panda & eros (zine)

 

Coming out [again]

I was 19 when I told my sister, one late drunk night, that I was in love with my best friend and had been for 2 years.  I held that secret tight for such a long time that one of the very last to know, when it just didn't matter any longer, was actually my best friend.  Holding those feelings inside for so long damaged me, it threw me into an emotional paralysis that defined the next 28 years of my living, and along the way nurtured some very bad habits.  The inner world I carried so protectively became heavier with each year passing, as I struggled to live in two very separate spaces – 1 private, the other public.  Reconciling the two has been a life long struggle, and although I am not a famous person (twitter followers: 128), I understand something of the battle to hold a private and a public self in one, juggling the two incoherently, dropping balls and ricocheting into tabloid headlines - I 'drank too much, said too much, and there's nowhere to go - but down.' (The Smiths – Disappointed).

My sister was not only not shocked by my revelation, she was also largely disinterested, ‘Is that all?’ were her exact words - she was spending many of her nights out in Auckland’s infamous Alfie’s Nightclub, a safe haven for gay boys and their friends.  Since that night I have been telling friends, family, acquaintances, boyfriends (sorry) and sundry strangers about my unrequited love(s), and by association my sexual preference.  Passing on this piece of information has generally been done with fierce heart palpations, a pale face, compressed speech and wild unfocused eyes, so that my friends’ response to ‘I have something I have to tell you’ is huge relief that I’m ‘only’ gay and not facing cancer or seconds away from cardiac arrest.

It would be funny.  If it it wasn't.  I've been coming out for 28 years, and, after all this time, its still as difficult as it was and sometimes just as shocking as the day I realised how I felt about my best friend.  A couple of weeks ago I took my partner to a work function and effectively outed myself to my work colleagues who didn't know (a) I had a partner, (b) she was a woman and therefore by deduction that (c), I must be gay.  My close friends at work knew but I certainly avoided going into detail about my weekends, my internet dating escapades, standing in the kitchen where others might overhear.  Six months ago I popped a framed photo of my partner on my desk at work, she, in stark contrast to me, after 28 years in hetrosexual relationships came out with what I can only describe as a bang.  She told pretty much everyone she knew in the space of 3 months.  I was alarmed at the speed of this coming out and cautioned her, quite a few times, to slow down. But I looked at my own life and felt inadequate in comparison - no area more so than at work. In an era that embraces diversity, mandates it even in certain sectors, I realised looking at my friends who are very much out and proud in every aspect of their lives, that I was letting them, letting all of us down.  So, with nervousness, much trepidation, wishing I  had never accepted the invite to drinks, thinking up excuses to explain non attendance at the last minute, I took my partner to 'the ball', and, had a great time (after a few steadying champagnes).  The next day one of my work colleagues said to me, 'You play your cards close to your chest!'

Coming out is an inside out operation, ultimately it hurts ourselves more than the people we resist the telling.

Love and Rockets - A Fan Writes

It was sometime in 1991 that I discovered Love and Rockets.  My boyfriend and I were house sitting a friend's flat, Donna Death, and her boyfriend owned a large collection of comic books.  I had always thought the guy was a bit of a geek, the wire baskets which housed his extensive comic book collection, sorted by title, sub sorted by date, each issue lovingly protected in a plastic sleeve, only reinforced this impression.  Back then the notion of adult/alternative comics was not well understood, if at all.  New Zealand was miles away from New York with Art Spiegelman and his Maus, from trans atlantic Neil Gaiman and his DC drawn and published The Sandman, and, from the bros Hernandez in Oxnard, California with their West Coast punk heckles rising (@xaimeh: if you were really hardcore, you'd have thrown a full bottle) and their Love and #$%^&** Rockets.

[Vivian]

When I delved into his comic book collection I began with Love and Rockets, Issue 1, 1981, the year Jaimie and his brothers Gilbert and Mario self published their first issue.  The early Mechanics stories of Jaime hooked me in, first page.  The clean lines, the cool chicks (like legions of fans I fell in love with Maggie and Hopey), and the brilliant stories too.  These guys could write, they understood, and still do, not just how to draw a story, but how to tell it, to make you listen and want more.  They are as good to my mind as the great story tellers, writers like Mansfield and Poe, Poe especially.  There is a darkness that plays out on so many of their best pages, the black ink allowed to spill out in a way that's impossible in (plain) text.

