God Loves us and Wants us to be Happy

So I've managed 31 days without alcohol. Suck it, voice in the back of my head that constantly tells me I fail at everything.  For those whom drinking constitutes a couple of light ales when on a night out with friends and colleagues, this probably doesn't sound that impressive, but please bear in mind my own relationship with booze is anything but healthy. While I've never felt any physical compunction to drink my go to response whenever I'm bored or at a loose end is to grab a couple of stellas or equivalent and shut my brain down for the evening. The problem with this, of course, is that I tend to get bored a lot and when repeated over months and years it becomes quite apparent that I am slowly poisoning myself.

I had one moment of reverse inspiration that was somewhat sobering - no pun intended. A couple of weeks ago one of my sisters forwarded me a picture of my mam's ex-boyfriend.  Using the term 'boyfriend' for a man in his fifties always feels slightly wrong and doubly so here as I was shocked to find he now looked like a geriatric. The man was, and presumably still is, an alcoholic and looking at him for the first time in about a decade it's readily apparent that it's ravaged him. Maybe, just maybe, it was just a shitty picture, but apparently he's also well on his way down the path of alcohol induced dementia, at least according to one of my brothers who bumped into him on the bus. He apparently rambled on incoherently at great length, never twigging who my brother, who he lived in the same house as for a number of years, was. The ageing effects of any sort of substance abuse is hardly news (hell, living round the corner from a couple of doss houses, it's something I see everytime I pop to the shops) but to see its effects on somebody who in an alternate universe somewhere might have been my step dad certainly gave me pause for thought.

I was quite relieved that I managed the month without any struggle, although the fact that I was worried about this in the first place probably says more than I'm willing to admit. I've lost weight, I'm sleeping better, I feel like I have more time and money and I no longer fear the scorn of the bin men as they pick up rubbish bags that clink and clank like a boozy version of  The Telltale Heart. I've also discovered that I can talk to animals. Granted, the animals do not talk back, but it's early days. I imagine I'll be off the wagon next week as it's my sister's birthday, but for now I'll toast your health with a warm mug of ovaltine, send out a thank you to anybody who was kind enough to sponsor me and bid you adieu

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Paul Thomas: A Celebration

A couple of weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack I made a passing remark that, alone among his peers, the Daily Express editorial cartoonist Paul Thomas had failed to produce a piece that commented on the attacks in any way. Fast forward to this week and it turns out that he's been fired. I imagine this  has less to do with his failure to engage with topical events (because, seriously, have you  read The Daily Express) and more to do with the proprietor's attempts to turn the title into a newspaper that contains no actual news and can be created by feeding a few random press releases in to a machine and then pressing a  big red button marked 'OUTRAGE!!!!!'. I'm a fan of the often under appreciated art of the editorial cartoon in general, and have a soft spot for Mr Thomas in particular. His work was not particularly incisive, original, funny, well drawn, topical or even pleasant, but there was something in his depiction of giant headed celebrities juxtaposed with row upon row upon row of featureless bald men all pointing and vibrating and spouting reactionary platitudes apropos of absolutely nothing, that I find strangely endearing. By way of tribute, I present ten of the best examples of Mr Thomas's work, and by best I mean the handful I was able to source before I lost patience with the Express's absolute mare of a website.

10)

There's a certain breed of person, usually found in the comments section of news websites, who will attempt to shoe horn a reference to their particular bugbears regardless of the topic under discussion or the appropriateness of the comparison. Above we see a wonderful representation of this sort of tosser; safe and warm, vibrating with contentment, surrounded by the paraphernalia of a comfortable, middle class existence and accompanied by his beautiful wife (who is also vibrating). What cares he about the hundreds of lives lost and the millions in damage as a direct result of Hurricane Sandy? Just as long as he can day-dream out loud about, frankly, unlikely scenarios where natural disasters are harnessed to further the Europhobic cause. Paul Thomas hates this man, whose response to the boxing day tsunami was probably to wish that a similar event would wash Britain further into the Atlantic, and he wants you to hate him too.

