evening_tsar

By the River Piedra I sat Down and Wept, is a long turgid sermon disguised a short novel, in which a young woman quits her job, drops out of school, and runs off with a quack Earth-Mother mystic. In the misty mind of author Paulo Coelho, this is admirable behaviour. So too is speaking in tongues, breaking glasses in a restaurant, praying half-naked in the snow, walking through snow in your sandals, and dying of frost-bite on a mountain-top to get a better view. In Coelho’s world, love is a kind of stroke one gets, and any amount of irrational behaviour is justified in its indulgence, especially if it can be passed off as divine revelation.

Call me cynical, but I tend to think demands for the surrender of your better judgement is the first sign of toxicity, if not abuse, in a relationship: I’ve been there, it nearly killed me, and Coelho will forgive me if I find nothing divine in those episodes.

But By the River is a death-cult of a book, so maybe a little toxicity is just what the preacher ordered.

I mean, what am I to think when the supposedly wise and kind priest says “those who died at the stake or in the sands of the arena rose quickly to eternal glory – they were better off.” ? Or the narrator’s “A fall from the third-floor hurts as much as a fall from the hundredth”, which some may take for pithy wisdom, but which is patently untrue. These are celebrations of death, not love.

You won't find here any time for the more gentle, patient, or nurturing qualities of love. Love for Coelho is only that which will injure, torture, or kill you. We are offered as a role model Mad Maria de Jesus, who spent two years walking barefoot to Rome. “For that entire period, she slept outdoors, in the heat and the cold, living on alms, and the charity of others.” grandly declares a priest, as if that self-imposed misery was something we should all aspire to. Thus, our young protagonist is apparently willing to die for her love (and very nearly does), but not wait two months to finish her studies.

If her newfound love is so powerful and transcendental, why, one wonders, is she so afraid it will dissolve like a snowflake if she goes back home? Ah, because that would be most unlike Mad Maria de Jesus! Love, for Coelho demands dramatic, near-suicidal gestures, the more senseless the better, lest it should prove a passing fancy. Our young protagonist throws a tantrum and nearly dies of exposure, not when her lover leaves her (oh there’s no question of that!) but when he gives up his superpowers in hopes of leading a normal life. Seems she was looking forward to the hard life of a mystic’s wife. Love just isn’t love in this world without a little masochism.

Even in her moments of self-doubt, our young protagonist doesn’t trouble herself with getting to know her lover for more than a couple weeks.

Our young protagonist would probably get on well with Goethe’s Young Werther of “Sufferings of” fame, who was also overpowered by an all-encompassing love. He also shot himself. Cohelho might balk at the comparison, but there was nothing Young Werther said up until his self-immolation that would have been out of place on the Banks of the River Piedra.

Suffering, sacrifice, spontaneous outburst of irrationality are what constitute love here. There’s little room for kindness in the characters’ incredible self-absorption. I suppose barging into churches after closing hours, or smashing other people’s property by way of “symbolic gestures” can be dismissed as misdemeanors, but it does show how little courtesy counts in their cosmic scheme of things. And though our young protagonist’s lover can supposedly heal people, I can’t help noticing they don’t visit a single cancer ward.

It’s not that I’m not a sucker for dramatic gestures. Nor that the heart of an old Romantic no longer beats in me. It’s that I’ve learned, rather the hard way, that demands to prove oneself with strident acts of self-harm are seldom friendly ones. Nor is it healthy to see love as a kind of roulette-wheel to bet everything on because you “have a feeling about it.” But Paulo Cohelho’s gotten rich peddling exactly that kind of crap. I shudder to think of how many young people threw themselves into toxic or abusive situations under his inspiration.

There are days when I contemplate middle-age, and rejoice in my ever-more apparent mortality. It means I will not have to long inhabit the ap-addled abattoir that society is building for itself, and which the poor kids will have to inherit. I swear I would rather jump from a moving bullet-train into a burning sulphur-pit than face the feckless future the tech-bros are planning for us.

