Star Wars: Episode VIII. ‘Zombies from the Underworld’: A Special Beatles edition

Because George Lucas is not getting on with it quickly enough, the small guy has decided to write the next three episodes of Star Wars himself.

He's completed Chapter VII as a project for school: this is the genre-bending Chapter VIII, featuring The Beatles having a massive fight with Justin Bieber and a pack of zombies. In describing the narrative to me, the small guy said "And then I played a massive loud guitar chord, and defeated Justin Bieber with the power of music, and then the zombies woke up..."

--

Star Wars: Episode VIII

‘Zombies from the Underworld’: A Special Beatles Edition

Part One begins
A long time ago in a galaxy far far far away, Jedi knights Falafel Pizzatush, Gidget Wafflechunks and Snotty Wafflechunks were enjoying a Beatles concert. Then a mad man, a mad woman, evil Justin Bieber, Grandma Loobrush and Fat Dude (the Sith) stomped into the concert and threw a guitar at the audience and stole Paul McCartney’s microphone. They also pinched George Harrison’s sandwich and broke Ringo Starr’s drums. The Beatles started fighting. They threw chicken drumsticks at the evil guys. Little did they know that they weren’t just bad guys. They were ZOMBIES.

Snoddle and Splott came running in to the concert. “Did you know that those evil people are zombies?” they cried. “What zombies?” Snotty asked. “The ones that are attacking the Beatles!” Snoddle yelled. “Hey Gidget!” said John Lennon, who was friends with him. “Can you come up here? I hear you have battled evil Emperor Laughing Sock before, and I think you could battle zombies, who are probably less harmful.” “Here we go again boys!” said Falafel. “Another adventure.”

Just then an evil old woman trotted in. But none of them noticed her, because she was disguised as a banana. You’d think that someone would disguise themselves as a man in a raincoat and a hat reading a newspaper. (Though hats don’t read newspapers.) You wouldn’t expect them to be a banana. “I have a plan to defeat evil Justin Bieber and his henchmen,” Snotty said. “We’re going to need a lot of giant electric guitars. OK, Falafel, you get everyone who isn’t a zombie some ear muffs. Gidget, you get some really big speakers. And me and the Beatles can be in charge of the giant electric guitars. When you’re done, meet me on the stage.”

“Finished!” Felafel and Gidget wheezed. “OK,” Snotty said. “Gidget, you attach those really big speakers to the pile of giant electric guitars in the middle of the stage. Falafel, we all need a pair of earmuffs each. Now, grab a giant electric guitar each. Beatles: you do the same. Put on your ear muffs, and start strummin’.”

Bang, clatter! The massive chords made the building tremble. It just so happened that Falafel, Gidget, and Snotty were hopeless at playing guitar. It didn’t matter at that moment because they needed to try and make the zombies deaf with a horrible noise. Once the zombies were deaf, they became humans again. But it made the villains deaf and still villains. However, Grandma Loobrush kept a secret supply of pink earmuffs in her handbag, although none of the good guys knew this. But some people in the crowd did, and they were trying to shout it out to the good guys, but the good guys couldn’t hear because of their earmuffs.

Grandma Loobrush was not a deaf villain. She was also not a zombie. She was the most dangerous witch in the world, and she went up on the stage and got her handbag and knocked Falafel out with it. “Oh no! Falafel’s gone!” Gidget, Snotty, Splott and Snoddle cried. But they fought Grandma Loobrush with her worst nightmare: the toilet plunger. Now four against one wasn’t fair, and Grandma Loobrush was defeated and the good guys won. Splott and Snoddle got it on her feet so she couldn’t walk; Gidget got it on her head; Snotty and Falafel, who was conscious again by now, got it on her arms. And so she didn’t make it. And to celebrate their glorious victory they went to the movies. And the Beatles went with them.

The End

Star Wars: Episode VIII
‘Zombies from the Underworld’: A Special Beatles Edition
Part Two begins

The story continues.

