Roddy’s Film Companion

..

Some “Clift-notes” for the intro for the issue I’m currently working on. This text forms the introduction to Roddy’s Film Companion Issue 5 (as yet, unreleased).

..

Hello, Fuckface! A Sort of Introduction (Part 1)

Robyn Kenealy Interviews Roddy McDowall

..

I never know how to introduce these things. What I’m usually aiming for, you see, is the “dissemination of the godlike text” or words to that effect. It’s all like I’m looking to confuse authorship (or something) but then I just end up writing some bullshit like this. Oh fuck, you know what I mean, folks: obviously I couldn’t interview Roddy McDowall because he’s dead. Sometimes it feels like he’s alive because I’m used to his character, but he’s not. He’s actually pretty damn dead.

Also in the Pretty Damn Dead Club is Montgomery Clift, who feautures in the following issue (Issue 5, unpublished - ed.). It’s another one of those things were I’d like to give you the skinny on the man before we head in - trust me, it’ll help. So I thought I’d just, you know, ask Roddy. Even though he’s dead. Yup. Wooooo. (That’s a ghost noise. Scary, huh?)

..

..

ROBYN E. KENEALY: So, tell me about Montgomery Clift.

RODDY MCDOWALL: The thing you have to know, that you have to really understand is that he was simply a terrific actor. Really. He was just splendid. He started that trend for tough but sensitive young men - James Dean et al. It all started with Monty. He could look so… hurt. And yet so… oh, he was wonderful, really wonderful.

REK: Yeah, I’ve seen some of his movies. I don’t know if I’d praise him as ecstatically as you would, but I was pretty impressed, especially by ‘A Place in the Sun’. That seemed like a really complex role. And he was pretty Method, but he didn’t jar against the other actors the way James Dean did in, like, ‘Giant.’ He was kind of… half way between the old style and The Method, which I gather was just coming in.

RMD: It was. But Monty - well, he was trained. In his early days, in the theatre, where he’d got to half from modelling, which he’d done when he was quite young and half just through his mother who was… well, like most of our mothers, as I’m sure you understand. Anyway, he was picked up and got a great deal of training from the Lunts, who, of course, were pretty well known.

REK: Sure. They were sort of theatre royalty, is that right?

RMD: Yes indeed, and they put a lot of effort into Monty, mostly because he was so bloody talented, right from the begining. Or so I’m told. I didn’t actually meet him until I moved to New York in ‘52.

REK: I take it you met him through Elizabeth?

RMD: That’s right. And by then he was working with Mira Rostrova, who was, believe it or not, an actual member of the Moscow Art Theatre - where Constatin Stanislavski had written ‘An Actor Prepares’, if you can imagine. She was wonderful. Half soft-spoken flower, and half artsy dragon lady.

REK: And she took you on?

RMD: Eventually. I was a little bit full of myself when I first got there - well, it was faux bravado, really. But I remember saying that I’d come from Hollywood and didn’t need any lessons, and Monty said, and I quote, “that’s fucking rubbish. You’ve got to learn to act.” He was like that, you see. He thought of it as a craft, and that’s eventually what I learned.

REK: He has quite a small filmography though, really. All things considered. Monty, I mean.

RMD: He was very picky. He turned down a lot. But… now, let’s see… there was ‘Red River,’ which was quite wonderful and ‘Wild River’, with Lee Remick. And… of course you’d know ‘From Here to Eternity’?

REK: Oh, yeah. Where he plays the bugle.

RMD: That’s right, though of course he didn’t really play it. Oh, and, at some point he played opposite Olivia deHavilland, in ‘The Heiress’ and then there was ‘The Young Lions’ with Marlon Brando - oh dear, Brando took such a shine to Monty which I think Monty really liked, although he went through his usual squiffishness.

REK: His what?

RMD: What I mean is, he would always have this hoopla where it went ‘you like me, I don’t like you’ - he was often a little more comfortable when people didn’t like him so he had a chance to make them like him. When people did like him he’d go out of his way to wind them up. But anyway, Brando was younger and he looked up to Monty because Monty was such an actor, even though he, Marlon, was a bit more sorted out in himself, I think, back then. He had a good crack at getting Monty off the drink, I seem to recall, though it didn’t go very far and, poor Marlon…

REK: He gave up?

