Have a kitten. Not that this is at all familiar…
Archives for 2012
The British Character — Pont
The British Character
Pont
120 pages
published in 1938
It must’ve been a decade ago that Sandra found this book in a secondhand bookstore in Middelburg. She liked the cartoons, but since she had read it by the time I was done browsing, she didn’t think it worth buying. I disagreed and bought it for her as a present. She took it back to Plymouth with her, brought it back over when we started living together and today my eye fell on it when I was looking for something to read from among her books. It reminded me of how she liked several of the cartoons enough to make high quality copies of them, to hang on our walls. She recognised herself in them, some essential quirks of the British character she also possessed. Looking at these cartoons now I can’t help but seen Sandra in them.
Pont is a pseudonym for Graham Laidler, a cartoonist who mainly worked for Punch, starting his “British Character” series there in 1936, with this collection first having been published two years later, and multiple times since. He himself had only a short time to enjoy his success, as he died in 1940 at age thirtytwo. He had been ill a long time, his sickness being the reason he turned to cartooning in the first place, rather than the architectorial drawing he had been trained for. Though his cartoons are very much of his time, they do touch on universal aspects of the British character.
Kickstarter: threat or menace?
Tom Spurgeon is uneasy with traditional publishers using Kickstarter to fund their projects:
I’m really uneasy about publishers using that mechanism, and I’m not even sure I can explain all the way why. It’s almost like that I feel the old model of doing things is being circumvented, somehow. Like these publishers are switching over to that mechanism because they’re not doing the other one well, not because the new one presents specific opportunities. I’m not sure, I’m really inarticulate on the subject and I need to firm that up because that moment in history is here. What makes it difficult is there are things I’m thinking about trying to crowdfund, too, which I’m not sure should make my opinions suspect but it should make them open to extra self-scrutiny.
The first worry with a publisher (or any other established business for that matter) using a mechanism concieved for independent creators to get funding is that it doesn’t inspire confidence in their financial state. If you have to get your readers to fund you in advance, you’re doing something wrong as a publisher. It feels like a flight forward, rather than a well thought out attempt to make use of new possibilities.
The second worry is of course how stable the Kickstarter funding model is. There is always the possibility that one or two high profile disasters will turn off people and, let’s face it, the possibility of such a disasters is always much higher in comics than anywhere else. Worse, what with fan dollars not being inexhaustible, there’s also the possibility that crappy, greed driven projects will push out more worthwhile, creative endeavours.
Which brings us to the feeling that using Kickstarter this way is cheating, that companies like this aren’t supposed to use this, that it should be kept for struggling young cartoonists. I’m not sure that’s a reasoned objection though, even if I share this feeling.
Ian Tomlinson killer walks off scotch free, has previous form
It took two years to to even get him before a judge, so it’s no great surprise that Ian Tomlinson’s killer has been acquited:
A policeman has been acquitted of killing Ian Tomlinson during G20 protests in London by striking the 47-year-old bystander with a baton and pushing him to the ground as he walked away from police lines.
The jury at Southwark crown court on Thursday cleared PC Simon Harwood, 45, a member of the Metropolitan police’s elite public order unit, the Territorial Support Group, of manslaughter following one of the most high-profile cases of alleged police misconduct in recent years.
Harwood told the court that while in retrospect he “got it wrong” in seeing Tomlinson as a potentially threatening obstruction as police cleared a pedestrian passageway in the City on the evening of 1 April 2009, his actions were justifiable within the context of the widespread disorder of that day.
Speaking outside the court, the Tomlinson family said: “It’s not the end, we are not giving up for justice for Ian.” They said they would now pursue a civil case.
It remains hard to convict a copper of anything, especially things done “in the line of duty”, even when said copper has previous form:
The jury at Southwark crown court, who took four days to clear PC Simon Harwood of manslaughter on a majority verdict, was not told that the officer had been investigated a number of other times for alleged violence and misconduct.
Harwood quit the Metropolitan police on health grounds in 2001, shortly before a planned disciplinary hearing into claims that while off-duty he illegally tried to arrest a man in a road rage incident, altering notes retrospectively to justify his actions.
He was nonetheless able to join another force, Surrey, returning to the Met in 2005. In a string of other alleged incidents Harwood was accused of having punched, throttled, kneed or threatened other suspects while in uniform, although only one complaint was upheld.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission described the chain of events around Harwood’s rejoining his old force before becoming part of its elite Territorial Support Group as “simply staggering”.
Emphasis mine. You wonder if the verdict had been the same if the jury had known Harwood had been investigated for assault previously, and was allowed to escape prosecution for it. But of course they were not allowed to know this:
The Metropolitan police attempted to keep the disciplinary record of PC Simon Harwood secret from the family of Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper seller he struck with a baton and pushed to the ground at G20 protests, it can now be reported.
Lawyers for the force tried and failed to argue that disclosing the litany of complaints about Harwood’s conduct would have breached his privacy, saying the officer’s disciplinary history did not have “any relevance” to Tomlinson’s death.
Harwood, 45, who was found not guilty of Tomlinson’s manslaughter on Thursday, had repeatedly been accused of using excessive force during his career, including claims he punched, throttled, kneed and unlawfully arrested people.
The jury in the trial were not told about the history of complaints, despite a submission from the Crown Prosecution Service, which argued that in two of the disciplinary matters he was accused of using heavy-handed tactics against the public “when they presented no threat”.
The application was rejected by the judge, Mr Justice Fulford, who said: “The jury, in effect, would have to conduct three trials.”
The establishment takes care of its own. If this had been an ordinary murder and the suspect had previous form, wouldn’t that have been admitted to court as relevant information? You would think so. Then again, a civilian who had been accused of assault and abuse would not have been allowed to escape prosecution in the first place…
Steady, as She Goes
Sometimes there are pieces of incidental music that you’ve been hearing for years without knowning where they originally came from, until you stumble over it one day. The theme to Radio 4’s Saturday Live is one such piece. I didn’t know it was taken from the opening bars of The Raconteurs’ “Steady, as She Goes” until I heard it on the radio just now, but now I know.
And knowing is half the battle.