The children are the first to know.

The children are the first to know

What they haven’t learnt in a lifetime.

What it is that is.

They already know as most important.

What we haven’t learnt in a lifetime,

They summed it up with their smiles.

What we have forgotten,

The children know most often.

And the children will show it to you

Even if you’ve forgotten.

Just this once

Let the children play,

Let the children scream

As loud as they desire!

Because their screams are of delight!

If you do not want to look bad

Just leave them be,

And smile.

The boy takes his fathers face

And tries his best to make a shape.

That moment,

Hanging on the hope

For his loving gaze.

But the human face,

It is nothing like Play-Doh.

And the child trips!

On what he doesn’t know.

So children,

This is why!

You must learn with all your might!

But as you do so,

Please don’t ever forget!

What is most important!

This was done recently, it's not meant to be read like a regular poem, you have to imagine that each stanza is in a single page of a kids story book which I intend to turn this into.

- Fatcrumb

On My Way.

If you have a spirit of endurance,

If you don’t mind that creativity

Is stenciled on the walls,

And that everything’s made of plastic,

I find that the airport can be a great spot,

For the on and on and on and on.

If you don’t mind

That the disposables are left

In the wake of the drifters,

Fuel for the everlasting movement,

That never returns.

I find that the airport can be a great spot,

A real sweet spot,

For the on and on and on and on.

If you don’t mind

That the caretakers of flight

Are in keeping

With their best static lie,

It is in keeping with the

On and on and on and on.

That they mimic the stance of

Their imaginary symbols,

The on and on and on and on,

Engulfs my heart tonight.

That these self-made symbols

Whisper

“Everything is worth it”,

With the same tenacity and pomposity

Of a pimple faced girl

Who says

“All is good for me,

I who have no company.”

Then get ready,

For the on and on and on and on.

That the dot on the map finally matters,

I am not concerned.

It is the heart of a nation

That perplexes me most.

Where is it?

The question goes on and on and on.

That those who have returned

From touching the great monoliths,

Dancing to the music of fading cultures,

That once knew life,

Barely feel it in their bones.

As they return with the sound

Of fading gypsies,

Going on and on and on and on.

These people,

Colorless like ghosts,

Convincing themselves,

Life is worth living,

While never feeling alive.

They go on and on and on and on.

And me?

I am on my way.

Buzz Street.

Standing naked,

Standing pink-eyed in the sun,

Standing with

The clothed,

Bearing down.

On a busy street,

Let me catch my bearings.

Let me arrive

On time,

Definitely

On time,

I must,

Be on time,

Even if,

A little undone.

This Holy fuzz,

Is telling me funny things about the weather.

A million hits

For a million faceless kisses.

Tricks,

Playing in the sun.

Let me soak in all of this,

Before my memory comes undone.

The Holy Fuzz,

Is telling me strange things about the weather.

Talk about the weather,

Talk about disease,

Talk about a feather.

In the sizzling heat, they run out of things to say.

In a blizzard, they run out of things to say.

 “Quickly,

Change the channel.”

Someone says.

“Or amuse yourself,

With a balloon.”

On a placard the phrases read:

Triple the employment.

Triple the Experience.

The Holy Fuzz is getting too abstract,

Its breath is foul,

And now,

It’s tripping over

The triplets of employment,

On a busy street,

That I am crossing,

A little undone,

And hopefully,

Very much in the nude.

Done on a busy day, 18^th of March. Jeremy gave a talk at CC (Scape). It was great! The kids I was teaching were difficult, but one or two were affected by the experience, and one or two is enough. They could be great artists in the future, who knows? I’ll keep hoping. Strangely, felt teary eyed all day. Remember feeling very disconnected with the reality of Orchard Road. I always feel a little disconnected there, a little strung-up. But Art helps a lot.

Sunday.

I find it difficult

Surrendering

To love.

I spent that day

With a white robe

Over my head.

And two white flags

For each hand.

I wasn’t trying

To be morbid

or anything.

It was just

My way of saying,

I was trying.

It was difficult to do

Anything else

That Sunday.

While waiting for her

To Christian me

As something

Loved.

It would have been

A great honor.

And in a way

It still was,

Being so close

To something.

On the edge.

But of course

It didn’t happen.

It may have been

That what I said

Was tainted,

Tainted by

Reckless thoughts.

If it didn’t come to mind

That she could just say it,

That she loved me.

And not actually mean it.

Maybe.

Maybe I could have kept

My mouth shut.

This is just

My way of saying,

I was trying.

So I was

trying.

There is no time for Sleepwalking.

