Badaude

Tentative d'infographer un Petit-déj

I had fun working out the perfect formula for breakfast for the London Review of Breakfasts. 

(The fact that I wrote it in Paris is neither here nor there.) 

Here's an excerpt - if you'd like to find the solution to breakfast, read more here.

Breakfast is a matter of proportion.

Any proportion can be expressed and analysed mathematically.

Take the four basic breakfast ingredients: egg, bacon, tomato, sausage.

The first thing to notice is that they can be eaten in various combinations. The taste of each ingredient is enhanced by combination with another. This is one of the chief pleasures of breakfast. Some people prefer the taste of sausage with egg; others, bacon with tomato. Fewer will eat sausage with tomato, and almost none, tomato with egg or sausage with bacon. This can be expressed thus:

Interesting results can be gained from converting this into a Venn diagram showing the most popular combinations, which expresses a fascinating and pleasing circularity accounting, perhaps, for the continuing popularity of the four basic ingredients (please ignore the central shaded area on the diagream below, which we shall come back to later).

 

Oulipo as always...

I'll be reading something, and talking to Lauren Elkin about Oulipo tomorrow, 7pm, Monday 11th March at Shakespeare & Company bookshop, Paris. Please come if you can.

 

It's sound

I can be found talking about Paris with Adam Biles & Kit Caless here on Resonance FM's wonderful show, Mapping the Metropolis. 

Towards the end of the recording I also read a story about sex & shopping (probably slightly less exciting than it sounds). 

The Paris photos below are from my Tumblr project, The Sky Over Europa.

 

An Invite For Tomorrow Night: Haecceity Project

I have some stuff in this show...

 

 

Not One But Two Begs...

First is, please support the Strumpet. I'm in it. A long, lightly fictionalised, autobiographical comic - the longest thing I've drawn for some time. Here's a taster. If you'd like to see more, go fund it!

 

 

Secondly, please come along to my book signing at The Book Barge on Monday 24th September. It will be moored outside The Narrowboat Pub, Islington. There are rumours of wine and if you're lucky I'll draw you a free biro tattoo. 

I.M. George Whitman: December 12, 1913 – December 14, 2011

I was asked to write a memorial of George Whitman, owner of legendary Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. You can find it here.

Perec in Peckham

I spent last Wednesday night talking about Georges Perec in an (allegedly) ex-crack den in Peckham with sawn off logs for seating, outdoor composting lavatories and excellent whisky-based cocktails.

This is my co-speaker, Karl Whitney, enjoying the 'bar' while we watched The White Review's editors, no mean roadies, drill a projector shelf into a ceiling beam.

 

Did we offer to help? No - we were too busy worrying about our talks discussing the finer points of Oulipo.

The Peckham Hotel was actually a lot nicer than this photo seems to show: in fact Karl is sitting in front of a roaring fire burning what looked like the missing floorboards from the rooms upstairs. 

This was the first time I'd seen Karl since I met him in the Place Saint Sulpice to record some street noise outside Cafe de la Mairie, working around Perec's essay, Tentative d'epuisement d'un Lieu Parisien. 

(Karl's not on the above pic but Perec is - the drawing was a private commission I did at the same time as the recording). 

I used the sounds as the basis for an audio-visual piece, working with David Bramwell (sound), Lauren Elkin (photos) Isabelle Carreira (montage), Sofia Saldanha (voice) and writer, Deborah Levy, who generously contributed a piece of writing to the project in response to Perec's work.

Karl paid tribute to Perec's translator, Gilbert Adair, who died this week, and gave and excellent explanation of Perec's use of the grid system in his lifelong Lieux project.

I talked mostly about Espèces d'Espaces/Species of Spaces - Perec on the describing and repurposing space (there's my photo of Paternoster Square again)

As is usual in my talks there were props (slightly mouldy tangerines which weren't actually used in the end), games and mild humiliation.

Thanks so much to everyone who helped set up and who came. Great evening! We must do it again sometime.

Incidentally I'll be doing another drawing workshop at Tent City University on Monday 19th December at 3pm. If you'd like to drop by on the day the Occupy LSX St Paul's camp's eviction ruling will be decided, please do.

 

Her Royal Majesty!

Just got back from Paris yesterday so (very) sadly can't attend the launch of the excellent Royal Majesty magazine tomorrow. But if you're in the city, you really should.

There's a short story by Lauren Elkin and, erm, cover by me.

BD Passion!

Here are a few photos of last weekend's fantastic BD Passion at the Institut Francais kindly passed on to me by Susan.

I participated in the final event of the weekend, talking a little about drawing in London and Paris as well as helping out José-Louis Bocquet, author of the fabulous Kiki de Montparnasse, by drawing a model dressed in nothing but Kiki-esque  1930s underwear...

There was also absinthe, macarons and truckloads of really legendary Franco-Belgian comics guys.

I seem to always make some kind of odd face while drawing...

"Can I stop this and have a drink now?"

It's getting like Jennifer's Diary around here: 

In case that wasn't enough I'd like to announce some more upcoming events.

On Thursday 13th a lauch for the excellent White Review at Foyles. YOU can come - just rsvp on the link. I have a piece in it. 

On Monday 17th I'll be talking at Laydeez do Comics. You can come to that too: you don't even have to be a Laydee to attend. And apparently they all have curry afterwards which is certainly a plus-factor for me.

See you at one of them?

(Incidentally the winner of my Tate competition - picked out of a hat - is James Hopkin, the final entrant!)

Kiki! - Last Minute Giveaway!

"You shall go to the comics festival!"

In a kind of Cinderella moment I've been whisked out of my normal 9-5 (or rather the far less regular work hours I normally keep) and asked to appear at the wonderful BD Passions weekend at London's Institut Francais in South Kensington, which starts tomorrow! 

Sadly I'll be replacing the fabulous Catel, the visual half of the team behind Kiki de Montparnasse, one of my favourite recent graphic novels. 

Happily I'll be talking about drawing and writing in London and Paris, and drawing live (and probably life-sized). There will be Absinthe.

This is my take on Kiki, drawn from a portrait of her ready to go to work in the studio of one of the artists she posed for. Luckily I've always been fascinated by Alice Prin (Kiki's real name), the girl from the sticks who became the most famous model of her day - and no mean painter herself, with a sell-out show in 1927. 

Looking at her in the photo it's difficult, in our age of airbrushed supermodels, to see how she held such sway. A little too hairy, a little too un-buff for today's tastes, she was ousted in the affections of Man Ray - not only her lover but the guy who fixed her image in the century's imagination with hundreds of photographs - by Lee Miller, a Vogue model and photographer much more in keeping, lookswise, with the Claudia Schiffers and Giselles of today. It was almost like the 19th century giving way to the 20th, the tram to the car, Romanticism to Modernism. Kiki refused to behave, be good, be conventionally beautiful, and ended her career overweight, underpaid and, most of the time, drunk, a heroic failure, like the heroine of a Jean Rhys novel. 

If you'd like to come and see me - or go to any of the other events over the weekend - I have ONE SPARE TICKET to give away. As the festival starts TOMORROW I'm giving it to the FIRST, yes the VERY FIRST person who asks for it in the comments box below.

READY... GET SET... GO!