Landscape Values

In 1936, artist Rita Angus travelled from Christchurch to Cass with two fellow artists, Louise Henderson and Julia Scarvell, for ten days' painting and sketching in the mountains. Presumably they took the train, disembarking at the tiny rural station which Angus was to turn into a national icon with her painting Cass, now in the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery. (I photographed the station in 2009; it is little changed from Angus's view.)

Rita Angus, Cass, 1936, collection of Christchurch Art Gallery, via Te Ara.

In 2007 Angus's Cass was voted New Zealand's favourite painting in a television poll. It was in the news again a couple of weeks ago, when the painting was cited as one of the factors in a decision to decline an application to intensively irrigate the surrounding landscape for dairying. The iconic work of art had served in turn to make the landscape it depicted itself iconic. The view which Angus had captured in the high country seven decades ago could not now be altered.

Angus, Henderson and Scarvell stayed at the Mountain Biological Station at Cass, a field hut owned by Canterbury College (later the University of Canterbury). An ecologist who helped to establish the station, Leonard Cockayne, viewed the area as a "natural laboratory"; generations of biology, forestry, engineering, zoology, botany, and agriculture students have carried out field work at Cass. Although a bathroom, a stove, and pipes for hot water were added to the hut in the early 1930s, accommodation at the field station was still fairly primitive in 1936. Electricity, courtesy of the Railways Department, was not supplied to the hut until the following year. Angus and her friends would have lit kerosene lamps as the evenings drew in.

A page from the Visitors' Book at Cass Hut from 1936, showing the names of the three artists.
Via Christchurch Art Gallery

Angus painted the field station from the back, in a view which took in the browned-off grasslands of the river basin and looked towards the mountains folded in purple shadows, while the steam train passed through on its way up to Arthur's Pass. The stylised curlicues of smoke from the train curl protectively over the hut; they terminate in a series of flattened half-moons which echo the lines of sunlight on the ridges of the hills in the middle distance. The landscape is dry, harsh, uncompromising. In the foreground, angular waves of grey and brown tussock appear to break against the back wall of the hut.

Rita Cook (Angus), Cass Field Station, 1936, University of Canterbury Art Collection

Between them, Angus and Henderson produced ten or twelve paintings from the trip; little is known about Julia Scarvell's companion works. Henderson exhibited her Cass paintings at The Group show at the Canterbury Society of Arts Gallery later in 1936. (The Christchurch Art Gallery wants to locate Henderson's view of the railway station, and exhibit it alongside Angus's work: Henderson also painted her own view of the 'Canterbury College Hut'. [PDF])

Over intervening years, Angus's Cass has become not only a much-loved and frequently reproduced painting, but an emblem of a certain kind of historical New Zealandness: rural, unpretentious, lonely.

Louise Henderson, Plains and Hills, 1936, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery

Back to 2013, and the new economic imperative to irrigate New Zealand's rural hinterland for dairying, which threatens to alter the distinctive character of our national landscapes. In making his decision not to allow irrigation at Cass, the Environment Commissioner, Robert Nixon, noted that the proposal would not serve to change the actual landscape painted by Rita Angus. But he agreed that the painting had "powerful symbolism", and that the proposed land-use associated with irrigation could have a significant adverse visual impact on views from State Highway 73, around the area of the painting. Nixon cited the high landscape values of the area -- variously shared, historic and recognised "significant natural science, aesthetic, and Tangata Whenua landscape values" -- and declined the application to industrialise the landscape.

Art history 1: industrial irrigators 0, you might think. A rare decision. But it might equally be recognised that there is something of an irony to this. One of Angus's purposes in painting the burned-off vistas at Cass was, like many of the more progressive artists of her generation, to depict the effects of modernity and economic progress on the landscape. Speed, transportation, telecommunications, industry: all are present in Angus's modernist depiction of Cass. Her inclusion of telegraph poles and railway tracks reveals a landscape in the process of being altered -- made modern -- by its inhabitants.

A generation or two previously, European settler artists were not yet at home in the landscape; their depictions of it were either topographical (sending information about the new land 'home' to Britain) or were concerned with the sublimity of the wildly unfamiliar landforms. Petrus van der Velden for example, travelling by stagecoach a few miles further into the mountains at Otira in the 1890s, painted torrents of rushing water in stormy, wild, rain-tossed surroundings: nature at its most elemental. (I think it was artist Ann Shelton, while researching her Once More With Feeling series which retraced works by van der Velden at Otira, who discovered that his vantage point for many of the works was actually under a bridge, snugly in the dry. But then I'd imagine it's almost impossible to paint in a storm.)