RMD: He was beaten. Monty couldn’t stand to be questioned, you know, beyond the… he liked it when one cared for him but not when one did so openly. You had to fool him. And Marlon… back then he was quite straightforward. He couldn’t understand how Monty could… Marlon told me, eventually, that when he told Monty he would go to the AA with him Monty simply said “I see” and just kept drinking shot after shot to make a point. That was the sort of thing he would do.

REK: What point?

RMD: “You can’t tell me what to do.” “I am my own kind of fucked up.” He was always like that… he wanted to be in control of not being in control, if you understand me. He was a person of contradiction. It was half awful and half hilarious to go anywhere in public with him. He’d do all sorts of terrible stuff - play with his food, throw things around, greet waiters with “Hello, fuckface.”

REK: Because he was a drunk?

RMD: He had a drinking problem, if that’s what you mean.

REK: That’s what I mean. And pills.

RMD: Yes. He was an alcoholic and a junkie, I guess you’d call it, for pharmaceuticals, mostly downers. But it’s worth understanding that everybody took pills back then. Everybody. Though in varying degrees, of course. It was just the culture of the time, which meant that it was sometimes difficult to recognise an “addict” - I never really noticed it in Monty until he started to get really sick.

REK: In the late fifties?

RMD: Or thereabouts.

REK: Was that because something had changed, or did it just… become obvious?

RMD: Well, partly it was that in ‘56 he was in a fairly serious car accident. This was during the filming of ‘Raintree County’, which he and Elizabeth were both in.

REK: He had an accident on the set?

RMD: No…. Elizabeth and Michael Wilding having a great deal of trouble, though of course I was living a lot of that on the telephone, since I was really only working on Broadway and not in L.A…. but anyway, what had happened was that Monty, who, of course, had been one of Elizabeth’s dearest friends ever since they’d been in ‘A Place in the Sun’ which I think was… ‘51? Also, he got on reasonably well with Michael, and for that reason he often ended up being a sort of foil between them, and he had been having dinner with them, foiling, as it were, and with Kevin McCarthy who often did a similar sort of thing, and Rock Hudson. I wasn’t there, of course, but I understand he crashed his car on the way home.

REK: They let him drive?

RMD: Kevin said he wasn’t drunk. Kevin didn’t even think he’d taken pills, or not too many. At worst, he told me, it could have been a bad reaction to something he had taken - he had colitis, you see, and occasionally he would have some fairly impressive reactions when he mixed his recreational drugs with his genuine medication - but it wasn’t excess, and possibly - this is what Kevin thought - for the most part, it could have been pure exhaustion. According to Kevin. Then again, Rock told me that Kevin told him that Monty had been weaving all over the road.

REK: What do you think?

RMD: Well… Elizabeth and Michael lived up in the canyon, and the roads are terrible late at night, being as they’re almost entirely uphill or downhill, depending on whether you’re coming or going. It’s possible it was just terrible luck.

REK: Did you ask Elizabeth?

RMD: Yes, immediately, since she telephoned me that night. Poor girl, she was horrified, she couldn’t answer a question like that. How I wish I could have been there - it was a terrible wreck, and he could have died, Monty. I immediately wanted to go out there.

REK: Why didn’t you?

RMD: Because I was working. And because eventually I found out he was going to survive and it seemed… I don’t know. His jaw was broken in eight places. It was frightful, and it was never really the same, although Monty worried about it much more than anybody else did, in terms of his looks. But, of course, the press somehow figured it out before the ambulance did - I’ve heard that some of them had police radios, if you can imagine - and they tried to take pictures of it all, but Elizabeth - she’s wonderful - she had managed to crawl into the car, which was absolutely mangled, and lift him a little, which probably kept him from drowning in his own blood. Actually, I have no doubt that’s what it did. He would have died if she hadn’t done that. And when the press came, she gave them a piece of her mind.

REK: She yelled at them?

RMD: And how! “You’ll never work in this town again!” and other, equally impressive clichés. At any rate, nobody took any pictures, except some of the car after they were already gone.

REK: So, then he finished ‘Raintree County’?

RMD: Once he was more or less functional. He was given a whole lot of prescription painkillers, and he had his colitis drugs, and, of course, he kept right on drinking, and it was pretty much downhill from there.

REK: So, you’d say that’s when he became “an addict”, in the true sense of the word? Or is that just when the fact that he was already addicted became really visible?

