Sojourn

Had a few queries about this blog and its raison d'etre. Still on it in theory but read on...

I broke my left fibula on Bastille Day 2012. This gave me about two months of time spent confined to my home. Wow! All that time for working on the Monsoons! You'd finish it. But, no, a lot of the time was spent managing pain and learning how to do things that I used to take for granted (like getting a hot drink from one room to another, showering, cooking etc etc). Every time I tried to think of and develop The Monsoons I mentally looked the other way. How to get out of this?

I began by noticing that, while I was telling people what had happened to me I was applying a formal narrative structure to it. Next stop, I started to draw some sequences and before I knew it I had the makings of a comic. This will be called FIBULA and I'm putting it on another blog. If I can find an elegant and user friendly way of reading this better than the one I am imagining I'll do it. Meantime, keep your eye on this space and this one as well. The closer I am to finishing this the sooner I get back to this. Thank you, thank you for your kind attention.

Soundtrack album

 I said in an earlier post that I didn't want a soundtrack associated with this project because it would distract from the story. I did make up a cd with the following tracks and drew scenes from the story as the cover art and I'd put it on while I was getting the studio ready for work. But like pencil, ink, paper and sable brushes, I eventually abandoned the cd. I use a Cintiq tablet and listen to anything from my entire record collection, reformatted as flacs on the laptop attached to the Cintiq.

Anyway, I've been getting requests to at least know what was on the playlist. Well, I dug the cd out and had a look at it and put it on and just enjoyed the hits 'n' memories. One caveat (at least about my motivation here) is that I remember the year on radio as being, like any other year on radio, mostly indigestible garbage but that the good bits were really good. They do still write 'em like this and not just to copy them ...  it just doesn't happen all in one year anymore. Anyway the songs .. with a few cd extras as I think of them:
 

Please Don't Go - K.C. and the Sunshine Band:I knew plenty of people who said they didn't like this big spacey love song and all of them were liars. In that sense it was the late 70s' More Than a Feeling.

Cars - Gary Numan:Ice cold proto-synth pop showed the way of the near future. I heard huge torchlight rallies in this that Gazza never intended. In 1979 the vid was also very future-now.

Egyptian Reggae - Jothanon Richman and the Modern Lovers:Simple guitar figure instrumental that no one would get away with now.

Olivers Army - Elvis Costello and the Attractions: Elvis Costello had already been dazzling with a number of short and deadly singles that had sharp and spiky videos to go with them. Oliver's Army had a kind of nouveau nostalgia look and sound which was instantly appealing but also still very sneery. First artist whose lyrics I cared about (and then only made out about half the words)

Uncontrollable Urge - Devo:Nervy energy and pointy rock music and one of the best call and response choruses ever.

The Banana Splits - The Dickies:Best version ever. From the look and sound I was flabbergasted to find out they were American

R U Receiving Me? - XTC:Gnu wave that even my older brother liked. Great vid!

I Need to Know - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers:Great forceful rock song where the indecipherable verse is there for the modal tune and the bulk of the song is in the chorus.

Pop Muzik - M:First white rap song? First international hit rap song? The term wasn't in the parlance until a few years later. I just took this as a kind of talking blues. Sounds like a toned down Fall to me now. You could NOT go to anyone's party in the late stages of 1979 without hearing this played about seventy-two times.

Girls Talk - Dave Edmunds: Irresistable and superior remake of Elvis Costello song with cinematic vid.

Who Killed Bambi - The Sex Pistols: Two ex Pistols albums came out in 78/79: the first PIL album and the ragtag soundtrack to The Great Rock n Roll Swindle. At first I preferred the latter to the former but PIL started making friends with me soon enough. This track, the final one on GRRS, followed me around for weeks.

CD extras:

I Say When- Lene Lovich: Odd mix of 50's rock and new wave flash.

Shadow Boxer - The Angels: I had almost finished my imaginary band's concept album (a rip off of the idea of Lou Reed's Berlin) with a big heavy buzzsaw guitar anthem called Depression. That was on a Sunday afternoon. I went over to my brother's place and played it to him. He loved it. Then we saw The Angels do it on Countdown that evening. Well, I didn't have their middle 8.

Birdsong - Lene Lovich: Video and song were a perfect match of horror movie atmosphere. This would soon be known as goth.

I Don't Like Mondays - The Boomtown Rats: No one who went to school at the time felt anything but love for this song.