Such a moment cam upon me again the other day, shortly after a grade-9 student told me in all sincerity, that Stranger Things was based on a true story. That by itself was not the moment of my all encompassing weltschmerz; that came later. At first, I merely iterated, in the admittedly condescending manner that grown-ups will often inadvertently adopt when confronted with childish fancies they are not altogether in the mood for dealing with (around the time when the elapsed hours since lunch are roughly equal to the remaining hours before dinner, and the longing for caffeine is slowly replaced by the longing for alcohol), that it was “just a story”.

“Oh no!” my little friend persisted, informing me that one of the actors of the program, the otherwise wonderful Gatan Motarazzo who brought the ever-so-loveable Dustin Henderson to life, told an interview that it was a true story.

I felt my heart sink into my boots, and maintained in an even more condescending manner, that actors, bless ‘em, aren’t always the oracles of wisdom and truth we take them to be.

“Yeah, but other people have said it!” came the paraphrased puppy-dog. At which point he whipped out his phone for indisputable proof, and I wished for the roof to collapse on top of me.

“You Can’t. Believe. Everything. You Read. On. The. Internet.” I slowly, slowly squeezed through bitten-bleeding lip in what I hoped was my most condescending tone yet.

“But there’s so much of it!” he says, and I wished someone would sticks dynamite up my nostrils and light the fuse. (“You see how that’s worse? You do understand how that’s worse???”).

I’d had just about had it at this point, and rather clumsily (for I was caught off guard and not prepared) threw out some such canards about verifying sources and evaluating veracity of information, when he’d opened up youtube to Mysteries Decoded: The Montauk Experiments, and I prayed for someone to dump liquid drano down my throat.

We’re going to pause here for a moment, and in violation of those abhorrent 5-paragraph essay templates I am state-mandated to force-feed our innocent youth, get to my main point/idea/topic/thesis here, having failed to mention it any earlier, in the event my audience’s no-doubt formidable-but-not-infinite attention spans may waver. The point is not that Mysteries Decoded was wretched even by the abysmal standards of Youtube docs. Nor is my failure to dissuade my young charge from believing that the US government was conducting mind-control-time travel experiments in 1981 the reason I wanted to throw myself into a wood-chipper. It was that this young man, far from atypical, had no capacity to tell reality from fiction. No critical faculties. No ability or even willingness to flag fraud or fantasy.

That fucking depressed me.

You may ask what the big deal is, and what business I, who once obsessed over Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, have in judging? Different times, different contexts, higher stakes, I would maintain.

Look, when I researched my cryptids, I was much younger than he is today. I had to go to the children’s department at the library and sign out – a book. I had to read – a book. If nothing else, I was reading – a book. The benefits of which are manifold. I was also surrounded by adults who valued education, had years of science and media literacy classes ahead of me, and, well, other books. He on the other hand is barraged by videos, memes, and soundbites, every single hour, and he believes all of it. He will come across other, nastier ideas, with no greater ability to discriminate. Today it’s the Montauk Experiment, tomorrow it’s the Protocols of the Eldars of Zion. He will encounter voter fraud conspiracies, anti-vax tirades, 9-11 Trutherism, Sandy Hook denialism, Holocaust denial, New Age quakery, religious fundamentalism, great replacement theory, whatever the hell Putin’s pushing at any given time, and Q-Anon Pizzagate conspiracies.

Indeed, compare nonsense. If a kid thinks there’s a plesiosaur in a Scottish lake or a hairy ape man wandering BC, it’s not much different from thinking there was a jolly toymaker living at the North Pole (which most of us recently believed). The Montauk conspiracy holds that the US government did mind-control time travel experiments on (unnamed) kidnapped children. It’s Pizzagate in germination. An unverifiable, unprovable, but unshakable conviction that genuine harm is being done to real people. Somewhere. Folks who believe that can be driven to extremes.

I have no doubt that every government, and the US government in particular, does some pretty nasty things behind closed doors. But I’m much more concerned about what we know to be true than what almost certainly isn’t. I’d rather break open an ICE detention facility where I know children are suffering, than some empty lab in Montauk, Long Island. Those concerned with the latter show precious little concern about the former: they certainly don’t churn out youtube and tiktok channels about it. Nor about child-poverty, childhood leukemia, child casualties of war zones, nor indeed any genuine issue facing actual, verifiable, children. You know, the ones with names. Energy and indignation are wasted chasing shadows. It’s maddening.
I am neither the first, nor will I be the last to pull out his beard with frustration at the baboons who for years obsessed over an imaginary child sex-ring run by a non-existent global elite, yet now seem to be fully onside with a genuine child-sex ring run by the actual global elite! Yet this is what happens when critical faculties are turned off. This is the danger of conspiracy theories. Millions have died due to them; Democracy itself may not survive them.

I wish I were being hyperbolic.

That’s why I wanted to dowse myself in gasoline and light myself on fire.

I seem to remember graduating from high school energized, galvanized, and ready to take on a world that ceased to exist the minute I stepped out into it.

I was a master of micro-fiche, card-catalogues, and the Encyclopedia Britannica (to say nothing of cassette tapes, and Word Perfect).

I enjoyed those investigative methods. I felt invigorated by the effort it took, and gratified by the results they yielded - the same way anything feels when your efforts pay off.

Needless to say, all these efforts went down the garburator with the advent of a certain technical innovation.

Today's "clicketyclicketyclick" research provides me no gratification, and certainly not better results. It feels a little like the way my Mother warned me I would feel after flicking channels all night with a bag of cheesies. Funny how the world spent so much time telling us not to stare at a screen too much while growing up, and now practically demands it.

But I forget: the generation that liked to stare at screens now runs the world.

It is a cliche to say the Google search engine has gotten worse. It has. It does not yield me the information I need but the crap it thinks I want, and, more importantly, the crap big tech wants me to want.

Alternative options are limited though, as so little information is provided any other way.

Don't get me started on GPS.

Mea culpa:

Pertaining to my previous post, it tuns out neither Ambrose Bierce, nor Gustav Flaubert wrote “[Patriotism] is the belief that one’s own country is best because one was born in it.” as I asserted, at least not in the sources I assumed.

What Bierce did write, in his Devil’s Dictionary from 1906, was that patriotism was “Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name.” He went on to define a “patriot” as “One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and tool of conquerors.”

So not exactly what I remembered, but still relevant to the discussion, and even more viciously skeptical.

In 1911, Gustav Flaubert’s released his own dictionary – The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas , based on conversations he overheard in drawing room parties. While not as angry as The Devil’s Dictionary, it is, for my money, much funnier, not least because these are things actual people apparently said. Alas, it has no entry for “patriotism”: nearest I could find was “Political Economy”, defined as “Dismal Science”.

Go figure.

Late the party as always, but I'll gladly bore the stragglers. Disney Doctor Who, series 2, my takes:

The Well - 8/10

Right-o, here’s what we’re going to do for the peace of mind of all parties concerned: let’s just ignore the pre-credit scenes of all stories from here on in. Just pretend they don’t exist because they all routinely suck. Then, we can get on to the real story, which so far has been pretty good.

The Well is definitely a win for style -over substance – but what style! A spooky dark planet with a mystery to solve, and a massively high body count to go with it. We haven’t had this kind of out-and out space-slasher since, when, Oxygen? If the story is more basic than it appears to be, and its connection with Midnight tenuous at best, the atmosphere is a triumph, dark, tense, and at times, genuinely scary. At least until Murray Gold’s shrieky string section kicks in, diffusing the tension like a leaf blower to a sand-sculpture. Ye Gods, can we please bring back Segun Akinola? At least he respected Delia Derbyshire’s theme!

Credit must go to co-writer Sharma Angel Walfall presumably injecting some guts into the proceedings.

Lucky Day 2/10

For the first time in forty years - in forever really – I skipped the intro. I can’t do it anymore, sorry. I should have skipped the episode. I did skip large segments of it.

Pity about Conrad. I liked him. I suppose we were supposed to. He was more than a bit of a buffoon, but I was attracted to his burning curiosity and open mindedness – qualities I admire. I thought he’d have made a good companion, and yes, I thought he and Ruby made a cute couple. I suppose that’s what’s supposed to have given the story its dramatic punch. Instead, I felt it to be more of a bait-and-switch, following an agonizing sixteen minutes of set up.