RMD: My feeling is that it’s a little of both.

REK: What I’m curious about is… you know, he doesn’t really look that bad. If you compare the photographs from before the accident and after it. I mean, his face is sort of… rounder, I guess, the shape of his jaw is really different, but he still looks good. Though I read that he felt like he’d “lost his looks.”

RMD: He thought he had. He was such a classic beauty, in his youth. I always feel Tom Cruise resembles him quite a lot, resembles the way he used to look. And to be perfectly honest, I think Monty was used to trading on the way he looked, and then after the accident he thought he couldn’t do that anymore. It depressed him.

REK: But he was already depressed?

RMD: He was always a bit depressed, as long as I’d known him, anyway.

REK: So there was the accident, and the drink and drugs, and… I read about the dinner parties, which is the late fifties, right?

RMD: His “family”? Oh yes. Yes, indeed. That was a “you really had to be there” time in his life.

REK: Can you explain?

RMD: The dinner parties? Well, they were dinner parties. There was drink and talk and… dinner. Usually.

REK: And drugs?

RMD: Well, of course. Monty was always sort of insistent about the parties but very ambivalent to them as well. He had started seeing Jean by then, and they were terrible for each other, they would race each other when they were drinking, and Jean really didn’t like it when Monty was higher than he was, so he’d try to catch up. But… listen, that’s my own personal soapbox, you don’t need to write that down. The point is, he was seeing Jean by that point and they’d have parties, back in New York, where they were living.

REK: So who would go? The “family”, I’m going to go ahead and assume, is a group of his friends?

RMD: Yes - Libby Holman, The McCarthys, Nancy Wheeler, Maureen Stapleton sometimes, whom he had met during the filming of ‘Lonelyhearts’, which is based on that Nathaniel West novella… Truman Capote… Tennesse Williams occasionally. And lots of other people. Lots of people drifted through, on and off. Monty was pretty hard to take, though. You had to be fairly committed.

REK: To hitting the hard stuff?

RMD: No, to dealing with the fact that Monty would inevitably, and quite often deliberately, pass out on the floor in the middle of the evening. And he would be very, very unhappy if anyone interfered with him, so one would have to leave him there, and try and ignore him. Then, sometimes, he wouldn’t come out of his room in the first place. It was… one could end up doing a lot of ersatz hosting. But one couldn’t… I couldn’t leave him alone. It was… well.

REK: I’m sorry.

RMD: Thank you, dear. And, of course, Monty would only ever listen to either Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald, never any other records. I remember he took someone’s head off once over Billie Holiday, or possibly Nina Simone. He really wouldn’t listen to anything else. So one had to get used to hearing the same songs with some regularity. Lord knows how Jean put up with it.

REK: I like Frank Sinatra.

RMD: Do you? I never minded him - his work, anyway - but I think I had my fill back then. I do remember there was a very good version of ‘Mack the Knife’ which I really liked, though.

REK: No, I like him a lot. I kind of like how he didn’t really sing.

RMD: No, he didn’t, did he? I suppose that’s what’s meant by a “crooner.”

REK: I guess so. But this was all a late fifties thing?

RMD: It was a fifties thing, Monty’s “family”, and it was his default setting when he wasn’t filming. Right up through ‘The Misfits’, which screened in ‘61, so it would have been shot… oh, 1960? Or ‘59? The dates all merge together these days… but anyway, I recall Marilyn Monroe joined us for a little while. I knew her quite well because we’d tap danced together when we were very young, and, of course I knew her and Arthur through the Actor’s Studio - everybody knew everybody in those days. She was a charming girl, for all her troubles, and she really loved Monty. She used to say he was the only person she knew in worse shape than she was. She was wonderful with those lines of hers, was Marilyn. She was quite the comedienne, though I suppose that’s hardly news to you.

REK: Not really. Marilyn Monroe’s pretty iconic these days. But I was going to ask about the… you know, eventually there was the ‘Freud’ thing?

..

……………………………………………………………….To be continued next week…

..

Lily Linton, a Wellington artist I know, is doing this thing that I think is awesome. She said, (though I can’t remember if it was on facebook or in person) that she had been inspired to start investigating this crazy urban field around us after the Wellington City Council saw fit to paint over the venerable Ian Curtis graffitti on Wallace Street. That piece of work, ‘Ian Curtis - Walk In Silence’ had been there as long as I could remember, and then it was gone, for reasons known only to the Prendegast government. It’s back now, thanks to some dutiful citizens, but it has returned with a friend - Lily’s blog, which you can visit here.