9)

Poor Ed Miliband. The man can't eat a bacon sandwich without people pointing and laughing. Of course all this ribaldry masks the fact that Mr Miliband is, essentially, interviewing for the post of most powerful man in the land. You'd think it would therefore be constructive to look at the substance of what the man says, rather than his demeanour as he says it, but the media narrative seems forever stuck on weird and nerdy - to the detriment of us all. Mr Thomas apparently had enough of this and decided to create the most over the top anti-Ed cartoon so a line could be drawn under the whole thing and allow us, as a culture, to move on. He's foregone the usual depiction of a hapless dweeb and instead portrayed Red Ed as a sneering, overweight, drag artist. Topicality has been dispensed with and we're invited to laugh at the Opposition leader not for anything he's done or said he'll do or even seems likely to do, but what he might possibly do in an alternate universe where cats go woof, rain goes up and everything is different. And to top it off the chief piss taker is the normally avuncular Bruce Forsyth, which is kinda like resurrecting Mickey Rooney, specifically so he can tell someone you hate that they're a knob. I feel a trick has been missed by not including stink lines and an actual willy coming out of Mr Miliband's head, but then subtlety's not in my vocabulary. Which is why Thomas spent years being paid the big bucks and I'm sat here eating dry pasta and Oxo cubes.

8)

A skewering of that old standby of the hard of thinking knuckle dragger: 'I can't be a racist. I love curry.' It's obviously not occurred to the vibrating fuckwit, who instinctively reduces the entire output of the Indian subcontinent to vindaloo, that visiting a Tandoori restaurant in Britain that is, presumably, staffed by British citizens does precisely fuck and all to further trade between the UK and India. The cartoonist also perfectly captured the dead eyed smile of customer service staff who are obliged to swallow their contempt and affect an approximation of laughter at your shitty "jokes". And the whole thing's pink, so very, very pink.

7)

This cartoon came as the nation was working itself into a tizzy about the hordes of Romanians that were meant to be invading the shores of Blighty come Jan 1st 2014. In the end the invasion amounted to one confused bloke, who seemed quite nice and already had a job in place. Here Thomas provides the only plausible explanation for the missing hordes that we were assured would be landing. They're all still in Calais, staring impotently over the channel, utterly oblivious to the fact that an EU migrant and an asylum seeker are two entirely different things and that they can legally enter the country any time they feel like it. Alternately Thomas either completely misunderstands or is happy misrepresenting the immigration debate. To which I say, poppycock.

6)

Any American reading this will remember Harry Windsor's visits to the States, an event in their history up there with the moon landings and the Gettysburg address, like it was yesterday. Of course they didn't really replace the Statue of Liberty with one of a member of a royal family that they had a whole war to get rid of - that's what's know as comical overstatement - but it's really not hard to imagine them doing something similar. After all, how could read those words by Emma Lazarus (Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore) and not think of Prince Henry of Wales? Extra points for having the torch hand pointing for no discernible reason and the numerous forty foot American flags, without which I'd have no fucking clue where this cartoon was set.

5)

This rings so true. I have many fond memories of childhood visits to my grandparents. Me and my brothers and sisters would get up early to pore over the broadsheet financial pages, hunting for any positive news on the pensions market while we slurped down our coco pops. Then, pre-armed with evidence in black and white, we would rush over to the granny and granddad we now knew to be minted, in order to extort from them as much as possible. Because, as any fool knows, all relationships, even those with your nearest and dearest kin, boil down to series of financial interactions and anyone who says otherwise is a damn hippy who probably wants to marry a tree.

4)

I genuinely find this hilarious. Not for the joke, which is straight from The Barmy Boy's Bumper Book of Rib Ticklers, nor the fact that anyone who bothered to read Ms Mantel's comments would probably found them entirely reasonable, thus making the reaction entirely inappropriate. The cartoon's brilliance is that it conjures up  the image of the head of state and her two immediate heirs queuing for three quarters of an hour in a Barnsley Waterstones for the sole purpose of delivering an absolute turd of a zinger and then awkwardly shuffling off after a couple of seconds of embarrassed silence. I love it. 

