its worth taking the shot for the subject even if the pic isn't as sharp as I'd normally try for; as Lee Harvey Oswald once said, sometimes you just have to take the shot. And its fun when the city offers up a little surprise like this; if I had gone home my normal route I'd never have seen this, it was just a sudden whim to go this way.

Books alfresco

I was looking at my ever-growing Woolamaloo Flickr site today and was a bit puzzled as to why a fairly simple B&W photo of some books in the garden which I posted months ago had suddenly had 60 odd viewings in one day:








Don't get me wrong, its an okay pic but not one of the best ones on there and its been up for months, so why the sudden flurry of interest in it? Turns out that the Book Bench blog of the New Yorker had spotted it, liked it and re-posted it. How very cool to get a mention by fellow book folks involved with such a cool journal! In case you are wondering, the book on the table is Guy Delisle's excellent piece of travel literature in comics form, the Burma Chronicles (published Drawn & Quarterly in North America, Jonathan Cape in the UK) and on the chair is Kurt Vonnegut's fascinating take on human evolution, Galapagos, which I was reading for my Book Group that month. One of the nice things about posting so many pics on Flickr is you can never tell when someone will come along, see them and enjoy one in particular. Which is part of the reason I do it and part of why I've always liked the web for so many years. (click the pic for the larger version on Flickr)

"Hello, I'm Johnny Cash..."

Cash: I See a Darkness

Reinhard Kleist

Self Made Hero

"If you wanna save your soul from hell, cowboy, then change your ways today. Or you'll ride with us through these endless skies, forever on the hunt for the Devil's herd..." Ghost Riders in the Sky

To say award-winning German comics creator Reinhard Kleist's graphic biography of the late, great Johnny Cash arrived with a fair weight of expectation - mixed with anticipation - on my part is an understatement. Those of you who've been reading the blog for a good while may recall that we first talked about this work nearly two years ago when the original made a big splash in Germany. In fact it sold out its original print run from Carlsen and among the awards it picked up was the prestigious Max und Moritz, before going on to be picked up and translated into other languages by publishers like Dargaud in France and an English language version was apparently on the cards from Dark Horse. Since many of us were eager to read it in English we were pretty happy at this, but then it went quiet and seemed to vanish off the radar until Blighty's Self Made Hero stepped forward. Home of the Manga Shakespeare and some fine literary adaptations we've been very much enjoying this seemed like quite a departure for them. Was it worth the wait? Was it worth the effort? Oh yeah. It was.

(The Cash family, including young Johnny, singing in the cotton fields)

Anyone who's listened to Cash's music over the years knows his songs came out of his life; the darkness and the light were both there, he lived through them, he pretty much lived his songs. And that's part of the point Kleist makes here, how so many people (including people like me who'd normally run a mile from anything remotely labelled C&W) bought into Cash because his singing is honest; you feel the raw emotion in his voice, in the early work and even in the final years (his cover of Hurt is immensely raw and powerful, for example, it could have been made for him to sing at that age in his life).

But since Cash's songs often deal with loss and the struggles against the forces that can all too easily grind us all down in everyday life, living those songs means he himself never had an easy life and Kleist selects segments of Johnny's life, from the childhood days on their New Deal sponsored cotton farm, struggling to fight their way out of the Depression, singing to keep up their spirits during back-breaking labour, marrying too young, his self destructive, amphetamine and booze fuelled behaviour touring on the road as his success grew, the love between Johnny and June Carter, the famous music gig at Folsom Prison.

(Folsom Prison; no fancy sets or theatre, just Johnny, June and the boys in the band in front of hundreds of hardened prison inmates; a gig that's passed into musical legend)

Its a long work as comics go, over 200 pages, but even so there is no way it can pack in as much in depth detail as a prose biography and Kleist wisely avoids the temptation to simply jam in as much of Johnny's life as he can. Instead he opts for a roughly chronological approach which takes in elements of the life that shaped Cash and his music, interspersed with comics interpretations of of some of his songs. In fact the book itself opens with one of these songs being acted out - almost the equivalent of the dream sequence in a movie, where the protagonist drives a car with number plates reading 'HELL' through the streets of a gambling city where he "shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die." While some of the song sequences have a slightly different style about them Kleist keeps the differences in style mostly small so on a first reading it isn't always obvious you're in a song/dream segment and not an actual 'proper' biographical chapter, until the penny drops and you realise this is based on one of Cash's songs.

At first I thought this was a bit of a failing on the artist's part, not more clearly differentiating between biographical and song-based chapters. But as I was drawn further and further into the book I changed my mind and decided that this was actually a good decision on Kleist's part; as I said earlier you can't really separate the man and his music; he sang life as he saw it and lived it, they were part of him and he's in each of them, so although the song chapters are a sort of fantasy they are also, in their own fashion, biographical.

The art through most of the book, both the biographical and the interpretations of the songs, is mostly in a suitably moody black and white with some gray tones for effect, although occasionally for the songs Kleist uses a more cartoony style (such as he uses for 'A Boy Name Sue'). There are a couple of distinctive exceptions to this, however, a section where June and his mother try to help Johnny kick his dependence on drugs that's leading him down a dark highway, executed in negative: white lines on a black background, an eerie sight of a human nervous system arced in pain, a glowing ball emerging from within, darkness and light, black and white, drugs dependency and love all warring within his body in a couple of wordless but very powerful pages. A song segment for The Ballad of Ira Hayes is again in a totally different style, much more symbolic and cartoony but equally powerful and, given the contrast they make with the principally more regular style through the rest of the book their impact is much stronger.

"Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war

There they battled up Iwo Jima's hill,
Two hundred and fifty men
But only twenty-seven lived to walk back down again

And when the fight was over
And when Old Glory raised
Among the men who held it high
Was the Indian, Ira Hayes" (the Ballad of Ira Hayes)

The music itself is normally presented in long, winding strips, reminiscent of the stretched out, long, narrow proto-speech bubble you see on say, 19th century cartoons, before the more common, modern speech bubble developed. Here Kleist uses speech bubbles for, well, speech, the long, thin ribbons for the songs. Its simple but very effective, giving the reader something of the feel of music, the way it doesn't always seem to come from one source but moves through the air, reflecting, echoing, drifting, carried on the wind, almost an elemental force. It also allows Kleist to visually display something of the power of music; for me he achieves this most powerfully in the chapter on Folsom Prison, as the music drifts out seemingly on the wind, across the echoing, depressing halls, through the bars, the razor wire and out into the trees beyond. Its hard not to think of the opera scene in The Shawshank Redemption and like that remarkable scene of modern film this too has a simple, elegant power to it about the ability of art to touch lives and reach through barriers.

(Cash and Dylan jamming in a studio; how much would you love to have been in that room??)

Its a wonderful read; in fact I found after I'd finish I had to go back and re-read it more slowly and enjoyed it even more on the second reading and I know its going to be one of those special books that I go back to every so often and read once more. Its a story of a 20th century icon, a man who bestrode pretty much all normal boundaries of genre to appeal to a far wider audience and a remarkable life. Its a story where the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan are just supporting characters (let me say that again: Lewis, Elvis, Dylan - I mean come on! Great flawed gods of music). But mostly its about a man, the darkness he sees around him that almost swallows him and the lights that lead him back out the edge of the darkness (although he'd never be completely free of it), the love of his mother, his lost brother, June. This will be going on my books of the year list.

Reinhard Kleist will be one of the guests at the excellent Comica festival in London this year; He will be in conversation with (appropriately enough) someone well known to Brit comics and music fans, Charles Shaar Murray on November 22nd; details here.