Well, a nation turns its back and gags

The last panel of this piece may need a little explanation (at the risk of killing the joke by explaining it).

Pure style (outdoors)

Birthday card for my sister-in-law.

Before you start hunting through thinkexist.com for the quote, I can tell you that it comes from this book which she requested as a present.

Real emotional trash

OK, Malkmus-solo will never be as good as he used to be in a band, but some of the tracks on the new album hit the spot. Cold Son has a chorus good enough to inspire a drawing or two, and Out of Reaches grabs at my heartstrings every time I listen to it.

For some reason, whilst drawing this, I felt I needed a Joshua tree in the frame. Only after finishing the piece did I have a wee look at the mythology surrounding Yucca brevifolia and it turns out to be remarkably apt. Almost makes one want to become a Jungian. Almost.

And if a double decker bus crashes into us...

Everything you always wanted to know about metaphorical breasts but were afraid to ask

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Sold my cold knot, a heavy stone; sold my red horse for a venture home

At the moment I'm running away from laryngitis. If April is the cruellest month, May is the is the gruelest month.

[Title from Bon Iver song: a man who did something useful with his running-away-from]

Whatever makes you happy

belated
birthday
card

for
my
brother

Know thyself

I've slightly changed my Nadler character. Having seen Guru Nadler in the flesh last night, I realised that glasses are probably as important to his persona as my own. A spectacles-less Nadler just ain't a Nadler.

[Click on image to enlarge]
[Click here to see Nadler's original drawing of The Switch]

Ludovicians/pissing in the wind

Have been putting my week-long supine state to 'good' use by reading a novel or two.

Steven Hall's Raw Shark Texts seemed to resonate.

I could do with being attacked by a memory-munching Ludovician at the moment.

Wish I weren't here

“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom” (Schopenhauer)

I think Schopenhauer would have also liked the following quote: "If you use a physical regimen like Bikram yoga to punish yourself for being alive, at some point the body will rebel."

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And the father who must be killed is a blight upon your blighted life

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Compare the best of their days with the worst of your days, you won't win

"One man had a branch embedded in his head, another had a foot missing." (Metro)

To donate.

Who (the fuck) voted for Boris Johnson?

London has a new mayor. God help us.

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Your boyfriend, he has the gift of the gab, or could it be the gift of the grab?

King Leer (click)

For once in my life, let me, let me, let me, let me get what I want this time

Lord knows it would be the first time (click to watch video)

Nadler's drawing of his Therapeutic Echo Chamber

Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?

Psychosis = the Ego assailed

To say the least: I'm truly disappointed

Watched this monumentally depressing film recently which was probably in the back of my mind whilst drawing this.

Doing OK

Cock munchers

Closure

Anger management

In a week in which the collective unconscious suddenly woke up to how incredibly angry we all are, it was also revealed that Charles Bronson (the jailbird, rather than the Buchinsky) is doing an 'Anger Management Correspondence course'.

The mind boggles.

Life is a pigsty

I hate id, and id hates me

Low batties (UK)/saggy pants (USA) are my new bête noire.

There's a place in the sun, for anyone who has the will to chase one. And I have found mine, yes I do believe I have found mine.

Seated from left to right: Freud, Sàndor Ferenczi, and Hanns Sachs (standing) Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and Ernest Jones (Photo: Berlin, 1922)

They do not understand the urgency of life.

(In the collection of my therapist, Brighton)

The hermaphrodite family is a happy family

"We begin by desiring (and wanting to murder) the parents; registering the horror, not to mention the impossibility of this project, we more or less relinquish it. We renounce our first desires and wait; and eventually, if all goes well, we will as adults find people who are sufficiently reminiscent of the parents to be exciting, but sufficiently different so we can consummate our desire. We want something; we realise the dangerous error of our ways; and we find the substitutes that can satisfy us. We can, in a sense, have what we want because it isn't what we really want, which we could never have anyway.

But then there is the parallel text to this story [in which] our desire is ineluctably, undistractedly, transgressive; in this life we are driven to always approach and avoid the objects of desire, and what makes us feel most alive makes us feel we are risking our lives.....In this life uncanniness is way in excess of our canniness; our actions feel at once inevitable and unintelligible (and so as shorthand we say we are in love, or we are tragic heroes, or we have made a Freudian slip).