3)

I had some difficulty locating an actual joke in this one. It's about Wimbledon and has something to do with the existence of foreigners,this much I know. But foreign nationals living in a city as cosmopolitan as London or their involvement in what is, after all, an international sporting event is so utterly mundane it really doesn't seem worth commenting on. Surely it's Andy Murray who's the oddity here, given British athlete's past inability to break through to the finals? The Polish do lend themselves to puns, but, as near as I can tell, Thomas has decided that he wont go there with a barge-them*. Is it that Romanians are intrinsically funny? Is it that there's a newspaper billboard propped up where there are no newspapers for sale? Regardless I've spent more time thinking about this one cartoon than I have last years Booker Prize Winner, which must surely indicate some sort of depth.

2)

Part of the reason that people have become so disillusioned with the political process is our leader's constant equivocating and simple refusal to call a spade a spade. Everything is so couched in spin and between the lines dog whistling that it's hard to tell what any of them think on a specific issue. Cue Thomas, who cuts through all the bullshit and tells it to us straight. If someone disagrees with your point of view, well, you straight up murder their bitch ass and parade their decapitated head in front of a crowd of gawking onlookers. That's what those ISIS chaps do, and say what you like about them, they get shit done. 

1)

Who says satire's dead? Paul Thomas, that's who. Because sometimes things are so obviously good, that to question them or to draw attention to their flaws in any way is not just churlish, but actively harmful to the good of the nation, stepping over the mark from simple quibbling to actual Quisling. Why the hell should a political cartoonist attempt to speak truth to power, when those in power are so evidently the very bestest thing for the country?  "Tory" rhymes with "Glory" and that's all you need to know. What does Labour rhyme with? "Gay, duh!" that's what. Kudos for looking past David Cameron's occasional resemblance to a pair of freshly paddled buttocks and instead depicting him as the square jawed, rakish go-getter that we all think of when we picture the PM. And for anyone who feels this portrait of Mr Cameron is unduly flattering and uncritical, you are invited to get a damn grip. It's not like he drew him walking on water.

Well. Except for that time that he did.

Honourable Mentions:

It's funny because he's disabled 

It's funny because Australia

It's funny because domestic violence during the World Cup is totally a thing.

It's funny because... the... the sea dried up?

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Please note, if you feel I have been somehow disrespectful to Mr Thomas, a man who has known vastly more personal and financial success than I will ever know, but has also, at the end of the day, just lost his job, please be aware that he has his own website where you buy cards and prints, enquire about commissions or whatever. Alternately, if you feel I haven't been disrespectful enough, there's an absolutely epic thread on the Mailwatch forum about him that was responsible for my introduction to the man and his work and can be more than a little unkind at points.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

*I'm fully aware how awful that was. I apologise.

Dirty Old Town

Silly David thought maybe he could skip posting for a week, well after a firm, but fair, telling off from the better half I have been dissabused of that notion.

Yesterday was apparently blue monday, the New Orderiest day of the year and apparently the point in the calendar where we as a nation achieve maximum glumness. Normally I would scoff at this, but seeing as I have embraced sobriety this January (cue obnoxious plea for sponsorship, poorly disguised as a pithy comment) the world has been stripped of its comforting beery glow and I find myself stranded in a Dostoyevsky novel  my mood marooned somewhere between alienation, dread and a mild arsiness. My general torpor has been abetted by the weather, which is shitty, the news, which has been depressing, my work situation, which is tenuous, and an annual report published yesterday by the  Centre for Cities which seemed to indicate that the place where I live is slowly dissapearing down the swanny.

To be fair, the picture painted by the report is more complicated that that. Wearside's got one of the best manufacturing bases in the country and is apparently top ten for It start ups. However it remains striking that out of the major settlements in the UK, the one I live in is the only one with a negative population growth. For clarity's sake I should point out that I am not of the Mackem persuasion myself. I was born in Yorkshire and grew up in the wilds of County Durham, where we laughed at the hoity-toity Sunderlanderers and their ilk, mincing around with their knives and forks and their 24 hour electricity. I moved here simply because this is where my job was and I've stayed here because this is where the lady I love is. I therefore have no real roots in the place, but it is where I keep the majority of my stuff and it'd be nice and it'd be nice if it could

Part of the town's woes can be put down to shitty luck, with all the town's key industries being wound up suddenly and without warning back in the eighties, with no real thought or care being put into what might replace them. Part of it can be chalked up to a crap location; the fag end of England, starved of infrastructure investment, right next door to a bigger*, better connected and more glamorous neighbour. Part of it can be put down to local mismanagement; it's a bit hard to blame the national government for the multitude of fuck ugly buildings, the notorious one way system or the recent debacle where £11 million of public money was spent commissioning plans for a bridge that was subsequently scrapped.

