A Very Happy Unbirthday

Winter, as the Starks - when they're not being deaded - are fond of saying, is coming. I sit down at the upside down cardboard box that serves me as a desk and it's bright sunshine. Seemingly moments later I look up and it's pitch black outside, stars twinkle in the firmament and wolves (or possibly the local winos) can be heard howling at the moon.

Taking advantage of the early nights, me and the girlfriend had a looksie up Roker Illuminations the other day. In addition to being an all round cutie and sweetie, wor lass is a keen amateur photographer and was hoping to get some night time shots of some of the displays. The plan had been to go several weeks ago, but various happenings and doings kept getting  in the way. This weekend was therefore our last chance before the whole thing is moth balled for another year and so we dutifully lugged camera and assorted paraphernalia across town. Upon finding a likely looking display she then spent several minutes setting up her tripod, trying not to get jostled by the streams of event goers passing us by. Of course, this was the point where it was discovered that she'd left the camera battery at home. How we laughed.

Still, it was a pleasant night and Roker Park's a pretty, wee place so it wasn't all for naught. The whole event was themed around Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and mostly consisted of fibreglass mock ups of characters from the book, covered in lightbulbs. There was one fairly interesting display where the fountains in the park lake had been synchronised to Live and Let Die, the jets of water illuminated by coloured lights. Unfortunately the effect was marred somewhat by the fact that, presumably due to noise and nuisance laws, the music was played at such a low volume that it was pretty much drowned out by the splashing of the water. It's fair to say that the whole thing is targeted to family's with young children - who all seemed to be loving it - and was somewhat wasted on the misanthropic thirty something demographic that me and the missus represent. I do think though that it'd be worth making it a biennial thing, perhaps alternating with the similarly but astronomically more successful Durham Lumiere Festival, and using the extra time and money saved to stage something truly special.

As a quick aside, the whole Alice in Wonderland thing wasn't something pulled out the organiser's bum crack. There's quite a number of links between the book and the North East in general and Sunderland in particular. A lot of the culture and history of the area feeds directly into the book's imagery. I would whole heartedly recommend Brian Talbot's graphic novel on the subject named, somewhat inevitably, Alice in Sunderland. I have no idea if this is already common knowledge or if anyone else cares, but, hey, it interested me the first time I heard.

Up top I've added another illustration from Black Hackerty's Windmill, this time from the opening chapter. I've also added it to the text I've got up in the Werdz section of this blog and have vague, but noble, aspirations to keep adding to it until it reaches a state of demi-semi completeness at which point I'll whoop softly to myself and go back to bed. That doesn't mean I've abandoned other projects and I've just completed the line work for another page of Rag and Bone, which I should have up next week. Also, because I'm a swell guy and Halloween's just passed, here is a picture of Dracula and the Wolfman. If they owned a pet shop. And were also in love.

still a better love story than Twilight

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton