BABY DYNAMITE - DUG UP FROM THE GROUND
If you’ve arrived here from the instagram pic I planted this morning, these three songs and a pair of boots are all I have left of Baby Dynamite.
Pulled from a very fragile tape cassette, I had to capture these from a tape player transferred into my phone headphone jack via an iRig…
White Knuckle Ride: I wrote this to be our ‘single’. Our Livin’ On A Prayer kinda thing…
Creature Feature: I pulled this one together either for Alice Cooper or because I wanted to be Alice Cooper. I always meant to give it to him but never got around to it. I guess there’s still time if I could figure out the correct road to take…
Hot Cherie: To prove the level we wanted to be playing at even though we had no money, I dug up this song from an old demo of a band I used to know called Brunette to record:
I wasn’t going to pass it off as our own by any means but I wasn’t exactly going to tell anybody either. As it panned out, a week or so after recording this, a band turned up on the scene called Hardline featuring members of Brunette and freaking Journey! JOURNEY! My secret probably wouldn’t stay a secret for long but I still think it’s a great song. Funny.
1993. It was a weird time. Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains had arrived. The sands beneath our feet were moving fast.
The only other thing I have to say is that we recorded these in a bedroom in five days with the most basic of computer equipment.
#GoodTimes #RockNRoll
THE MYSTERY OF THE VAGINA
Man… you know you’re tired when you catch a glimpse of an advert that features a graphic of a hair follicle and you think it’s a vagina.
It also says a lot about advertising when you weren’t surprised in the slightest that you think you’re watching an advert on early evening TV for something to do with a vagina. What they might be wanting to sell you on the vaginal front is a mystery but it’s 2019 and the world will try and sell you anything if it thinks it can make some kind of margin on it.
In only a kind of related subject, earlier today I was running some admin on the site here and one of the links took me to an article on personal branding… and I read it out of curiosity. Then I read some more articles on it. It’s a real world thing that people are concerned about. If you don’t have a ‘personal brand’, how do people know what you do? If they don’t know what you do, how are they ever going to invest their time and money in you?
It’s a good question and an important one, whatever business you’re in but there’s a part of me that simply reacts with: ‘this person is trying to sell me a personal brand message’ and I don’t much like being treated like an idiot… and I switch off because I like to discover things for myself.
Whatever happened to discovery? Led Zeppelin were a mysterious band because they never talked about anything. Kiss were mysterious because they didn’t have any human faces. Alice Cooper was mysterious because well… he was just mysterious.
Mysterious = people want to know more. The less they can get to know, the more interested they are in you and what you have to offer.
Much like the vagina really - though it’s probably also fair to say the opposite is true regarding the penis if your interest lies on the other side of the sex fence - it would be a worrying state of affairs if you mistook a hair follicle for a penis though.
What is it with people and hair follicles these days? Humanity has gone through millennia of coping without being stripped to the bone of its hair but now, you’re an ugly beast of a creature if you keep your hair anywhere but your head? I can’t believe people buy into it but they do. Beards are in? Seventies porno bushes are out?
Talking of keeping your hair on your head, I was thinking about cutting all of mine off again just to drive a stake through my own personal brand.
Like Kiss, the make-up over-rode the great songs. Like Alice, the chicken thing drew away from the fact that he was probably the greatest lyricist of the seventies. Like Zeppelin, the black magic drew away from the playing… then again, they all survived because they meant what they did and did it for long enough that people knew they weren’t lying.
What did I learn today?
Keep the hair.
Keep writing.
Don’t worry about ‘personal branding’, if you’re real, why would you need to brand anything at all?
If people don’t know who you are… why not?
Vaginas do not look like hair follicles.
Probably best I get some sleep before writing anything else.
THE PROBLEM WITH NUMBER 10 AND THE WHITEHOUSE
It’s been staring us in the face for so long, you’d be right to be worried that so many people had missed it - and I would venture to say Number 10 and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are not the only governmental offenders either. It’s something that transcends the colour of any party you purport to lead too - and there’s a lot to be said for that. Colour doesn’t belong in politics in more ways than one.