Regardless of how the place got in its current state, it's current state is where it is and the only useful conversation to have is how to move forward. One silver lining about the areas relative crapness is that there's a number of fairly obvious measures that can be taken to improve things. Half the town is like a building site at present and the council certainly seem to have some sensible-ish plans to relocate more economic activity in the city centre, although there's always a quite sizable gap between talking and doing. The City Deals announced last autumn by the current government are also very welcome, although I can't shake the concern that it puts Sunderland in direct competition, rather than partnership, with Newcastle, and as things stand at present the Mags are always going to win that particular derby. Also encouraging is the formation of the combined authority -  made up of the various Tyne and Wear councils, plus Durham and Northumberland - although at present that feels more like a talking shop than anything else.

Regardless, here's hoping by the time that the next report is published a year from now that there's some tangible improvements. Not, you understand, because Wearside can be regarded as being merely at the sharp end of a wedge of an society wide trend that is gradually seeing capital accumulating in the hands of a shrinking number of people, while actual communities are slowly beggared. No. Here's hoping things improve because I live here and my life would be a teeny tiny bit better if we could somehow wrangle it so that the city centre got a 24 hour supermarket (Durham's got two, for fuck's sake) and also maybe a Paperchase.

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In other news I did another page for Rag and Bone. Aren't I clever

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

* A lot of Mackems will tell you that up until very recently Sunderland was bigger than Newcastle, which is kinda, sorta trueish if you only look at the populations within the officially defined city boundaries. On the other hand if you look at the population of the continuous built up area, then Tyneside's clearly about 3-4 times bigger than Wearside.

Proper Charlies

Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries

Like many people I've spent the last week utterly horrified by events in Paris. There's something about the Charlie Hebdo attacks, even when set against the atrocity exhibition that is the modern world, that was particularly ugly and hateful. The freedom to hold contrary opinions, to pick holes in the ideologies of pompous demagogues and to generally take the piss is an important one. There's not really a hell of a lot I can do in the face of the men with guns, but, hey, at least I can think what I want, and it's this that the gunmen were attacking last week. Unsurprisingly in the aftermath we've had the usual bell ends sounding off about how the best way to combat this sort of horror is to undermine our own rights, ramp up tensions with those of our countrymen who happen to be Muslim and generally do everything that the people who carried out the crimes want us to do in order to further their cause. Thankfully the vast majority of people seem uninterested in drinking that particular kool aid and have decided that the appropriate response is to celebrate our freedom of speech and to remember that our enemies may be murderers and war criminals, but they are also knob-heads who must be pointed and laughed at.

As well as being free to make points that may offend we are also free to make points that are incoherent and poorly presented, hence the above cartoon. I'm not sure if it works. It kinda hinges on your familiarity with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the figures are a bit on the wee side to be recognisable. While the above is a bit crap cartoonists from around the world have produced some brilliant work in response to the attack on, what is after all, their profession. (unless your Paul Thomas at the Daily Express, in which case the most pressing story in the world last week was energy bills. Ho-hum).

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Away from the world of current events I went to the Life museum in Newcastle the other day. I can imagine it's a fantastic place to go if your ten. unfortunately I'm a full grown man and was thus underwhelmed. I blame my sister, whose idea it was. Unfortunately she's having a bad time of it at the minute so I can't really shout at her and must content myself with shitty looks and slow shakes of the head. I'm also now eleven days alcohol free. I've lost weight, am breathing better and can now usually remember how I got to bed. You can still sponsor me, of course, because God knows that self improvement is no longer a good enough reason to do anything, but if you don't, please pay it forward in some way, such as buying a big issue or petting a particularly glum looking dog.

I also finished another page of Rag and Bone, so go me.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Ring in the New

Happy 2015. I hope everyone reading this had a great new years, because God knows New Years Eve has never been a disappointment for anyone. 