Gidget, Snotty, Falafel, Splott and Snoddle were watching a soccer game. The Brazilian soccer star was versing Cool Dude Man. Justin Bieber was not deaf from the last episode. Because he was wearing his iPod earbuds and listening to some of his favourite songs. Justin Bieber wanted to get on that stage in the Beatles concert. He wanted to sing one of his rubbish songs. The Beatles were playing at the half time at the soccer stadium. Justin Bieber was terrorizing everyone. He burst the soccer ball with a pin and he switched the Brazilian soccer star’s and Cool Dude Man’s soccer outfit with tutus and hung his washing on the goal posts.

It was finally half time and the Beatles started playing Here Comes the Sun. Justin gave the signal for Robber Ducky to attack the Beatles. But Falafel was waiting for him he punched him and Snotty attacked from the rear. The Beatles song was done by then so the soccer players started playing. Cool Dude Man accidentally kicked the ball into Robber Ducky’s shin; he screamed and then collapsed. Robber Ducky was defeated. Next Splott and Snoddle got out their catapults and fired water balloons at Justin Bieber’s hair. “My beautiful hair” he cried then he collapsed and that was the end of him.

The End

"Drop in jacuzzi: Enjoy!"

Something I really dislike is being commanded by a waiter to 'Enjoy!' whatever he or she has brought to the table. It can put me right off my food. When this happens, which it does quite often (or at least it did, prior to the earthquake, when cafes were open in the central city), I think to myself that -- actually -- I'll enjoy what's been served if it's any good, and if it's not, I won't, whatever you tell me to do. And then I catch myself thinking this stuff (of course I never say it) and feel like a complete tosser and slightly ashamed, as many years ago I realised there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think it's fine to be unpleasant to people in service roles and those who do not.

My linguistic intolerance is not only confined to chafing at commands to enjoy myself; self-indulgent references to "me-time" make me gnash my teeth with impotent fury. A while ago when the people's folk-punk poet Billy Bragg commented in an interview that he really enjoyed walking, as it gave him a chance for much-needed me-time, I went right off him, A New England notwithstanding.

However, the small guy, who has recently been learning to write procedures at school, has come up with what I think may be the only acceptable use of "Enjoy!"

Here it is.


Procedure for making Crunchy Cockroach Cupcakes, by The Small Guy

A short story

Sometimes I agonize for twenty minutes over writing a single sentence, wrestling with different constructions and nuances until I am heartily sick of both the job at hand and myself, and need to pop out for a coffee or a little walk. No such wafting about with the small guy, who is a man of action when it comes to writing and experiences no terror of the white page whatsoever. I admire the workmanship in this recent short story, pictured above.

"Satiation is no longer a dream"

Calling all Art Lovers

"For the art hungry who are feeling the cold fingers of cultural starvation gnawing at their vitals, satiation is no longer a dream. Melissa Sharplin has popped up like the genie from the lamp to show the world her latest exhibition "Swit Swurl" held at Archibalds Audi showroom. Wrapped in a dress by Gillian Melhop, Melissa, looking gorgeous, almost competed with her own paintings."

from CC: See and Be Seen, issue 9, 3 December 2010, p.8.


More art writing like this, please. I shall get on to EyeContact about it.

Sixty year view

Doris Lusk, Canterbury Plains from Cashmere Hills, 1952, oil on board, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery

Last Sunday we drove up to the Port Hills in search of the landscape Doris Lusk painted in 1952. From the city below, the hills were shrouded in low cloud. It seemed doubtful we'd see anything at all, yet alone a sixty-year-old view. I was sure I'd seen it before; I distantly remembered driving along the winding hill road many years ago and catching sight of it suddenly from the car window and thinking oh, there's that painting; but I couldn't remember if the bend in the road where I'd seen it had been before or after Victoria Park or even beyond the Sign of the Kiwi, the second of Harry Ell's travellers' way stations which marks the high point of the road before the long descent to Lyttelton. The eroded valley Lusk painted might be anywhere really; and we prepared for a long drive.

