Sexton Ming, Our Kenttucky Pussy & Me
New book from Nix Comics by Sexton Ming & J.T. Dockery available for pre-order now through August 2nd, 2019: right HERE, rockers!
“There isn’t a whale net big enough to contain Sexton Ming’s idiosyncratic artistic visions. His music long ago chased away all the normal people.”
— Irwin Chusid, author of Songs in the Key of Z: the Curious World of Outsider Music (quote provided by Chusid for the promotion of Sexton’s 2004 final tour of the U.S.)
The sordid tale of the 15 year odyssey of Kenttucky Pussy from conception to print:
Boy howdy, do I have some mustard seed Good News that might grow into a Mighty Oak in your hands, Dear Reader (True Believer?). Plant it in your garden, spread the mustard (if not seed) around, or even ignore it (this News) and/or Do What Thou Wilt & That Shall be the Whole of the Law. Wait, what are we talking about?
What I’m saying is: Nix Comics has been (and is, until Aug. 2nd, 2019) hosting a pre-order plunge-drive Kickstarter for their summer 2019 season that includes a new work, Kenttucky Pussy, by Sexton Ming & myself (that’s I/me, J.T. Dockery making these sounds).
Here, again, the Kickstarter link.
“An obol now, friend, and when the community asks you to contribute for my funeral, you can say that you’ve already given.”— Diogenes, 5th century BC (translation by Guy Davenport).
Kenttucky Pussy, title inspired by my late cat, Lula (aka Tallulah/aka Lula-Bear, etc.), goddess rest her soul (hey! get yer minds out the gutter! The title and the titular piece are about a cat, as in Felis catus, pilgrims: what did YOU think it was all about? har-dee-har-har) was conceived as a book during that final tour in 2004. However, the manuscript of Sexton’s words was lost when in process of completing the collection in the original 2004/5 season, and we had declared the project never to be, pronounced our Pussy to be a Dead Duck, proverbial.
Flash forward to Oct. 2018, and a copy of the manuscript surfaced. We not only fired up the chainsaw of the old idea/work, but transmutated it into something new/different for the 2019 season, using the old illustrations that never saw print as a kind of sketchbook/jumping off point to jump into making of Sexton’s poetics of 2004 into new Dockery adaptations/comics.
If you feel like exploring this territory with us, by all means keep reading with us (we ain’t stoppin’ ya!). To make it more user-friendly, below is a map, and while a map ain’t a territory, the glimpse up the skirt of our petticoat-al-content will help you find your way(!?).
TABLE OF CONTENTS/TABLE OF TASTY MORSELS:
I. Short Version of Our Truth
II. Longer version of Our Truth/More Truths/Some Relative Truths, Etc.(bonus information, of the Biographical & General Babble Variety/Who Knows What All), Or: What is a “Sexton Ming” & Why Not?!
III. Nix & its Suave Rock N Roll Comics line: Why Nix is Perfect for Letting Our Old Pussy Purr in the Sun (finally) in a New Time/is Good for the Corner Where Rock N Roll & Comix Meet/Good for You, Dear Reader.
IV. Comparisons in Contrast of Old Illustrations vs. New Comix, MORE Eyeball Kicks from Our Pussy, Etc.
V. Our Kenttucky Pussy’s Sampler-Platter O Ming-Thing Sizzlers. You want something for nothing? Have we got you something! A temporary free-floating streaming Doc-selected selection of Ming-tunes “greatest hits”/via Dogwhistle Records!
I. Our Truth/s (in brief/s):
Sexton Ming & I previously published in 1999 the book he wrote and I illustrated, The House of Nunn, under my old Hanging Dog Productions imprint. I also, in 2002, published a collection of his poetry covering the years 1989–2001, Choice Cut Fillets, illustrated by his wife, Ella Guru.
I met Sexton & Ella in 1998. Sexton, Ella & myself maintained a creative partnership for the next few years between Bumf*#k, Cantuck & the Devil & England & the Deep Blue Sea, culminating in my organizing Sexton’s final U.S.A. tour, Sexton having deemed it time to hang up his touring spurs.
Kenttucky Pussy was conceived as a book during that final tour in 2004. However, the manuscript was lost, and we had declared the project never to be. Yet, flash forward to Oct. 2018, and a copy of the manuscript surfaced.
