Colour Me Badd

In order to break away from my crippling addiction to making terrible cartoons like the above I took part in the Sunderland Color Run last week*. The idea, which I'm sure even the slowest thinking of you has guessed, is that you run around a circuit while overly enthusiastic young people throw coloured dye at your person.

Awesome Squiggle Words

click to embiggen

Just for shits and giggles I've set myself a challenge. By challenge, I don't mean anything that could lead to personal growth or have any sort of beneficial ramifications. I won't be learning a new language, mastering a musical instrument or forcing myself to talk to new people rather than throw bricks at them. Rather I'll be writing and illustrating a short piece of sequential art, which is basically just an extension of what I do anyway. The narrative functions as a sort of prequel to The Great British Novel I've been trying and failing to write, which is pretty much the only reason the action's set in 1975 (although it does have the benefit of doing away with modern suspense fiction's greatest enemy: the mobile phone). Above is my first effort. You will note that one of the kids wears a bobble hat. This may prove to be very important later on (it won't). I've no title at present, not even a working one, so for now I'll just refer to it as Awesome Squiggle Words*.

I'm not committing to any sort of update schedule as I've played that game before and lost badly, but will be farting them out as and when in between the usual shite. It's highly conceivable that I will be distracted by pretty colours or an old man selling magic beans and thus never finish it, but given that I don't see this running any longer than 30 odd pages, it seems borderline achievable.

Charity run tomorrow. While the godless south basks in a heatwave, it's piddling it down up here. I care not. If necessary, I'll swim to the finish line

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

* Which, you would assume, would make that the working title. However, for reasons that I am far, far too intelligent and important to go into, you'd be wrong.

Future Imperfect

Hey! Manic Street Preachers have a new album out. What do you mean, you don't care? Of course you do. It's the Manics. The last great literary rock band! They had a number one about the Spanish Civil War! No. Not 'Fernando'. That was Abba. The other one. You still don't care? Well, sod you, chum! It's my blog and I'll write about what I want. Review below.

We Went on Holiday by Mistake

Painting not by me (you can tell because it's good) but by Venus Griffiths

A couple of years ago The Idler released one of those banged out in time for Christmas, read it on the toilet kind of books simply titled Crap Towns. As the name suggests it was basically a compendium of  the less than desirable settlements within Britain accompanied by rants that were - theoretically - amusing, but too often degenerated into former students curling their lips at chavs eating chips instead of, say, foie gras. Sunderland, where I currently hang my hat,was top three. Middlesbrough, where the Denton half of my family hale from, also managed a solid top ten placing. Without wishing to be cruel, while I could argue the case for either town, the placing wasn't particularly surprising, given that they have both become synonymous with northern England's post industrial malaise.  What was surprising was the inclusion of my mother's home town, Cleator Moor, near the bottom of the top fifty. Not that the place is particularly glamorous. It's a small, fairly workaday former industrial town in West Cumbria. I only really know two vaguely interesting facts about the place, beyond  me mam being from there. One: LS Lowery sometimes visited the area. Family legend says that the guy actually sketched me mam as she played in the street and then presented her with the drawing. When me granda John heard this he promptly interpreted it as one of the dirty mac brigade perving on children and proceeded to throw the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest popular artists in the fire with a promise that if he caught the filthy bugger lurking around his kids again he would kick seven shades out of him. I have no idea if all that is true at all, but I very much want it to be. Two: kangol hats  (Y'know, the ones that Samuel L. Jackson wore circa Jackie Brown) were originally made there. Oh, and Three: The town experienced sectarian riots in 1871. So that's three facts about Cleator Moor I know, which isn't, I admit, much of a rebuttal to any accusations of crapness (especially when one of the facts I've offered up is historical religious bigotry).

What I would argue is a tick in the pro Cleator column is the town's setting. The lake district is one of the more beautiful parts of this country. As a kid I never really appreciated it, associating it with long drives, pissing down rain and me grandma's pathological desire to feed me and my siblings with as much stodge as possible. Now, as an adult, I've a much more developed feel of what a special place it is. Mountain, sky and water form a landscape that is serene yet dramatic, natural yet otherworldly. Or, to paraphrase Billy Connolly describing the similarly pretty Scottish Highlands to his children: Sky! Mountains! Nice! Now repeat after me: Ooh! Aaah! Nice!