I’m talking about pets - or very specifically, dogs.
It’s hardly a surprise that Moby Dick is the first president in nearly two hundred years not to have had a pet of any kind since James K. Polk (1845-1849) and I’ll slap a crisp ten pound note on the table that says that’s the first time you’ve ever even heard his name never mind knew he was a President. (Even Andrew Johnson (1865-1869) whose picture belies him as the most miserable president ever to serve, apparently fed a couple of white mice he found in his bedroom.)
A cat - which is what we currently have at Number 10 in the shape of Larry, unless he was evicted with Mrs May’s pride - doesn’t really count in politics. A cat is far too independent for a political household. It will find a rub behind the ear from anybody in the house and be truly satisfied with whoever it chooses to adopt.
A dog on the other hand will remind you every opportunity it gets that something needs attention around here other than your own ego.
To not have a pet at all just hoists a red flag the size of a bus in the air that you don’t give a fuck about anything except you own agenda… and if we look closely, you’ll find that’s exactly what’s going on over there, but let’s bring it back home:
There’s never been a dog in Number 10 as long as I’ve been alive and one is very much needed. Preferably one that needs to be walked properly twice a day. When you’re running a country, you should be getting out there with other dog owners (pretty much a microcosm of the general population anyway and their opinions will save you a lot of messing about with referendums), working off your noodles for lunch and generally paying attention to the fact that there are other things in the world than your own needs - aka: the contents of your bank balance.
So far as I can work out, the last PM to have a dog was Churchill. He had a few in fact and at one point in time, also a lion (a gift) which he swiftly handed over to London Zoo. As we all know, Churchill got stuff done. He also smoked a fair old whack and had a tattoo. Hell, even his mother had a snake tattoo on her wrist. I like the guy.
For all his faults (and I guess that depends on where you live), even Mr Putin has dogs. Four of them last time I counted. For good or ill, you can’t deny he is hyper-aware of other people, though what he chooses to do with that knowledge is for a bigger mind than mine to analyse. He’s also an active participant in the conservation of many endangered Russian dog breeds. Incidentally, he too had a big cat - a tiger - gifted to him that he also gave to a zoo. Where do these foreign dignitaries get lions and tigers to give away like others do with Belgian chocolate?
I don’t have to mention Mr Obama’s dogs. They probably even have their own twitter account but again, proof positive that a dog will make you aware of other life forms outside of your own five inch aura.
Macron - a guy I kinda like out there in the political arena - has Nemo. Over in Canada, Justin Trudeau has a dog that may or may not exist called Kenzie. He was spoken about and photographed once and then never heard from again… hopefully he is still around, but the fact remains that even if he had to give him away, Trudeau recognised the potential of letting the public know he had one.
Off the radar of (most of) the world, is the Finnish president, Sauli Niinistö, who has a Boston terrier called Lennu. In my opinion, there’s another country with its shit mostly together in the big scheme of things.
Taking it to the extreme, ex-Aussie PM, Malcolm Turnbull, even ran a dog blog written in the voice of his dog JoJo. Maybe that’s taking it too far and would explain why the word ‘ex’ appears in that sentence.
Hell… even Kim Jong-un (who was rumoured to have fed his subversive uncle to a pack of revenues dogs - a rumour that began with a satirists cartoon) is a huge dog lover. What, with Love Island making all the news last month because a man with a beard humped a girl with hair when she should have been going out with some other dude with a beard, it probably didn’t make the news that Kim had recently gifted Moon Jae-in (the South Korean president - see, you didn’t know that either did you) a couple of North Korean Pungsan dogs to improve their relations.
You see it all coming together?
If Mr Johnson outlawed puppy farming to the tune of £100,000 in fines for those caught in the act and took on a dog from a rescue centre while also bringing back the dog licence at £100 a year and throwing a cool-ish £1m into something like Guide Dog training, he’d surely have most of the country at least on his side regardless of what happens on October 31st.
And if it all turned to dust in his hands, one single picture of him with his dog would have most of us forgetting at least for a little while.
