A couple of days back, my friend, former colleague and most excellent music writer Nick posted this on F***b**k:
(For the non-British sharing space with us today: “bog = “powder room”.)
This is too good a question to leave entirely in the hands of Zuckerberg, so, with Nick’s permission, I’m asking the same.
What’s on the wall of your littlest room? For the avoidance of doubt, mine has a light dressing of posters and other mementoes from various shows Mr Mole was either in or produced. Plus this:
It’s original artwork from
Leviathan, a weekly cartoon strip that used to run in the
Sunday Review, the elegant, thoughtful and at the time much-imitated magazine produced by
The Independent, where Nick C. and I both worked during much of the Nineties. The strip’s eponymous hero was a bald-headed, featureless yet deeply expressive baby, who was enamoured of a tattered stuffed rabbit called, with appealing economy, Rabbit. Leviathan’s best friend and partner in baby-crime was a philosophical cat. Called, you guessed it, Cat.
Leviathan was the creation – offspring, if you like – of Peter Blegvad. Not a man you can describe in one word, or probably even 10: simultaneously an artist, songwriter, writer, inventor, musician…maybe the best way to describe him is as someone who made stuff. A lot of stuff; all of it quality. A former colleague has told me he thinks Blegvad came on board at the
Review because he was a friend of one of the editors; but equally it may just be that the ed in question had a damn good eye, asked, and got the magic “yes”.
Whatever, it was a win. Blegvad’s contributions were multi-layered, polymathic, touching, punning, playful; meta long before Meta. You can see a selection
here or make the artist a few pence richer and buy his
book (call to purchase: Matt Groening is a fan). Here’s a sample:
I was entranced by Leviathan, at least partly because at the time I had two Levis of my own, both as equally bald and intrigued by the world as his cartoon baby. I was passionately, physically in love with the little boys I had to keep leaving at home, but didn’t dare let this show at work, and
Leviathan was like a weekly coded message from their infancy. No one in 1990s newsrooms gave two hoots about babies; like Willy Loman in
Death of a Salesman, they were too common and too lowly for attention to be paid. Blegvad, though, he was paying attention. Apparently, he chose a baby for a hero because he observed how, with his own children, “you bring them home and they’re bigger than anything else in your life.” That paradox – hugeness held in smallness – is very Blegvad, a master at noticing the insignificant, then filling it with meaning. Though his cartoons weren’t about childhood per se, they used the otherworldliness of that early human state to gaze at life in a way that was questioning, complex, unclouded by any preconceptions – as well as being, quietly, very funny. It felt to me like he saw the magic, and honoured it.
I can’t remember exactly how I ended up with this particular drawing, of Levi’s “suit of clothes, like a body, spotted by food & shameful behaviour”; from memory Blegvad would have filed his artwork not to me, an assistant editor who looked after the back of the book, but to the picture desk. I know the innocence and sadness implicit in the abandoned clothes struck a particular chord: a child’s Babygro years are the perhaps the sweetest, certainly the shortest. And while it’s true that small children, like dogs, never stay clean for more than 20 minutes after you last wiped them down, they are most loveably and purely themselves when sticky, smelly and splotched with something reprehensible. (Also like dogs.)
So maybe I asked the picture ed for the artwork after it had been marked up, scanned and gone to press; or maybe it just landed in my in-tray somehow and I hung on to it. I know for some years it lived, along with a (now tragically lost) faxed conversation with Hunter S. Thompson, in the filing cabinet below my desk at the office. It came home with me at the start of the millennium, when I cleared that desk and turned in my staffer badge to go freelance. I loved my job, but my two small boys were waiting; attention needed to be paid. I framed the picture to remind myself both of why they deserved that attention, and, equally, of the joy of working alongside people as sheerly surprising as Peter Blegvad. A quarter of a century on, it’s still doing the trick.
I couldn’t link to Nick’s original post as it wasn’t public; but you’ll find plenty of his recent writing here: https://substack.com/@nickcolemanwriter. If you have ever enjoyed listening to a piece of music – Dylan, Dizzee Rascal, whatever – and wondered why, go visit.
