Gus
Weird One Minute Sketches
Charlie
Charlie was a border collie, crossed with springer spaniel and a member of the Luke family until November 2007. He died four weeks after Eileen Lucas (my gran), and had lived to around 16, or another good age for a dog. The family got him as a pup shortly after I moved out of the family home in the early 90s.
The previous dog in the previous home was Murdock, named after the Howling Mad character played by Dwight Schultz. He was my dog, mine and Graeme’s, and Charlie, was Gavin and Stuart’s. Except that Charlie had a bit more energy than just allocations could handle.
The bond probably strengthened following my hospitalisation in 96, when I went to live with my parents for a few months. The time off work allowed me to enjoy simple pleasures like throwing the dog the ball, and walking with him.
There was no reckoning the energy to him. By 2001, I’d moved back to Bangor, and a few years later a lucky set of events found me renting a property opposite my parent’s home. My brothers had all moved out and Charlie and I ended up spending more time together. Those who have had dogs (or cats), will understand just how close good relationships can be. I rehearsed my stories and songs on Charlie, complained to him about co-workers, tried to persuade him to watch Buffy with me. I must say the dancing wasn’t my idea.
Charlie’s favourite toy was “the blue”. Mere mention of it could set him of into one of his two-gallon Cola frenzies.
Living with a dog, it’s essential (as with humans), that they’re given decent exercise and quality specific time.
Charlie could keep a secret and when things were bad I’d confide in him. If I didn’t, he’d already have known something was up. He could sense someone approaching the door four minutes away. We truly loved one another, but he couldn’t possibly hope to keep his affair with the postman secret.
Phone calls from University to home were dog tales of sad. Diarrhea, blindness, bumping into things. He wasn’t the same. The energetic extremes of his life were going, I was told. I made a trip home and I was told the most remarkable change happened.
And that was the last I saw of him, the last I remembered him. My confidante, companion. The butt of jokes who suffered the shit with a smile. My trainer, my dearest friend. I know you miss him. We just gotta keep going.
What a fricking incredible mutt he was.
Sketchy Miscellany
Good night at Late Night Arts in Belfast last night. Today’s offerings come from the Sketchy’s hosted by Adam Turkington, Seedhead Arts and The Black Box. I think you’ll like these.
[Comic] Bob’s : Can I have your autograph Mr. Hooker?
You couldn’t quite call them policies, maybe intentions, one of the intentions I had when making Bob’s comic was to include a guest star each issue. William Shatner appeared in the third episode, having fallen asleep on Bob’s couch during an alcohol fuelled binge which no-one could remember. Despite wearing his Star Trek: The Motion Picture threads, he went unrecognised until someone mentioned the TV show T.J. Hooker. Bob insisted that Willy get a dustpan and shovel and help clear up that mess amidst calls of “Can I have your autograph, Mr. Hooker?”
The Ralph Kidson got such a chuckle out of this he sent me his interpretation of the moment. I used this as the cover to the first Bob’s spin-off, about Willie’s return to the Enterprise and the ramifications of his days of a County Down bed-sit dole hole life. Here you go,
Blog: Creativity and Collaboration
My hearts not really in any of the pieces I’ve started: nothing that would allow me to finish them in an hour.
Tonight, I’m producing an audio segment for Stephen Millar and Colm Clarke‘s WAB FM project which enjoys a brief resurrection at Belfast’s Golden Thread Gallery as part of a Catalyst Arts retrospective. I’ve a special idea in mind for this. Listen for ‘The Call’ at the gallery over the next month, or on this site.
I got two or three DJ spots on Wab FM with my sometimes collaborator, Richard Barr. We’ve some flash-fic showing up here over the next month. There’s also plans for the two of us to work with our friend, Irish comix artist, letterer and playwright John Robbins. After a year of failed projects, I’m looking forward to a more organic return to work. If I could give one piece of advice to somebody wanting to make comics as a career, it’s this: don’t, and secondly, work with people you like and trust and only them.
One happy exception to that this year has been with Ruairi Coleman. I saw Ruairi’s work at 2d last year and got him on board hours before Uproar Comics spotted him and did the same. He’s been the lead artist on three issues of their Zombies Hi! comic, and is now doing some stuff for Rob Curley’s Atomic Diner imprint. Ruairi has been drawing from my script for “Brand of Britain” for the “To End All Wars” book published by Soaring Penguin Press and due out before next June. There’s been a lot of reference to follow, and a lot of editorial demands and Ruairi has been handling it all very professionally. I have set things I want to do however the process of creation is organic. Making comics or any creative work is not factory work: it’s communication and needs communication period.