For Pakeha New Zealand artists of Angus's generation, Britain and Europe were no longer home. There had been six generations of Angus's own family resident in New Zealand by mid-century. Home was New Zealand; and images like Cass were a way of making oneself at home in the changing landscape. "It expresses joy in living here,' said Angus of the painting.

In citing Angus's painting as a factor in the decision not to allow industrial-scale irrigation in the Cass landscape, there is clearly a gentle irony in a work of art concerned with the effects of modernity stalling contemporary economic "progress". It is as if the restless sea of tussock, the light along the ridges of the mountains, even the train steaming through the landscape, are to be frozen in time, captured by Angus's brush in 1936 and remaining unchanged into the future. Angus's view of the landscape is the view which will prevail. There is a cost to this. As economist Eric Crampton tweeted:

There were more factors taken into consideration, of course, beyond the painting, which led to the decision not to irrigate the environs of Cass. But I think the presence of Angus's painting in the deliberations makes the decision remarkable. (I'm unaware of a precedent.) Rita Angus's personal expression of "joy in living here" has come to stand for a common pleasure: it has become one of the emblems of contemporary New Zealand identity. Eighty years ago, Angus saw and communicated the cultural value of the Canterbury high-country landscape; the price put on her vision in 2013 is considered, with this decision, to exceed the potential economic returns of the landscape itself.

"Excessive physical manifestations of quiet internal desires"

Yesterday the small guy and I paid a visit to the School of Fine Arts to see the annual sculpture exhibition, 'Heavy Pattern'. It's the eighteenth annual group show, and includes work by third and fourth year students and postgraduates. The sculpture lecturers are Neil Dawson, Rob Hood, Louise Palmer and Bronwyn Taylor.

We'd come by way of PaperPlus where we were buying a birthday card for the small guy's uncle, who is an academic with a PhD in English Lit. "This is perfect!" said the small guy, brandishing one with an off-colour joke about a naked 90-year-old man at a flower show.* "He'll LOVE it!" Then his attention was caught by the musical cards. There was one that played the Kung Fu Fighting music when you opened it. Another one barked. But the best one of all had a chubby-faced muscle-man on the front. When you opened it, the man flexed his bicep to the accompaniment of a wet raspberry kind of noise.


"MUM! LOOK AT THIS CARD! IT DOES ARM FARTS!" shouted the small guy across the shop, opening and closing the card at top speed to release a deafening volley of fart noises. "POO! That's revolting! Pfffft! PFFFT! Say pardon! Hahahaha!"


It took some time to detach the small guy from the card, and with wistful looks over the shoulder we were just about to go when he spotted a school friend who'd just come into the shop with his grandmother and little sisters. "Hang on, Mum," he said, scuttling back to the card display and taking out the musical muscle-man again. "This is important. Hey, Oscar, come over here and look at this! You won't believe what this card does ... ARM FARTS! Actual ARM FARTS! POO-WEE! Say pardon please! PFFFT! PFFFFFFT! HAHAHAHAHA!"


And thus another pleasant five minutes passed as I waited in the queue to be served, looking somewhere into the middle distance, while a running commentary punctuated by loud farting noises and raucous giggles filled the shop. Eventually a frowning young man in PaperPlus uniform came over and told them to knock it off. "You're running down the battery," he said severely. "I was just putting the card back," said Oscar untruthfully, and scampered off. "That's probably the funniest thing I've ever seen, Mum," said the small guy, still giggling in the car five minutes later. "Definitely worth getting told off for."


At the art school I expected things to be a little more sombre. The student who'd emailed me the invitation to view the show had said, half-apologetically, that there were no humorous works in it, so I had in mind some serious exploration into mass and form and volume and material properties and negative space and all that proper oldie-fash sculptural stuff. No narratives, no pop culture, no horsing about. The first room was, in fact, a bit like that: a diverse series of works beautifully fabricated and installed.

Among them we particularly liked this work, a wild tangle of tree roots on one side, with the still-attached tree-trunk carved into a rough obelisk on the other. We didn't have a catalogue to hand, there weren't labels, and in some cases the website is slightly enigmatic; so I'm not certain who it's by.

This work by Lucy Matthews was positioned in the foyer outside the gallery. The artist describes it as an "excessive physical manifestation of quiet internal desires".
It was quite large, and the small guy asked if he could get inside it. There was no one around, but I thought it best not.