Me and the better half took advantage of the weather and time off work to visit Keswick mid week. If you've never been it's a postcard pretty town on the Derwent Water and surrounded on all sides by hills and mountains, very touristy, but small enough that it's not obnoxiously so. A very lovely time was spent walking the area and exploring the various shops, museums and galleries in the town. It was not without cost however. My girlfriend, not as given to tromping round as me, ended up with mangled and blistered feet. But we've spoken with the country's top doctors and she will be walking again in time for charity run in a couple of weeks.

The William Wordsworth poem 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' was inspired when, walking along Ullswatter, he rounded a corner and was confronted by thousands of daffodils swaying in the breeze. I had a similar experience when, walking along the Derwent water, I rounded a corner and was confronted by hundreds of ducks, also swaying in the breeze*. Both William and myself, separated by miles and centuries, but linked by a shared moment of pantheistic awe, stopped short, muttered to ourselves 'man, that sure is a lot of daffodils/ducks,' and, filled with a white hot burst of creativity, grabbed our notebooks and bled poetry onto the page. My effort is below.

Puddleduck

I wish I were a little duck

I'd float around - it wouldn't suck

I wouldn't miss those things I'd lack,

'Cause I could swim and fly and quack

I would dine on bread and fishes

Dine on me? I'd be delicious! 

I'm sure you'll agree, it is a masterpiece. You can probably google Wordsworth's effort. Whatevs. I've always been more of a Coleridge man.  Oh, and here's another illustration thingummy from Stitchskin, shorn of any context that might provide it with meaning.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

*Do ducks sway? yes. They do. Shut the duck up.

I've Decided to Become a Mensch

I drew the above after watching Billy Wilder's 1960 film The Apartment for the 9 billionth time. Despite what my efforts may indicate, the film is not a B movie horror about a sex pest with no peripheral vision who is murdered in an elevator by faceless ghouls, rather it is satire cum romantic comedy in which office drone CC Baxter - played by the late, great Jack Lemmon- advances up the corporate ladder by allowing his superiors to use his apartment to have it away with ladies who are very definitely not their wives. Hilarity ensues when his CEO makes use of this set up to get his sleaze on with the lady of Baxter's dreams, the very lovely Miss Kubelik, as played by the very lovely Shirley MacLaine.

Despite a lot of the references now being dated beyond belief (elevator girls/typing pools/Noo Yoik taxi drivers referring to people as "Mac") the film still feels relevant, given that it's essentially about allowing yourself to be debased in a soul crushing job in order to get on in life, which last I checked was still a thing. It's hardly an obscure film - it usually crops up in those 100 greatest films ever lists that are periodically published, but going off my own experience it's one that's passed a lot of people by and tends not to be talked about a lot, so I'm talking about it now. Think of it as an analogue version of Mike Judge's Office Space, only with better leads and no scene where three guys go gangsta on a photocopier. It is my very favourite film and if you haven't already seen it then I would  highly recommend you do so

We celebrated me dad's 60th over the weekend. Among other thing we got him giant helium filled balloons in the shape of a 6 and an 0. We will now hold onto them till they can be re-utilised when his 90th rolls round. Next week me and the missus are off up the lake district. I'll bring you all some kendal mint cake back

Love and fishes

All Men Must Die: Game of Thrones Season 4 Review

Warning, the below assumes you've watched seasons 1-3 of Game of Thrones so, yeh knaa, spoilers

"What was it all about?" Tyrion Lannister asks his brother at one point in season four of Game of Thrones. He's referring to a long dead cousin, Orson, who suffered from brain damage and whose favourite, indeed sole, pastime was crushing beetles with rocks. The gratuitous, methodical and utterly pointless killing apparently provoked an existential crisis in the young Lannister and he relates how he devoted all his time and energy to determining why his cousin felt compelled to smash insects into paste. He never gets an actual answer, but, it is inferred, it's the same reason that some men beat, kill, steal and rape. Because they can. Because they have a rock and you do not. Because they are large and others are small. And this, to get back to the original question, is what Game of Thrones is all about.  To say that power is tempting is obvious bordering on trite. But what George RR Martin conveys is that it's the application of power (the ability to impose your will on others) that's intoxicating, rather than the trappings (wearing a shit metal hat and sitting on the worlds most uncomfortable chair) and that it follows its own pitiless, remorseless logic, spurring the user on to ever greater brutality in an effort to fill the vacuum created by their own ability to act. The violence depicted in the series is brutal, ugly and very rarely satisfying-