Laughs aside, there’s a lot of truth in this if you toy with it. A dog will absolutely make you pay attention to the world around you.
Down at the bottom end of the scale, if you can’t handle your dog because it asks too much of you, you should probably cash in your chips and not be a world leader at all.
Or you could simply step up to the mark and be the person your dog thinks you are, then we’d all be cooking with gas.
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THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES
In the papers last week - over in The Guardian - there’s a piece about Simon Armitage, the new Poet Laureate, and his first poem in the role. It’s about the moon landing and to say it’s underwhelming in the extreme is an understatement. Don’t take my word for it, you can read it yourself here. I’m sure he’s a nice guy - I even quite like some of his older material - but that particular piece… that the whole world is looking at because of who he is and what it’s about, just plain sucks for the job in hand.
Can I do better? Not sure. Let’s have a stab, live and unedited:
THE DAY THE EARTH ALMOST STOOD STILL
Cheese
Fucking cheese
He was so surprised, he said it out loud
“Fucking cheese. Who woulda thought!”
Hits the button on his chest to open comms back to Apollo
Armstrong: Buzz, turn off the cameras
Aldrin: Problem?
Armstrong: Not so much a problem…
He thinks for a moment
Armstrong: Just turn off the cameras and come see for yourself
Two stand on the surface of the moon
Two wonder what they’re going to tell the folks back home
Aldrin: I vote we say nothing
Armstrong: Copy that
Aldrin: But we could take a few handfuls back up for lunch right?
Armstrong: I see no harm in a few scraps. I think there’s even bread of a kind up there somewhere
Aldrin: Cheese. Who woulda thought
Armstrong: That’s what I said! One small lunch for us but it might too much of a giant step for mankind if we tell the truth
Aldrin: Hey that’s good. You should use that when we set the cameras rolling again
YOU EVER READ A BOOK?
You ever read a book and think, ‘Damn, I wish I had written that’? (Maybe it’s a writer-thing. Maybe folk that don’t write ever think such things at all). There have been a few for me over the years. Some of them are pretty obvious but perhaps one of the less obvious ones for me is Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. It was one of those books that drew me in from afar and burrowed itself into my psyche, maybe not as much as when I discovered Carlos Castaneda as a teenager but it was the same kind of thing.
Maybe it was the right book at the right time - that happens sometimes.
Anyway, there I was chewing over some book projects I’ve had on the back burner for a while when my buddy Wayne suggested I write something similar... there is a whole train of thought behind this but if I lay it all out here, the idea will lose its sting, so I’ll keep the detail to myself. The concept has legs and I found myself thinking about it pretty much all day long.
Whether I do or I don’t end up writing such a thing, the very thought of getting down to the business of a serious book (I use the term loosely considering what it would be based around) means you have to consider your own beliefs about the world. Do they stand up to close scrutiny and appear strong enough to use as a foundation to build on?
The jury is still out on that but I think it’s worth a shot. The biggest kick I could ever get out of writing would be for somebody to say “I wish I had written that”.
Er… yeah… that’s all. Consider this a thinking out loud blog post as I get back into the discipline of blogging as well as writing.
WELCOME HOME
There’s few better feelings than getting together with your bro’s, eating a few bowls of Chinese food, sinking a few drinks and checking in… which is exactly what I did a couple of weeks back with my old buddies from, well, forever:
Yep… I look like their pet dog that got lost in the woods for a while.
It’s funny how time never changes anything at all between us - and the line in that Bon Jovi song about being there ‘if I got that call in the dead of the night’… that’s these guys - though in the real world, I guess it might take me a while, but still.
When I came back home, it got me to thinking. You always think you’ve got all the time in the world but you haven’t. All you’ve got is right now. So without being a sentimental fool about things, figured I had better get back to what it is I had decided I should be doing with my life… which would be writing books that might make people laugh now and again but also give them pause to realise I’d cut them with a pen so sharp they didn’t even realise there was any blood and writing songs that do the polar opposite.
It always sounded like a good life plan but sometimes, you can get distracted by the noise of the universe - which I did.
But now I’m not, thus, the rebirth of the website and the blog.