This work (I think it's Joins by Steve Walsh) is positioned in the courtyard between buildings. It's a satisfyingly improbable object.

This is a view of the sculpture gallery at the art school, which they call The Fridge. We had to wander around the studios for some time to find it, which was no hardship. At centre is our favourite work in the show, Tim Middleton's Phallic Tantrum. It's a punching bag in cast plaster. You really, really want to punch it when you see it, but think better of it, with considerable regret.

This fascinating list was written on a white board at the far end of The Fridge. Is it a work? Disinformation? A teaching aid? An enigma code for art historians?

"The central issue is that ... That is not good enough." Keir Leslie. This is scribbled on the white board near the list of sculptors. I still have this enigmatic text in my head. (I always respond warmly to a slacker aesthetic combined with harsh self-criticism.)

Alissa Gilbert's work for the show is a shop selling handmade objects including soap, T shirts,  sew-on patches, 'tawdry frivolities' and 'contemplative aids'. Pictured above is a shelf of 'Deadwood Soap'. You could also take small free samples of the soap home, which was nice, and we did.

Gilbert has pasted up a poster around the art school which reads COME TO MY SHOP YOU FILTHY BITCHES. The small guy read this out loud with some satisfaction. When he saw the Divine poster pictured above hanging in her shop his enthusiasm knew no bounds. "Buy my sheeeee-it." He was still repeating the phrase under his breath an hour later. It was the second-best cultural highlight of his day. 

I suspect what he took from today's school holiday outings was the useful knowledge that what you get told off for doing in a chainstore is often quite acceptable at an art exhibition.

*Prize for "best dried arrangement".

Merleau-Ponty in New Plymouth

Once, years ago, I was in New Plymouth for a few days, and went into an interesting-looking record shop. I flicked through the bins and inspired, asked if they had anything by Merleau-Ponty. The guy said he didn't think they did, but he'd look up the catalogue.

I realised after a couple of minutes as he thumbed through the pages that I'd given him the wrong name.

"Sorry, my fault, I mean Carlo Ponti!" I said.

"Oh, OK," said the record store guy, and turned to the 'P' listings, but couldn't find anything, though he took ages, looking in several catalogues for me.

It wasn't till I'd got down the road I realised I'd actually meant to say Paolo Conte. But by then I didn't feel I could go back to the record shop and ask. Ever.

Tossery at #twecon

Yesterday I took part in the inaugural Episto Tweet Conference on Twitter, organised by @HORansome (the admirable Matthew Dentith, academic philosopher of conspiracy theories and "one of New Zealand's top debunkers".)

Here is @HORansome giving his opening address (nice suit):

The rules were very strict. A paper in six tweets, one of which was to be the title, each of which must be numbered consecutively and contain the hashtag #twecon. The papers were delivered as delegates made themselves available throughout the day. There were some questions from the floor, but as @kittenypentland noted, thankfully no conference weirdies. (Regrettably, there were also no conference drinks.)

Here's a copy of my paper, which could very well be subtitled "Imma Tosser".

Many of the papers were very good. I particularly enjoyed @SarahLibrarina's exposition of hand-painted signs on Dunedin student flats (research for her forthcoming book), and @KittenyPentland's consideration of ethics on Twitter. (Matthew Dentith has full transcripts of all papers available on his blog.) The event itself was a great success, and will be repeated. It also indicated the possibilities inherent in new modes of academic communication, which Mike Dickison discusses briefly here.)

In  short: despite unspeakable tossery from me, #twecon was a good thing. Looking forward to the next one.

Beer, Art and Philosophy

Image: Drinking at the Hammer Museum, with Ed Ruscha behind the bar and Tom Marioni to the far right. Credit: Michael Robinson Chavez for the LA Times.


‎"The act of drinking beer with friends is the highest form of art." San Francisco artist Tom Marioni, author of a memoir entitled Beer, Art and Philosophy, has put together a series of beer-fuelled art happenings since 1970 which have taken place variously in his own studio, museums, and neighbourhood bars. A show of his work (and five accompanying invitation-only beer salons, at one of which his friend Ed Ruscha tended bar), has just opened at the Hammer Museum in LA.

The public are invited to a performance later in the month called 'The Beer Drinking Sonata for 13 Players', in which players blow into the bottles after each sip, so that the tone -- so to speak -- gets progressively lower and lower. (Have a feeling I might have seen something similar done in a student flat in Christchurch in the 1980s.)

When asked by writer Jori Finkel if he agreed with Marioni that drinking beer was the highest form of art, Ed Ruscha commented: "I don’t know about a form of art; a form of life maybe. But you can call anything art, and that’s Tom’s thing. And I like the beer part of it."

The G Word

I've been favourably considering the proposition that only people who haven't worked in an art gallery would find Gordon Ramsay particularly rude or stressful.


Likewise the Hotel Inspector. "Fuck the stupid bears! I don't give a shit about them." "It's just junk." "I loathe these burgundy napkins." Very mild indeed.


I'm currently a bit obsessed with Ruth Watson's latest televisual venture, Country House Rescue, in which she visits crumbling British estates of unbelievable loveliness, and spends a commercial hour bullying the stubborn, hopeless, be-corduroyed owners into adopting her unpalatable ideas to make the place pay. Each episode features some kind of event -- a wedding show, a country market, a cocktail party for tourism writers -- which looks in grave danger of falling flat on its behind, until a final bit of chivvying by Ruth gets it up and running. "Get those fucking posters away from the windows! For goodness sake!"

But again, there's nothing new here for art gallery alumni: the melee which ensues each week in Country House Rescue is not much different to the scene prior to the more stressful openings at public art galleries, an hour or so before the guests arrive. "Pick up those bloody sponges!" "Who's got the fucking labels?" "Look, just put all that shit in the cupboard: we'll sort it out later." "Oh, for Christ's sake, he wants what?"


I've been enjoying following, with half an eye, the live tweeting of Sarah Jessica Parker's new reality TV show, Work of Art, which launched a couple of weeks ago. The hapless contestants, fourteen would-be famous artists, compete for a solo show at a nationally-recognised museum (Brooklyn Museum, which has been in the news a bit itself lately) and $100 000 by making works from scratch in a range of mediums, a la Project Runway. The judges include the prominent and outspoken art critic Jerry Saltz, while a 'mentor to the artists' is Simon de Pury, art auctioneer.

Work of Art: The Next Great Artist sounds hilariously awful: the Twitter jury seems to be out so far about whether it's just complete horseshit or also vaguely worthy in that it brings contemporary art to primetime. I'm extremely keen to see it, but can't imagine in a million years that the New Zealand TV networks will pick it up, given their records of screening anything remotely smacking of art at deliberately inhospitable hours, relegated to the graveyard shift with religious programming and infomercials for vibrating exercise machines. Perhaps it could be franchised here, though? There'd be a few decent contenders for the various critic/judge/mentor parts, but the Saltz role would surely be a shoo-in.

I think what I'd really like to see most of all rather than artists duking it out is an Art Gallery Rescue, where an ailing institution calls in a tough-talking Mrs Fixit to increase its audience and critical credibility. Compelling viewing.

Early Sunday Morning

The after-lives of famous artists, in Clarence Street, Riccarton, Christchurch.

Merry Christmas me arse

The small guy gets into the Christmas spirit with a homemade card.

Japonisme for the modern home

Came across this in a second-hand shop in central Christchurch today: the kind of dismal shop filled with stacked mattresses and plastic chairs and old metal TV trolleys, advertising 'Social Welfare Quotes' on a hand-lettered poster near the door. Of course, it wasn't for sale, this sort of thing never is: which is probably just as well, as I suspect there's no house that's really quite big enough for an eight-foot-tall plaster statue of a cute Japanese girl. Especially ours. Wish it was, though.


Mind you, if I was allowed to have my head with the acquisition of all the objets trouve I have a hankering for, our place would end up looking even more like something from Spinal Tap than it already does, rather than Kahn's My Architect, as I might otherwise hope. (Fat chance of that, though. My dreams of stylish high modernist minimalism are continually thwarted not only by the children's accumulations of plastic stuff -- there are days when our lounge carpet looks like the plastic soup of the Western Pacific Ocean, or a fairly haphazard installation by Tony Cragg -- but by my own popular-culture-inflected squirrel-like nature. Oh well. Sayonara.)

Playing on

One of the most recognisable fonts designed in New Zealand in recent years is 'Parihaka', the typeface drawn by Neil Pardington (Kai Tahu), Aaron McKirdy and George Clarke for the exhibition and book Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance at City Gallery Wellington in 2001. The typeface was used for the title of the book, as well as for indvidual chapter headings.


Gifted by the designers to the trustees of Parihaka Pa for their use following the exhibition, the font is now used as a logotype for the annual Parihaka Peace Festival in Taranaki.

