Behind the Lines: Anthony Haden-Guest

It was the summer of 1970 and I was at the Isle of Wight Festival on the UK coast, hanging with Richard Neville of Oz magazine and his team. There was a crowd of 600,000 and performers would include The Who, The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen and the whitehot Jimi Hendrix. Richard Neville had seen me perform in clubs and got me booked. A piece I’d just written about Vietnam would work, I decided. I got onstage and began:

Muzak, Hertz and Cellophane
Have all sent product to the Front
IBM sent us a brain
Continuing:
Hilton sent pictures of his penthouse
The Haig Fund sent memorial poppies
Rank Xerox copied us and sent us
Copies of copies of their copies

And so forth. I’ve been writing and performing rimes ever since. So why do I call them rimes – a borrowing from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a core text of Britain’s Romantic movement – rather than poems? Well, rime is a plain word, not loaded with associations. Also my pieces usually do rhyme. I’m a committed rhymer. Indeed I have found that looking for a rhyme can work in writing as accidents may in visual art, taking you to places you weren’t thinking of going.

So the rime was developing way, way before the cartoonery but I was working on that too, getting impetus from multiple sources. Years before I had become spellbound by the great black-and-white 1890s illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley. Everybody knew about Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, but I had discovered Beardsley in ancient copies of The Yellow Book and The Savoy, which I got for five shillings from John Sandoe’s bookstore off London’s Kings Road and he seemed my private property.

Near contemporaries were budding significantly too, such as John Glashan, Mark Boxer, Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman, who would illustrate Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. So I worked away. But producing what? I’ll just say I am hugely grateful that this was before permanent records of just about everything would be up for grabs on the world-wide web because the concepts would often be okay but I remember them as being weak in execution.

So you plough on. And things will improve. I have always seen my writing and cartooning as being pursued on distinct tracks, often with the same interests, but very differently handled. Then came this. I handwrite the captions to my cartoons and often captions for cartoons I haven’t yet done to see how they will work. As when I wrote:

I TRIED TO PUT EVERYTHING I FELT ABOUT YOU IN ONE LINE.
IT TOOK TWO.

As soon as I was done I realized this wasn’t just a caption. It became the first in the suite of brief and pungent rimes I have called Into The Microverse. Which you will see within.

So the rimes and the cartoonery can work together. And will, I know, do so again.

The Big E

I’m planning my once in a lifetime affair
It’ll be the party of everyone’s year
The beaux and the belles,
The heaviest swells,
The celebs, the smarties,
The funky, the arty, the glitterati,
The hale and the hearty,
The coy and the tarty,
Those mystery-mongers, the Illuminati,
Will all take their places and show us their real faces
At my Extinction party
Count on it, everyone will be there.

Covid was a great dress rehearsal for this
And the way that we handled it shows that we
Have learned just how to deal with catastrophe
So now should the climate just chance to get worse we’ll
All come together and briskly agree
How to put the process into reversal
We’ll then hunker down and do just what it takes
To retreat from the brink of the threatening abyss
Re-freeze melted icecaps, refresh those dead lakes
Replant the rainforests – and count upon this –
Resolve our plastic disposal mistakes
While we whoosh all that stinky bad air away
Do I hear some folk calling for laughter breaks?
Hohoho! Hahaha! Yuckyuckyuck! TeeHeeHee!

I see some of you wonder
Yes, it’s easy to see
Why planning this party so matters to me?
Why should I work as hard as this
On fun and games I’ll be certain to miss?
Well, okay, not that long ago
I also felt exactly so
I was sure I’d be well outta here
Before terminal stuff began to appear
And routinely ugly weather events
Would make almost everyone start to see sense
But that was how I felt, past tense,
Now it’s clear I got my timing wrong
We’re passing the tipping points
And now before long –
But I’ll spare you the spoiler
Jut get on with the song

We don’t have to go quietly when we just gotta go
So my closing party for the End of Days
Is going to be one helluva show
There’ll be massed choirs singing songs of praise
Marching bands and firework displays
We’re putting on an Extinction ballet
That’ll be quite a laugh, just to choreograph
But art will be the beating heart of the show
Art throbbing with concepts, art pulsing with feelings
Will be slathered on every available wall
Sculptural tableaux? No trouble at all
And squads of nouveaux Michelangelos
Will be on hand to have a go on the ceilings
There’ll be multiple dance floors at my Extinction do
So those wishing to say goodbye two by two
Can pick a polka or a Viennese waltz
Get ’em all dancing! That is my goal
And you’ve got to admit that it does take some balls
To bring back dance from an olden time
To a time like just right now when hardly a soul
Could take to the floor and do real Rock and Roll

In such well-heeled places as Silicon Valley they say
Mega-rich dudes have been working on ways to avoid
The stuff that’s heading the rest of our way
Like an ocean platform, they call that Seasteading
Or find a safe planet, arm your own asteroid
But we shouldn’t whine about wealth gaps
They complain such talk jars
We should work down here on our tan, chaps
They’ll be chilling with Elon on Mars
What valiant spirits! They’d have been terribly missed
Except they’ll find out that they’re still on the list
Yes, you just gotta go when we all gotta go
So I’ll just say Yoiks! And Tally-ho!
Pip Pip! Ta Ta! And Tootle Ooh!
And everyone’s welcome, no matter who
There’ll be no clipboard nazis, no turnaways
From my closing night bash for the End of Days

So when we’re finally all outta here
That’s just when the UFOs at last will appear
They’ll do their due diligence, plough through the data
Note our brilliant achievements, spot some silly mistakes,
Separate some real pix from huge heaps of Deep Fakes
Cruise ruined museums, look at breathtaking stuff,
But in such bits and pieces that they’ll find it quite tough
To see why a Happy Ending would be a non-starter
Then when they’ve taken in more than enough
They’ll be heading right onwards past sun after sun
Searching for a world that’s not totally done.