‘I am interested all aspects of public space: active edges and private/public boundaries, urban design and land use planning, transport networks, public services, shared resources, pedestrian perceptions,’ Lily writes, ‘cities are what we happily give each other.’  This is her project - to examine and inspire and basically respond on every level to the physical urban world that we are so frequently taught is impersonal. Urban Field Studies, to me, raises the fundamental sociological question: is human society more than or equal to the sum of its human parts? This is topical, in light of the *ahem* postmodern condition, in that the separation, or, as my pal Jameson puts it, ‘diffusion’ of our cultures that inevitably arises from globalization and free market ideals, requiring us to map our own cultures atop them. It’s also topical in light of such legislations as the ‘zero tolerance’ ban on graffitti, in tandem with the rise of Phantom Billstickers and their total dominance of public postering space, causing me to wonder what room, if any, is left for genuine public art.  

Enter Urban Field Studies, which is, apparently, ‘a place to engage in critique of art in public spaces, and to encourage more creative use of public space. (Ideally leading to an increase the sense of ownership and belonging that can come from community involvement, and reduce alienation in our cities.)’ Well, allow me to add my two cents to that: I say now, as I said at the begining, that’s awesome. Urban Field Studies is awesome. Enjoy it today!

Normally, I would go back over this blog and reword it all pleasantly and rationally in order to invite discussion and demonstrate openness to all views, but not today. I am good and solidly fucked off. I am too fucked off to pretend not to be fucked off. Why? I’ll tell you.

WTF is with the proposed ACC cuts?  Seriously. WTF? The upshot is, the government would like it very much if survivors of sexual abuse would, after a period of a month or so, be psychiatrically assessed to determine whether or not they qualified as having a mental illness. If yes, they receive counselling treatment on ACC. If no, they receive nothing. There are so many things wrong with this. I shall now itemise them for you. 

a)  After a month or so is too fucking long, in some cases. Treatment needs to begin at the discression of the claimant, because they are the only person who knows what they need, after such an intense breach of their personal self. Not to mention the fact that in some cases, survivors of sexual abuse will not be able to address what has happened to them until many years after the event. Those people do not need to wait a month. They have already been waiting long enough.

b) Not everyone at the receiving end of sexual abuse winds up with an official mental illness. The same way that not everyone who breaks their leg winds up Crippled 4 Life. But, and here’s the thing, YOU’D STILL PUT A CAST ON THE FUCKING BROKEN LEG WHEN IT WAS BROKEN, WOULDN’T YOU? Yes, you would!! Because, even if you don’t wind up with clinical depression, or whatevs, as a result of your experience, IT WILL STILL AFFECT YOU and THAT’S NOT A MENTAL ILLNESS! THAT IS A NORMAL, HUMAN REACTION TO TRAUMATIC EVENTS, and in many cases that process will require counselling assistance. These cuts are like a big fuck you to anyone brave enough to face what’s happened to them. Essentially, they will either be told ”you’re sick now” or “get hard, why don’t you, and go back to work.”

c) This is the real kicker. Under the proposed changes, IF you were lucky enough to receive an official mental illness sticker, you would have to declare it to potential employers. That’s right. Yes, you would actually have to say, at a job interview, or whatever, that you were officially sick.

I want you to imagine this, if you haven’t already. I want you to do a little visual exercise with me. Imagine, if you will, that you have been raped. That you have had your power and your safety and yourself ripped away from you, and you are struggling to rebuild that. Imagine then, that you work yourself up to the point that you are strong enough to admit it and ask for the help you need, from your community. Imagine then having to jump through a shitload of diagnostic hoops to prove that you are, in fact “sick” as a result of what has happened to you. What will you decide? To give up and decide not to fight for that help? Or accept that you have an illness and that you will be treated until you are “better”? Imagine then, after having decided, and received treatment, that you apply for your dream job, and then you have to tell a complete stranger what you have been going through. Imagine that. Imagine it. I don’t care how. Even if you don’t imagine you. Imagine your sister. Or your daughter. Or even your son. Does it make you, as it made me, feel like taking every single member of the incumbent NZ government over your knee and giving them a severe spanking in full and deliberate violation of section 59(a) of the crimes amendment bill?   