I'd been thinking of the task like detective work, assuming that while the view might be quite changed, there would be certain features -- the bones of the landscape, if you like -- which would remain the same. Ignoring trees, we were looking for the silhouette of the hills, and perhaps the little volcanic knob in the foreground, much in the way you might discount the effect of the hair and focus instead on the shape of the head of a missing person you were trying to identify. (Our ostensible purpose was to add Lusk's location to the Christchurch Art Gallery's new geotagging project, which records the geographical coordinates of landscapes depicted in works from their collection.) In the event, we were a little disappointed to find Lusk's landscape so quickly, at one of the first entrances to Victoria Park, a walking track named for Harry Ell. While the trees had grown up thickly over the upper slopes, the fissured walls of the valley were unmistakeable.


In search of Lusk's painting viewpoint, we took the steep track up through the trees into the park. There was a crossing of paths, and a knot of runners pounded past, shaking drops of sweat on to the ground. Further in, the pine needles were thick and soft underfoot, and our footsteps made no sound. Shadows fell sideways through the pines. I thought of Heavenly Creatures, and a brick in a stocking. The canopy blotted out the sky. It was impossible to see the valley below through the trees.


Frustrated, we climbed back down to the carpark, past the painted fire danger sign which from behind looked like an easel. Squinting through the trees, the viewpoint from the bluff above the carpark was almost the one in the painting, though a little to the right.



As we drove on, we wondered how Doris Lusk had got up here; we thought it unlikely she'd owned a car in 1952. Perhaps by bus? Or bicycle, though carrying the painting materials might have been tricky. But then artists at mid-century thought nothing of biking enormous distances in search of landscape subjects or to organise exhibitions: for his exhibition in Dunedin in the early 1930s -- the show which a young McCahon wandered into -- Woollaston sent his paintings down from Mapua by carrier, following later by bike. It's possible that McCahon's own epic journeys by bike were immortalised in his Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury, of 1950; there's a fancy that the streak of red down the centre of the panels refers to a graze he took in a tumble from his bike, but that's probably pressing the autobiographical factor too far.


Lusk's bare hills were thatched with grass and tussock: grazing land. The early 1950s were arguably the highest point of agricultural optimism in New Zealand, a point at which national prosperity seemed inextricably allied to sheep farming -- much, perhaps, as it does to dairy farming today. As soil scientist Andrew Carran notes, since the wool boom and bust in the mid-1950s the same valley has hosted two crops of pinus radiata, a land use unthinkable at the time of Lusk's painting. Today there are clumps of pines and expanses of grass, some small buildings and an orderly market garden (perhaps a vineyard?) on the lower slopes.


In search of a place to turn round on the narrow winding road, we drove on towards the Sign of the Kiwi. And as we drove back to the city, we finally saw it: Lusk's viewpoint on the distant valley. But there was nowhere to stop, and no way to climb up on to the thickly wooded bluff above the road. I took some photographs out of the car window, but it was gone in a flash.

The blurb about Canterbury Plains from Cashmere Hills on the Christchurch Art Gallery's website has Lusk 'influenced' by McCahon, in her painting of the bare, unpopulated land. Certainly, they were great friends; they had known each other as young people in Dunedin, where they had both attended Russell Clark's Saturday morning art classes at John McIndoe's studio. Lusk later spent time in Nelson with McCahon and Woollaston and others, and when McCahon moved to Christchurch in 1948, he initially stayed with Lusk and her husband Dermot Holland, painting several of his major religious works in his small bedroom there.


McCahon famously received a copy of Charles Cotton's Geomorphology of New Zealand for a wedding present at the time of his marriage to the painter Anne Hamblett in 1942, and his subsequent works demonstrate his study of the linear landforms pictured by Cotton. So, I would argue, do Doris Lusk's paintings of a similar (or perhaps slightly earlier) vintage: her Towards Omakau (c.1942) -- a comparatively little-known painting which I'd argue should be considered one of the key works of early modernism in New Zealand -- reveals a similar treatment of the folded hills in the distance. Perhaps, as is frequently the case, what art historians misleadingly describe as influence (a power relationship which almost always proceeds in one direction, from the more well-known artist to the lesser-known) is rather more accurately described by artists themselves as common interests.

Doris Lusk, Towards Omakau, c.1942, oil on board, Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery

It's a small world after all

The small guy and I collaborated recently on a review of the new children's exhibition at the Christchurch Art Gallery. You can read it here.