Me and the better half went to Tynemouth the other week, which is a pretty wee seaside village in North Tyneside. A nice day was had wandering around the market and the ruins of the priory, which also doubled as an anti aircraft installation back in the day. The only dampener was one rather bizarre incident when me and wor lass lass were sat waiting for a meal when a family of six came in, saw that there were no free seats and, rather than walk the ten yards to the next establishment, promptly sat down at our table. They sat with their backs to us and made no attempt to acknowledge our existence us or the weirdness of the situation, everybody that is except the children, who had obviously not got the memo and stared at us with the slack jawed intensity that only pre schoolers can summon. We were eventually moved to another table by the - very apologetic - bar-staff at which point one of the invading party decided.that we did actually exist and offered the limpest of apologies. Fear not anonymous table usurpers, I have now moved on, but I must warn you that as far as wor lass is concerned, you have made an enemy for life. 

We also went to Middlesbrough the other day, because apparently we are the sort of couple who go on day trips to Middlesbrough on purpose. One of the reasons for this was so we could visit the local Institute of Modern Art, which turned out to be a silly reason as the bugger was shut. The other reason was to have a wander around Middlehaven and hopefully scratch the girlfriend's photography itch. 

For those who don't know, Middlehaven is a large redevelopment area on the banks of the Tees. Middlehaven was for a long time, very literally, on the wrong side of the tracks (or "over the border" as the Smoggies would have it), home to the town's red light district and the skeletons of industries which were, at one point, world class. There were plans on the table to completely revamp the whole area in one big bang. Unfortunately the double whammy of the credit crunch hit and Tory led austerity meant that that went to shit and the local authority have had to move the whole thing forward piecemeal.  As such, at the time of writing, approximately 5% of the area is made up of restored classic buildings, 5% derelict buildings that are beyond saving and 15% shiny new office and college buildings. The remaining 75% is made up of deserted brownfield land with the wind whistling mournfully over it. Maybe some day they'll finish it and it'll be super smashing great, but at present the whole area stands as slightly mournful testament to the scale of the challenge facing many areas in the north

I've been busy with a distance learning course over the past couple of weeks so haven't done as much drawing as I'd like. Below's a panel from Rag and Bone because finishing the thing is as near as I've gotten to a new year's resolution (that and for the killing to finally stop).

I'm also still doing stupid Dryathalon thing. I spend my evenings stood at my window, watching the local winos roll around in their own filth, shouting incoherently at the seagulls, and I am green with envy. Any donation will, of course be gratefully received, but I am happy to accept a high five in lieu  of money.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

All the Way There and Back Again

The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies Review

Given that Peter Jackson's adaptations of Lord of the Rings made all the money, it was inevitable New Line would make an adaptation of The Hobbit, they would have been financially irresponsible not to.  Also, given that The Hobbit is vastly different in tone, register and structure to the Ring trilogy it was inevitable that substantial changes were needed to make it fit in with the earlier films. And, given that puffing up a children's bed time story to the size of a Beowulf-esque epic is something of a big ask, you could also argue that it was inevitable that the new films would suffer in comparison to Jackson's earlier efforts.

This was most true of the first Hobbit film, where the boom and blare of Jackon's additions about falling civilisations and quests for revenge - copy pasted from the appendices - clanged like a motherfucker when set against the sing song pitter patter of Tolkien's original narrative. The second film was a definite improvement, settling into a more consistent tone, even if the action was that little bit too cartoony, undermining any sense of threat. The third movie is all crescendo; a two hour fight scene relying on the previous two films to provide it with context and substance

Luckily it's a good fight scene. There's an actual feeling of weight and peril to proceedings that was missing from the previous instalments (assuming that is, your not Legolas - in which case the laws of physics are your bitch). As for the few quiet bits, the stand off outside the gates of Erebor and Thorin's tap dance along the edge of sanity are well handled, and Martin Freeman remains the best Bilbo Baggins they could have possibly cast, even if here, as in the books, he's more or less run out of things to do at this point. Also there are war goats. I now want a war goat. But there's so little story here that it's hard to justify it being its own film and even at two and a half hours it feels too long. It's difficult to view The Battle of the Five Armies as its own thing, as opposed to the final third of  a larger story. That's fine. That's exactly what it is. But it presupposes a lot of heavy lifting in the earlier films which was simply not present.

