Hang Ten with the Lisan Al-Giab

Hello You.

I went to see the Dune Movie last night, Dune 2: Dune it again Dune 2: What’s he Dune Dune 2: Sisters Dune it for themselves Dune Part 2. I left the cinema quite giddy having just sat through the breezy 2 hours and 47 minutes of extremely dense science fiction film.

And then on the way home I saw an Owl.

What a time to be alive.

I spent three of the last weeks having a really bad chest infection which reduced me to a sofa bound slug coughing and retching for breath as I play Fallout 4. I would describe this situation as “Less than Ideal”. I am not the best at sitting and doing nothing, I have a drive inside me to have activities on the boil at all times. This does lead to situations where I am forced by my body to sit down and shut up when I ignore a few weeks of illness and let it blossom into something grotesque.

So I would say its been a quiet month but I still ended up travelling to Scotland, doing a Zine fair, and spending a large amount of time working at the studio. What I’m saying here is I don’t know how to relax.

Topics wise we are looking at:

1) What am I doing right now?

2) The Art of Taking Yourself Seriously.

3) Writing for the sake of writing.

4) Nick’s Music Corner.

So as always if any of those particular topics pickle your herring please skip a head, if not, lets hit this thing.

Big thing to happen this passing Month was that the album Ground Work by Animal By Products was released on Spotify with a physical album coming out some-day in the future. The Leeds based punk band approached me at the tail end of last year about doing a single cover for them for the title track of their new album which was all about allotments. After a wonderfully collaborative process of working out what was best for everyone, getting their design nailed down, and then creating it.

I have to say I am chuffed with the output. I loved seeding in lots of little details into the image so that when its eventually a vinyl sleeve it’ll give people lots to pour over and get lost in. I bought a bunch of new procreate brushes for the job and as always seems to be the case they really liked the basic one so I didn’t get chance to use them. Still got the brushes though so who’s the real winner? I hope I get to work with them again, as it was all very easy and we got to make something that contained all our voices.

Next Weekend I return to Lancaster for the Coco Comic Con. Its my third one of these on the trot and they’re really well organised friendly events. Its also slightly earlier on in the year than the previous two so hopefully it won’t be extremely hot as it was the last two times. But the Coco Comics ensemble are a group of friendly positive people who really drive the idea of positivity in the comics community. I will be selling things, and hopefully will have some previews of the new experimental zine I am working on. More about that in the taking yourself seriously section.

I will also be at the Derby zine fair.

I was pointed in the direction of the Derby zine fair by the extremely talented JamZilla who is probably one of my favourite human beings on planet Earth. I adore their RPG work, using collage and repurposed images alongside a keen knack for story telling to make some really weird role playing games. This will be my first trip to Derby and I am excite to not see any of it and sit in a room selling zines all day.

My current Zine project is an experimental narrative book revolving around my anxieties about academia. I always feel like I am not a particularly academic person, or at least that in order to be academic I have to try very hard. I’ve been making comics for a decade now and a lot of those are about explosions. I like drawing Martians and naked people, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Taking this and transplanting it into a University setting makes me feel uncomfortable and a little sweaty. In order to create a smokescreen around this I have described myself more than once as “Silly”.

I was in a PhD supervision meeting the other day and I called myself “Silly” once again and my Supervisor said “Well it took you 50 minutes to say something self depreciating this time, lets try and make it a full hour next time”.

I try and stay away from self depreciation. Its bad for your mental health and self image. But I diminish my work all the time, which is equally as bad. The work I put together has value, and when I dismiss it I dismiss not only the hard work I put in but also the people who really dig my stuff.

As a result I am now committed to the Art of Taking Yourself Seriously. I haven’t googled to see if that is a book title yet, but it should be. It should be a lifestyle movement. A cult maybe? Can we get an MP elected to the House of Commons under the Taking Ourselves Seriously Party?

