Royalty Free Idea: Christian Bale Shouts the Shapes

The problem with uploading big batches of sketch and slowly drip feeding it into a blog is that it can often feel quite dated by the time it comes to post. Case in point; the above post-it, drawn shortly after Christian Bale's now largely immemorable outburst on the set of Terminator 3.

So I won't linger. That said, there's nothing like listening to radio comedy from the 40's, for instance, and not having the first idea why some jokes are funnier than others, purely because the references haven't stood the test of time. Sometimes seemingly innocuos observations get spontanious cheers or staggered laughter or something equally uninclusive. But you can still laugh, mainly because it honestly just seems like a crowd revelling in the joy of language and it's deployment. And that's always something to celebrate.

Normal Post: Holiday Character Opportunity

As a big fan of holidays (of both the forced and unforced variety), a subject of personal interest is how they come about in the first place. Not the novelty-free ones - celebrating a bank holiday is a recognised medical signal that you're depressed, and the long summer holidays you have in school were only ever designed to prop up the now booming nostalga markets (the kind that sell imported foam cereals and untransformble Transfomer statues to ronrey men) by creating vast continents of terminally boring time that could only ever be filled by actively just-buying-stuff. No, not those holidays.

I'm specifically interested in holidays that have some kind of character associated with them, Santa Claus being the obvious example. It's how these characters come into being that's the fun bit. Perhaps they're a bit like latter day memes, ideas that gradually take hold of the collective imagination through a sub-concious desire for that kind of thing to exist (like we all want a giant rabbit with an unlimited supply of chocolate whimsically circumanvigating our home security systems every year).

It could also be a guilt thing. If you're christian, for example, you believe that Jesus died for our sins on the cross on Easter. While I suppose it's a good thing that that particular act was never given the novelty airbrush, it'd probobly be equally galling to find that the day of your sacrafice (and the subsequent holiday weekend you bestowed on generations to come) was permanantly subject to a takeover bid from the aforementioned chocolate ninja hare, and that the large swathes of the public were fine with that. I'm not saying that everyone has to be into Jesus or NOTHING AT ALL. It's just that it feels a bit like the equivelant of, say, a national holiday for an important religious figure like Mohammed, or even a respected contemporary leader like Gahdi or Mandela, being hijacked by the public desire to believe in a magic wise-cracking penny who can grant wishes.

To be fair, though, I think Jesus is comfortably winning the fight for Easter. No one seems massively bothered about investing in the Easter Bunny, he's the least represented holiday mascot going. There are no real definiatve images of him, because no companies or corporations see any profit in defining him. So it's left to comman conscensus to flesh him out, which means he ends up with sometimes a basket, sometimes a bow, and zero to say for himself. No backstory, no cool explanation for how he breaks into your house. Why is he even giving out chocolate? Nobody cares. Like the trope 'unpopular lonely rich kid', he tries to buy your interest, which lasts precisely as long as his money does. And it's funny how the Easter Bunny melts away after the big Santa reveal. Nobody 'finds out' about the Easter Bunny, because nobody is that stupid.to properly believe in him in the first place (I'm beginning to think I might have some terrible, repressed beef with the Easter Bunny, actually, so I might just move on).

We believe more in the Tooth Fairy than the Easter Bunny because the story provides an irrational explanation to something even more irrational i.e. giving children money for their old teeth. Giving children money for their teeth. Chocolate at Easter is sort-of plausible in that, even at a young age, you can figure out that it's all about money and jobs and needing a break and indulging and cheering up for a while. Giving children money for their old teeth is just stupid, even if your subsequent explanatory trip to Wikipedia tells you otherwise, because most folk giving their kids money for their old teeth don't know why they do it in the first place, and have to pass it off as 'fun' and 'part of the magic of childhood'. Why not make understanding how the NHS works 'part of the magic of childhood'? I'm going to be a terrible parent. It'll be fun to explain to whoever ends up as my child that I'm reaching under their pillow because I want to buy their teeth off of them, in the middle of the night.

I'm probobly typing at length about this, though, because it's what happened to Santa Claus that worries me. From my limited knowledge of the myth (being interested in novelty holidays doesn't actually involve any reading or research or learning of any sort), it stems from the story of some old chap who went around his village giving the children carved wooden toys/ the god Odin raining down presents on those who left their nosh-filled boots out for his steed / St Nicholas leaving gold for three penniless single women (nice!) so that they could afford to marry. It's probobly all of those, and none of them at the same time.

But the gradual morphing of the stories into what we know today is quite unsettling, in that the same thing could very well happen to me. If this period in time were ever to be looked back upon as one of, say, deluded hubris, who better to be morphed into its terrifying anti-mascot? I'd presumabley be used to scare children into choosing a career with prospects, or at least a mindset of productivity, diligence, and calm, resourceful action. My biggest worry is that, to illustrate the importance of developing into a well-rounded individual, I wouldn't end up being some cool-evil sarcastic robot or anti-hero with awesome hair. My 'character' would probobly turn out like one of those animatronic cobbler puppets, fated to fruitlessly hammer away at nothing, all the while with a big gurn on my face (it always annoys me when you see one of those idiots mugging away while not actually hammering any shoe).

But I'll probobly be dead before that character comes into being, so that's all right.

International Relative Exchange Vol.17

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Normal Post: All Too Easy

In the past, folk would wile away their leisure time by patrolling their communities and challenging negative behaviours, reading, or staying on late in an occupation they really cared about. These days, we all enjoy relating well worn anecdotes and dredging our memories for forgotten trivia from our own bygone eras (i.e. a couple of years ago).

I only mention because it would be easy for me to retroactively apply some sort of subtext to the post-it posted above - something like "it's easy for the big corporate lizard kings like Google to seem omnipotent now, and end up buried and fossilised if they aren't able to comprehend how to deal with the massive rocks (i.e. technological advancements/fate)coming from space. Just look at Freeserve/Bebo/The HMV downloadable music service thing".

In reality, I really just drew up a robot dinosaur (a robotosaur) and dug up some common tech lingo from the mental backrooms. It's almost frightening how much of that there is lurking back there - standardised advertising and instructional terminology that sits in the back of your head that you understand and respond to on an instinctual level. I know, I know - it's designed to work like that, it's been researched and tested and etc. But trying to then conciously find an example, catch it, pull it out into the daylight and make it work for you, that's something else entirely.

In fact, this dredge really feels a bit like attempting to make repairs to your car after watching a 2-minute Youtube video (I have done this) or deleting seemingly unimportant fat files from the programme directorary on your PC (I have also done this) - no matter how assured or confident you are, you can't shake the feeling that you're just sticking your hand in the Flash Gordon tree and hoping for the best. Using the power of your subconcious slogan-bank might get you out of word jam once in a while, but perhaps it's best left alone in the long term.

International Relative Exchange 16

Please note, due to a high number of complaints, the individual-for-trade "Simon Swann" will no longer be available. While terms and conditions still apply in all instances in which Swann was distributed, we would like to express our regret at having made him available on our databases for quite so long. We would like to assure our members that Swann and his inflatable trousers will never willingly be deployed in a social context again.