Via Outdoor Styles.

The font's ancestry is complex. It's based on the lettering hand-painted on the walls of some nineteenth-century Maori meeting houses, which in itself was influenced by printed letterforms remembered from the early missionaries' Bibles. (The painted word has thus been a part of New Zealand art history from very early days.) While Maori communities lived with their treasures daily, it was not until 1993, with the publication of Roger Neich's seminal Painted Histories, that these early works of art were brought to wide public attention. Re-imagined and hand-drawn in a Wellington design studio in 2000, and finally digitised, the ongoing history of what's now known as the Parihaka font describes the way in which design is fundamentally a circular and cyclic process, the passing of a baton back and forth between artists of different generations and places.

Fiona Pardington, Puhi Wahine/Rere Torohai/Ae: I–V, 2004,(Noble Woman/Rising from underneath/Yes, 2004) video installation, 5 LCD screens, dimensions variable. Via Auckland Art Gallery.

I think it's one of the most important examples of New Zealand graphic design produced in recent years: utterly distinctive, at once elegant and engagingly awkward, informal yet painstaking, it speaks of the shared history of Aotearoa New Zealand while resisting categorisation as an antique aesthetic. Neither historical nor modern but something else again, the Parihaka font is essentially a hybrid, a coming together of diverse cultures and technologies.

I've thought a lot about this font over the years, and hence perhaps I'm unnaturally attuned to sightings of it. I was, however, completely astounded to see a version of it appear on Rhys Darby's pop culture TV programme Rocked the Nation the other night, in a sign held up at a rugby game in about 1990, following Wayne 'Buck' Shelford's dropping from the All Blacks' captaincy.

Here's rather a blurry photo I took off the TV, which I think should henceforth enter the ranks of the Parihaka font's various ancestral iterations.

Always on my mind

Left: Elvis Presley, c.1971. Right: Colin McCahon,1961. Photographed by Bernie Hill. Courtesy of Gordon Brown © New Zealand Magazines. Via Te Papa.


The latest collaboration between Auckland's Objectspace and Jonty Valentine (curator, writer, graphic designer, and academic) is an exhibition and book entitled Printing Types: New Zealand Type Design Since 1870. It's an important event, representing the first attempt to trace the unwritten history of New Zealand's type designers (the people who draw the original letter forms to be made into fonts, rather than typographers, who arrange the type on the page), and includes not only the typefaces but interviews with and original writing from the type designers themselves. There's Joseph Churchward and his 'plumpy' Marianna font; Tom Elliott's Air New Zealand logotype from 1968; Bruce Rotherham's elegant 'Wedge', begun in 1947 and finally completed four decades later.

There's also an extremely interesting article by Luke Wood, discussing the evolution and subsequent dissemination of his 'McCahon' font, a process which he likens to Frankenstein's monster being unleashed on the world. It's a fascinating account, which describes the appropriation of handpainted lettering from informal advertising on farm gates by Colin McCahon, to Wood's digital rendering and publication of the font resulting in a series of unauthorised uses for advertising, to its recent adoption by a juice company to signify 'honesty' and 'down-to-earthness' in its product range, mimicking the original farm gates which inspired McCahon. 'And so,' writes Wood, 'as if through some sort of voodoo or dark magic, McCahon is returned to his point of departure.'

Printing Types is all great stuff, and makes an important contribution to the history of New Zealand's visual culture: but it would be worth acquiring for this quote alone, which, albeit written by a graphic designer (Wood), may be one of the great lines of New Zealand art history.

'And then of course there is Colin McCahon. Who, like Elvis, casts a sort of posthumous shadow over everything.'

Can't believe I didn't think of that one myself. In the spirit of McCahon-ish appropriation, I certainly intend to use it.

'A stripe painter may not wear stripes'

When criticising a mutual acquaintance's art practice, an artist friend of mine once said in all seriousness: 'I always knew his work wouldn't be up to much when I called round once and saw how he'd decorated his house. No decent artist could have lived with those kitchen cupboards, let alone painted them that colour. I won't even begin to describe the lounge suite.'

I've thought about this a lot over the years when visiting artists of all stripes at home; and actually, it's proved infallible.

I think it's a point of view of which Roger White, author of the best thing I've read for some time, a treatise on 'How Artists Must Dress', would approve.

Here's some of White's utterly indispensable advice:

'The relationship between an artist's work and attire should not take the form of a direct visual analogy. A stripe painter may not wear stripes.'