Influenca: Jonestown, Kabul, London Munich, Everybody talk about Pop Musik

 

I remember hearing the reports back from the horrors of the People's Temple mass suicide. Some I saw on tv but most poignantly I remember hearing the reports from the morning news in Dad's car as he drove me to school. The ABC voice, clipped and authortitative, a voice dressed in pinstripes, was like the sound of history to me. No one talks on the radio like that anymore. It would sound affected and fake. On those mornings, as that voice delivered fresh details the same way and time we got the morning bread and milk, I learned piece by piece about something that sounded like it was done by time travellers.

918 men, women and children died at a thing called the People's Temple run by someone with the roll call name of Jim Jones. Almost all of these deaths were suicides. The guy with the plain Jane name got them to do it. The developing picture revealed some mighty stresses placed upon the colony (which enlightened me on the existance and position of Guyana) and offered some motivation for Jones's command. But the thing missing, the shivery little whisper I heard whenever I heard anything about this event was why all those people killed themselves because they were asked nicely.

I knew of forced labour camps and worse where the victims outnumbered the guards but while saddened by it I had no real trouble understanding that no one among the victims wanted to step forward and be the next one shot. But this was different. People were poisoning their children and it wasn't just because they were afraid of being shot.

You can google the facts yourself and read it all but I'm posting about it here because in 1978 I, as a teen who considered himself cynical and worldly was terrified by it. I wasn't scared that 918 zombies would rise from their jungle graves and invade Australia. I was scared that such a thing could happen in the name of religion in that day and age. It was as though the population of medieval Paris had travelled through time and found itself surrounded by Saracens. It belonged to fiction yet the smell of the putresence of the corpses seem to waft from each new report.

At home, late 70s Townsville, this kind of thing was inconceivable. There were Mormons in white short sleeves and ties but they were jokes that no one let past the flyscreen. Anyone displaying more than an inherited reflex action religiosity was treated with suspicion as a possible fanatic. If it was too hot for sport it was too hot for that old fairy tale. The only church goer in my family, and an infrequent one at that, was my Mum. I never questioned her about her persistent faith because I just wasn't interested.

My point is that religion seemed old fashioned and quaint, like a bakelite radio with long passed stations identified on its dial. And over the waves somewhere with a name that sounded like it was somewhere else, almost a thousand people had killed themselves and their children for beliefs I thought were on the verge of extinction. That genuinely frightened me. It reminded me of the stories I heard of one apocalyptic branch of one of the many cults of Christianity who allegedly sold everything they had and waited on the sand of the sea on a particular day to be swept up by god. You were meant to find that story funny. I didn't. It made me think of Hitler and Stalin and Red China. It made me think of the fictional horror stories I used to read against my own advice.

But it got worse. The Shah of Iran was deposed after months of stormy civil unrest and mass action that exploded into revolution. The result? The modernising monarchy (not pure as the driven snow, mind you) lay in shards and discarded wrappers in the gutters while the country hurtled back toward the dark ages. Why? Religion. Violent religion. Great monolithic nightmare religion as creepy as the Jonestown flavour exploding like a squid's sperm sac over the land, lodging into the spinal cords of a people who had been well on the way to the kind of intellectual tolerance I had taken for granted where I was all my life. Well, at least it wasn't more oafish political hegemony. Vietnam has taught the whole world a thing or two.




December 1979, the Soviet army rolls into Afghanistan (admittedly at the resquest of the Afghan government). They will be there for ten years, brutal, ineffective and hated. Good thing we had that lesson otherwise it would only happen again.

The Apocalypse was around the corner and everything was going backwards. The seventeen year olds in The Monsoons are about to step up to their legal adulthood and greet a world that will not seem worth fighting for. Same as their real life counterparts. You didn't have to hang around uni students like I did to feel any of this, it was there in every news report. The default assumption was that we were among the last of the human race. This went unspoken but was a shared feeling.

It was remembering this feeling that gave me the middle act of The Monsoons. It's a kind of apocalypse by neglect, as though humanity cared so little for itself that it would bilthely vanish overnight. I felt anger over this but also resignation. I wished for the death of every ideologue and religious leader on the face of the earth and death to all who would take their places, wishing as agonisingly as for that one still-warm smile from an early ex girlfriend. And of course the more I wanted it the more remote it became.