This thing called ‘culture’

Is like a scuttling rat,

Too fast and slippery to catch.

There used to be a time where

The rats would overwhelm the masses.

Then we’d catch a whiff

Of the bubonic stage.

A slowly sipping poison,

Through, muzzles, cages, mazes

And the Internet.

And I am trying very hard

To be coherent,

And unpretentious,

And caring.

Amidst the waves of ceaseless information.

Culture lives externally

From methods of display.

There must be something

Wrong with us,

Cultureless like the rats

Who play in trash.

Trash that makes

The prostitutes and scavengers,

Stand like gods.

Our values unbeknown to us

We slip into it like sleepwalkers.

It takes a whiff to wake us.

A little too late,

A little too much.

The Wisdom of Old Flesh.

I observe them,

From the discipline

of staring blankly.

There is a world of wisdom

underneath those callous skins.

The wisdom of having learnt a great deal.

Obviously the old man,

Or woman,

Who whines all day.

About taxi drivers

Waiters

Maids

For all the kinds of service

Done wrong to them,

Except their own,

Haven’t learnt shit about patience.

And mercy,

And gratitude,

And expects none.

And the fetid flesh stinks.

But they have learnt so much about the opposites.

They know a world of bitterness.

And it is in that flesh.

The wisdom of their flesh

That stinks the earth,

And wraps the babies now.

Kids on Skateboards.

Kids on skateboards

Rolling to the back end,

Because the back end is where they feel they fit?

Shallow cute girls,

Talking about shallow cute boys.

They couldn’t get any louder.

Because they feel like they’re on top of the world?

Lost in the moment?

Lost in the moment.

The ugly people on the bus

Are all quiet.

Just saw the driver of this bus,

Leaving a man

Who chased after it,

But was a fraction to late.

And by law?

The bus moves on.

One of the cute girls leaves,

The one left takes out her phone,

Immediately.

The kids at the back

Yelp like Hyenas.

They seem to have the right to.

They have a significant number

Are of the same color

And they have skateboards.

Poems, starting of with 'Beauty Never Did a Thing for Me'.

Beauty Never Did a Thing For Me

This love is paper-thin.

I’m back again, sufferin’

For paper love so thin.

Crumple it on a fixed day,

Then set it out in the sun again.

The sun that shines on everything,

The big, the small,

The pathetic and the profound.

I’ll climb your summer dress again

And call out your name

as if it were a revelation.

Pass your netted fabric,

Then clinging on

to your streaming hair.

I’ll keep climbing till,

like on a mountain

I could say I was there.

And on that mountain,

You’d catch me singing to a situation

That was never there,

Singing

Beauty never did a thing for me.

Beauty never did a thing for me.

This year, I started to write poetry. It all happened rather naturally on a bus journey home thinking about well...girls... and well... rejection. I only have the courage to show these thanks to the encouragement of my family and to my fellow teachers in the english department. Thank you guys! Some of these poems will be turned into comics, for instance this one was written with comics in mind. But I thought it would be a good thing to show them bare first before the images add an extra layer of meaning. 

- Fatcrumb

Thinking about Nick Drake.

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking of one of Nick Drakes stanzas from his song 'Hazey Jane II', which goes like this "If songs were lines in a conversation the situation would be fine." It's a line that has been haunting me for days. The simplicity of that line seems to say that if art and our lifestyles could coincide with one another, there would be less misunderstanding.

Yet the difficulty in all this is that ironically Nick Drake's music did not garner the sort of attention he was hoping for. The album in which he released this song 'Bryter Layter' was his second attempt at making an album that he hoped would gain appreciation. When you listen to it, there is no way one could argue that it is an amazing work, but for some reason, sales for the album went really bad. From then on Nick Drake's romanticism was shattered. The mood in his follow up album has a different tone, it's less hopeful, bleak in its vision. I feel that this story is a wake up call for all artists, that if they aspire for recognition through their work, the truth is that it may never happen. For me, there has to be a better reason for making art other than money or recognition.

Still, those lyrics echo a consideration of mine, that one of the areas I've been interested in my own work is this irreconcilable relationship between art and everyday life. I feel that one big reason that the quality of a lot of Art in galleries are getting weaker and weaker is that it's distant from that deeper connection between the viewer and the artwork. For instance, I've seen a lot of work that relies on interviews which probably would work if not for the fact that the person interviewed is probably putting up a front. So where is the truth in any of that? It's not a problem for me when I read my books or comics, or when I listen to one or two good albums, or occasionally, a good movie, but in most exhibitions something always feels lacking. It's not that I'm against conceptual art or abstraction, but what's missing isn't an idea or a technique it's... well...it's...it's... (not existentialism either) I couldn't put it in any simpler way than to say that it's... heart!