A friend of mine who had a past life working in International Banking (small scale, don’t worry) was telling me about intercultural training they had where they were taught how to speak to people frim different parts of the world to not offend them but also effectively communicate what they mean. One of the things on this list was the difference between Americans and the English when it comes to self assertion. American business teaches you to be committal, you say YES and NO and deal in definites. English business has a lot of “We will see what we can do”. There significantly less commitment to what you mean. This extends to the presentation of ideas. According to this training if you’re an American businessman showcasing a project, you are more inclined to lean into it as the best god damn project that has ever been proposed. The Englishman however is more likely to be reserved in his endorsement. “This is something we threw together”. “This could work”.

Its business training so its a gross simplification, a generalisation for the ages. However, I do feel myself doing this. When someone asks me about one of my books, or my art project, or my PhD I shy away from the enthusiasm I have for it and talk about it like its just some dumb thing I do on a weekend rather than the main driving force in my life. I rarely tell people that I on a full scholarship for fear that they’ll think I am showing off. We don’t shout about our achievements because we are terrified someone won’t like it and that will dent our entire sense of self. Better sabotage it before anyone else does. Its the equivalent of burning down our house to protect it from burglars.

I also see it a lot in Mainstream entertainment. One of my biggest bugbears in Marvel films is their inability to take themselves seriously. I say this as a consumer of Marvel Entertainment and a fan of their output of yesteryear. Comic book movies are wild suspensions of disbelief where we have to believe that people can fly and Ant man can afford half the rent on a San Francisco apartment straight out of prison. but rather than assert themselves they quaver away from the things they’re showing you by having characters smirk at one another and say “Well that just happened” and quip their way through events that then sits in harsh contrast to scenes that are supposed to have emotional gravitas. Its an increasing problem that frustrates me to the point of brain damage. I see it in sitcoms, family dramas, and horror films. Sly self awareness tainting the dialogue and the narrative.

Dune 2: Dune it for the Kids Dune 2: How you Dune? Dune 2: Dune your Mum Dune Part 2 was a refreshing antidote for this frustration. A quip free movie that presented some absolutely unbelievable shit with such a serious commitment that you had no chance but to take it seriously. It wasn’t Po faced, there was humour in Dune, but it was baked into the characters and their human dialogue. It never felt like the Fremen had a team of SNL writers feeding them lines, instead there was a gentle humour in their interactions with Paul, a man with a very ordinary name. My favourite scene for this was when Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a newly introduced secondary antagonist is being introduced as a sociopathic monster. He’s celebrating his birthday in a rigged gladiatorial battle against drugged prisoners. As an extra safeguard to make sure he wins, around the outside of the arena are figures in black morph suits with great arched head dressed and hooks to back him up should he start to lose. The costuming is perfect, but my god does it lean into the alien. In isolation it looks like humorous fetish gear, but because its presented as part of this intense and cruel scene we believe in it. Dune has earned our trust in this world so we trust in the design even if it steers close to the ridiculous.

I think that the Lord of The Rings series had a similar thing going for it. Its a story about short hairy footed men who love pies trying to beat a magic eye that lives at the top of a tower. But because it takes itself seriously, because it commits itself to the logic of its world, we trust that it all makes sense. I don’t think that this is an inherently difficult thing to do. I think that lots of creatives have done it, but in a world where cinema has a heavy reliance on box office returns and making sure those shareholders are happy, people are less likely to open themselves up to ridicule.

If someone in Guardians of the Galaxy wears a silly hat, they must make a comment about it just in case someone in the audience thinks its silly. In Dune, everyone gets a silly hat at the door, and they wear them whilst staring at a grossly overweight man fly around in a silk dress. But we are totally okay with it because the film creates a world where it all makes sense.

The burden is on you. You have to take yourself seriously. Your ideas matter if they matter to you and if you can then impart that onto someone else, that’s even better. We have to make a commitment right now to embrace the Art of Taking Yourself Seriously. Even if the thing you’re committed to is the most ridiculous thing on planet Earth, you have to have faith in its importance and its quality. Vic and Bob never downplayed what they did, even if they were two child voice men in a car park doing terrible Parkour. You have to be stone cold committed to your lunacy. Sell it like you’re reinvented the wheel.

Making a comic book about a man who eats famous scabs? Its revolutionary!

Doing a video art piece where you put skittles up your nose? This is integral!

Putting together a story where talking boats solve cold case murders? Buddy you’re changing the world!

You have to take the what you produce seriously. Its rare than anyone is going to do it for you without you leading the way.

Art Review recently did a… well… review of Thomas Gardener’s book Poverty Creek Journal. You can read the review here. Gardner is a Professor of English at Virginia Tech which means he is free to live on the edge of the Jefferson National Forest in Southwest Virginia. He is also a keen runner and Poverty Creek Journal is a documentation of his runs through the woodlands near his home. Each entry never exceeds a paragraph and each run is the same route leading, so the focus isn’t always on the new things he is seeing and his times and distances, instead its also a documentation of his feelings and thoughts as he repeats the same loop over and over.

As a runner with easy access to a woodlands myself I know what this is like, as I will run the same route sometimes three or four times a week; heading up the same hill, crossing the same bridge, hopping over the same puddles. For me, exercise isn’t an experiment in selflessness its a thoughtful process of unpicking and unwinding. I do my best thinking when running and this is something that links myself and Gardner as he recounts literary quotations that come to mind, poetic insights that border on the spiritual, and meditations on grief and loss because shortly after his experiment with writing began his brother passes away in his sleep from a heart attack and his runs become a method of processing and analysing this sense of absence. (Daunt Books, £8.99)

I’ve been slowly picking through it, reading a paragraph a day, and its really made me thing about my approach to running but also my approach to writing. I realise that when it comes to writing the majority of my writing is done because a purpose is already in my mind for the words before they are laid down on paper. I write articles, I write essays, I write this newsletter, I write short stories with the intent to submit them to various publications. But I don’t just write for the act of writing. The topic of casual writing is definitely part of my personal Zeitgeist at the moment. My therapist has been keen for me to journal on a few topics and the self care app I use to plan my days has a real focus on reflection and mindful writing. The app is called Finch by the way and it is painfully cute and has been revolutionary for my productivity and mental health management. its something that I was thinking of embracing, and out of no where my songwriter friend sent me a website that they have been using for sense based writing exercises.

Objectwriting.com gives you a word of the day and a ten minute timer. Its roots lay in sense based writing, which is an exercise in using your sensory understanding of a prompt to write uninterrupted for a period of time and just blast out a bunch of words that you can use either as a basis for something else or as a way of challenging your current descriptive approach when writing. I have found it very useful in the same way as I find life drawing useful; its helped me reappraise my style as a reflection of my view of the world. My friend Christopher R Moore, a skilled poet and writer whose musing on fear and being passed the aux cable during car rides can be found here, has a poem about memory that he calls “Drawing Danny DeVito From Memory”. That poem is an expansion from a Cormac McCarthy quote from the Road where he says: “each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins”. Every time we remember something we remember the last time we remembered it, and like the Telephone Game (I refuse to use its racist English name so we will go with the American/Canadian version) every time the message of the memory is passed through your mind it gets warped and changed.

I feel that as creatives every time we write something or draw something, we forget to revisit the real thing we are expressing and instead remember the last time we wrote/drew it and do that again. I know this is something I am guilty of. The more time I spend in my head the more I draw things in the Nick Gonzo style, write things in the Nick Gonzo way, and just refine and develop what I’ve already done rather than find new ways to express myself.

So right now I am advocating for us all to spend some time doing some writing for the sake of writing. Spend ten minutes and just let words come out of you. Whether that is the outpouring of thought in the sweaty aftermath of a run, or ten minutes thinking really hard about a random object, I think the benefit of reconnecting with the world will have fresh benefits.

Here by the way is something I wrote this week by just writing for ten minutes and then editing it slightly for spelling and sentence structure. Please Enjoy:

Garbage Can

Down a back alley there is your Garbage Can.

A cylinder of metal, rusting at its base, wearing thin from the weekly drag to the curb and back.

It stinks, a putrescence that's almost medical. Split bags vomiting out their contents and dripping foul juices have stained it. Its engrained. It can never be cleaned out. Spoilt fruit, rotten dairy, fluids of your making; they haunt it in-perpetuity.