We knew we would be heading into study or jobs. And then there was the strain of us that smiled knowingly and headed to the margins to live out whatever fell upon us. Those were our first careerists, the eco farmers, self-taught and self-sufficent connoisseurs of THC, the ones who dressed low but lived high while we shook hands with the Society Men of the Sunshine State. Want to see the end of the world? Watch it from the penthouse. Well, not quite but by comparision that's how it would have looked regardless of how alt we were with our George Orwell haircuts and op shop suits.

And, of course, it didn't happen. Everything just went on, including all the political tension, military action. The religion ebbed (but of course would flow freely a couple of decades later). And we just handed our assignments in or drew our pay.

But on the brink of all of that, the electoral roll, r-rated movies, drinking and hedonism that didn't have to be stolen, we didn't know it was just going to drone on. We thought we were going to inherit a cinderblock. We sang with M:

"Fix me a molotov, I'm on the hitline."

Influenca: Contamination Grey of the Old UK

Something is happening. A small girl with a face made of marzipan and a thick straight fringe interrupts her piano practice by playing some note perfect Rachmaninov with a stare that could pierce reinforced concrete. Her mother rushes into the room just in time for the cherub to instantly resume clunking through The Ash Grove. Everything is normal but the sweet little dear's expressionless face looks knowingly into the middle distance as she nods. Outside the cloud cover seems eternal. Even when the sun shines it feels like its filtered through mist. The soundtrack beyond the dialogue and all the foley work and fx library stock, is a thickly layered synthesiser wash, sweeping from one huge melancholy chord to the next. It never quite fits in. It never just sits under the action like a normal orchestral score does. You always notice it. It pulses with alien energy and the kind of crushing sadness that everyone is familiar with from facing an unpleasant inevitability. Overhead the clouds move so slowly it's barely noticeable. Something is always happening and it's almost never good.

As a child I was fascinated by the apparently endless supply of intriguing and often unsettling young audience tv that came from Britain. Production values were so low by today's standards that they are due for an ironic revival after everyone gets sick of the found footage boogaloo. But this only added to the atmosphere. There was a place in the white noise that found a foothold in the broadcast channels and invaded fullscale around the May and August holidays that was forever cold, grey and worrying. Even the advent of colour in the mid 70s (my family were and are early adopters of tech) did nothing to warm this chill. Here the troubles of the daily round weren't fighting over whose turn it was to take the bins out but how to stop the bins from communicating invasion schedules to the lawnmower. No one cared about the rained-on look as their imaginations were too busy coping with the ideas. And whoever wrote these six part torments for children knew about imagination and all its many uses.

British TV is not like this anymore. Some of the comedy is easily on par with the classic stuff but the weird fascinating sci-fi that could give you massive symphonic nightmares just before dawn has gone. Dr Who offers occasional glimpses of it (its spinoff, Torchwood offers more) and the occasional triumph like Life on Mars (which significantly harks back to the 70s I longingly evoked above) comes out but it's not the norm. There is still good writing and the performances of UK casts seems to be of a superhumanly high standard. But the things over your shoulder, the elemental spirits or radiant boys from distant star systems, have all blown away.

Maybe they should have. Things should change. But the feeling never has too. My favourite John Carpenter film Prince of Darkness is one that even his fans find a little too goofy but for me it's J.C.'s love letter to that vintage  Brit sci-fi/horror. He even wrote it under the pseudonym Martin Quatermass after the scientist hero of one of the UK Tv's golden era mindblowers, Nigel Kneale. And it plays out like a Kneale story with a cavalry charge of ideas storming into the viewer's imagination at a gallop. And, despite its Californian setting it seems as grey and icy as a Yorkshire moor.

I've forgotten the plots and most of the titles of these but the atmosphere remains, forever a mix of homely tidiness and offscreen disorder all seen through the gluey haze of old video. The icy synthesiser score shimmered on. To this day if I find myself outside on a cold and overcast day I look around and almost expect to see something, just a detail, out of sorts, a speck of chaos in the order, on the road or the footpath, something wrong.

Beyond all of this rainy day press there is a silent clarity where, like the urgent crushing universe a reach away from the stratosphere, there is only silence and non-being, neither god nor intergalactic alien, just the silence of nothing.

This is what I feel in every frame of The Monsoons where there is more white than line.

Influenca: CLANCY OF THE OVERBLOW

I loved Clancy.

I still do.

So, I'll say it that way.

I love Clancy.

When I say Clancy, I don't mean Liza Goddard.