So, bam! We were/are back in business. Sexton was up for me approaching the old material — not merely illustrated but adapted into comics — in & Ken Eppstein/Nix Comics were up for releasing it in their “Nix Rock and Roll Comics” line, and, drum roll please…here we are: this Kenttucky Pussy to become born’d, almost exactly fifteen years later than the original due date/anniversary of Ming’s last tour which we toured together of the U.S. of A
II. What Is A Sexton Ming & Why Not?!
Sexton Ming, born 1961 in Gravesend, Kent is a British artist, writer & musician, prolific in many different mediums, by any stick by which to measure prolificacy. You might even call him an actor, as he (in)famously portrayed Queen Victoria in the 1997 cult classic film, Pervirella (all he had to do was act naturally).
Sexton is both dyslexic (as he said to me once, as a child he was placed in the “morons’ class”) — his writings and text in his art are most often presented with uncorrected grammar, instead, written as he writes/reads language — and he has suffered from/grappled with hallucinations much of his life. As his wife Ella Guru said: “Sexton takes drugs not to hallucinate.” There’s visionary artists and then there’s visionary artists.
He’s arguably most widely known for his creative partnership with Billy Childish, fellow citizen of the British Empire. Together, they were founding members of the Medway Poets, in 1979 (a group that also included the future Brit Art luminary, Tracey Emin, as well). Ming & Childish were part of — or more accurately the primary, motivating figures within — the “Medway scene,” post-punk & gleefully provincial on the outside of metropolitan London, addicted to making art in various mediums by any means necessary (and often those means (if not forms) were the dole). Garage rock/expressionism/modernism revivalists as a way of blowing out the dried snot of post-punk/post-modernism, but dodging the label “retro” by using all these lo-fi, bare boned forms to express themselves and their contemporary, Kentish perspectives in acutely personalized/internalized/externalized respiratory specificity.
As one of the stable of Childish’s Hangman Records/Books, etc. imprint (not to be confused with my own imprint’s handle of Hanging Dog, which is in fact named after Hanging Dog, NC, where several generations of my Dockery ancestors percolated in the soil, many still percolating in the regional muck today, or so I’ve heard & beyond that, we’re not even mentioning Sexton’s own old Phyroid Press, which released over 30 pamphlets in the late 70s/80s), Ming, in solo albums such as Old Horse of the Nation (1987), brought the visionary, the child-like in his music and performance to the table in the garage. Just as comfortable composing/performing with cheap children’s instruments as cheap electric guitars (and swinging in content from the innocent to the profane to the just plain funny/surreal up from the dirt to the cosmos without blinking an eye, like a Natural Born Star Child, or, at least (sometimes): “The Ultimate in T.V. Filth Rock”).
Spool the tape back around again to 2004 and that final Ming tour, the material that comprises the text of Kenttucky Pussy was essentially born of a conversational trading of fours over the course of the tour and then, after the final performance, the next day of rest spent on my front porch in Lexington, Kentucky. The women of & in the house were off shopping. Actually, I recall that some kind of sheepish young zealot/missionary of some off-brand version of Christian-like faith approached Sexton & I on the porch that day. His opening line to me was, “Are you the man of the house?” To which I replied, road-weary & in no mood for theological debate outside of trading fours aforementioned with Sexton & I then retorted, “Sometimes I pretend to be,” which, thankfully, put an end to the conversation (and I wasn’t even wearing ladies’ lounge wear relaxing upon said porch, as, unlike Ming & Manley (for the record, neither was Ming, at that particular time), that’s never really been my bag, although I’m friendly to such bags (obviously)(?)). (I love parentheses, don’t you?)
Sexton & I, except for one foray to the record store (for the historians among you, Sexton purchased a Frank Zappa live bootleg, as I recall & the record store was CD Central, which as of this writing, still lives among us (and has even out-lived the dominance of compact discs in the marketplace implicit in the store’s old name (dates it to the 90s for an incept date, don’t it?), although they still got ’em besides plenty o vinyl, etc.) on South Limestone St. in Lexington; stop in and tell owner Steve I said, “howdy”), remained on that porch, joking & jiving with the R&R. Sexton recited several spontaneous odes & he/we took notes in his notebook. Afterwards, we had settled on the notion of those notes being worked up into poems, to be a book written by Sexton and illustrated by yours unruly & that book would be called Kenttucky Pussy.
Sexton returned home to London, England (not to be confused with London, Kentucky). He typed up the notes as finished poems/into a manuscript with an author’s introduction and sent those to me. I set about illustrating in ink, with a ratio of 1 illustration per each poem.
In the meantime & in between time, artist Ben Durham, who had been looking over my shoulder now and again at the process, arranged to turn one of Sexton’s poems, “What Goes On in Lubock?” into a letterpress broadside, with the papal wave of the hand of Sexton’s permission, which was included in Johnny Brewton/X-Ray Book Co’s Bagazine #1 (2005), which we considered as something of an advance teaser for the forthcoming/in process book, as well as a stand-alone bit of art-printing by Durham.