I suppose I should be grateful that the schmaltz was undermined in such brutal fashion, but that’s not what I wanted. I didn’t begrudge Ruby her boyfriend; I just didn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with them. And for God’s sake, I didn’t want her suffer. It was squirmy and awkward and uncomfortable, and didn’t at all make up for the torturous sixteen minutes. It felt mean.

And how about this throwaway bit of dialogue.

“Was he [the Doctor] your boyfriend?”
“Oh no. If he were here, he’d be flirting with you.”
Notice: once again, it’s entirely the sexuality of the character/ actor that determines whether the Doctor fucks his companions. NOT because he’s an ALIEN!!!! Not because he’s more than A THOUSAND YEARS OLD!!!!! No one ever brings that up. Why tf not?

Anyway, if Pete McTighe’s script offered a much needed take down of conspiracy fantasists and online post-trutherism, well that’s great, but it also made for miserable television.



The Story and the Engine – 8/10

Holy shit, did he really name his ship “Nexus”? Bugger all, that was a key term from MY latest fiction! Bloody hell, it was the title! Granted, it was always a tentative title, but now I’ll have to come with another one.

But onto the story, we are taken to the heart of bustling Lagos where an interdimensional spider-shaped vessel fueled by fiction is disguising as a barbershop. It’s an inspired, almost brilliant idea that makes for immensely entertaining television. Here’s the thing: I rather like stories, and have always been a sucker for stories about stories. So something like this has me in from the beginning. It’s rather reminiscent of “Rings of Akhnaten” in terms of this theme (another, much maligned, tale I just melted for): some big malignant entity craves stories, and who knows more stories than the Doctor? I suppose I could quibble with the Doctor’s contention that a night in the life of Belinda is more compelling than his adventures with Cybermen and Ice Warriors – it ain’t.

A more serious quibble might be that there are altogether too many mini-climaxes, so many long, drawn out triumphalist speeches underneath Murray Gold’s ear-splitting score - and I cannot emphasise enough, for the fifth time in a row, how much this hackwork ruins the episodes (who knows how they might have been under a more sensitive artist). It feels like the episode spends nearly a third of its running time ending itself. When things are going so well, what’s the hurry?

I’m also not thrilled about the Doctor hobnobbing with “gods” – we’re in full mythological territory now, but then again, we have been for quite some time. The abandonment of rationalism is something I deeply mourn.


Interstellar Song Contest 7/10

Argh! It looks like music won’t be getting any better between now and 2925, and I’ll be stuck with drum machines forever. Argh!

Alas, alak, if we could side-step the episode for a moment, I wonder if some audience members who balk at values espoused in episodes from fifty years ago might similarly bat an eyelid at the presumption inherent in this on that human culture, to say nothing of Western pop-culture, will not only survive but remain fundamentally unchanged for nine hundred years. I grudgingly accept that to mention it is to rather curmudgeoningly overlook the (undeniable) joys of the story, but I can’t help myself: it is a grumble I have with virtually every show of this nature, not just Disney-Who. Granted, it is impossible to predict the future, and not the purpose of every story to do so, but disappointing how few even bother to try.

Ce serra, the story is otherwise a hoot, mandatory sentimental drek (as probably mandated by Head Office) notwithstanding. I was tickled by the idea of some scruffy rocker type hijacking the futuristic Euro-vision, and the actor Freddie Fox’s superficial resemblance to a young Thomas Gabriel Fischer even more so, but it is probably for the best that the story did not go down this road. Besides which, the character states quite unequivocally that his favourite music is pop: I choose to believe that he meant it and was not just making an incredibly morbid pun. I would be willing to bet that far more mass murders have been committed by pop fans than rockers, but am in no mood to compile that data.

Back to the point, I was distracted from this train of thought by what I thought might have been the biggest onscreen body count in – nevermind Doctor Who, in television history. I’m glad it wasn’t – the spectacle of a hundred thousand dead human beings (and other species) floating around like so much glitter was truly nasty.

As per usual, schmaltzy violins ensure we never break out into autonomous emotion, and we are somewhat encouraged to believe that a song can halt a world-wide corporate genocide. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the power of Song – just not that one.

