Self-portrait with daffodil torch
Violet made me this Katy Perry Roar staff by picking the remainder of the daffodils and threading them on a stick. I’m sad for my daffodils, but I’m impressed by their sculptural qualities. I’m wearing a favourite op shop dress that my friend Helen sent me a few years back (you can see it for real here) and I added snow because my friend Drew sent me a picture of himself in the Dunedin blizzard. Snow! I haven’t seen you for so long.
Self-portrait with cat biscuits
I was given a little notebook last week and I thought that maybe I would do a self-portrait series, since I don’t work in an office, and nobody gets to see my outfit. I am particularly pleased with my new necklace I’ve been sent from Mali (via Belgium) and I’m enjoying my new boots, which are like my 1991 docs only they haven’t gouged a pit in my foot. Around my feet are cat biscuits – I asked Violet to feed the cat and she flung them like confetti. Next to me is the flower arrangement she made, picking the daffodils and magnolia that have bloomed at the promise of spring, and adding a stretch-marked balloon for extra pinkness.
Intensification – thinking about Unitec
Here is a comic I didn’t get quite right for Metro, but waste not want not so here it is up here! I tried to tackle the issue of intensification happening in my neighbourhood. I do believe that the Unitec grounds need intensifying – Mt Albert/Pt Chev are such funny neighbourhoods. The shops, as a whole, are a little run down as the prime business has been siphoned away by St Lukes shopping mall. Both suburb centres are split by major arterial routes, making it hard to saunter across the road or sit under an umbrella on the footpath drinking a craft beer. So yes, if they get the Unitec development right, prioritising pedestrians, cyclists and public transport, maintaining the natural beauty and waterways of the site, installing boutique shops and restaurants rather than chain stores, it could be fantastic. My fear is that they will do it cheaply and quickly, and there’ll be industrial run-off in Oakley Creek, an area that the community has spent lots of time restoring. And I also feel for the local residents, and the quiet kindy that all three of my children went to – it will no longer be quiet; there will be a steady stream of cars coming in and out. The hope is that with increased population density, public transport will get better and even rich people will use it. But Aucklanders seem so wedded to their cars and as I write there is a league of road workers carving an ever wider gully between Unitec and the Pt Chev shops for the south-western motorway. A bunch of high rise apartments are planned to overlook the motorway. Sure, they’ll be able to see the sea, but what about those stats about how unhealthy it is to live above 10 lanes of traffic? You can look at Unitec’s submission here – it’s really long, but if you scroll to the end you can see the actual plans. My call to Unitec is this: it’s amazing opportunity – get it right!
Oh, and if you haven’t already, you should vote in the NZ Post Book Awards People’s Choice. Of course I will love you forever if you vote for me, but we (the non-shortlisted fiction writers of NZ) want to see if it’s possible for a fiction book not on the shortlist to win.
6 ideas to make biking in Auckland better
So often I bike to the shops and there’s nowhere to secure my bike. I’ll loop my lock through the back wheel and lean it against the shopfront, hoping like crazy no one in a truck drives by and decides to nick it. It’s not only about security; it’s also about welcome. What better way to suggest to your customers that they bike rather than drive than to install a nifty bike stand outside your shop!
Face it, cars don’t really want to share their road with cyclists. It sometimes takes forever to find a safe place to pass. So why not allocate a special lane for them? Or at least one they can share with the buses. Auckland has so many berms – strips of grass between the road and the footpath – that could easily be co-opted for bike lanes. And do we really need parking along the main streets? That space would be better used for bikes and buses, which would mean less cars and less need for car parks.
My mother tells me that there’s been a new optimum bike route indicated through Mt Eden that goes up the steepest streets. Do town planners actually bike the routes they suggest? Or if they do, are they ex-Tour de France cyclists? I like biking but I’m not a super fit-type. I don’t much like breaking a sweat. I like to take the cruisiest route possible, pootling along just fast enough to make my hair flap a bit.
Talking of taking the easy route, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a bike lift on Upper Queen Street? You could just hook yourself on halfway up and arrive at your K Road cafe date fresh as a daisy, not about to salt your espresso with sweat. I think the same could apply in many Wellington and a few Dunedin streets. This is one of the the reason why Auckland is not Amsterdam: too many bloody hills.
When I was in London and Paris there were bikes to hire everywhere. Of course they had the advantage of being bike-friendly, flattish cities. Auckland also tried to instigate this but as far as I can tell it didn’t really take off. Perhaps because there were too many cars trying to run bikes down, not enough places to park your bike and no bike lifts to help you up the hills. But we can change that, right?
This is one for my husband Jonathan. He complained that his old work didn’t have decent showers for after his bike commute. If all work places had decent bathroom facilities and gave biking employees an extra 15 minutes to freshen up then there would be so many more people happy to bike to work rather than being stuck in a bus. When I had an office in town I used to bike rather than bus because then I always knew how long it would take – 25 minutes rather than 20-50 minutes on the bus, depending on the traffic.
Do you guys have any more ideas for Auckland or your own city? Please add them in the comments.