Then, following a move in early 2005, despite being almost completed with the illustrations for the project, I could not locate the manuscript. I inquired, via email, to Sexton if he could send the poems again. But now Sexton himself could not locate the original travel notebook from which he had previously typed the poems, much less any other copies in any form of the original manuscript. I had the only real, finished copy of the manuscript in existence in my care & I blew it. We accepted the fate of our Pussy.
Every once in a while, over the years, I, with woe in my heart and without much expectation, would go looking in folders and boxes of my back-pages with the old worn-thin hope of finding the pages of that long lost Kenttucky Pussy manuscript. Flash forward to September or so of 2018 and in the process of moving once again, this time I was sorting through all the way to the bottom of a briefcase full of old original drawings of my own, not looking for anything in particular but hoping rather to downsize/re-organize some of my archives before the move. At the very bottom, what should I find there (you may see this reveal coming): but hot damn the lost Sexton Ming manuscript. Lost, yes: but now found.
While I never lost the illustrations I’d worked up in the 2004–5 season, having held onto them all these years, it no longer struck me as a “correct” note to try and use those/reproduce them in a direct fashion for the book in the now. Sexton’s words may have been locked in the amber-pulp of print, but my imagining them had wandered/roamed the world for 15 years. Reading over Sexton’s poems/returning to them, my previous/unused illustrations looked to me more akin to a “sketchbook,” one to work from in the now to translate/adapt Sexton’s writing into comics. There is much of the spirit of the old illustrations, but Kenttucky Pussy is now new artwork/comics.
So, here we are: today, even if I’m not sure what day or time it is, but that’s not the point. Was there a point? If we can make it to the finish line and reach Ken/Nix’s Kickstarter goal, the once lost but now found book, Kenttucky Pussy, will purr among us.
Oh, we’ve discussed the Ming-Thing, but, also: who/what am I (J.T. Dockery)? So good of you to ask that eternal question, to which I have the eternal answer: I don’t know. What I can say is that I’m a semi-dormant musician/performer (mostly dormant because of disabling health problems, file under: suffering from a form of arthritis for over 2 decades), but despite all the complications, I am a practicing cartoonist, among other things. Besides churning a whole wheel-barrow fulla zines, mini-comix, chapbooks, and who-knows-what-all print matter out there behind the barn circa 90s-Mid Oughts (often on my old Hanging Dog imprint aforementioned), more recent werks include: In Tongues Illustrated (2008), Spud Crazy w/ Nick Tosches (2011) & DESPAIR vol.s 1–3 (2013–15). Notable albums of sound, both 2005, include Here Lieth the Smacks! Protected by the Ejaculation of Serpents and Night Life w/Hasil Adkins, among many, many other even more obscure releases (allow me to refer you to Splat! by Cheeseburger & Fries (Jeffrey Scott Holland & myself), which appeared on Rural & Unusual Punishment, circa 1996, recorded in the Richmond (KY) Cemetery, where the earthly remains of writer Walter Tevis (The Hustler/The Man Who Fell to Earth, etc.) are at rest. My adaptations of late 19th century poems into comics (from DESPAIR vol. 1) by Stephen Crane from The Black Riders and Other Lines got a nod as a “Notable Comic” in the annual Best of American Comics (2014) by Series Editor, Bill Kartalopoulos.
III. Nix (ROCK N ROLL!!!) Comics!!!!!!
If you move past the degree of “Why Pussy?” to “Why Sexton?” to “Why Doc?” perhaps you dear reader have prepared your body & soul to ascend to the inner-chamber of the Mystery Cult of Ming to…WHY NIX COMICS? Well Kenttucky Pussy fits like a glove with Nix as Mr. Nix aka Mr. Ken Eppstein (you can just call him, “Sir,” or, really, “Ken” is fine, as he’s both distinguished & casual), naturally.
A former record store owner meta-morphed into an independent comics publisher (records + comic books are his passion, his soul, baby), Ken/Nix puts out not only print comics, but, hot dawg, sometimes he prints comics with finely-pressed vinyl records/soundtracks(!). Ain’t that something?
He’s reprinted several music themed comics, from Mark Rudolph’s Closing Doors (Rudolph being Mr. Metal as a an ink-slinger & his most recent tribute art/comics book featured Judas Priest, was published by Decibel magazine and featured art by This Reporter, file under: bonus trivia) & resurrected the 1980s music themed comics anthology from the original publications into one, collected as Pure Entertainment #1, featuring works by the likes of (including but not limited to) Mort Todd, Bob Camp & Peter Kuper. Nix PRESERVES the GOOD (rare and/or (almost) lost )STUFF.
Not to mention the two adaptations of writings from Bela Koe-Krompecher into comix-form(s): Do You Remember Rock N Roll Record Stores? about meeting the Ramones & Jim Shephard: Negotiate Nothing. But, gee, Wally, you might find yourself standing alone in a room asking yourself: but rock and roll and comics, sure, but, poetry and comics? Nix previous to now as even got you there, bubber, with last year’s poetry as comics — Beauty Found In Darkness —by Kent Grosswiler.
I met Ken circa 2012 when my dear friend Caitlin McGurk relocated from the library at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT (where McGurk & I both over-lapped as residents for a year or so, hanging in the CCS, etc. regional community) to take a gig at the Billy Ireland Library/Museum at Ohio State University (on the cusp of the Billy Ireland opening with a brand new, stand-alone facility/gallery — or, as I have joked with McGurk: comics got a Capitol Building and she has, whammo, got an office in that building!). Post-Vermont, I myself relocated back to my native soil of Kentucky, I started spending a fair amount of time in Columbus, Ohio and hanging in & around & with the comics/arts community in orbit of the Billy Ireland. My stock joke was that only a real KY hillbilly would treat Cbus, OH as a “vacation town.”
Running into Ken and some of his cohorts/pals/collaborators such as Bob Ray Starker, among many other goodly folks (let’s not forget the faculty & staff at Kafe Kerouac!), I fell into a group of people to whom I didn’t have to explain myself too much to, as they were already there. “So, yeah I did a book with Nick Tosches.” Didn’t have to explain that/Tosches. “You guys heard of Hasil Adkins?” No instructions necessary, with these literate hep cat rock n comics n rollers. Short-hand insta-comrades.
Well is that all not enough dazzling music + comics inter-facing in a Ken/Nix Comics-way fer ya?! Well, good, cause we got more in the guise of the forthcoming (and almost/seemingly damn well never to be) lost but now found KENTTUCKY PUSSY. If Nix ain’t the imprint for a resurrected book by a singular garage-psychedelic-art/letters/sound visionary (you might say “outsider” in relation to Ming and mean it (motherhumpin’ Irwin Chusid did (& he should know)) Sexton Ming & This Reporter, then there ain’t no damn imprint for it.
IV. Eyeball Kicks from Our Pussy/Journey Into Process In Which Everything 2004/5 is 2019 (Let’s Twist) Again.
And, yas, originals of the 2004/5 stand-alone but never used/never seen the light of day until now illustrations are for sale/available as rewards until 8/2/19 via our pre-order plunge-fest, HERE.
Le Process:
V. Our Kenttucky Pussy’s Sampler-Platter O Ming-Thing Sizzlers!
Yer still here?! Or mebbe you just leap-frog-scroll’d yourself down. Either way, pat yerself on your back. Open a cold one of your choice, Big Orange or udder-wise. If you’ve never listened to Sexton Ming before, sit back, relax, float yerself down-streaming & treat yourself like #1 (do you need to be reminded?) Or mebbe you’re well-versed in Ming already, honey (good on ya!). No matter, allow me to spin 12 tracks, totally free, for a limited-time only fer yas. Covers the years circa 1993–2005, with an emphasis on 98–05, as that’s the years I was seeing Ming on a regular basis & soaking up lots of the new releases served up on discs as they were coming out of his work-shed. leading up to the original time-period of our first Pussy inclinations, naturally. Just click it on over for this Doc-selected (you can’t even pay me to say “curated,” hoss, heh) Ming “greatest hits” written in the ether/world wide web, HERE.
For newer werks by the Ming, check out the multiple albums of his Porridge Van project on thee Bandcamp: HERE. Hell, there’s even a song on “Demonic” called Those Kentucky Boys from January this year what makes myth-o-mulch out of, you guessed it, folks such as myself, Manley & J.S. Holland…
Older werks, collabs with Billy Childish/Hangman Records, etc. are all hanging out there on the interwebs or even your local (quality) brick-and-mortar record stores, which, either way, hey hey ha ha, if you haven’t ever done before gone fishing in the stacks for Ming: I SUGGEST IT! I did warn you Sexton was/is prolific.
On behalf of Ming, myself, Nix Rock N Roll Comics & Our Pussy…
WE LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU IN THE FUNNY PAGES.
— J.T. Dockery, Summer 2019, Bumfuk, Cantukee