'Whereas a dealer must signal, in wardrobe, a sympathy to the tastes and tendencies of the collector class, an artist is under no obligation to endorse these.'

'An artist compensates for a limited wardrobe budget by making creative and entertaining clothing choices, much in the way that a dog compensates for a lack of speech through vigorous barking.'

'An artist may dress like a member of the proletariat, but shouldn't imagine he's fooling anyone.'

I am very very tempted indeed to align these sartorial homilies with various members of the New Zealand art world by means of the judicious placement of photographs, but unusually I have restrained myself and you must just imagine to whom they could be applied. However, I very much like White's idea that an artist's 'sartorial choices are subject to the same hermeneutic operations as are his work', and his recommendation that artists should bear in mind while dressing the possibility of a five-paragraph review of his or her outfit 'written by a critic he detests'.

As chance would have it, I once canvassed the idea of writing quite cutting reviews of art critics' clothes which could be published alongside their own reviews, thus enabling everyone else to see whether or not their aesthetic opinions were worth listening to, but it would have been a lot of work and I didn't get round to it.

Click through for White's article: it's completely brilliant.

A brief list of things I learned from Julian Dashper

I was lucky enough to work with Julian Dashper several times over the years, and each time was an unforgettable experience. The most precise and exacting of artists in regards to the presentation of his work, he was also one of the most straightforward and delightful people I've ever worked with.

Over the past day, I've been thinking back over those times. Each project was characterised by a cluster of funny anecdotes (things that happened over the course of the project, as well as stories recounted by Julian about other projects). Each time I worked with Julian I went away with an increased confidence in the significance of public art galleries in bringing important work and ideas to public attention, and a series of valuable new reflections on curatorial practice and the workings of on-the-hoof art history. He was genuinely inspiring. I'll always remember a talk he gave to a bunch of high school kids about how he spent his day as an artist: he was just about mobbed afterwards by them, everyone wondering where they could sign up. While he'll be remembered chiefly by the extraordinary body of work he left behind, Julian's role as a teacher and mentor -- both formal and informal, variously of younger artists, curators, writers and public gallery staff -- shouldn't be underestimated.

As I wrote yesterday, I think the importance of Julian Dashper in shaping New Zealand's contemporary culture will become increasingly clear. It's already evident that someone of great significance has been lost to our culture.

Just for now, I want to make a brief list of some of the things I learned from him.

1. That the smallest details are worthy of consideration.
2. A different way to look at the relationship between form and content, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
3. That distance could be a strength and a source of distinction.
4. That contemporary art and popular culture aren't positioned at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum but instead run parallel to one another.
5. The evergreen coolness of Al Hunter.
6. The importance of collaboration between artists and writers.
7. That the placement of a semicolon can be of critical importance.
8. To wear my Noconas with pride.
9. That it's always all about the details.

Abject robot

No. 1 in an occasional series of accidental public artworks: Ronnie van Hout's Failed Robot sticker grinning up from the concrete floor of the Christchurch Art Gallery's underground carpark.

Revisionist western: 'I am sick of killing bandits'

As I have been known to remind him from time to time, the big guy is a very lucky man indeed: and one of the ways his good luck is manifest is to be married to someone as keen on westerns as he is. Blame it if you will on all those winter afternoons in our respective childhoods stuck in front of Bonanza, The Virginian and High Chapparal, and in my case the endless John Wayne seasons on the BBC during school holidays. 'Get on your horse pilgrim...'.

I think of my personal graduation from spaghetti to revisionist westerns in the 1980s (though actually we're not fussy these days: either will do) as marked by a shift from dust to mud, from the tumbleweed shoot-em ups of John Ford and Sergio Leone to the mud-splattered 'realism' of Sam Peckinpah on TV and Jim Jarmusch at the movies. Moving quickly past such lightweight excursions into the territory as Young Guns and Unforgiven, we arrived, some years ago, at what the big guy and I both regard as the final unbeatable high noon of the revisionist western genre; the single best show ever made for TV, the mighty Deadwood: vast tranches of mud and grit, buckets of gore, volleys of swearing of an almost operatic nature, corpse-eating pigs, corrupt big business and politics pitted against reluctant law enforcement, and a mother-lode of anti-heroes.

Now it seems the small guy has inherited his parents' fondness for epics of dust, blood, gold and tumbleweed: his latest book is titled Super Sheriff and the Stupid Sombrero Gang. In it I think he's been able to quite neatly incorporate many of the significant tropes of the revisionist western.