This is Liza Goddard. She got the Skippy gig when her family moved o'er from the UK in the sixties. She moved back after Skippy and had a respectable acting career in Blighty. By that time this is what she thought of Skippy. I hope she now lives a happy life as a nanna growing cumquats and roses in a cottage garden in ..... Surrey. But I wasn't talking about her. She's a real person. Clancy is better than that; she's an imaginary one.

Skippy was finished already on a loop when I first saw it. See also Get Smart, Gilligan's Island, Lost in Space and my favourite, The Bucaneers. But Skippy was ours, looked and sounded like us.

I can't remember how old I was when I was dispatched with a handful of siblings and cousins to see Skippy and the Intruders. The cinema was packed. In one scene a chest was opened to reveal gold bars. A kid in the row behind mine responded with a highly audible: G-g-gold. It almost had a speech balloon around it. I didn't turn and look but laughed easily with everyone else who'd heard it. This was an under-ten aspirant adult, a wannabe, a collaborator with the adult occupying forces, the type whose doughy cynicism always sounded like the kind of indoctrinating instruction suffered by children in dictatorships (or even our own in Queensland). He was nevertheless, for all our sniggering, experiencing  this movie the way it was intended.

To watch Skippy was to walk around inside it, to be resting, gumnut baby style, on a eucalypt leaf or one of the deadly rotors of the Waratah's chopper. If I was ever lodged in one of my loungeroom's 70s chic beanbags I was also there in the endless light of Skippy's paradise. And there, too, was Clancy.

I'm not going to go into the memory of a prepubescent near sex experience (those who know me personally would be in counselling for months). An instant nuclear grade sexual attraction was in effect every time she was onscreen but that's not my point. When Clancy entered the screen she walked into my imagination, strolling lightly among the Lost in Space set of red dangling bioforms that I imagined my brain to be, touching, here and there a stray hanging tongue-like protuberance from either idle curiosity or hard fascination.

On screen she might have had her foot caught the muck under the rising tide as Sonny provided her with ever longer improvised straws to use as snorkels (a real episode) or joining in some goofily choreographed fighting in the mud with a rock band dressed as the Kelly Gang (another real episode) -- actually, both of those examples are getting me all hot and bothered so I'll close up the thought with: on screen she might well have been the good looking female prop around which action took place (unlike the good looking male props like Ken James or Tony Bonner who usually came in to act directly after Sonny and Skippy had solved the mystery and needed variously adult and human assistance). ANYWAY, that's what she might have been on screen but as I watched she was in the room with me watching and being, sipping from the same family-size bottle of Coke that I was (and could never finish by myself so it would go like all the others into the fridge to flatten and be forgotten), selecting petite sized twisties from my packet and watching Skippy.

She was an odd (ie exciting ) mix of demure and cheerful and even to my still forming sexuality seemed to drive all the boys around her to hard competitive action. Skippy him/herself was meant to do this but not if you were male and around nine years old. It was her, it was Clancy doing all that. She wasn't in many scenes per episode but didn't have to be. All the action returned to her magnetic centre. Well, that's what happened when I watched it!

All the world loved Skippy. It was translated for Cuban and Conquistador alike, into Czech for the other side of the iron curtain. Carthage might have fallen for Skippy. Only Sweden resisted. The show was deemed irresponsible for depicting an animal capable of doing so much (eg. operating speed boats and literally disarming villains but, curiously, never mowing the lawn).  But I loved Clancy more. As soon as I was old enough for a girlfriend it would be she. I imagined this done by Royal Decree. We would receive a white envelope at our Aitkenvale home. It bore the blobby red seal of The House of Windsor and contained a card with guilded borders which, when opened, was thus inscribed: It is our pleasure to command that Clarissa Merrick hereafter called Clancy be the sole companion of one Peter James Jetnikoff of Aitkenvale, Townsville, North Queensland, Australia. The Queen. I'm filling out the language there, but that's how I saw it. I didn't call it fantasy then. Didn't have to. At nine, who does?

But the world of Skippy was as real as Mr Squiggle (I'll get to him later and explain that). We even had things in our kitchen from his home (no, not the kangaroo paw bottle opener). Waratah Cheddar was a kind of dairy flavoured pliable plastic that came in a package the same shape as a pack of Golden Crumpets (fellow entries in the greater Australian electoral roll, this is how you ruin a toaster). It was very salty, just the kind of cheese that would keep you going through days of being lost i' the bush. There it was, as close as the fridge.