What might happen here is anybody’s guess but my intentions are good, so that’s OK.
Home Alone
Aside from Hector, I have the house to myself for nine days. Totally against the grain of my soul, I’ve mapped out a ‘plan’ for how to spend those days wisely… and contrary to popular opinion, they don’t contain Pot Noodles and an abundance of Netflix.
I’ve got the next issue of the magazine under control (which can only be done with late nights, coffee and being smart), which has freed up some time for galavanting with a pen through some more of what will be my next novel (though it will be a short one - I have plan on that front too) while also flirting dangerously with a Gretsch and GarageBand.
And while I was making pasta this evening (not from scratch, so that should read ‘watching it boil’) I thought it almost looked like a life and I wouldn’t be far off. I might not be swimming in a pool of plenty - what committed minimalist is - but the wheels are moving in the right direction and that’s good enough for me.
Feeling pleased with myself that the plan worked out (at least for day one) I went looking for a print of this but came up empty handed:
That would look great on the wall around here. Maybe I’ll pursue it a little harder if tomorrow rolls in the same direction.
VINDICATION
You know those times when you think about something really hard for a long period, decide that you are indeed correct and then act on it… only to find that months down the line, nobody else thought your idea held any water?
I had one of those a couple of years back when I decided that social media was not a good place for me, closed all my accounts and threw all my eggs into the basket you see here. I figured some other people might see my reasoning also - and there were lots of reasons, such as: twitter being useless for saying anything because everybody else was also talking at the same time every second of the day, instagram/facebook being run by people (ie: your ‘marketing partner on the internet’) that thought it was OK to let other people post some foul comments/videos despite what came out of their mouths to the contrary… that’s a hot topic this week for all the wrong reasons too. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for me.
Anyway, I stuck with it and kept on walking away but I never saw anybody else figure out the same thing (maybe I was looking in the wrong place) but yesterday - being as I’m on a book binge at the moment - I was catching up around the place and saw that Joe Hill had resumed blogging. I like Joe a lot - his comic book series Locke & Key is quite superb.
In his ‘returning to blogging’ blog post, he wrote this piece and I hope he doesn’t mind me grabbing a piece from it (he really won’t mind at all if you go buy some of his books) to illustrate the point:
“It can be my space or it can be MySpace; something I own or something that belongs to Mark Zuckerberg. I went with me.”
Bang on the nose - took the words right out of my mouth. Think about it for yourself. It’s not easy getting out of the cult/s and staying out. It’s baffling as to how you might be able to make a difference to what you’re doing without them but in all honesty, I don’t recall ever selling a book from a social media post. Working those socials until you die is neat for some people who can make it work and don’t mind being associated with them but it’s not for me… and hey… my friends know my phone number and my email address so I’m not missing out on that front. Hell… some of them even come round.
Read that piece from Joe. It makes a lot of sense. At some point, you really do have to stand for something.
OTHER PEOPLE’S STUFF
Sometimes, things can pass you by for no reason at all. This album - Dregen - is five years old (maybe more) and I didn’t know it had even come out but this weekend, I found it and made everything right in the world again. If you’ve ever surveyed the landscape and considered rock n roll as you once loved it to be dead and buried… dream on sucker. What a great record this is for all the right reasons and somehow, digging it out of the earth with my bare hands has made it even better.
Meanwhile, I went wandering in search of wholesome brain food and Daisy Jones and The Six might be a very decent meal. I haven’t started this yet but everything is pointing towards it being a class act for all the right reasons and if my memory serves me well, it’s also heading for Netflix as a series sometime soon. I’m hoping it will shape up to be one of those books I’ll finish and wish I had written:
We appear to be in a great place for books at the moment. Despite - or in spite - of the world proclaiming print is dead, I swear I am finding more things to read than ever… or maybe I’m just open to different kinds of things, but I don’t think so. I’m treading the same path I have always trodden really. For instance, I picked up Gwendy’s Button Box - a novella by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar - and umm… sat until it was finished (bar a couple of breaks for coffee).