To End All Wars, Soaring Penguin Press, 2014 (Image creator unknown)
Some relationships haven’t worked out this year. I’ve bowed out of Studio NI’s Skeletons in the Closet collection and Borderline Press’s Zombre over creative disagreements. I think when I’m not being paid for a job, it’s perfectly acceptable to walk away in some circumstances. Creativity is not an obligation, it’s a freedom.
The project I’m most excited about at the moment is a solo project due out in oh ho about two weeks. I’ve been very lucky to have been blessed with an editor who took my work and made changes to make it better. I know! Imagine my shock. Here’s another teaser from the project:
And there’s a few bloggers I should probably be talking with this week. Get in touch with my agent if you’d like to run something.
(yeah, I’m still my own agent)
Alex Jones / Sontaran Mashup II
This set goes out to Geoffrey D. Wessel,
More Alex Jones / Sontaran mash-ups archived.
I wonder what Alex will have to say about the upcoming 50th anniversary given he’s been using the Who soundtrack on his show for years now. Co-opted indeed!
La Table
La Table is in Merville House, ‘the main house of the estate were the mayor lived in the nineteenth century’, Abel tells me. ‘There was a hunting accident in the
family, he was shot by his own gun. This was in the 30s or 40s and his widow didn’t want to live there anymore’. Dark times indeed. ‘During the war the army took it for a barracks, in the 50s…it was given to the people, or abandoned or something. There was a lot of money put in to renovate it. 1.2 million I think. This was in the 60s.’ It doesn’t look like a new building, I remark. It’s a beautiful stately room, chandeliers, oil paintings, ornate wallpaper. ‘Well it’s not. It’s 17th Century, Georgian? Or maybe 200 years old. It used to be offices, grey carpets.’
Now it’s a spacious tea room, a patisserie school and a function event just behind Belfast’s AbbeyCentre. I met Abel Mehablia at a Business Enterprise course early last year. He’s from Paris previously. The tables have grabbing Teapigs menu presenting thirty teas, funny, and engrossing reads. I wish I’d taken my time before ordering coffee, I could have gone through these. Do you get much uptake on these?
‘People have conservative tastes here. They won’t try new things.’ We both like that about coffee. He reflects that La Table is ‘not on the road, it looks like a private street’ but remarks optimistically, ‘If you do something special people will come to you.’ Reputation planting. ‘There are no tea-rooms in Belfast. Malone, Lisburn..’ But these are National Trust or the type, I say. They tend to be place orientated: castles, notable buildings. “The coffee is just right here: it’s strong, not bitter”, I tell him. Abel tries to find the word: ‘character?’ “Yes, that’s It goes down cosy, compatible.
Abel is running the cafe under the Steps to Work Test Trading scheme, which facilitates self-employment for six months. Earned money must be declared but cannot be spent during the period and traders get £10 on top of their fortnightly benefit. (A full-time worker on the scheme gets about £10 a day) Abel has two of his six months left. The set-up took too long, ‘there was not enough time’, and every-day he’s losing money. Worry is foremost on his mind. La Table though is in beautiful grounds, it’s off-street, and even on this rainy day it’s surrounded by pretty flowers and trees. While just off the Shore Road, it feels like the countryside. A squirrel passes. I tell him about Rathlin will all of my enthusiasm, and he recounts the tale of a man in debt in Greyabbey or Portaferry, who got from the bank a loan to buy a house on a hill to turn into a cafe. It was a remote space, with land all around it. ‘It was madness. There were no neighbours, it shouldn’t have worked, he was told. But now it’s a thriving business.’ It’s grown from a cafe into a quality restaurant, nursery, farm shop and has it’s own tourist centre. I’m not sure Abel can manage the same but we can at least try. La Table is a little enclave haven in the middle of commercial industry, safe, quiet from it’s excesses.
La Table Cafe (and the upcoming Patisserie School), are at Merville House, Merville Garden Village (off Shore Road, behind the Abbey Centre) in Newtownabbey, BT37 9TH. The cafe opens Tuesday to Sunday.