- Fatcrumb

New Path in a Rapid Transit System.

Sentimental Bat.

Sometime last year I got really depressed, I remember it was a bad week after a string of disappointments. Then I started listening to Nina Simone and as I was listening to her, I realized that her music was like having someone listen to your problems without being judgmental. I like the range of songs she has, you have songs like 'Mr. Bojangles' where you feel like she's right there with you in your misery and then suddenly she breaks out with a beautiful rendition of 'Suzanne' to cheer you up. Of course there's so much more music that I'm really grateful for right now I'm listening to Lambchop, earlier in the day it was Johnny Cash's late albums, their great! I do feel that music like this has a common goal with the comics I read and create. 

- Fatcrumb

It All Went to Fuck.

Mr. Mosquito.

Naked As I came Naked as I go.

So here are the first few entries of my ongoing strip Soreheads! There are four main characters in soreheads Existential Boy, Batty, Dinky and Fatcrumb. So let me know what you think by mailing me at fatcrumb@gmail.com. 

First Entry: A Kinda Statement.

Hi guys,

if you're new to this blog you probably heard it from me or a friend or from my comic that I'm releasing... very soon!

I'm just writing this entry to explain the inception of this little project of mine. But before I go on, I would like to clarify one thing. I'm cautious when it comes to explaining my work, I am someone who feels uncomfortable when too much is explained about an artist's intentions. So when it comes to explanation, the furthest I'll go is describe the origins behind one or two of my ideas. Another thing I'd like to do is to talk about one or two of the technical difficulties I had while making a work. I'm a teacher as well as an artist, so I'm always hoping my students can learn from my mistakes :)

NOT EVEN FUNNIE is meant to be more than a place to showcase my comics, it's a space where I'll blog about all kinds of stuff. The beginnings of this blog started germinating in my head a couple of years ago but I was still a little directionless about what angle to approach the idea, so it sort of just sat there in one of the quiet segments of my brain, then a few months later, I read Saul Bellow's book Herzog. It's an epistolary novel about a middle age guy (Herzog) who keeps a diary about all his past relationships, his feelings towards his fellow men etc. The Funny thing is I never got to finish the book, but I got really inspired by it. The excerpts from the diary are really short fragments of thoughts and ideas about society and life, but the way it's framed, from the standpoint of a diary, I found that very affecting. It occurred to me that I should make a blog that could showcase fragments about my own life, in the vain of a diary.

But the problem, is that diaries are difficult things to handle when thrown in the public sphere. I think that there is something wrong about writing statements about how you feel about someone you know and whom you don't like and posting these statements publicly. I'm the sort of person who would like relationships to be restored rather than shattered. And anyway, I'd hate to give a one-sided opinion about any person. Although I have to say, some people are like magnets for those kinds of statements. But still, I love the diary. I think the diary of any living person is like a sacred text. That's why I love auto-biographical comics to death. When you hold one of these comics in your hands, it's a real privilege in my opinion. So in these comics on NOT EVEN FUNNIE , I decided to explore the diary theme through fiction just like in Herzog, keeping it fictional saves me a whole lot of heartache. So the short comics on this blog works like diary fragments and the writing in each of the posts are like an ongoing stream of fiction to support these various fragments.

The comics in NOT EVEN FUNNIE will be split into two different comics, the first will be a comic strip by the title of Soreheads. Soreheads are a group of characters I made while serving in the army. They were conceived in a training shed one sunny afternoon, out of boredom. I abandoned these characters for a few years and only now am I coming back to them. Another kind of comic I want to make are individual shorts that have no connection to Soreheads. These shorts have the same diaristic approach, but they have no leading characters.

The reason I'm focusing on short strips, for these blog comics is that I'd like to express the little moments in life that get convoluted when made into a longer narrative. Sometimes, I like to look at these comics as short prose poems. This doesn't mean I won't be making longer comics, I will. It's just that not all stories should be long in my opinion and that this blog is a place for those shorter narratives. So don't think of this blog as B-sides or waste material instead of being longer grander narratives. They're just as  important to me.

In the end, this blog and these comics are another venue, a space, where I'm choosing to put to words, thoughts and emotions that have no place in the mambo jumbo of everyday life. Hopefully through the medium of this art form, I will start to express myself sincerely in a language that I hold dear to me... I hope!

best regards,
Fatcrumb