To the outside eye it is a storage unit for filth. For the discarded things you don't want hanging around. The plastic wraps and table scrapings left over from a life well lived. In truth, its a vessel for your secrets.

Some are mundane secrets; the food you eat, the products you buy, the things you do late at night to keep you young and sane. The Garbage can has seen them all. But it knows your personal secrets too. It has seen your bank statements, knows what you buy in hotel rooms when you're alone. It knows every time you've cut your finger, had a nose bleed, tried to drown a cold in over the counter medication. The Garbage can knows that you ordered fried chicken three nights in a row when the last love of your life left. It knows that you threw all away all the valentines cards they sent you, only to come and retrieve them at 2am, eyes red and nose streaming with snot. The Garbage can knows about the last time you shit your pants, when you were drunk on vodka after your best friends wedding, and you cried because this is not the way you saw your life going.

But what does the Garbage can think?

Does it sit in judgement?

Not even for a second.

Its loves you and wishes it could do more to help.

Imagine seeing all the pain and waste of someone and having to stoically sit and wait and be dragged to the curb every Tuesday. Imagine having to see the archaeology of a person disappear into the back of a giant crushing truck. The Garbage Can wants you to know you're only human. You're just one person. There's so much pressure on you. So much you have to deliver and provide. The Garbage Can wants you to know you're enough. You don't need to do more. It thinks you're doing fine. It wants to hold you close and say “You don't need to hide any more.”

But you wouldn't let it, even if it could.

Because its a Garbage can and it stinks.

As mentioned in January I didn’t really get into the nitty gritty of music last year, mostly revisiting the same sort of thing and not expanding my horizons. To combat that, please have some music.

-Some Divine Gift is the 2022 album by Pop-noir ensemble The Bullfight. Each track is a moody composition featuring a guest speaker over the top, combining spoken word with dark subtle music. The opening track features Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandius and Track four (My Sister) feels like a short story by B. Catling.

-Lover’s Walk (Instrumentals) is an album by Nottingham based musician David Boulter. I really got into his soundtrack for the Brazilian body-horror film Tinnitus this week, but lovers walk was a welcome accompaniment to some recent hikes through the woods. Gentle compositions with some real depth and beauty.

-Arc de Soleil is a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who makes funk infused instrumentals in the vein of early Khurangbin. He doesn’t have an album out yet, but has a bunch of EPs and singles on spotify that are excellent.

-I have been listening to the band Bambara a lot this week, specifically their 2020 album Stray. A post-punk band with narrative lyrics, very Nick Cave adjacent, though making comparisons like that always set people up for a fall and opens me up for people to complain at me that they aren’t as good as Nick Cave. They aren’t OK? But they’re still enjoyable. Jeez.

-ShitKid is a garage-rock project by Asa Soderqvist. Their 2020 LP Fish sounds like a Russ Meyer film. It has a late 50s sound to it, but also feels fresh and new. I really enjoyed it and it seems that the musician behind it has vanished from Earth, so that’s fun too.

Thanks for reading this far. I had a lot of fun writing this so I hope that translates into you having a lot of fun reading it. If not, well I didn’t write it for you.

That’s a joke. I wrote it for you and you only.

That being said…

In the final scene of The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), a film that was really important to me when I watched it at University, David Bowie’s alien Visitor Thomas Newton meets with a former friend Dr Nathan Bryce played by Rip Torn. Newton has recorded an album of music as an apology to his wife who he may never see again, the two of them separated by millions of miles of space, the alien world only reachable via the radio waves blasted out by Earth and picked up years later by their receivers. His hope is that the radio play his music gets will send the message back home like a message in a bottle.

When asked if he enjoyed the music, Bryce gives a negative review, and Thomas Newton says “Well I didn’t make it for you”.

I love this scene, but I love this exchange so much more. Bowie doesn’t play it angry, or disappointed, he just is impassive, putting his sunglasses back on as he dismisses Bryce’s lack of connection. Art is a form of connection. Its communication. We are all just firing out our own radio signals with the home of speaking to our people where ever they may be.

I hope this signal finds you Earthling, and I hope you’re my sort of people.

As always, yours faithfully.

Nick Gonzo.