Walls and Bridges:
by Joel Meadows

06-27-06

I hate transcribing. It doesn’t matter if the interview you’ve done is with the most fascinating person on the planet, I get really fucked off and bored after transcribing for a while. We’ve reached the six month point in the bloodinthegutters blog so I hope some of you are popping by on a regular basis. I would like to begin by apologising for not putting anything up since the entry at the end of May. It’s been a fairly eventful month and it’s gone by pretty swiftly. I mentioned transcribing at the beginning because I’ve been doing tons and tons of it this month. I’ve finished transcribing Joe Kubert and Tim Bradstreet for the Studio Space book and I’ve also been writing a piece on British filmmaking for US movie magazine Moving Pictures Magazine, which involved (guess what) interviews and transcribing. That piece will be out in August in that magazine. I’ve also interviewed artist Robert McGinnis, whose work you will have seen on a number of the classic Bond posters of the Sixties, which will be appearing in Saga Magazine over here in the UK in November to tie in with the release of Casino Royale, the first Daniel Craig James Bond. And, guess what that entailed too?

But it’s been working on these various projects that’s made me realise how lucky I am sometimes: apart from being permanently in debt, working as a journalist has allowed me to meet many of the people I admire (you can ask for the sick bucket now if you like) and gives me the chance to write about their work. Getting over the halfway point with my interviews for Studio Space has made me think about the artists whose work I really admire and I’ve gained a few fascinating insights from speaking to figures like Joe Kubert that will be in the book when it’s out next year.

It hasn’t been all work in June: the very beginning of the month I got to go to the Pixar exhibition at London’s Science Museum with my friends David Baillie and Diana and Duncan Fegredo, who came down from Leicester to see the exhibition. There were loads of concept drawings and models and we spent two hours wandering the exhibition. Normally paid exhibitions aren’t worth the price of admission but this was truly great. Afterwards we went for a very late lunch to a pub by the river in Hammersmith called The Old Ship and walked up towards Chiswick where we found the churchyard where Hogarth and Whistler are buried. You can’t beat wandering around Victorian gothic graveyards…

Also, I caught up with Mike Carey, Ade Brown and Dave Baillie and his girlfriend Jen at Ade’s Just One Page launch which took place at The Plough pub near comic shop Gosh off Great Russell Street on June 8th. It was a very entertaining affair.

I also got to go to a rather fun evening on June 14th. I went to see Chip Kidd, Random House’s Assistant Art Director, lecture at the Royal Geographic Society in South Kensington. It’s a fantastically grand building with statues of Arctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and Dr Livingstone’s companion in Africa, Stanley, on its exterior and inside is no less impressive: the theatre where the talk took place almost reeked of history. I will write a full report of the Chip Kidd lecture in the next entry so here I’ll just say that he was very funny and very interesting and held the audience’s attention for the hour and a half he was speaking. Expect the next Walls and Bridges entry in about two weeks’ time and then after that will be my San Diego convention report.