We do not know what we are doing, and yet we feel ineluctably involved in our lives. Where once there were security operations, now there is risk; where once safety was the be-all and end-all, now fear is preferred. A sense of aliveness displaces a sense of certainty as a paramount consideration. Surprise and dread are the order, of the day. In our transgressive life it is as though there is; something - or someone - we seem to value more than our lives, more than life itself."

From Equals, Adam Phillips (2002:112)

Reasons to be cheerful

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It's Richard's 40th today.

I wanted to come up with an equal number of reasons to be cheerful. But faltered after the first five.

Compare the best of their days with the worst of your days, you won't win.

This was inspired by a post on Jeannette's blog.
There was an interesting discussion about suicide on the Moral Maze this week.
But before you throw yourself out of your goldfish bowl, listen to this.

Black sun

I am haunted by this image.

(Quote from Adam Phillips' essay 'Depression')

Yes, there are things worse in life than never being someone's sweetie

The ageing Morrissey is a joy to behold.

Sometimes when my mind is full of venom and retribution, I sit for a while with buddha

The organism wishes to die, but only in its own fashion.

Virgins/raisins (click to read)

This is your life Ma

It's been a bit quiet on the Prozacville-front recently as I've focused my energies on a side project for my mother's 60th birthday (which is today).

It's a 60+ panel piece, with each illustration depicting a memory from her childhood - drawn, hand-coloured and then mounted on 'ash grey' board.

It has given me much pleasure collaborating with her on this Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time undertaking.

This strange eventful history will now hang on a wall in her lounge, prefiguring perhaps the 'second childishness' to come, and oh yes, the 'mere oblivion' to which we are both now heading, albeit at slightly different speeds.

X marks the spot (a state of illusion)

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"The male has instinctual urges and predatory ideas. The female has a breast, the power to provoke lust, and the idea that she would like to be attacked by a hungry male. These two phenomena do not come into relation with each other till the woman and man live an experience together. I think of the process as if two lines came from opposite directions, liable to come near each other. If they overlap there is a moment of illusion - a bit of experience which the man can take as either his hallucination or a thing belonging to external reality."

(From D.W. Winnicott, 'Primitive Emotional Development', in Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), p152 - Prozacville edition

The death instinct

Dadaism is stupid

Defaced exhibition postcard

Internet dating profiles: the triumph of emotional capitalism over romance

"On the internet, the private psychological self becomes a public performance...externalized and objectified through visual means of representation and language....The internet structures the search for a partner as a market or, more exactly, formalizes the search for a partner in the form of an economic transaction: it transforms the self into a packaged product competing with others on an open-end market regulated by the law of supply and demand; it makes the encounter the outcome of a more or less stable set of preferences; it makes the process of searching constrained by the problems of efficiency; it structures encounters as market niches; it attaches a (more or less) fixed economic value to profiles (that is, persons) and makes people anxious about their values in a such a structured market and eager to improve their position in that market. Finally, it makes people highly aware of the cost benefit aspects of their search, both in terms of time, and in the sense that they want to maximize the attributes of the person found. ... The cynicism of [some] internet daters marks a radical departure from the traditional culture of romanticism and is an effect of the routinization produced by the sheer volume of encounters and by the market structure and culture which pervades Internet dating sites....I think that such cynicism is what Adorno had in mind when he suggested that in contemporary culture, consumers feel compelled to buy and use advertising products even though, and at the very moment, they see through them."

Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. (2007)

My therapist has been dipping his foot back into the blogosphere again. Enjoy the free version. Some of us pay him about 1/5th of our monthly earnings so as to benefit from his services.

"The large brain, like large government, may not be able to do simple things in simple way." (Donald Hebb, 1958)

More tips on how to lose weight without having to go on a diet

The Four Fs

Four Fs link

How to lose weight without having to go on diet

Democracy in action?

'Adi' meets the Lubavitchers

I like the idea of a Nazi Dog.

A natural history of Christianity

But don't take my word for it.

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