This is not to say that some survivors of sexual abuse do not develop mental illnesses. They do. Traumatic events CAN cause or trigger mental illness, PSD being a prime example. But these are two completely separate issues! A survivor of sexual abuse who develops a mental illness as a result would need BOTH things - counselling for the trauma, and treatment for the illness. Because, the thing is, just what is the definition for “better” here? Is it when you feel strong again? Is it when you feel ready to enter a relationship? Is it when you’re no longer afraid to walk down the street? Or is it… as I suspect it is, when you are able to return to work and not cause capitalism any trouble?

All I can think is that these proposed cuts are an example of the extension of the worst logic on the planet. Firstly, because counselling for survivors of sexual abuse is not a place we should be “tightening our belts”, secondly, because the whole thing stinks of privatization, and thirdly, and I think most importantly, the need to cleave the population into “sick” (unproductive capitalists) and “well” (productive capitalists), and the suggestion that emotional reaction to traumatic events is not something that our society needs to be concerned about is just fucking fucked. As if all that matters is that you’re a functional worker, or you’re not, and so our STATE HEALTH CARE would direct itself towards either making you into a functional worker after figuring out exactly why you were not, or simply insisting that you be one, regardless of the real reality of human experience. I hate this! It’s like it’s all geared up to help the people with the money and the power, already, at the expense of some of the most vulnerable people in the country (even more so in rural areas, as Rape Crisis points out.) People who are being told, again, that the problem is with THEM, not with what has happened. Yes, this really does have the faint aroma of blaming the victim (”faint” my Irish Catholic ass. It stinks to high heaven of it. I could smell it under water.) It also has the stench of roaring gender disparity, but I’ll leave that discussion to my far more competent pals over at The Hand Mirror.

The point is this: these people do not need to be blamed any more. Trust me on this. I know plenty of victims of sexual abuse and THEY ARE ALREADY BLAMING THEMSELVES. 

Just two final words: anyone who even starts to talk to me about the need to cut funding to cut out malingerers can fuck right off. I don’t even want to entertain that conversation, and there are two reasons for that. Firstly, I do not care. I do not care if ten thousand fakers receive ACC money if one person who needs it gets it. I just do not fucking care. That person, and their needs, are so important to me that I balk at anything that may make them hesitate in their decision to come forward. The second reason is this: so what? Okay? So what? We work to live, okay? Not live to work. People are so, so much more important than money. And if you don’t already know that then you have bigger problems than this legislation.

And, any sympathetic right-winger who wants to moan about the ACT tail wagging the National dog stands to be reminded that assessing ACC and attempting to reduce its spending was a National Party campaign promise.

To do something about it (even I went to the march on Parliament and everybody knows how Robyn E. Kenealy infinitely prefers to stay home and grumble) head here.

..

September was an exciting month at the Wayfarer Gallery. We have recently overhauled the frontpage and it now looks like something from Geocities, circa 1996. We are actually really pleased with the new design and very happy to have so many new projects underway.

What started as a few scattered posts on S.O.L.A.R. has developed into its own website called “Haiku News” (run by Dick Whyte and Laurence Stacey). Haiku News is an e-journal dedicated to publishing quality haiku, tanka and senryu poetry from around the world reflecting on news articles and contemporary events. We publish 1 new poem every day, with links to the news article that inspired it. In our first month on-line we had amazing submissions from Denis Garrison, Ed Baker, Janet Lynn Davis, Vasile Moldovan, Mike Montreuil, Terry O’Connor, Liam Wilkinson and Paul Smith. Still to come this month are submissions from Joshua Sellers, Barbara A. Taylor, Michelle V. Alkerton, Chen-ou Liu and more from Denis Garrison, Janet Lynn Davis and Paul Smith (as well as more from Dick and Laurence, of course). Special thanks to Paul Smith for his dedication to writing amazing poems for the journal. Check it out here.

Because S.O.L.A.R. (the Science Of Linguistic Aesthetic Research) has been busy working on the development of Haiku News, the S.O.L.A.R. website has been relatively quiet. We have begun posting a series of “protopoems” (alphabetical lists) which are the sketches for a new journal called “Protophilosophy” (which will be unleashed in November, everything going according to plan). Sometime this month Solar will resume posting image-based research and new haiku poetry. The S.O.L.A.R. site is also due for a design overhaul which we hope to complete sometime in November as well. Last month Dick Whyte also gave lectures on “Difference in Art” and “Time in Art” to Massey University’s third-year critical studies classes (Wellington, New Zealand).

