Cement Madeleine
no flowers at the waffle cemetery
In today’s letter: a few sketches from my time in Belgium, a couple of templates for planning a book and teaching, and lastly, cement mixing in the regions of hell.
1. ON BEHEST OF THE KING OF BELGIUM
I haven’t tabled in ages and ages, and lost my mind a bit after a day, started drawing these kinds of things:
I will say, it was quite gratifying to see 99.999% of the people chuckle, if not properly laugh, while looking through my comics. Most of them would then put the zine down and walk off, as if to say: I got my value out of this, no need to buy one.
Which is FINE. I particularly enjoyed this Dutch lady translating and enacting my Painting with Children comic to her friend:
Like I said, it’s FINE and I have no problem with them ignoring me after having their little chuckle, not bothering even to acknowledge or nod at the author of the thing that gave them joy.
If you are one of these people who came by, laughed and left, I will always remember your happy smiling faces, and if I ever see one of you bleeding on the street, I will stop for a second, have a laugh, and move on.
2. NEVER BUY TEMPLATES
Earlier, I shared how I create color schemes, plan pages and so forth, but to zoom out, here’s how I plan a book. Well, normally I don’t, and the book is an unreadable mess, but for the current long-ish dense-ish project, I had to be more organized, so I made a very simple wiki of sorts. You can use my setup as a free Notion template.
The same general idea can be applied to any big project, of course. I’m sure you can make them much more elaborate to suit your needs, add a timeline, collaborators, etc, but I personally prefer to keep it as stupid as possible. I usually have a DUMP folder, where I can quickly add something on the go, then organize it when I have time.
The most useful part of this so far has been putting together an outline (and being able to drag-drop events around), and having a character wiki, since I tend to make tons of notes here and there, and keeping track of them can be a real headache. Mind you, it’s still a mess, but a digital mess, where you can at least search for keywords, and so forth.
And for teachers, I also shared a template for managing a class, most likely at an art school. It’s a very simple setup, again, focused on simply making sure everyone has access to the briefs and homework folders, so these lazy bastards can no longer have an excuse of ‘missing’ a handout.
3. CEMENT REMIXER
Anyway, I recently revisited a song by the regional Russian band Kuvalda (Sledgehammer), called Cement Mixer. This thing was something of a proto-meme, and to be honest, I still find it very pleasing:
Most people of my generation discovered this song through MTV’s Shit Parade, a show that seemed to me then (and now, to be honest) the definition of a dream job—getting paid for disparaging other people’s creativity.
The hosts picked some of the worst songs and videos they could find, and mocked them to the delight of teenage edgelords like myself. Among the more notable acts were a Queen cover about maintaining an apiary, and a Kazakh techno wizard, but Kuvalda stood out more than anyone, probably due to the highly specific nature of their lyrical output: the intersection of construction work and cannibalism.
This kind of thing is not uncommon in Grindcore (the Japanese band Kandarivas comes to mind—their singer is a professional surgeon, who put his medical expertise to work in songs like Grind Surgical Attitude), but there’s something particularly appealing about a humble cement mixer as the subject matter. I believe the Kuvalda lads had background in landscaping, but maybe it’s my memory’s wishful thinking.
The narrative is fairly simple: cement mixer mixes cement, the construction crew drinks moonshine, foreman Petrovich passes out in the cement mixer, the electrician Stepan launches the machine, the foreman’s body is mixed with dough into a meat pie, which is then consumed by the rest of the crew. The final lines are:
Cement mixer!
Alcoholism!
Cement mixer!
Cannibalism!
There’s something disarming about these lines, as well as the opening of the song:
Cement mixer!
Mixes cement!
I’ve written a good deal about repetition and primitivism, and this seems to me a perfect example of all that stuff at work. Last year, I made a post about the difference between clever stupidity and stupid cleverness, and that applies here, too.
I have a great deal of embarrassment about all the stupid cleverness in my early books, but I suppose you do have to go through all this exploration to rediscover what’s always been right under your nose. Thinking of all that stuff reminded me of this bit from a Bolaño lecture:
“…Kafka understood that travel, sex and books are paths that lead nowhere except to the loss of the self, and yet they must be followed and the self must be lost, in order to find it again, or to find something, whatever it may be—a book, an expression, a misplaced object—in order to find anything at all, a method, perhaps, and, with a bit of luck the new, which has been there all along.”
PS. BEIGE SATURDAY
And if you got all the way down, here’s a shockingly good discount code for the midmonth letters (where my naughtiest content resides), cutting the already-reasonable price in MORE THAN HALF.
Must be redeemed right now, before December 1st. If you missed it, there will be more grubby deals, don’t worry, and you can always scam me by ‘referring a friend’ with your burner/work/school email, I don’t care.
