Word to the Machine.
I don’t seem to have any time to put word to the machine at the moment. The days are crowded with things to do. Artwork for the album is almost finished, thanks to Dubai Dave who, unfortunately, is not as dodgy as Mary’s monicker for him would otherwise suggest. I have a folder somewhere full of photographs that I took while making the record but they are lost to me at the moment so they won’t appear on the sleeve which, as I’m sure you will agree, is most unfortunate. If I find them I’ll stick them up here so fear not! You’ll be able to look at pictures of me sweating and singing out of tune to your hearts content.
A couple of weeks ago an illustration that I did for the Times received a number of complaints from Christian members of our community including this one from a Mr Brin Dunsire from Princes Risborough.
Please note this as a formal complaint about Martin Carr’s graphic associated with Caitlin Moran’s article about the 1970’s in the issue of 27th April.
He chose to insert a gorilla’s face over the face of the Virgin Mary, and George Bush’s face over that on the Infant Jesus.
I hope he genuinely did not realise that the icon he chose to use was more than simply a “stock” image of the Madonna and Child; it is in fact an icon known as Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, and is very precious to many Catholics across the world. My interest is that it is special in the Catholic Diocese of Northampton, for which I have the privilege to work ; we have two churches named after Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, and a rare copy of this icon is displayed in a shrine church in Northampton. Catholics do not, of course, venerate pictures and objects as such, but the content and concepts which they evoke, and these may be very intimately held in our spirituality.
Martin Carr may be the kind of person who thinks it is cool and amusing to mock the images associated with religious belief: I can see from his portfolio that this is not the first time he has chosen to incorporate a Madonna & Child image into his cartoons for satiric purposes. But this use was simply gratuitous and vacuous. It is difficult to reconstruct the thought processes involved in deciding to use a Madonna image in the context of illustrating Caitlin’s Moran’s opening paragraph, which itself was purely a whimsical diversion from the main point of her article. Surely, if his point was to imagine a gorilla “nurturing” a Baby Bush, this could have been done in a more clear and amusing way ?
It is also disappointing that the inappropriateness of this kind of material was not picked up by a sub-editor, though I suppose time is short.
You (and Mr Carr) may be tired of hearing this point being made by Christians, but it bears repeating nonetheless; can you genuinely state that you would have no hesitation in publishing a picture of the prophet Mohammed with a pig’s face inserted, if it suited the pure purpose of mocking religion, and the only thing that is stopping you is the fear of possible violence ? Because if your reply would be “ No, that’s not the only reason, it is not right for us to cause gratuitous and unnecessary offence to religious people” then you should not be using illustrations like this simply because they are “only Christian” and you can get away with it without being threatened. What do you say ?
I say nothing Mr Dunsire, if I can’t believe you have nothing better to do than write letters such as this then I would be foolish to become involved in a debate with you, theological, sociological or otherwise.
Actually, fuck it, while we’re here..
I found Caitlin’s column difficult to illustrate that week. I don’t why this is, some weeks the image jumps out at you as you read through but I couldn’t find anything suitable, no overreaching theme that needed illustrating. I decided to focus on a throwaway line she had written about a time traveling gorilla. Hang on, let me find it…
“Going back to the 1970s could help tackle global warming, researchers claim. Well, yes. We’ve all seen ‘Quantum Leap’. Of course Dr Sam Beckett leaping back to 1973, into the body of a climate-campaigning gorilla capable of sign-language, who touches the heart of the young George W Bush forever, could help. That’s not in doubt. We know that.”
Ok, that’s illustration gold right there and who cares whether it fits in with everything else she says. Like the May Fly the page lives for a day before returning to dust and looking at the wider picture, at the daily injustices meted out by uncaring, corrupt, inept politicians, the poverty, the violence, the greed, war, starvation etc It’s not that important. Not really.
The illustration, as you can see, is of a time traveling gorilla using sign language to teach the young George Bush about the benefits of protecting our beautiful planet. It was called ‘Greenilla’. It has nothing to do with religion. I have nothing to do with religion. I’m not an atheist either, I’m not involved. Nor do I think that it’s ‘cool and amusing to mock the images associated with religious belief’. I’m forty years old, I don’t think anything is ‘cool’ (except for maybe Stuart Hall). I love religious images, songs, buildings. I love people who deemed their immense talents to be a gift from a higher being, Diego Maradona, Christopher Wren, Mahalia Jackson etc but I don’t believe what they believe and I see nothing in the various icons that I’ve collected over the years but their manifest beauty. Even if I were willing to guide you through the minutiae of my thought processes, I couldn’t do it. Inspiration works at speeds many, many times faster than light. I threw some images together until it looked like I wanted it to, that’s all I did and if that offends you, I don’t care. Obviously the sub-editors at the Times feel the same way as I hand my illustration in three days before publication.
And you’re damn right I wouldn’t put a pigs head on Mohammed. I’m scared just to type it out. I think visually and as there is no visual representation of Mohammed permitted, the thought would never occur to me. I didn’t stick an apes head on Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, I pushed pixels around a screen until they were ordered in such a way that I liked.
It’s all in your mind, not mine.
I was out with an ordained vicar last night & she was telling me that God was a sexual being (because, if as The Good Book claims, humans are ‘made in his (her) image’, the fact that humans are sexual beings, must mean God is one too) (Are you still with me?).
I was struggling with this idea, and argued that, given The Good Book also seems to make it clear that God is (and always has been) the only one of his (her) species (from what my friend says, it seems that God is a hermaphrodite), what would be the point of being a sexual being? (In response to this my friend tutted, muttered something about biological determinism and told me that I was only thinking about sex in a mechanistic and typically male way (as if this was a bad thing!).
Anyway, I didn’t think that I was going to be persuaded, but then, in a Road to Damascus type revelation, I suddenly thought about (you’ve guessed it) Christmas. My eyes were opened and I conceded that God is indeed a sexual being because, if God hadn’t shagged the Virgin Mary, how was I going to explain Little Baby Jesus? (Are you still with me?)
Catholic guilt. It’s just a big bag of bricks. Put it down by the side of the road and walk on.
;)
Catholic Guilt a big bag of bricks? Thought it was an album by Edward Ball!