Whatever. Gatwa’s a blast, Sethu’s earned my respect, and if I don’t particularly like these song contests, at least I take comfort know that in that space station’s museum, there is probably an exhibit for Lordi.

(Yes, yes, this isn’t Eurovision, but don’t YOU get technical on me!)


Wish World – 5/10

One of these days, I will avoid the spoilers.

I think I managed to miss one of them, but it was so damned obvious it was hardly a surprise. The other one might have been, but I’ll never know. I’m takin’ it all in stride now. It’s almost like the big reveals don’t work anymore. We’ve come a long way from the time Derek Jacobi revealed himself as the Master. For one thing, they’re all practically unrecognizable, often sharing not much more than the namesake of the originals (I think only Davros got through unscathed). That, and it’s almost become routine. Who’s left I wonder? The Black Guardian most obviously. But who else? The Meddling Monk? Morbius? The Graf Vinder K?

How is this new reinvention? Well, Archie Panjabi is a delectable Rani. She drips evil, and megalomania, and even somehow delivers her lines like Kate Omara used to, even though her latent sexiness is miles away from Omara’s virtually robotic psychopath. Possibly we’re meant to think of Michelle Gomez’s Missy instead, though I doubt Missy would have the patience for. . .whatever the fuck this is.

Damned if I know what she’s up to strutting about in that celestial Fred-Flinstone palace. Something about getting all the energies aligned so that the Seventh Son of Seventh Son (no Iron Maiden in the soundtrack? Wasted opportunity!) becomes the Wish Master god who creates a world only so that it can implode and crack open the fabric of reality and unleash Omega. . . but she’s failed to notice a differently-abled encampment underneath who will doubtless be key to unravelling her plans.

I’ve almost stopped paying attention. There are so many disparate elements – Conrad, baby Poppy, two Ranis, the Wish God baby, the wheelchair Underground, a really big clock – I can’t tell you how it all adds-up, and pretty past caring because I’ve learned from hard experience that it probably won’t add up. None of it will matter because none of it ever does. The Rani will go “blah blah blah *something bad happens”. The Doctor will go “blah blah blah *something good happens” and it will end with long sentimental goodbyes amidst an ear-splitting violin assault. Destroying the world yet again will have no lasting consequences. It won’t make any sense because it never does.

Last year’s emergence of Sutekh was at least cool. This is just a blob. I don’t know how Conrad reading “Dr. Who” stories to the world every night contributes to the Rani’s plan. I don’t know why she wants to bring back Omega. Nor did I catch how her indulging Conrad’s retrograde fantasies serves her purpose – something about. . . oh why bother?

Taking the piss out of post-war American suburban utopia is old hat. It’s been done a hundred times from Stepford Wives to Wandavision. It reeks of complacency and smugness. It’s easier to satirize a long-dead social illusion from some seventy-five years ago than to turn the mirror on one’s own society. As for the mental slavery – the illusory world of false memories, false histories, and false contentment, well it all seems a retread of “Lie of the Land”. And we all know how badly that particular Hindenberg crashed and burned. . .

Still; breaking through illusions, confronting doubts, defying the gods and thinking the unthinkable are themes near and dear to my heart (why then am I not a bigger Matrix fan? Long story. . .). “Tables don’t do that” is a kinda neat moment. It made me long for a longer story which could unfold at a more natural pace and wasn’t so obviously a set-up for something that had been foreshadowed since last year. As is, it doesn’t amount to anything: the Rani breaks the illusion for him, which makes me wonder why she bothered putting him through it in the first place.

Overall, I get the sense that there’s nothing new here, just the usual overblown setup to the traditional end-of-season letdown. I can’t get excited because I know nothing of consequence will happen. Magic will save the day and none of it will have mattered. Call me cynical, but hey, I’ve learned to recognize patterns.

(And just suppose the next one, miracle of miracles, manages to deliver? Will that change my outlook? Probably not. A really good episode would have me caring what came next. A good follow-up may compensate for a poor build-up, but cannot retroactively fix its flaws).

Reality War – 0/10

Right, we’re done.

I swear, sometimes the convergence of life’s disparate elements is amazing.