King has seriously come back to the table recently. This is a great read and - with a nod to the post I made a couple of posts ago about the Pushkin Vertigo novellas - I’m seeing an awful lot to love about the novella these days. So much so, that as a writer, I’m thinking the format might suit me more than anything else. There’s something immensely satisfying about them that I can really relate too. Stairway to Heaven is a fantastic (perhaps the greatest) piece of music to get involved in but sometimes you simply need that four minutes of Back in Black to plug your spirit into the mains of the universe.
The days are gone when I had the capacity for huge novels like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (maybe not forever but certainly for the foreseeable). Not that I don’t have the attention span for such things - rather that I have other things to do. At least I think that’s the reason.
Maybe I just like reading novellas and that’s reason enough.
Sion Smith: King of the Novella. It has a ring I could get used to… and more importantly, a shape to it that suits my brain.
Now and again, I dig some poetry too. Not every day like some people do, but occasionally my heart demands it. This is pretty cool if you like such things:
Oh… I forgot about this - mostly because I bought it, tossed it in the car and haven’t actually been out in the car since:
Never really paid a lot of attention to John Cooper Clarke’s work but I went into HMV to see why some Canadian thought it still had legs as a brand and for a fiver, I figured I’d give it a whirl. It’s the kind of thing I usually look at and think “I could do that” and then don’t do because when you really listen, find it’s harder to get right than you ever thought it could be.
But hey… the thought is there.
I have a dog to walk and work to do and so should you.
Later Gators…
WHEN THE GODS DON'T WANT YOU AROUND ANY MORE...
…they send Mother Nature to do their dirty work.
I swear, if I had been wearing earbuds, this would have come down on top of me… but I don’t wear earbuds on a dog walk and my life was saved by the unholy crack it gave before it separated us. Hector had run on ahead and found himself trapped on the other side (not the supernatural other side, just the other side of the tree). I climbed over it to get to him but we sure as hell weren’t coming back that way anytime soon.
It was pretty scary actually, particularly when…
…not 15 minutes later when we had abandoned that neck of the woods because there were too many trees that didn't look stable, this happened. Again, right in front of our eyes. This time we were a little further away but after a quick whip around this field, we went home because you can only push your luck so far in a 80mph wind.
Not So Secret Agents
It’s the London Book Fair next week. I’m on the case. Over this last eight years, I’ve been to what must rack up to hundreds of conventions but I’m not sure what to expect at such a thing as this so I shall simply turn up and roll with it.
Yes - you can read between the lines and discover that it’s time to search for an agent. There’s dozens of things I want to do with a pen out there and I can’t do it alone... no matter how much I think I’d like to: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough go pro’. Hunter S Thompson always did have a way with words. Ain’t nobody going to be saying that about me without an agent in my corner and you know... one day, I’d really like them to.
Just one person.
Preferably not my mother.
I’ll keep you clued in.
Meantime, I made some plans for getting around the planet (in association with day job of course): Florence (natch), Luxembourg, Neumünster in Germany, Helsingborg in Sweden, Odense in Denmark, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Gdansk in Poland and New York are all on the list.
I probably won’t keep you clued in about much of that until I have enough material to release Cities of the Dead V2… and then all will become clear by itself.
And then I bought Hector a new collar tag - Aladdin Sane style:
NOIR. SHORT NOIR AT THAT.
Some time ago, I picked up a copy of Dard’s Bird In A Cage… then last week, I came by The Wicked Go To Hell and fell in love with both of them…
So much that I went ahead and ordered these yesterday:
There’s something about these short novels that really works for me right now. I think they all clock in at around 120 pages and don’t take long to read really. Not that I struggle to read a thick novel at all, but perhaps there’s a time and a place for the shorter novel in my life whereas I’ve usually tended to dismiss them. I’ve got work lying all over the place - magazines, songs, book projects - and those things can be time consuming in the extreme but a day in which I don’t read is a day I failed to live my life properly.
Anyway, Pushkin Vertigo have a great collection of these hit n run length novels out on the market - they’ve all got great covers too and because they’re mostly all translations of foreign authors, they are far from run of the mill stylistically.