Except this. Whoever made this made the most satisfying thing ever

-but it's a feels like a faithful representation of power politics which, when you strip out all the fancy words and dynastic posturing, ultimately boils down to one man twatting another man over the head until he does what he's told. Thankfully, for the most part, we follow the bludgeonees rather than the bludgeoners - the bastards, cripples and broken things that are as near as this setting gets to heroes - thereby preventing the show from being depressing as all hell.

Given the somewhat high mortality rate in Westeros more and more of the focus is on the younger cast members. They are, for the most part, excellent. Props to Alfie Allen, who at one point plays a dude, who thinks he's another dude, playing a dude, all the while trying not to think about how he now lacks that part of the anatomy normally associated with dudes.You do wonder if Jack Gleeson will spend the rest of his life reminding people that he is not in fact a homicidal, odious little turd who gets his jollies murdering prostitutes, or if Kit Harrington will forever be condemned to having complete strangers inform him that he 'knurrs nuffin.'

The standout performance is Peter Dinklage however. Compare with the Xmen film, where his primary character trait was having a sweet moustache here he's given much more to work with. We've spent three seasons with the character not only surviving within a system inherently prejudiced against him, but thriving. Now, when the powers that be really start sticking the boot in, we see him first reduced to the shell of a man, before lashing out with a lifetimes worth of stored venom. Over the final few episodes we pass through defiance, hope, despair and gallows humour, before staggering towards the final confrontation of the season, a man with not a single fuck left to give. All that's missing at the end of it is a mic drop. Good stuff.

It's not all good. There's a lot of plates to keep spinning and it's unsurprising that some wobble. Both individual episodes and the series in general are heavily weighted in terms of action towards the last third.This results in a lot of what can only be described, for want of a better term, as pootling about in the early and middle stages. Season 3 ended with Stannis (the Mannis) Baratheon realising that shit is about to get super real beyond the wall in the far north and he needs to get up there and start knocking heads together, like, yesterday. Cut to this season where he spends nine tenths of the time sitting with his lip out and giving Ser Davos (The inexplicably loyal Gromit to his dour, gloomy Wallace) the stink eye for failing to magically produce an army out of his bum, before finally remembering he's got some ass to kick in the final episode. The numerous plot cul de sacs and shaggy dog tales rob certain plot strands of any tension, such as the Jon Snow/Ygritte romance, while turning others, like Bran and chums quest for the magic pigeon, into a bit of a trudge.  At one point Arya Stark (Little Miss Mentalist) breaks down into manic laughter after being told that (metaphorically) your princess is in another castle. As an audience member, it's easy to sympathise.

Not that this is anything but the mildest of criticisms. Travelling round with Arya and the Hound, kicking ass and eating chicken is a fun way to kill time. But there's the nagging feeling that despite some fairly momentous goings on in this season we're broadly at the same place we were at the end of season two, with Daenerys Targaryen to the east being all Mother of Dragons and that, the white walkers to the north, wondering whether to finally get off the pot or shit and a major part of the kingdom presumably about to go apeshit due to the deadification of a prominent noble. The difference this time around is that, following the events of this season, many of the people remotely qualified to deal with things should the hammer drop are either dead or on the run. Roll on 2015.

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I did start on a cartoon to accompany the above but real life got in the way, by which I mean I drank a litre of Um Bongo and gin and passed out in the park. I may add it at a later date, at which point I will make like Stalin and edit the above text to suggest it was always there. In the interim, and sticking with the GoT thing, I suggest you check out the Beautiful death website. It's not only neat, it's also swell.

Oh look, the cartoon that was always there is still there. How nice.