Of the many fetid Facebook slime-pits where I inexplicably continue to waste my precious time, the Midnight Oil Fan Community is possibly the least offensive. If the gallery of near-total strangers modeling their band shirts and hosting gatherings I will never be able to attend are of no direct relevance to me personally, neither do they do me any particular harm. In fact, they occasionally do me well, as when I was able to show off my Midnight Oil poster and accompanying pun to great fanfare - the only place in the world I might have been able to do so (yes, I am still a fanboy at heart, worn firmly on sleeve).

More recently, a chance posting by one of the aforementioned near-strangers (as in United-in-Oil, though naught else) allowed me to solve a childhood mystery.

The post in question was simply the image of the band’s 1990 single “Forgotten Years”, which is not only a great song, but also the song they closed with on their very final show in Toronto, making it the very last song I will ever hear them play live. So, associations are positive, if bittersweet.




What struck me about the most about the post though, was the image on the cover, which I had not seen before. It was not the standard picture of the band, or accompanying vista of the Australian landscape the band tends to prefer, but a cartoon of a jet plane coming apart mid-air. The words “Who Cares” (or “Who Care” technically, as the final “s” cut off by missing tailfin) were written in bright pink across the fuselage. They were so prominent, one might have thought that was the name of the single. It was a cute, eye-catching image, playful while somehow ominous, and in no way frivolous, that well suited the raucous tone of the song and the tempered-by-but-not-trampled-by-realism idealism of the band.

Thing is, I’d seen that somewhere before. Not the whole picture; just the pilot. The pointy nosed, wide-eyed cartoon character. I knew that character, and that style. Where? A rusty cob webbed door of memory slowly creaked open.


In the early 80s, my uncle kept a strange cartoon book in his cottage. On the cover was a headless naked body chasing three flying heads with a butterfly net. The comics inside were just plain rude. I vividly remember one cartoon of a chef taking a dump in one of his soup pots, as posh diners cluelessly carried on in the next room. Another was of a urinating man inadvertently pissing in his own face when he tried to watch a butterfly. Yet another had a man using a periscope to examine his own bum (with evident disappointment). You get the idea. They were crass and scatological, the kind of drawings that would certainly have been confiscated at school and got you sent to the principal’s office. The appeal to a five-year old could well-be imagined. To find every dirty schoolyard joke given form, drawn, bound, and published by a grown-up was just, well, too hilarious to believe. It was big piece of subversion, carefully hidden from Mom and Dad, mischievously revealed to Grandma (who was obligingly indignant), conspiratorially shared with my uncle, and eagerly sought out every time we visited his cottage. It regrettably vanished when he sold the cottage and got married; my pious aunt would definitely not have appreciated its humour.

I was too young to remember the artist, so could not look it up in any library (who probably have refused to carry it anyway). I came across nothing like it in any second-hand bookstore. For all I knew, the book would be relegated to that overstuffed cabinet of the brain which stores the near forgotten fever dreams of childhood.

But now we’ve got the internet, and our Borg memory can remember anything. Here I was confronted with a crashing airplane, on a Midnight Oil ep cover of all things, and I was certain it was that guy. Who drew it? Again, the near-strangers of the Midnight Oil Fan Community helpfully informed me this was the Australian cartoonist, Michael Leunig.

Leunig. Leunig. Of course.


Leunig was apparently quite the figure in Australian media, named a “Treasure” by the National Trust of Australia, and seller of many books. He drew for the Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne’s The Age, and a pile of other publications. He was a vociferous opponent of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and, less admirably, an equally vociferous opponent of masking and vaccines during the pandemic. He got canned from the Age after comparing an anti-vaxer to the tankman of Tiananmen Square (classy, eh?). He died in December of 2024.


That book in my uncle’s cottage was The Second Leunig: A Dusty Little Swag. Unlce must have picked it up on one of his travels; to my knowledge, Leunig never made terra-firma in North America. I certainly never came across him until now.



Finding the artist and looking him up though only made me wonder again whether I’d hallucinated the whole thing. The samples of Leunig’s work I’d initially been able to find online (admittedly a small one) were clean, Hallmark level earnest, and infused with heavy religious overtones. Nothing at all like the vulgar etchings I remember. Granted, The Second Leunig was published in 1979; his last cartoon was published just before he died in 2024. More than enough time for an artist to evolve. Still, the gulf was jarring. Was it the same guy? No doubt: that was absolutely the book. By what tangling path does one get from that Point A to that Point B?