In other news Roddy’s Film Companion, a comic biography of Roddy McDowall (the film actor who played Cornelius in the original Planet of the Apes) is back full force producing 3 new pages a week of a graphic novel detailing the relationship between Roddy McDowall and his partner John. The third issue has just started going on-line and includes guest stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Check it out here. Robyn E. Kenealy, writer and illustrator of Roddy’s Film Companion, was also awarded “Best Comic” at the Aotearoa Student Press Association awards (APSA) last month for The Darkroom (an RFC backstory published weekly in Salient, the Victoria University student magaizine). Congratulations Robyn!

Finally, The Wayfarer Gallery is also pleased to announce that we will soon be hosting the Tao Wells archive. See a sneak preview here. Till next month, salome!

..

..

Sorry everyone, but due to work on the Wayfarer Gallery website (which hosts this blog) Roddy’s Film Companion has been absent for two weeks. I realise this is really annoying for anyone following the blog, but things have been crazy at the moment with work and websites. I absolutely promise we will return to a regular schedule from now on (three pages a week). We have not been good at keeping these promises in the past, but I assure you, this time we mean it buddy!

In other news The Darkroom, a Roddy’s Film Companion backstory that has been appearing in Salient (the Victoria University student magaizine in Wellington), was awarded Best Comic at the Aotearoa Student Press Association awards (APSA). This was very exciting. Many thanks to Jackson Wood for nominating us. Also, the Wayfarer Gallery has recently undergone an overhaul. It has a new frontpage and a brand new journal, called the Haiku News (this is one of the reasons both Roddy’s Film Companion and Solarts have been slack in terms of uploading the last couple of weeks). Haiku News is a journal publishing news articles transformed into haiku poetry. Check it out!

Happy reading!!

..

..

1. That ‘Werewolf’ magazine exists, with lots of sweet journalistic goodness from Gordon Campbell, who used to kick ass all over the now sucks ‘Listener.’ Butt Hat Snot All! Brannavan Gnanalingam and Tim Bollinger also write there. And others! (Plus Bollinger plugged me, so I love it even more.)
2. That when I download a David Rovics song, the genre of the song on itunes is automatically listed as “leftist cheerleader.”
3. This story (thanks to Claire Harris for this one.)


..

..

For the past year a chapter of Roddy’s Film Companion (titled ‘The Darkroom’ and set sometime just after Europe! Europe! Prologue) has been appearing in weekly installments in Salient (the Victoria University student magazine). Much to my surprise ‘The Darkroom’ has recently been nominated for an ASPA award for Best Comic (ASPA is the Aotearoa Student Press Association). Many thanks to Jackson Wood (the editor of Salient) for nominating my comic. The association has held an annual awards ceremony since 2002 recognising the best in New Zealand’s student media. Although they do not have a website, they are listed on Wikipedia. I’ll let you know how it pans out after the award ceremony on the 12th of September. Wish me luck.

..

..

So my partner and I went back to work and school and everything got really busy so we didn’t have time to update anything recently, which must have been annoying considering how close this issue is to finishing. The next three pages are lined up for Wednesday and Friday (of this week) and Monday (of next week) and that is the end of the Cleopatra issue of Roddy’s Film Companion. Horay!!

The next issue, called “The Burtons” (in the way one might say “The Simpsons,” but not in the way you might say “The Nazis” - however, it is set in Switzerland for anyone that cares) will start next week on Wednesday. It is about Roddy and John visiting Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at their flash new house in Gstaad. Hilarity ensues when Richard acts like an ass (again), John is Catholic and feels guilty about everything, Elizabeth is both drunk and rude, and Roddy is still gay (nuts to you non-believers)! As Dylan Horrocks once said, “They’re such awful people,” so what’s not to like!

This one was originally published in paper form way back in 2008 for the Tripple Threat exhibition featuring Draw and Claire Harris, and the New Zealand Comics Weekend but I can never be bothered keeping them in print so thankfully the internets can pick up the slack (I heart you, internets). It’s about sixty pages so it should keep you busy for the next half a year (or there abouts). After that I might put up a range of short strips that have appeared in other places.

In other news the new issue of Bristle is out with a beautiful cover by Claire Harris (above left). I was too busy to anything for it this time, but its full of great comics from Solar, Draw, Ari Freeman, Brent Willis and Lorenzo Van Der Lingen (among others). It costs $NZ 5.00 and can be ordered from Brent Willis at celfbw[at]xtra[dot]co[dot]nz. Or you can just send your address and $5 to Brent Willis, PO Box 27-258, Wellington, New Zealand (if you live in NZ you could even try your local comic book store).

That’s it from me - I hope you enjoy the last few pages of Cleopatra. Peace out!

…

..

Today’s title is awesome, isn’t it? I promise you I’ll explain it. I will, honest. You’ll just have to sit through a little rant first. Just a little rant. It’s only wafer thin. In the mean time, you can just bask in the awesomeness, while you scroll on down to the end.

Today’s rant is about New Zealand, the country I live in. If you live in New Zealand too, you might have got this thing your mail box lately. I got one today. It’s this thing with the funny orange blobby man on it and a question that I am supposed to answer. The TV tells me it’s a referendum. One question, New Zealand (says TV): “should a smack, as part of good parental correction, be a criminal offense in New Zealand?”

…

…

Boy, I love democracy. It may function more or less always as a political coke vs. pepsi fight for supremacy but I fuckin’ love it and I can’t WAIT to participate in it. Oh, I love having my voice listened to! I’m gonna say exactly the right thing! I’m gonna fill in this form! Well, I was going to, but then I got little bit confused! I have a few supplemental questions that just burn to be answered. Given the above question, what is a smack? and just what is “good” parental correction? Oh jeez, I think I just answered myself If a “smack”, whatever that is, is part of “good parental correction”, it must be good, then, huh? And you can’t punish people for being good! I guess we have our answer! Boy, that was easy! Ain’t democracy fun?

Ok, obviously I’ve got my sarcasm freak on, but this really is a little hard to take. Doubtless, you’ve been aware of the controversy surrounding Substituted Section 59 in the Crimes Amendment Bill. Really, unless you ignore media in its entirety (and if you do, can I come live with you? I’m messy, but I’m real easy going) you’ve heard all about it. Trust me. Though you might not have known you had, because in the New Zealand media, Section 59 is never referred to as such. Rather, its moniker is snappier and far more media friendly (read: polarizing): we call it the “anti-smacking bill.” Just so you won’t be confused. And this is what the referendum is about. It is not a question from nowhere. It is a question which the government is obligated to ask you, the people, because enough signatures went on a petition that calls the NZ government to address the “anti-smacking bill” and all it stands for.

Sounds very important. So, what is this bill? Section 59, to use its actual, I don’t know, NAME, is, as far as I can tell, an attempt to close an extremely problematic loophole in NZ law. According to Parliament, “the purpose of this Bill is to stop force, and associated violence, being inflicted on children in the context of correction and discipline,” or, to  say that nothing “justifies the use of force for the purpose of correction.” I’ll summarize that for you, in case you were wondering. It is no longer legally acceptable to beat your children for punishment. You may still remove them physically from a situation that is about to hurt them, or someone else, but, as Finlay MacDonald writes, “if you belt your kids just to teach them a lesson, rather than to prevent some clear and present danger or disruption, the law is not necessarily on your side.” It’s not about parenting so much as it is about violence, or, as Te Kahui Mana Ririki (anti-violence spokesperson for Maori youth) puts it, “You cannot smack another adult without being brought before the law, so why should adults be given the right to smack little children?”

Agreed, Te Kahui. Assault is assault, and I have to say that that old child-beating adage “this hurts me more than it hurts you” probably doesn’t even need the oxy in front of its moronic. However, according to some critics, the bill is not quite that simple. There are many oppositions to it. There are, in fact, about 30,000, the number of signatures on the aforementioned petition, which means we’re obligated to pay at least a little bit of attention. Some criticisms I even find relevant - that the bill is confusingly written and not terribly clear, that it doesn’t address the fact that real and serious violence against children is still going unpunished, because the problem is with our culture and not with our law. These are good things to be talking about, because the problem IS with our culture. However I, along with Barnardos, and Women’s Refuge, among others, believe that the bill contributes to a change in attitudes towards a culture where violence towards children is not OK. I have a friend who likes to remain nameless, a former teacher, who, one night after many whiskeys said to me in a sad voice “the most dangerous things a child in New Zealand can do are shit its nappies or cry.” He was quoting a breadth of very real, and very horrible statistics, and he was right.

Then there are other criticisms of the bill, which, while they indicate to me very real and serious anxieties about change and value differences amongst New Zealanders, really do scare the be-freakin’-jesus outta me when it looks like they might end up having an influence on law in New Zealand. Family First, an christian lobby group, for example, has been fighting the bill positing examples of “good parents” who have been unfairly punished by the bill. I bring this up because Family First are really the biggest and most influential group in getting this referendum together, and I find that Family First and I really, really disagree about a good parent is. When their examples include a father pushing his teenage son over (three times!) because he refused to play rugby without his full uniform on, I find I want to call that kind of behaviour a) mean and b) quite bad parenting, really. Different worlds, I suppose. But this rant isn’t really about that.

I, personally, am opposed to hitting children, in general, and pretty much always. Don’t hit kids, okay? Don’t hit anyone! Just count to ten, and have a beer instead (no, wait! statistically you’re much more likely to hit your child if you start drinking in NZ - just count to ten!!). But my opinion on this matter is neither here nor there. Even if I thought that hitting children was the sweetest thing since Skynard’s ‘Freebird’, I would still find the referendum question misleading, because it is. It does not take a media scholar to figure out that the connection between smacking and good parenting has been made rhetorically, and that the question basically begs an answer to whether or not one likes “good parenting”, not whether or not one thinks Section 59 should be repealed. It doesn’t address the legislation under scrutiny and it doesn’t address the issue at hand, and this is possibly why Prime Minister John Key plans to ignore it. I think this is the only time I have ever agreed with the John Key about anything.

Yes, it’s a big frakking deal. I’m prepared to publicly agree with The Smiling Assassin over it, for fuck’s sake! Jesus! The referendum question being what it is, regardless of whether or not it effects the law, speaks volumes about this country, its attitudes, and the kinds of violence we find acceptable. It also talks to us about our media, and the continuous way in which we as viewers are called upon to view things as simple, as polarised, and as “normal” or “strange” and not as complex. I think I’d gone a full year of media interaction with Section 59 without ever having heard its real name. I had to look it up on google. And, when I did, it was immediately obvious that it is not a bill about smacking. It is a bill about assault. It also became scarily obvious that the largest outcries against the bill have come from people who want the kind of assault they do to be legal, as seems to be the case with Family First. The whole thing reminds me of a quote from Cynthia Heimel: “you don’t want to be accused of acquaintance rape? Well, how do you think it feels to be acquaintance raped?”

There’s nothing I can do about it except laugh, really (or cry, but I’ve just got through having a week long sulk about Dick Cheney, so I thought it was time for some positive action, if only to spare my husband the pain of more impotent watery whining from me.) Let’s embrace the power of humour instead!  Let’s all go and hang out at this sexy new Facebook group I was invited to today. It’s the group where I found this wonderful image by a fellow called Fraser Moss:

…

…

I also found the awesome, awesome title of this “blog” there (I told you I would explain it!) I have to say, I find both to be very accurate critiques of the biased phrasing of our brand spanking referendum. They made me happy anyway. Well, happier.

But you can play too! Your challenge is to come up with a referendum question that is equally as clear and precise and not at all misleading as the real one. Are you up to the task? I think you are! They provide a blank template so you can even make one that looks like the real thing. I really think you should join. Think up as many as you can.  Go forth! If nothing else, it will give you something to do that is more useful than reading Roddy’s Film Companion.

..

..

..

Sorry about the week long absence. I actually thought I had already uploaded last weeks images, but obviously I was mistaken. So here they are, in all their glory. We are now nearing the end of Cleopatra, which means that it will be time to start a new story soon. I’ll keep you posted.

Also, in other news there was a short 2 page Roddy story included in the Wellington comics anthology called Bristle, edited by Brent Willis. This great collection also includes Draw, Dick Whyte, Carlos Wedde, Brent Willis, Claire Harris and GCR (among others). It also has a spiffy colour cover by NZ comics legend Tim Bollinger. It only costs NZ$5.00 so if you want to get a copy email Brent Willis at celfbw[at]xtra[dot]co[dot]nz. Alternatively, if you’re in New Zealand you can try your local comic book shop. Happy reading!

..

..

..