It was a lot of fun working with him, and I think we might do it again.

Just asking for trouble, really

Louise Bourgeois, Sleep II, 1967, marble on two wooden timbers, Tate Modern

'Editing is everything. Writing a first draft is akin to moving a big block of marble into a sculptor’s studio. It’s hard, and it requires some finesse, but mostly it’s just heavy lifting. It isn’t art. The art happens when the marble starts getting chipped away to find the Pieta within. And that is the role of the editor -- with luck, in concert with the writer.'

-- Dan Baum, from 'The State of Editing'

As an editor, I can only admire this statement. As a writer, of course I refute it utterly.

The incongruity of peacocks

Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius (1486), egg tempera and oil on canvas transferred from wood, 2070 x 1467mm, Collection of the National Gallery, London


While over the years in my professional life I have written many hundreds -- quite possibly thousands -- of extended labels for art exhibitions, the number of exhibition labels I have wanted to read in a personal capacity can probably be counted on the fingers of two hands. When I look at a work of art in a gallery, or an object in a museum, I am quite happy to do so without knowledge, or at least only the prior knowledge I might bring to my encounter with the work: if what I see interests me enough, then I might find out what it is, or who made it and when it was produced, but it's most unlikely that I'll seek interpretation and contextual information while standing there actually looking at the thing.

When I'm visiting a gallery or a museum, I'm there less for education and more for experience, for the opportunity to become immersed in another way of seeing the world -- to see something I couldn't have imagined by myself. If I simply can't get what I've seen out of my head and have to know more -- specifically to understand the context of its production -- then I'll buy the catalogue on my way out, and think about it later. I don't think I'm alone in this way of dealing with cultural objects.

(One can, of course, simply ignore extended labels when visiting a public art gallery, but it takes a strong will not to read a sign on the wall: we're all conditioned to do so.)

Here's novelist J.G. Ballard's view of the matter, which I came across recently in his terrific autobiography Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, published last year after his diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2006. (He's working on what is quite possibly going to be his last book, whose working title is Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life, at the moment.) Since adolescence, Ballard's intellectual touchstones have been Freud and the Surrealists, whose ideas landed like 'a stick of bombs' for him in the middle-class drawing room of his grandparents after his experiences in war-torn Shanghai as a child. (“I felt, and still do, that psychoanalysis and surrealism were a key to the truth about existence and the human personality, and also a key to myself.”)

"I am sure that a large part of the enduring mystery of the Renaissance masterpieces, in the National Gallery was due to the absence of the explanatory matter that now drains away much of the strangeness and poetry of the Old Masters. I would stare at Crivelli's Annunciation, charmed by the peacocks, loaves of bread and other incongruous items, the passer-by reading a book on the bridge and the Virgin in her jewel box of a house. I was forced to use my own imagination to stitch these elements into a master narrative that made some kind of sense, rather than read an extended wall caption and be solemnly told that the peacock was a symbol of eternal life. Perish the thought, and let the exquisite bird be itself, and nothing more or less than itself. What could be more natural, and more mysterious, than a peacock and a loaf of bread appearing on the scene to celebrate the forthcoming birth of the Saviour?"

J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, An Autobiography, London: Fourth Estate, 2008, p. 155.

Milestone, millstone

Maths has never been my strong point, but I think yesterday's entry about the vast gulf between the superior photographic image of public sculpture and its tawdry real life was my 150th post.* Which is time to take stock.

I've been blogging for just over eight months. I started in June last year at the behest of Best-of-3, who said come on, I think it would suit you, you should do it. I didn't do anything about it for a while. I'd read something somewhere (probably in a doctor's waiting room, which is where I read gossipy women's mags now I don't work in an art gallery, in whose tea rooms they are rife) about 99% of blogs being abandoned shortly after birth, and I didn't fancy adding another orphan to that statistic.