I’m finding a lot to love here.
As a little appendix to this, on the Pushkin website, they have a page about book design and how important it is. Damn… all publishers should host a page like that. Here’s an extract:
Book design means a lot more than making a book look good. It should be an appeal to (or, if you like, a seduction of) the prospective reader, a manifestation of the qualities of the writing, a primer of expectations. A book should feel right in the hand, and present itself, and its text, well to the eye.
That means that the details matter: not only the cover design and illustrators, but the paper, the binding, the typeface inside, the positioning of the textblock and a dozen more details.
So we work hard to get it right, with great book designers like David Pearson, Clare Skeats and Nathan Burton. And when we do get it right, each of our books should be a beautiful object you want to keep forever. And it should disappear completely as you read.
It might not be top of everybody’s list of important things when it comes to a book but you know… if you get it wrong, it can kick a book over the cliff into oblivion no matter how good the story is.
That last sentence though: it should disappear completely as you read - that’s genius.
Always judge a book by its cover. It’s a great indication about how much the people behind it care and believe in it.
THAT FORWARD LOOKING THING CALLED MOMENTUM
One band I have never seen live and actually want to experience is Alice In Chains. I was trading trans-atlantic demo tapes of these guys back when they were a very different looking band in the late eighties and nobody had yet coined the word ‘grunge’ as a handy term for any band with a guitar that came out of Seattle. So today, I decided to bite the bullet on this tour even though I despise Wembley with a passion:
The new album is a killer. Should be neat.
I’ve been chewing over how to boost my profile as a writer this week. There’s probably a million things I could do but as alluded to somewhere on this blog a year or so back, I see little point/mileage in doing such a thing through social media like a blind digital samurai throwing mud until it sticks so I started fishing with a long rod.
There’s a couple of radio stations out there that are decent, brave and forward thinking enough to have had poets in to talk about their work recently. In fact, some of them are turning out better programming than the BBC so that’s top of the list for me over the next week or so.
There are still a fair few indie bookshops around too that are worth investigating. The main drag now is to figure out exactly what it is I would do when I got there that's beneficial to them - because I don’t mind going anywhere for anything. So begins a tour of the internet in search of good ideas and then carving a hole in the calendar to how I can make it work.
I can see the main bone of contention being why anybody should be bothered going out of the house to listen to somebody talk and read that they’ve never heard of before. It’s a good question and one that I’ll answer with the assistance of a lot of coffee. I’ve probably got quite a decent amount of collateral if I look at it analytically enough.
Kind of associated - but only from the point of standing up in front of people who are waiting to be impressed - I decided I had best put a strap on a guitar and start working on my material standing up because trust me… playing standing up is way different from sitting on a stool. Everything is about is different as it can ever be. It’s getting there but then you introduce ‘the mirror’ into the equation and that’s a whole other ballgame in being self-conscious… well, it is when you’re not 14 anymore.
Then again, there’s only one way to move forwards and that’s by putting one foot in front of the other and as I said to somebody the other day who was having some concerns of their own: “There’s plenty of fucking idiots out there succeeding - I wouldn't worry about it too much. Don’t be a dick, be cool to people and do what you do... or don’t do it.”
Which is good advice for just about anything.
I’ll leave you with this. We just pulled together a neat feature to go into issue 300 of the mag on this guy - Andreas Vrontis - because anybody who can put a great tattoo of Hemingway together out of typewriter letters is worth spending time with. Brilliant.
Issue 300! That’s quite a landmark huh.
LIONS
Daughter. Lions.
Lions. Daughter.
I spent the morning at the zoo today hanging around in sub-zero wind while my daughter scored herself some work experience at said zoo working with the Big Cats. I probably make it sound a bit more exciting than it will actually be but it sure as hell beats sitting around in an office doing a whole bunch of pointless stuff that nobody else wants to do and then wandering over to a shop to buy a bag of crisps for lunch.
She is very pleased. I am very pleased. We are both still trying to figure out what we really think of zoos - I’ve had a lot longer than she has to work at that and still can’t decide - but she wants to spend her life doing conservation-type stuff so we’ll roll with the positivity because it puts things in the right column for doing the right kind of things when the right time comes.
