The Tiger who came to Monday Night

So, Monday night is a bit of a tradition at my parents' place. They put on a delicious meal, and whoever of us offspring is around (there's seven of us, plus our families, plus some really good value cousins and their families) drop in for dinner and birthday celebrations and frequently other commemorations.

Last night was tiger night, because last week saw the death of Judith Kerr, whose 1968 picture book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, is magnificent.

My mother Mary Anne asked me if I'd make a kamishibai story to celebrate the great Kerr, so I dropped around in the morning, we had a chat, I had an idea, went off into my day and in the arvo went and wrote and drew and painted a 4-card story.

After the main meal, but before sweets, my dad Salvatore read William Blake's poem 'Tyger, tyger' from his old school poetry book, In Fealty to Apollo, then I performed this new kamishibai story, which curled The Tiger Who Came to Tea up into our Monday Night dinner tradition.

Then mum talked about Judith Kerr and the place that her book has had in our family, then people sang happy birthday because it had been my 51st birthday on Saturday (yes, it was a lovely day, thanks for asking), then we ate a cake that my sister Anna constructed out of two squiggle cakes (the cheap, nasty and very popular cake that I bring every week), iced and garlanded to precisely resemble the cake in the book.

All in all, a highly successful Monday night.

But as you may have gathered, they pretty much all are.

(thanks to Anna for the photos)

Vale, Ralph McLean 1957 - 2010

Today in the hot sun at La Mama theatre in Carlton we farewelled a true member of Fitzroyalty, Ralph McLean. I have got to know Ralph over the past couple of years doing comics reviews on 'Yartz', the weekly arts programme that he began in 2000 for the community television station Channel 31. On Saturday afternoons a group of folks would arrive at his bedsit in Little Gore Street in Fitzroy and through a haze of cigarette smoke and snappy dialogue, Ralph would pull together a review and interview show about the arts in Melbourne.

There were some euphonious eulogists today - the service was delivered by Liz Jones, the grand wazoo of La Mama, and above, Francis Italiano, these days of Perth but once upon a time, and for eight years, Ralph's partner, spoke warmly of his time with Ralph. When some people would refer to Francis as Ralph's 'handbag' (ie when Ralph brought him along to shows), Ralph would correct them:

"He's not a handbag. He's a mink stole."

Above, on the left, Misha Adair, who spoke on behalf of the Yartzers, with Ralph's principles of 'making stuff' mysteriously appearing on his pin-striped suit. On the right, Scott Gooding, who had organised an extravaganza of 'Yartz' footage that screened on a monitor inside La Mama, which you could go and see before and after the service. Nice work, Scott.

Hermione Gilchrist also spoke beautifully about Ralph, and has blogged about him, with 'Yartz' footage embedded, here.

After the service and a beer with Mary Anne, who is my mum and one of the 'Yartz' theatre reporters, I cycled off through Fitzroy to community radio station 3CR on Smith Street in Collingwood, where I met John Retallick and Jo Waite and together we went to air with the last 2010 show of The Comic Spot. It was the round-up of the year, which has been a pretty remarkable one for Australian comic books.

After the show, we repaired to the Union Club Hotel, Ralph's local and the site of his wake, which was still going, where we drank traditional post-show G&Ts and laughed traditional post-show laffs.

Huzzah for community broadcasting, and huzzah for you, Ralph McLean, and all that you gave to the arts in Melbourne.

It was an honour to know you and work with you.

'The Arrival' at The Arts Centre

This morning Zebedee my younger son, Mary Anne my mother and I trained it into the city to visit Collected Works Bookshop, where we talked to Kris Hemensley, who runs the shop with his wife Retta. It is always a pleasure to speak with either of them, and Collected Works is one of the reasons that one would live in Melbourne.


Then we headed south along Swanston Street, passing Young and Jackson's Hotel, Flinders Street Station, and crossed the Yarra Yarra River using Princes Bridge. It was like being in a comic book about Melbourne. Somehow, I'd discovered that there was an exhibition of the artwork from Shaun Tan's mesmerising silent book comic, 'The Arrival', outside The Studio, a small theatre at The Arts Centre. And there it was.


What I hadn't realised was that the theatre show of 'The Arrival', featuring actors, projections, moving sets and puppets, was also on, and we arrived just in time to see hordes of school children march into the Studio to watch it. We didn't have the tickets or the time to see the show, but a very kindly usher turned on the television monitoring system so that we could get an idea of what the show was like. It looked GREAT. And when I find a link to the theatre company who produced it, I will post it here.

(Thank you Scott Wright: name of the company is Spare Parts.)

The exhibition is only on until Sunday May 5 - it features digital prints and original pencil art from 'The Arrival'. Of course, to see the work this way, out of the 'flow' of the narrative, is instructive as I found that I was looking at the pictures as 'finished art', rather than 'ongoing art', a topic which surfaced in the discussion with Mandy Ord on last weeks 'Comic Spot'. (see last post)


Above is the sketch that I made from the monitor displaying the show: that's not 3 characters at the front, by the way, but two shadows from the main character. And there's his creature/pet in the right hand window - in the show it was coloured blue. The audience really was spilling all the way down onto the stage. One of the most amazing things, from my attenuated view, was the use of projections of images from the book, on the three main flats and the ramp, to create all sorts of spaces and scales. The flats were made of screens that could be drawn up, across, down. I loved that.