Shameless self-promotion with mandarins
Did you know that you can vote for The People’s Choice book of the year over at the NZ Bookseller’s website? And you can win $1000 worth of book tokens. Click here!
You could vote for one of the shortlisted books, or scroll down and vote for another book. Hint: The Fall of Light by Sarah Laing. Go on! You would make me very happy. And Booksellers promises to destroy your personal details after the voting is completed.
Violet is 5!
Today is monumental for me because Violet, my youngest, has turned 5, the official age to start school. I have been parenting preschoolers for over 11 years. I started drawing comics in 2003 when Otto was a baby, and here is one from when he was about 6 months old: 
(In case you’re wondering what the difficult Booker Prize winner was, it was DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, which I don’t remember enjoying very much.)
And here is a comic I drew about Violet when she was seven months old:
It was quite good that Violet’s birthday was today, because it distracted me from the NZ Post book awards announcement. I was hoping in a vain and ridiculously optimistic way to make the fiction shortlist, even though The Luminaries would be on it, and there wouldn’t be any chance of winning, but I didn’t. I was in fine company – I could’ve sworn that Elizabeth Knox’s brilliant Wake would been on there, and what about Tracy Farr’s wonderful The Lives and Loves of Lena Gaunt? She made the Australian shortlist, but not ours. Where was Dylan Horrocks’ Incomplete Works? What about Fiona Kidman, Pip Adam, Craig Cliff and Tina Makereti? Actually it was a bloody good year for NZ books, and I have to confess that I was pleased that Tina Makereti’s book wasn’t on the shortlist, because I am reading Where The Rekohu Bone Sings now and thoroughly enjoying it, and I might’ve felt too jealous to finish it. Awards are weird. They are a great way to promote NZ literature, but they exclude so many. The books that made the cut are great – but so are the ones that didn’t.
This Saturday is zine fest, which is always a fun day and a chance to see all the local comics and zine makers. I’m going to be selling issues of Let Me Be Frank, issues 1-5, but then I had a panicky thought that it was not enough – I needed more. So I went back to my little hand-painted books. I’ve made six so far this week: four issues of FAME FAME FATAL FAME, and a monsters and fairies book for good measure.
Here is a spread from my Bloomsbury edition of the FAME book:
Lytton Strachey looks like my father – same nose, same beard, same book obsession, and this picture of Dora Carrington reminded me of Lena Dunham – didn’t she first find fame with a youtube clip of her topless in a fountain?
And here is a spread from my Dead Pop Stars issue:
I also have pop stars who died of cancer:
I can’t go past a Morrissey-themed book:
My final FAME FAME FATAL FAME book is a homage to some of my favourite lady cartoonists, although of course they draw themselves much better than I can draw them:
Today I drew some fairies to keep Violet happy, but she was pretty disgusted because they were the wrong kind of fairies:
Fairies are apparently blonde and none of them have short hair or glasses. And I also drew some monsters for good measure because I can’t rely on everyone having the same fascinations as me – monsters are universal:
Anyway, come on down if you’re keen to buy any of these – one-off! Hand-painted! Stitched spine! Signed to you! Only $25! Which is a total bargain given how much time goes into them, but then again zine fest is hardly the venue to charge high prices.
Swimming pool
And so ends my week of drawing school holiday comics. I’ve been reading Gabrielle Bell’s Truth is Fragmentary book, collecting all of her diary comics, and they are really great. I’ve read them as they’ve come out on her blog but something about having them all collected as a book gives the narratives more weight – they become bigger than themselves. She’s made herself do a July diary for the past few years, drawing a comic a day for the month of July. Even though they are filled with frustration and a sense of inadequacy, barriers against working, lost keys, too much heat, I still envy her NYC life, hanging out with cartoonists, going to bars, living in the city… sigh. Another day in the burbs at the end of the world lined up for me…
Ok, I have to stop blogging or else my daughter will watch all the episodes of Numberjacks ever made, and although it’s educational, it’s possibly not so good for her.
An hour at the museum
I’m never sure if I like going to the museum or not. Mostly it fills me with a sense of lethargy, counterpointed by moments of excitement when I find something I really like. Yesterday I found this:
…and I was also quite excited to find a collection of netsuke so soon after finishing Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes. But I think the fact that I am lead by my children’s whims hampers my enjoyment a bit… all those hours in the war section, in the Gallipoli trench in particular…also we only go when it’s rainy so it’s forever connected with miserable weather. Of course you can go to the winter gardens for some seasonal adjustment afterwards. And now there’s a great song by Tiny Ruins about the museum and the winter gardens:
Wind beast
As my blog has been in danger of languishing, I am trying to post something every day this week. This means that I’m not waiting for the perfect idea for a comic – I’m just drawing whatever comes into my head when I sit down to do it. The wind has been in my head and in my face for the past few days, and the rain is threatening to rain forever and ever. Of course it’s school holidays. I’ve told the kids that tomorrow we’re going to go out in the wind and the rain and imagine that we’re intrepid explorers.
LET ME BE FRANK 