Back in the real world me, my lady love and my sister will be participating in the Sunderland Color Run come 20th July. Me and our kid are running simply for the honour and glory of our family name (Our house sigil: The startled badger. Our house motto: 'I'd give it five minutes if I was you'). Wor lass, however, is raising funds for South Tyneside Women's Aid, a charity that, among other things, provides refuge for women fleeing domestic violence. Assuming you're not reading this from the future, please feel free to make the world an ever so slightly less shitty place and donate here.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

The Trouble With Arsenal is That They Always Try to Just walk It In

I'd say that Chris O'Dowd* is my spirit animal, but I'm A) probably too old to get away with saying things like that and B) fairly certain that's the plot of Moone Boy

Some of the more culturally astute of you will have noticed that the World Cup's on. For those of you not in the know, this is a associated football competition contested by various nationalities including, but by no means limited to, the French. The last team standing at the end of the tournament is presented a golden ice cream truck by Dame Helen Mirren and given a lovely sloppy kiss and a high five. All the other teams have to call the winners 'Sir' and make them sandwiches for a year, at which point we go through the whole shebang again. This year the tournament's being held in Brazil who are celebrating the universal appeal and uniting power of the game by flattening poor communities and shooting protesters in the face.

Despite what the above inanity may suggest, I am actually quite fond of the World Cup. I like the spectacle, the sense of occasion and the little men running around and kicking balls. I even like the fact that something about Phil Neville's commentary on the BBC puts me in mind of a robot struggling to process the concept of love. You could argue that the Premier League provides the same sort of thing, but closer to home. But there are those of us out there who support solid, but not particularly glamorous teams like Middlesbrough who aren't in the premiership and so it's nice to have an international tournament every couple of years, even if it's awarded by a governing body as irredeemably corrupt as FIFA. 

What I've never been particularly boshed with is the whole three lions shite that often rears its head around this time. Don't get me wrong, I like England. I keep most my stuff there, the weather's unlikely to kill you and bacon sandwiches are plentiful and easy to come by. But nothing can persuade me to view twenty two men kicking a ball around as anything more than an entertaining distraction, as opposed to a re-staging of the battle of Agincourt, our hopes, dreams and aspirations hanging on the result. There's nowt wrong with a bit of enthusiasm, of course, but we seem to expect what is, at the end of the day, a game to somehow embody the nation, which ends up being just a teensy bit reductive as you've effectively condensed an entire national history to what the lizard brain of a terminally drunk football fan can still remember around around the eight pint mark. You can see why the Scots get arsey.  

Thankfully, mainly due to the national team being a bit on the green side this time round, expectations are much lower than normal this year and the resulting coverage has bordered on the sane. The Sun newspaper has made a token effort though, sending out a free advertisement newspaper, headlined 'This Is Our England' with a Sgt Peppers type collage of what it presumably believes are pre-eminent examples of English greatness. This is the kind of thing the paper always does, taking broadly popular cultural reference points and appropriating them, as if it itself was in some way responsible for Only Fools and Horses and The Beatles. Depressingly noteworthy was the sheer ball shrivelling banality of most of the choices. There are, let me be clear, many reasons I love England and am grateful that I was born here. James Corden and Simon Cowell are not amongst them. 

I was also interested to read about the brief shitstorm that hit Ed Miliband when the daft tit agreed to pose for a deeply unflattering photo holding the aforementioned shite rag, thereby offending the entirety of Merseyside (incidentally, when did we become okay with our senior politicians shilling for private companies in order to help them shift product?).  It generally seems to be accepted that the Labour leader's dropped a bit of a bollock over the issue, which I tend to agree with, but surely he's not the one who's come out looking the worst out of all this, given that it's prompted discussion of why this was considered such a faux pas in the first place. It's reminded people that The Sun, a paper that presumes to speak for the English working class, saw fit to slander Liverpool fans (the majority of whom are, erm, English and working class) in the most vicious manner possible  in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster, only offering an almost apology decades later. Amazingly, following Miliband's apology, this morning's editorial (The link leads to another blog discussing the issue. The paper itself exists behind a pay wall) managed over a 100 words of self righteous outrage without once even hinting at why so many in one of Britain's most important cities wont even wipe their arse with the paper, instead framing the controversy as the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition suffering some sort of patriotism cringe. 

So remember: overly enthusiastic, ever so slightly forced love of football is good and natural and proper. Actually giving a shit about the lives of football fans and their families is very, very bad and evidence you hate this country and should probably fuck off to Russia. 

Sod it, I'm off to watch the second half of France v Honduras and have a pie. Here's another character sketch from that thing what I writes.

This one has a moustache.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

*Yes, that's meant to be Chris O'Dowd on the left. Shut up.