I examined the available cartoons a little more and dug deeper into my memory. Tenuous

connections began to emerge. The “new” ones (or more recent anyway) were not as innocent as they seemed at first, especially once he got into the anti-war stuff. But they were still earnest beyond earnest, and did not seem at all in keeping with the crudities of old. Yet, there may have been more to those than met the 6-year-old eye.

It wasn’t just the dirty jokes that drew me to those cartoons. There was a weird ambience about them that I found enticing. They were surreal, dreamlike, and a little ominous. They did not take place in any recognizable world, but in impressionistic landscapes, often empty and dreary, where night always seemed to be falling and things only made sense within the borders of the panel. Opening the book rather felt like falling asleep, and so not unlike the hallucinatory escapades of Halloween is Grinch Night, the Magic Shadows theme, Winnie-the-Pooh’s encounter with Hephalumps and Woozles, or Dumbo’s drunken visions. There was always a little darkness creeping in around the edges – literally and figuratively. I liked to dip my toes in that darkness. Just enough to see how it felt. I still do. I like to lift the rock of the subconscious and look at the little slugs hiding underneath.




The characters were wide eyed, big nosed, kid-friendly creations in a seemingly permanent state of confusion or mild-disappointment. The occasional happy ones (keeping in mind I’m relying on Google images to bolster 40+ year old memories here) usually sat blissfully unaware in environments otherwise suggestive of bleak despair.


A recognizable philosophy emerges.


Context helps. Reading them now, and seeing how involved Leunig got in socio-political issues, lends the older images meanings that were not previously apparent – to me anyway. I notice things now that I didn’t back then. Life experience will do that to you. An English degree and a teaching degree will also do that to you, not to mention showing other people how to recognize symbolism for almost a decade.


Perfect example, this one here, the only one I’m certain was in the Second Leunig I’ve been able to find:



I remember grumbling that this one wasn’t funny. I didn’t like the idea of being held up on a stick. I figured the grown-up behind was just trying to be edgy, and turned the page. As a kid, I didn’t get it.

As a middle-aged man, I definitely get it. When someone points to a dark void and says “face the future!”, it can only mean one thing. Many adults use children to ward of fear of that one thing. They see children’s lives as mere extensions of their own.

Whatever you think of my interpretation (and who knows what specifically Australian context I might be missing) this is not merely an edgelord scrawl: it is rife with meaning, and almost certainly polemical. Looked at that way, the previously mentioned cartoons take on a new significance. The shitting chef could be seen as contempt for the bourgeoisie (or possibly a critique of Australian’s culinary scene, I’m just speculating here). The pissing man got pissed on when he tried to look up from the ground and follow something beautiful. And the periscope? An indictment of self-examination. How often does it reveal something not worth seeing? Even a half-remembered multi-panel sequence about a man who lost his underpants was something of a Kafkaesque tale of wandering naked and alone in the desert.

It would seem that nothing was as it seemed.


This Betooga Advocate described Leunig's cartoons as “bordering nihilism” (and him an "old shit stoner"). I’m not sure that’s fair - about the nihilism. True nihilists don’t take principled stances against war or poverty (and say what you will about the idiocy of his mask/vax stance, in his own mind it was a matter of principle.) I would say they’re existential. Explorations of life, musings on the meaning of existence. Attempts to clear off bullshit (sometimes quite literally).

I’m not so invested in Leunig to be too disappointed that he turned out to be a crank (though it is dispiriting that yet another one went down that road). Yet, his work was a piece of my childhood, and all my predilections were formed in childhood. A tendency to navel gaze? A fondness for storm-clouds, shadows, and broken windows? Whatever came later, reading existential cartoons at the age of 5, 6, and 7 did its part.

Come for the bums; stay for the existentialism.

So, hitting the "Post" button on DW's menu will not post your post. It will clear the way for a new post.
It will not ask if you wish to save your work. It will ask instead:

"Restore from saved draft entitled ""?"

Say what?

Hitting the "Cancel" button does not cancel your action. Instead, it cancels the auto-save, and provides you with a nice blank screen to replace the unsightly full screen you had up previously.

I'm not convinced this is the best way of doing this, but what do I know?

An “exquisite corpse” is a collaborative piece of art created by three artists, each in complete ignorance of what the other two have done. The Exquisite Corpse Project is ostensibly an attempt to apply this approach to film: five different writers are tasked with writing one section of a film script, without knowing what came before, or what will come next. If you’re expecting an interesting experiment in collaborative art, you will be disappointed: if you have a sense of schedenfrude, this garbage fire of combustible egos and flammable friendships may tickle your fancy.
The title is misleading: these guys aren’t working in complete ignorance – they are allowed to read the last five pages of the previous guy’s script. So they actually know quite a bit about what the last guy established and where he might have gone. It’s more like one of those creative writing projects where you have to continue someone else’s story. Either way, we never actually get to watch the titular corpse project from start to finish: it is constantly interrupted by interviews and cinema verite footage of the writers arguing with each other. We’re clearly not meant to care about the finished product, but only the dysfunctional process – this is not an experimental film, but a documentary about a failed creative endeavor.

The six guys in question (five writers and the director) once comprised the comedy team Olde English, who achieved some amount of success earlier this century, before disintegrating over creative and personal differences. It’s not hard to see why: these guys do not work well together. They don’t even seem to like each other. They’re endlessly critical of each other (and quite harsh in those criticisms), completely insensitive to each other’s concerns, and make no attempt at all to build on each other’s contributions. I’m not sure they had a kind word to say about each other. Maybe that passes for comradery amongst comedians.
The result is more a combative project than a collaborative one. Instead of working together to create something, they treat it as a kind of party game, where they try for laughs by obliterating the previous guy’s work with increasingly egregious deviations. This kind of one-upmanship might work as a party game, but sabotages any art. It might have worked as comedy if any of it were funny.
What we do manage to see is virtually unwatchable. It’s hard to know how much of this is intentional, as we’re mercifully spared more than a few minutes of it at any time. But disguising incompetence as comedy is a trick of the amateur (see Unicorn). Another is to feel the need to explain a joke, or draw attention to it in case we miss it (again, see Unicorn). Whatever the intention, it never escapes the tension of incompatible personalities struggling for dominance.
What struck me more than the failure of the project itself (understandable under the circumstances) was the unwillingness on the part of anyone to even try to make it work (one of them even boasted about being intentionally awful). I didn’t get the need of these guys to tear down their mates. Maybe it’s a personal thing: when given an unfinished piece, my first instinct is not to junk the thing in its entirety – I’d start my own piece and not bother with the original if that were the case. I would work with what I had and try to make it fit. I’d take pride in the seamless of it (if achieved), not the incongruity. But that requires a little bit of humility – something in deeply short supply here.

When I taught drama camps, the most popular activities tended to be improv games, involving the kids just going up and making up scenes off the top-of-their-heads. Our only strict rule was “you can’t say no” meaning not that you couldn’t say “no” as a line of dialogue, but you couldn’t out and out reject your partner’s contributions. You had to build off what they gave you, and they’d do the same. This lead to way more interesting scenes, to say nothing of the life lesson: cooperate with people, work well in groups, and the end result will be greater than the sum of its parts. You belong to the art, not the other way around.

These guys never learned that rule. They should have come to my camps.

Ha, little did any of you suspect, I too have been drunkenly writing this night, hacking out derivative retrograde space opera on a manual typewriter.

That's right, a Quiet Tab Deluxe Underwood typewriter, circa 1963. Feeding used paper scraps into the roller like belts of bullets into a Maxim gun, hitting big fat keys attached to big iron arms punching tangible ink letters directly into meat-space paper RATATATRATATATRATATAT.

But it's not death I'm spewing out, but life as new worlds appear on the page. Not the screen, the page.

It's a Godly feeling, never to be recreated on lousy touchscreens.

Now, if I could only figure out how to end the story. . .

(Not too worried for the moment about the potential allegories. Just as well: too blatant allegories make for lousy literature).