And at some point I'd looked at Paris Hilton's blog, or was it Ginger Spice's, with its wildly enthusiastic initial entries, then a few hasty posts followed by apologies for not writing and promises to be more regular in future, then radio silence; much like the scenario that always played out with magazine pen-pals in the 1970s. Having been through that experience I would hate to start something with a whizz-bang that I couldn't finish, and just dribble on for a bit until I ran out of puff. (Post-grad studies have honed this rather numbing sense of commitment all too keenly; one gigantic sword of Damocles hanging over my head at once is quite enough, thank you.)

Yet over these months, I've found that I quite like blogging: the inconsequentiality, the politics, the anecdotes, the humour, the virtual community, the online acquaintanceships; the chance to develop ideas into a little something that stops short of an essay but has more juice than than just a passing remark. Blogging four or five times a week feels less a millstone than a kind of mild and pleasant vice (now, if only I could advance to the same sort of state with my studies...). My sense of it is a rolling conversation with like-minded friends, albeit invisible ones. I've written various posts that I haven't published, largely because on reflection they were fundamentally ill-natured (albeit perhaps amusing); that's my personal line in the sand, in matters for public consumption at least. Likewise, I've appreciated advice from bloggers I admire: no matter what the temptation, don't blog when inebriated, don't bang on about the kids or post their art online. I've almost always followed these words of wisdom.

One of the things about blogging that I quite enjoy is having a look now and again at the site stats; being a complete ignoramus about technical stuff, I've just followed other bloggers' leads on this (particularly Best-of-3, who remains a daily inspiration) and gradually worked out over the time I've been on the air not only how to analyse who's been visiting Art, Life, TV, Etc. and where they've come from, but more to the point why they've come. When you write for print publication, there's a big gulf in time and emotional distance between what you put out there and its eventual reader. The immediacy of blogging's reader response -- seeing who's reading, and commenting, on what, almost as it happens -- is vastly appealing. It can also be quite astounding.

Over the short life of Art, Life, TV, Etc., I have been frequently taken aback at the bizarre nature of some of the Google keyword searches which send people to my blog. A while back I posted about the supposed censorship of a local artist's work at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, thus unwittingly sending dozens of nude dwarf fanciers from around the world to my site. (Vastly disappointing when they get here, no doubt. Off you go, please.)

There's a sense of community that arises from blogging, no matter how dubious or intangible its basis. Sometimes I wonder about the advisability of blogging about one's personal obsessions: a creeping horror that Pareidoliac's notion of blogging-as-therapy might be on the mark. (No! No! Please, no...) But overall, I'm glad to reveal that blogging has proved it's not just me: I must be quite normal as literally hundreds of people round the world (albeit mostly concentrated in the southern continental US and frequently logging in from military bases) are likewise obsessed with the painting of the two dogs in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. I repeat, it must be quite normal, and it's cheered me no end. I've had millions of hits on countless misremembered variations of 'One dog going this way and one going that way', 'One goes East and one goes West', etc etc. And then dozens more wondering who painted it? Where is it now? Which National Geographic photo inspired it? What does Joe Pesci say about it? And finally one asking where can I buy Tommy's mother's painting? (Rather hopeful, the latter, I would have thought. But you never know.)

Occasionally I feel a little guilty at the trusting nature of some of the queries which have come my way. People wanting extermination solutions for bathroom insects are bound to go away disappointed. Likewise the surprisingly large number of readers in the Indian subcontinent wanting access to the "thoughts of great men" have met only with unbridled smart-arsery of an art-historical nature. (Sorry about that.)

Occasional queries are quite specific. Someone in Campbell, California, wanted to know artist Coosje van Bruggen's maiden name. (Couldn't help.) Someone in Wellington wanted to know how old the new director of Auckland Museum, Vanda Vitali, is. (Sorry, don't know. Can't imagine why you'd want to.) Someone in China is very interested in artist Marie Shannon. Someone in Kuala Lumpur wants to know more about writer Edward Hanfling.

Then there are the school (or perhaps undergraduate) projects; diverse, yet overall art-historically comprehensive. "Where are sculptures with Viking helmets that are currently in a museum?" "Pine martens fur were used in art for what?" "Why is Pak 'n' Save's logo yellow and black?" "How to enter a paranoiac-critical state?" "Is there a press release for artist Doris Lusk?"