But Clancy remains central to me as I write and draw this story of mine. Because if Gail ever did resemble someone it was she. Liza Goddard was too old to be Gail and too young to be her mum. Big sister subtracts too much from the concept. So it's Clancy, Clancy as an Irish Queenslander (Gail's name is Byrne) from the manager classes, but really Clancy all the same, grown up and aware of the powers of her physicality, Clancy whose backchat and frowning observations were those of a teenager who had to compete with an entire family good at both, a Clancy who would get sick of the boys running at windmills of solutions and do something more practical.

It's Clancy, demure but developing, who gets what she wants, sharp minded and boxing gloved like Liza Goddard against all the bullshit she's known so far and all the bullshit that is to come. It's Clancy in the big, haunted silence of the final scene with Meg and the weirding events of the middle act. Clancy in an episode of Skippy so serious and challenging that even the kangaroo wranglers refused to step forward. She won't need those gloves. Skippy won't be there. This is the episode of Clancy: Monster Hunter, Ghost Caller, Conqueror of Chaos. Only her name's Gail.

Influenca: KILL THE ENEMY: war comics

This is the cover of the first war comic I ever bought. I would have been about nine or ten. Mum ridiculed the title but that's what made me pick it out at the newsagent. The cover and the title formed a kind of concentrate. My first war comic had to be full flavoured and lasting. This one promised magnificent violence and in machine-like hatred. Win!

I think it's particularly apt, then to begin this subseries of posts about direct influences over the look, feel and content of The Monsoons with what was a huge formative influence o'er my life for about three years, either side of eleven.

The story of Kill the Enemy, in fact, was about a soldier twisted with a personal hatred. Fuelled by vendetta and propaganda, he was ready to go out in a blaze as long as he took a few beastly boche with him. Eventually, he was brought around by his fellow soldiers because it's all bad and puts everyone's life in danger when they could fight more coldly and kill a whole host more of the deadly hun. Well, not quite, there was in fact a quite effective anti-war message to this which I grew to quite enjoy. No contradiction here, I liked the war story and liked being invited to join in and condemn war: I take one in and get to feel superior (yea, verily unto myself). Then everything rebooted for the next one.

This was a War Picture Library comic. It was British. The other British war comic to get was Commando. These were black and white, mostly without tones and varied little but noticeably in style. They had to move quickly and be very authentic with their military hardware and landscape. Something I always noticed about the stories set in the desert campaigns was that they captured the effect of glare through very sparse use of line. You could put tones galore on the North Sea,the roof of New Guinea or the beaches of Normandy but the desert was all line, thin line against white that looked blisteringly hot.

The American war comics were coloured and heroic but it was easier to get the antiwar messages from them. If you didn't notice that the circle drawn around the words THE END in the last panel of each story itself contained a phrase like MAKE WAR NO MORE then you were choosing not to look. Sgt. Rock was chief among these (it was the one with the end messages) had some intriguing stories, sometimes verging on the kind of sci fi nazi of eighties cult cinema. They'd also tack on shorter stories from different eras of warfare. One was set during a Roman campaign. Blood flowed from the title panel and poured into a centurion's cup as red wine. That really zapped me.

The UK ones never went anywhere near there. They were the solid universe replaying over and over as I reread and reread them until the pulpy beige pages disintegrated in my hands. However, as a reader the two strands, fantastical and adventuresome, I conflated them into a World War II of clean lines and phantasmagoria. War movies, by contrast were always drab by comparison, either too jolly and heroic or as everyday as the war machines I could see just by looking up at the sound of a jet engine in my town of soldiers, sailors and flyboys.

The stark line of the desert comics is the same as the one I'm using for the piercing glare of the tropics in The Monsoons. The esoterica (well, near enough) of Sgt. Rock weaves in between the hard edged line and the wandering white of the Commando blaze. I cannot stress too strongly the effect that these comics had on me. It was to the cost of any super hero fare and even horror pieces that my elder siblings left in their wardrobes under their old paisley jackets and cadet's slouch hats.

Perhaps they also fired, I doubt it not, the young imagination of Magnetic Island's most infamous or famous son, Julian Assange (will I put him in?) who, at the age of eight during the The Monsoon's timeline, would, just like me and all of us, have looked up at the sound of a jet engine to see the hardware of the state, a Mirage or a Phantom fighter, tearing at the clouds, or gaze into the waves in case he saw not stingers, nor sharks, but an Oberon Class submarine rise huge and awesome from the jade green waves of Cleveland Bay. That's what I was looking for.

Marty profile

Best recent take on Marty done on my Lenovo tablet.