In a broad sense all the changes that Jackson introduced are clever or at least understandable, creating dynamics and threads that run through all three films and going at least partway to reduce the gratuitous use of deus ex machina employed in the book. But it's when it comes to the execution that the adaptation sometimes sags. Take the much derided dwarf/elf romance, which didn't fall flat because the idea itself was stupid. On the contrary I thought it personalised the ongoing conflict, helped distinguish important characters within a large cast, created new dramatic tensions within the group and raised the stakes for the final confrontation. The reason it didn't work was that it was dealt with in an entirely perfunctory way, making it feel forced and unbelievable. Similarly anyone who's read or seen the supplementary material the film makers put out knows the individual dwarfs are all reasonably well formed characters, with a culture that a great deal of work had been spent into realising. It's just that almost none of that made it onto the screen, the preference instead being for overlong action sequences, comedy mugging and episodic scenes from the book that could have easily been cut, resulting in a amorphous, beardy mush.

I'm ultimately fond of The Hobbit films. Even putting my affection for the original novel to one side, Jackson's films have always been at least fun and now we've seen the trilogy in full it's possible to make out the shape of something very worthwhile. Whether that something would bear that much resemblance to its source is debatable, but it's hard to shake the suspicion that a ruthless, two film cut that included more character development while sheering the bloat off some of the spectacle wouldn't merely be good, but excellent.

                                                                                                                                                  

Anyone remember the scene in Candyman where Virginia Madsen wakes up in a strange flat, no recollection of how she got there, covered in the blood of a dog that it appears she's beheaded, some wifey screaming in the corner and a small baby missing. Yeah, well, after a not dissimilar Friday night I've decided to knock alcohol on the head for January. No sooner had I made this decision than an advert in my local bus shelter informed me that this was a thing that Cancer Research UK is encouraging people to do. While I am generally speaking pro cancer, I understand that a lot of people aren't and figured I might as well try and raise some money for charity while I'm giving my liver a stay of execution. If you feel inclined to donate you can find my Just Giving page by clicking the following link

I wont be posting next week due to festivities so I'll wish you Merry Christmas - unless you don't celebrate it, in which case Merry Thursday - and I'll resume my witless rambles in the new year

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

The Walrus Loves the Carpenter

The moon was shining on the sea,

Shining bright and white:

The walrus and the carpenter

Sat out in the moonlight

And this was very odd, because

it wasn't even night.

Carpenter licked his fingers clean,

And tossed an oyster shell

Now that their repast was now complete

His face, it suddenly fell.

Those oysters, they had trusted them,

And they'd not been treated well

"Walrus," he said, into his chest,

sniffing away a tear

"We did those shellfish a great wrong

that they can't forgive, I fear

As now they're stuck inside our guts,

Are we the bad guys here?"

Walrus's flipper reached behind

And gave his back a pat

"My joiner friend, there is no need

To feel like you're a rat.

We were hungry. They taste good.

And that's the end of that."

He lifted up the chippy's chin

and looked into his eyes

"Don't be sad', the Walrus breathed

And to Carpenter's surpise,

Butterflies swirled inside his tum

and something began to rise

His face and loins were burning hot,

Carpenter suddenly knew

That oysters are aphrodisiacs

And he'd had thirty two

He put his mouth to Walrus's

At which point things got blue.

I'll spare you the gory details

of all things done and said

For walrus/man love is not a thing

you want inside your head

Though I believe you can find such things

Out there on the web.

They lay there panting, side by side

After the deed was done,

For sex is hard when your new lover

Outweighs you by a tonne

But thanks to lube and harnesses

They'd had a lot of fun.

"I can't believe that happened,"

Carpenter happily sighed

"But I'm glad it did as now it means,

I've no reason now to hide

That I love an Artic mammal."

"That's great," the Walrus lied

You see, what he was thinking,

But didn't want to say,

Was that he felt himself a player.

Monogamy? No way!

He'd just hoped to scratch an itch,

And get his end away.

"Oh Wally," said the Carpenter,

"I think that you're the one.

Do you think our parents will understand?"

But answer came there none-

And this was scarcely odd, because

That fucker, he had gone.

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With all due apologies to the estate of Lewis Carroll. This is apparently what I do with my spare time.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton