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16.5.13Beck the CartoonistBeck the cartoonist delights me more than Beck the musician. But it's not a competition! They are both cool in their own ways.
Beck the cartoonist has honoured me by illustrating two of my tweets again recently. 'I drive a small car to compensate for my even smaller car.' 'If they take away our freedoms, I hope someone nice gets them.' The second one, especially, I think, is marvellous. I was talking about the hideous things Bloomberg and Ray Kelly were saying just after the Boston bombing, about doing what's necessary to protect us by searching us all the time, by profiling, by claiming that the Constitution may need to be changed because 'we live in a complex world where you're going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days.' I was also thinking of the police surveillance culture in New York in general. All in that tweet. Maybe that's why people liked it. I think Beck has compressed my anxieties into a visual metaphor that is both instantly effective and haunting. And funny! Everyone loves a fish in a cartoon. Cheers, mate, I say! And thank you. 11.5.13See, I Did It in No Time at AllA good story is like a good execution: summary.
7.5.13Spy vs. SpyThe lie 'I told all those lies because I'm a spy' quickly explains away all your other lies.
10.4.13It's Not True, but It's Not ImpossibleIf, in the woods, a tree wants to be seen, it puts on a colour other than green.
25.3.13Furrowed Brow and Borrowed FrownWhen Damon Hill said to Martin Whitmarsh at the Malaysian Grand Prix, alluding to McLaren's poor form at Melbourne, 'Last week, your furrow was browed,' what did he contribute to the world of metaphor?
Obviously, if one is ploughing over a hill (a Hill!), a furrow might be browed (ridged) at the summit. Is that a problem? I think not. Or, to consider it another way, an existing furrow might become 'browed' if the earth swelled beneath it. Possibly more of a problem, and one that could easily apply to Whitmarsh's situation and state of mind. But it would be pretty extraordinary. Or is it the case that Whitmarsh's furrow was browed in the sense of 'bounded' or 'marked off.' Is he like the Attendant Spirit in Comus whose pasture land is 'hard by i' the hilly crofts / That brow this bottom-glade' (Comus, 531–2)? This seems more likely. In the verses, the bottom-glade in the 'hideous wood' is the scene of awful doings, but it is a limited space. It seems that Hill was suggesting, rightly, that Whitmarsh and McLaren's furrow, and the late-season fruitfulness it ought to represent, is being limited, bound and bounded. And the worst thing is, according to everyone at the team, that no-one knows why. But they are working on it. They are working on it. Fighting back against the wilderness. Ploughing with the MP4-28. An interesting perspective offered by Hill. 7/10. 10.3.13Love at the Bun-Shop'Does the lady out shopping ever fall in love with the waiter at the bun-shop?'
In Tea-Table Talk (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903), by Jerome K. Jerome. Illustration by Fred Pegram. 27.2.13'I'm Also a Client'Is your product's spokesperson willing to pronounce awful truths, truths so awful to hear that, as if by an eldritch whirlwind, the consumer is sucked from the world of life and advertising and flung onto a plane void of desire and need and fulfilment, where the aeons pass, indistinguishably, one after the other, one by one by one, under the light of a sickly sun, only to be returned at last to our time and place, emptied, afraid, alone, and with one thought: 'I want things, while there is still time. Tell me what I want.' Is your spokesperson willing to do that?
Or is he or she willing to get naked? 26.2.13Fifty New Kipling PoemsUp, me chummos! Huzzah, huzzee!
Jodhpurs, hotspurs, jingo tea! Barracks, jharaks, radaree! On the road to Kedgeree! 24.1.13Liner Notes'In the 1960s the [Miss Marple] theme was a number one hit in the Scandinavian pop music charts.' (The Film Music of Ron Goodwin)
'Guillaume Connesson is irresistibly attracted to the infinitely massive.' (Cosmic Trilogy) 'Britain has a fine tradition in the creation of quality light music—music of the sort that plumbs no depths of intellectual or emotional stimulation, but lifts the spirits with ingratiating melodies decked out with consummate craftmanship.' (British Light Music Classics, Vol. 1) 29.12.12Amazing Optical Illusion!Incredibly, the object inside the shadow and the object outside the shadow are the same shape.
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