[Isabel Ruebens]

Meanwhile my boyfriend had started to despair, I was spending hours in bed, or curled up on the sofa reading comics and nothing would cajole me out of the happy reading zone I found myself in.  It took time to recall that my love of comics was formed early in the 1970's with Tintin and Charlie Brown and the gang.  I'm currently reading my way through the Fantagraphics (who also publish Love and Rockets) republished The Complete Peanuts of Charles M. Schulz.  And all these years later having to wait, impatiently, for the next issue of Love and Rockets reminds me just how lucky I was to find this treasury of comics and to read issue after issue in their original format.  I guess my friend's (x)boyfriend was more punk than geek - in retrospect.

eureka!

it might be New York uphere the way the buildings arc and follow the river

hugging the muddy water down to the harbour yawning in the rain

where bow legged cranes stack containers and nothing human moves

up towards the stadium a ferris wheel breaks the repeating vertical lines

neon signs stutter out a message indecipherable even from here

I might swing from the buildings (Batman) or drape myself from these facades

from inside this room with its canapés its waiters its drinks and chatter

I watch a plastic bag picked up by the wind perform a pirouette

far below the streets pulse with evening traffic along arterial roads

the building unravels quickly down to street level to the noise

and the cold eureka! I am as large as the city I am larger than you

-Amanda Surrey (2008)

Sydney and the 14th Dalai Lama

All roads lead to Sydney lately.  I love Sydney in winter, taking an early morning flight out of Melbourne, away from the great southern bi(gh)te and all that grey-making rain.  My compass resets, I'm pulled north.  It's more than the weather, it’s the girl from the Sydney suburbs, and three days last month listening to His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, teach the Buddhist concept of Bodhicitta.  Simply put Bodhicitta is the determination to become enlightened for the sake of others.   The text which formed the centre piece of the three day talk was Vast as the Heavens Deep as the Sea, a collection of searingly and deceptively simple verse, from the Tibetan scholar and monk, Khunu Rinpoche Tenzin Gyaltsen from whom the Dalai Lama received a direct oral transmission of the teaching.  Its a beautiful piece of poetry, Khunu Rinpoche penned each of the 356 verses as a thought for the day in his 1959 diary, the very same year the Chinese suppressed a Tibetan national uprising in Lhasa, forcing the Dalai Lama into exile.

When I'm asked about Buddhism one of the first things that springs to mind is a point the Dalai Lama made repeatedly over the three days of teaching - Buddhism asks you to test all its precepts, not to take the instructions as a given from a higher authority, or from the learned ones ensconced in their sacred places.  'Buddha said you should not accept my teaching out of faith, Buddhism believes there is no independent soul or self, these are creations of the mind.'  Listening to the Dalai Lama I'm reminded he is a man of science and enquiry more than a man of the spiritual realm, he relies on empirical proof, not the leap of faith so many of us stumble over.  Buddhism asks us to take everything apart - to ask, to challenge, to seek, and ultimately not to find and that not finding is emptiness, the last and hardest Buddhist teaching to understand.  Buddha was a teacher, not a creator, the Dalai Lama is firm on this point.

For the Tibetan people the prospect that the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama may not be found by monks in a Chinese dominated and controlled Tibet is a deep sadness.  China's crackdown on Tibetan Buddhism ejected the Dalai Lama from his own land and brought these ancient Buddhist teachings to a wider western audience already looking east after the social upheavals of the 60's and 70's.  As I looked around the predominantly white, affluent and female audience in Sydney I reflected on the pollinations that political and economic ambitions unwittingly unleash.

Verse 294

In general, a virtuous thought arises only with difficulty;

even more difficult than that is the beginning of the Buddhist path;

yet more difficult is the arising of precious bodhicitta; 

nevertheless, one generates it by making an effort.

Graphic novels! Melbourne!

Wednesday night, Anzac eve, I found myself reclining on a deck chair in the State Library of Victoria's out-side-in Experimedia (the outside walls of the old library form the inside of this more recent wing).  I was there to watch Graphic novels! Melbourne! and self styled 'mad maestro' Bernard Caleo introduce the movie he directed with Daniel Hayward, a documentary about the burgeoning graphic novel scene in Melbourne, of local artists pitching themselves against a form at a distance from the country which has so roundly defined it these last many years, the United States.  Bernard himself is an integral part of the scene in Melbourne, both as an artist in his own right (Mongrel, among others) and as mentor and editor of the collection Tango, his passion has brought many of these talented artists into the orbit documented here.

Graphic novels! Melbourne! is very much a who's who of talent in the genre and Shaun Tan is identified as the author of the first published graphic novel in Australia, The Arrival.  I remember attending a Wheeler Centre afternoon session several years ago when Shaun Tan interviewed Nicki Greenberg on her recently published Hamlet, the friendship between the two and the passion they shared for graphic novels was infectious and indicative of the camaraderie and low key egos prevalent in this group.  Two of the many things I like about the comic book scene are the a) unabashed geekiness of artists and fans; and b) the enthusiasm the artists have for each others work and their willingness to share.

Bruce Mutard is one of my favourite draftsman, his clean lines and shading recall an earlier era of comics, and his stories are well thought out and precisely executed, the narrative is central to the work.  The Sacrifice is the first of a trilogy set in Melbourne during World War II and is well worth reading, it deals with war, politcis, family and love, and it is beautifully rendered.

[fine lines, Bruce Mutard]

Mandy Ord is next up, Bernard the roving reporter visits each artist in their homes or at work, it feels very much like he has popped round for a cup of tea and a chat (he has), and this gifts the documentary with an easy intimacy - Bruce Mutard's mum makes an appearance and shares a few thoughts.  Mandy began writing letters as a kid to her pen pals and the drawings began to form from there, she uses thick lines and plenty of ink.  Pat Grant is an artist I hadn't met before on paper, his themes as a Sydney sider are naturally different from the Melbourne set - surfing and the race riots in Sydney, his new book Blue addresses racism and  immigration in Australia.

Nicki Greenberg, artist, lawyer and mother has produced one of my favourite graphic novels - The Great Gatsby, an inspired retelling of the classic - forget Baz, this is brilliant.  Like the later rendition of Shakespeare's Hamlet Nickie reproduces these tales from her own visual lexicon, you can tell she has imbibed the books, remembered them by heart and filtered them - a very talented artist - Buy! Read! Enjoy!

[crazy love, Gatsby, Nicki Greenberg]

Other interviewees include Oslo Davis the cartoonist, and Erica Wagner from Allen & Unwin who have published many of these titles and created a space on bookstore shelves for a form once shunned by the 'literary types'.  To reinforce the point an academic at the University of Melbourne comments, 'comics are another stream to the creative writing bow'.

Bernard Caleo ends the documentary on Ruckers Hill in Northcote with the city outlined in the near distance, he tells us, 'What a great time to be in Melbourne and reading comics'. Indeed! Graphic novels! Melbourne!

Gaiman and Bacon (Part 1)

Early last Friday morning I flew up to Sydney to attend a Neil Gaiman performance that evening at the City Recital Hall in Angel Place.  I had missed out on tickets in Melbourne and was determined to see the Sandman.  Neil was to read chapters from his new novel which he described as a 'short story that had got away' from him, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  Not only that, but groupies like myself, and I might add there is a sizeable army of us, would all receive an advance sample copy of the first three chapters from that novel.

I describe Neil Gaiman's evening as a performance, which for a writer is high praise in deed, not many have the eloquence, the stage presence (somehow he fills up a theatre, and its not just his clear well annunciated words delivered in a very particular English country accent) and the talent to take his audience, laughing and enthralled, all the way with him.  Neil traverses mediums with ease, his relationship with Amanda Palmer, his equally talented wife, has seduced the musical side of Neil the performer out on to stage.  A month ago at a New Years gig in New York Neil stepped out from the wings and joined Amanda front stage with her band accompanying him as he sang the theme tune to Gerry Anderson‘s Fireball XL5, something of a dare between the two.  On Friday night backed by the string quartet, FourPlay, Neil sang the same song with the pace and authority of a Brat Pack era crooner, albeit more shaggy in appearance.

Neil has been a 'friend' to me via the pages of his writing over many years.  I discovered him back in the late 1980's when I had the good fortune to access a collection of comic books by an astute collector.  The Sandman comic Neil authored served up story arcs of fantasy and horror, plundering but not butchering the classics of English literature and old ancient fables, weaving in and out of modern day via the imaginings of the Sandman and his band of brothers and sisters, most notably Death.  Death featured in her own 'mini series', a popular character, the traditional  bone and rattle skeleton of the Grimm Reaper usurped by an attractive young Goth, who gently, with compassion and kind words despatched the dying to the other side.  It was many years later and after the Sandman had published its last that I picked up American Gods, published in 2001, and sunk back into a world where old gods are dying in a new and disinterested world, in an America that had assigned them to the scrap heap, an America, without the gods and reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon's surreal nightmare.  Neil could write good novels, why that surprised me I don't know.

As an Englishman who now lives in America Neil's sense of place and what may be wrong with it is well honed and links in with a view that he is forming, or has formed of Australia.  Neil ended the evening with a poem he wrote two years ago to coincide with a performance Amanda Palmer was making at the Sydney Opera House on Australia Day.  Acknowledging the traditional owners and elders of the land, Neil began reading his poem with FourPlay winding out and curling their strings around him.  The poem begins, 'We killed them all, when we came here' and he spoke of a land where 'nightmares loped', and 'night falls down' to 'swallow up Australia Day'.  These few words lingered, and as Friday night would soon tick over into Saturday, Australia Day (26th January), we filed out of the Recital Hall, this poem from the Sandman ringing in our ears, a storyteller who understands the value and wisdom of the very old stories, and the horror we run from in the new.