The long and the short of it is that after 150 posts I haven't run out of puff yet: there are more personal obsessions, art historical anecdotes of dubious scholarly merit, and tangential art-world digressions still to work through. Thanks for your company so far. See you next week.


*D'oh! I just looked again and it's actually 160. Told you maths wasn't a strength. Oh well.

The terror of the empty studio

Clearing out some files the other day, I came across an art history essay I'd written at university in the 1980s. When I looked at it, not only did I have no memory whatsoever of having written it (something to do with the iconography of the Rossano Gospels; wouldn't be a popular course today I'd imagine) but I could dredge up no single fact about the subject that I'd retained over the years. Nothing. It was like someone else had written it.

The other remarkable thing about the essay was that it was handwritten. It was like an artefact from another civilisation, more akin to objects in the family archive like my mother's World War II ration book or my great-grandmother's homemade wire toasting fork, than anything I'd produce today. I suspect I'm a member of the last generation to have handwritten essays; when I was doing my undergrad degree only the commerce students (trainee capitalists and smug young Nats who stood for student politics) ever seemed to use a PC (or "word processor" as it was then referred to) to produce their deathless prose. Arts students couldn't afford to, though my flatmate had an ancient upright manual typewriter he'd bang out his essays on, like the one Peter McLeavey still uses to type his exhibition invitations.

The main thing I remember from writing essays at university was the terror of the empty page. I'd write my name and the title of the essay at the top, and then I'd put my pen down. It always felt impossible to start, even when I had something to say. The paper seemed so clean and white and unforgiving, while my thoughts were so inchoate and meandering, refusing to order themselves sensibly around the topic, let alone suggest anything remotely profound.

Books about writing practice advise people like myself making heavy weather of it simply to start writing, even to write complete nonsense, on the premise that breaking the ice is the first step, and that editing is easier than writing. Even so ... I'd run the first few painful sentences through my mind, eventually write them down, and dismissing them as either pretentious or banal (quite possibly both at once), would crumple up the page, chuck it in the rubbish bin, write my name on another blank piece of paper and sit, there, stumped. This could go on for hours, until in desperation I'd ring my father, a man of action.

"What's the essay about?" he'd say.

I'd explain.

"What's something interesting about the work?" he'd ask.

I'd think of something.

"Right," he'd say. "Here's the first sentence." And he'd dictate it down the phone.

I'd scribble it down, change it a little maybe, and I was away.

For some years after that, although I used a computer at work, I had to initially handwrite anything that required sustained or creative thought, and transfer it later to the screen. It took a decade for me to start writing directly on the PC, when to my surprise I found that there was no equivalent terror of the blank screen. Everything was so provisional, could be changed or deleted so quickly, that it all stopped being so critical, and I could just start writing.

I've done a lot of writing over the years, and although it's got quicker (and I haven't needed to phone my father for opening sentences for a long time now) it hasn't got easier. Each piece of "serious" writing is as difficult as the last, and takes the same degree of temporary withdrawal from the world and emotional energy to sustain it. But there's nothing like the feeling of having finished a text to one's own satisfaction; there's an emotional high that can last hours or even a day or so.

To this end, I have a great admiration for artists who year after year produce serious bodies of work, and send them off for exhibition and public criticism, only to be confronted by an empty studio and the need to do it all over again. And again.

Interviewed on National Radio's 'Arts on Sunday' programme a couple of weeks ago, after receiving one of this year's five Arts Laureates awards, painter Shane Cotton spoke about his experience of completing new works, and the way in which earlier paintings are left behind.

"The only great time -- I'm talking from personal experience -- when one has the real sense of standing on top of the mountain is [when] you've produced a suite of work, the exhibition's up, and you're very happy with it; and then you walk out the door, and you leave it, and then it's down the hill. And the whole thing's got to start again. And that's how it is. The work's always going to be out there, but just in terms of achievement, and feeling like you've got something going here -- it's gone. You go back to the studio; it's empty; the walls are bare; you've got to pick up the brush or whatever it is you do, mix the paint, and start again. And it doesn't get any easier."