Links
http://www.mervillehouse.com/
https://www.facebook.com/LaTableBelfast
Photos by Abel Mehablia, from the Facebook page.
KROTEKK! (Comic: With Gary Parkin)
Ninja and Warrior were members of the superhero team The Peacekeepers which featured in the five issue Hero comic by Gary Parkin, who was fifteen years old when he was self-publishing the series back in 1997. He was also self-publishing Fuzzball, a children’s comic fit for adults about a ball of fuzz that enjoyed playing football. The story above came from Hero and The Peacekeepers #1 (1999?), and was one of two stories I wrote for Gary, with the rest of the book being about the fate of lead character Hero. These were the first multi-page comics another artist drew for me. Of course, the story makes little sense to me now. Much like REM’s first album Murmur, were many words were indecipherable, I was aware I was setting out my first words on a semi-career and chose them playfully. KROTEKK! KROTEKK! And look how pretty the pictures are.
The Rat Files
Stormont was an iconic parliament building, three levels of ten windows along either side of six columns out front. After the War, the removable paint never really removed, and the building lost the ‘white house’ look. Despite that, the hill added to it’s stature and Stormont was visible from various parts around Belfast. No parliament could sit in the long low intensity conflict, so there was no heavy security installation. Instead the building had a heritage house feel, albeit closed, though the acres around were publicly open. Our family moved to the area in 83, and my brother and I would take the ball ten minutes for a kick about the grounds, which were green and wide.
One day while watching the Roland Rat Show, Roland announced he and Kevin would tour the UK. This was sort of big. Roland was the fore-runner to the grunge movement, a brash, outrageous knit. He didn’t care for pleasing the typical lot with demand for primary colours. He was grey and animatedly pushed boundaries. He was arrogant, translated as, self-confident for a reason. Kevin the Gerbil by contrast was so pink, so welcoming, that his straight-ness was bent, gay iconic with an unassuming air. And maybe, Kevin was Roland’s beard. Jokes were made of his subservience, but his agenda of conformity opened up not just the Marxist dialogue, but also that of social interactionism. For conformity had it’s reasons. The biggest news.
The biggest news in all this was that Northern Ireland was recognised as the fourth region of the UK. Roland Rat Superstar was to ignore the Irish sea, fuck a two fingers to the war of the Troubles, he was coming. Blue Peter didn’t bother, ITV’s many paranormal productions never filmed here, John Craven treated us with the same black-out mentality as Police Six, which was supposed to be local! So, Graeme and I made our plans. One Friday morning, after London, Roland announced they were coming. We got mum to make sandwiches, and packed an apple, and a biscuit from the biscuit barrel, into a green plastic (Tupperware) container. By mid-day we were at the gates of Stormont. We kicked the ball diagonally, broad strokes, hoping that it might be intercepted by a film crew.
By Sunday gate closing we were worried. It was the summer holidays and come half eight the next morning we set off for what we were sure would be a live show. Roland never came. We heard it in the air that yes, indeed, he was in Northern Ireland. So why hadn’t he come? On Tuesday with lunches, no Roland, no Kevin. Not even Errol the hamster. We ate everything we had and stayed on two hours after the show ended. I told Graeme we might see the crew set up for the next day, but it was probably desperation on my part, I could see he had given up. On Wednesday I left the ball behind and when it became clear he wasn’t showing up I ran home. Graeme confirmed Rat On The Road had reached Northern Ireland, in some place called Ballycastle. One of the Ballys, one of the Castles. It didn’t sound too impressive.
On Thursday I stayed in the living room and watched as the TV-AM cameras tried to show the hexagonal stepping stones known as Giants Causeway and the wild exposing ocean. The two slithers of sock puppets traversed these inter-locking columns, their missing feet skipping the playfulness. A sixty million year old rock formation, it was suggested comedy happened, as Roland and Kevin’s wires were blown across the wide open landscape. There was no rain and I was unconvinced. I can’t care what happened on Friday. By Monday, he and Kevin were in Wales. There were no people there. I didn’t care about that either, how he’d much rather follow an isolationist agenda. By Tuesday he met people, were he hoarded cheese, and lorded it over them. Wales was the birthplace of Errol the hamster, but The Rat made quite clear Errol was only in the band to suit his prerogatives. By Wednesday, Roland had the people of Wales by the balls. Errol was a lost figure, Kevin was a dithering sycophant, the puppet government was in place.
andy-luke.com 