She is eighteen in a few weeks. Not sure my opinion will count for a whole lot one day soon but you never know… I might get to be one of ‘those’ Dads that retains the X-Factor long after it should have run out.
My buddy JJ mailed me a link to a story about writing yesterday… it goes like this:
“INJECT is a free digital tool that can help stimulate journalists’ creativity by providing them with a variety of perspectives on a specified topic. Journalists can use it as an idea generator, a suggestion machine, or an inspiration tool that can help them find innovative ways to tell their story.”
It goes on to say:
“Journalists, today, have less time, and fewer resources, to create ideas and write stories. What INJECT will do is to make journalists as creative as they are at the moment, but more quickly and efficiently. The INJECT tools will do this by implementing strategies that will enable them to undertake some of the work of experienced journalists more quickly, to permit and support journalists to spend more time on creative thinking and story development.”
Neil Maiden, INJECT’s Project Leaderand Professor of Digital Creativity at Cass Business School, London”
I do NOT class myself as a journalist even though I edit a huge international magazine. I do write - and I write a lot - so I feel I’m at least reasonably qualified to say this man is talking with his mouth full.
Journalists today have way more time than they ever did. They can write on the move, ship stories in at the click of a button, take a photograph to go with it if needs be… text their buddies if they’re in a hole, fly relatively cheaply around the world… tech is their best freaking friend on so many fronts so I don’t know about that ‘fewer resources’ bit either. The problem facing journalists is not creativity but actually getting paid to do good work in an environment that’s shrinking financially but growing digitally (and for free) on a daily basis.
As always, if you have the penchant to write and feel like you don’t have enough time or resources, step away from the bullshit drain of social media, turn off the TV and the other four devices you have at your disposal, grab a stub of a pencil, the back of an envelope and get to fucking work. Write something meaningful. The world is on its knees for quality journalism.
You do not need an app with a pop-up bar to give you ideas - that makes you a computer operator. What you need to do is get to work. The only way you can be a writer is to write. To be a journalist… journal.
Using this app will not help make you a better journalist.
And it sure as hell won’t make you into a lion.
TROUBADOURS
I went on a shopping mission this morning. I felt the need to lounge around in the swamp with the greats and came away armed with this:
And this:
And this:
And this:
The conclusion that I have come to before opening any of them is that these artists were successful because they went out on a limb and did their own thing. Interestingly perhaps in the big scheme of things, I would say that none of them will ever be in the Top 100 singers of any list, ever (Kate could scrape it maybe) but they should all be in the Top Five of any list that looks at storytelling songwriters. Call it poetry if you like but it’s more than that. It’s full on Troubadourness (I don’t think that’s an actual word but it is now) and I never really noticed that about myself before - that storytellers in music are my ‘thing’. This is a good thing to know about myself as I push forward with the whole Deadbirds project.
(Note: because Troubadour is an ancient word, it is thus the male description of one. A female troubadour is called a Trobairitz.)
Given that my love for him is boundless and such a thing does not exist, I got to thinking that maybe I should put together an authorised (which might take a while) complete lyric book of Alice Cooper’s work. He is one of the best the world has ever seen without question and that talent is absolutely overshadowed by escapades with chickens and guillotines… and he also falls neatly into my ‘not the best singer in the world’ thesis. I’m not saying none of these guys can sing - I’m just talking technically. More to the point, I don’t think any of them ever cared either. The point is to deliver the song and tell the story not to shatter a glass at twenty paces.
Maybe that’s the payoff? It’s sure as hell a payoff I would take every day of the week over somebody fawning over my voice - not that such a thing is ever likely to happen.
Not relevant to any of that, but did you know there was a theory that Scooby Doo is a collective hallucination of The Gang who are all tripping on LSD? I thought I was well versed in pop culture but that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that floated down the river. We can only assume it was a bad batch of CIA infused drugs when somebody threw Scrappy into the arena and spoiled the fun forever.
Just say no, right?
Finally… I’m not really a t-shirt kinda guy anymore but this looks like a valuable addition to a limited wardrobe:
LONE WOLF II
I love seeing a book of my own out in the wild... this copy of Coffee House arrived at its new home this morning and probably won’t look this new for long but I’m putting a tick in the win column over making the cover the same colour as this coffee:
Here’s that very same book a day or so later:
I love writing books.
It’s been a full-on week so far out here. Carved my way with a scythe through a stack of day-job work, spent some time with my buddy Adrian beating the living daylights out of that new Gretsch, walked across the hills with Hector to the tune of about 16,000 steps a day (I must stop looking at that stupid app thing) and I’m beat. I also need a good night’s sleep and a shave.
It’s my small persons eighteenth birthday in about ten weeks. After much discussion, I reluctantly agreed that maybe… just maybe… it would be OK if she went away by herself (with a friend) somewhere exciting. She floated Paris as an idea but I think I’ve rewired that machine so that Paris now means Florence. Paris is cool and everything… but for a young girl… I wasn’t super happy about that. Florence on the other hand is reasonably small and super safe so far as I have ever seen when I’ve been out there.
It’s a big step for me to cope with this. We have reached an age in which some of her friends now have cars and drive. An age in which she can make plans that involve aeroplanes… and fistfuls of other unholy things. It scares me to fucking death and back again.
There is only one thing for it. I’m going to print a few of these and hide them in her pockets, suitcase, purse… you name it, I will find a home for it:
I heard a good line on a TV show tonight. It goes like this: “It’s become fashionable not to be believe in anything except your own personal gain.”
There’s more truth in that one line than there is on the whole front page of the BBC News site - or any news site for that matter - but maybe one day soon, the nation will swing back and start believing in satyrs and Gef the talking mongoose again... now there’s a story you don’t hear very often anymore:
Look it up.
Meanwhile, I spent most of the afternoon working on a song called The Wolves In The Radio (that I’m loving very much) and any moment now, I’m heading to the place known as ‘ratting a pencil between your teeth’ to wrap up something I started on yesterday before the threads of it disappear forever.
...and then I might just abandon what remains of the day and read.
And maybe I should finish off those cookies before they go stale. That would be a rea shame.
on writers block, lions and dick dastardly
One of my freelancers asked me for couple more days on a feature they were writing earlier this week… the answer is ‘of course you can’. No editor who has done it long enough will ever hand out a deadline that can’t be moved by at least 10 days.
I’ve never had writers block. I don’t even think it exists - you sure can’t tell your GP about it - but I see how easy it might be to throw it out as an ‘excuse’. It’s a great phrase to pile more negative thoughts into a writers head though… like we needed any more self doubt than we already have, huh?
If you think you have it, all that’s happened is you turned up at the office when it was shut. Simple as that. Great creative ideas don’t line up around the block waiting to be released at 9am and wrapped up nicely by 5pm. They never have and they never will. You can fluff it and sometimes set fire to the world, as proved by huge writing factories like Mills & Boon, the pulp publishers of days gone by or songwriting in Nashville but somewhere along the road of doing it like that, two grammes of your soul will float away on a passing breeze at the same time every week. Thus:
If you want to see a pigeon of an idea, just go outside at 9am.
If you want to see a lion of an idea, you will need patience, stealth and a pen in your back pocket.
Anybody can catch a pigeon (except Dick Dastardly) but a lion will elude you no end and the pay-off for your patience will make you feel like a God.
Drat, Drat, Double And Triple Drat… I really want one of these.
I assume the whole 9 to 5 idea of a working life was spawned by the industrial revolution and then, as years turned into decades, just became ‘a thing’ everybody took for granted. It’s no way to live but it’s a fantastic way to die if you’ve got a creative bent inside.
Staring at a screen is a horrible way to die. That’s why I write longhand. It was probably OK to stare at a sheet of paper in your typewriter for a while but staring at your screen leads to youtube which leads to facebook which leads to twitter… which leads to you dying slowly in front of all your followers… only there will be nobody there to help you because they are all dying too. Not all suicides are recorded.
For instance, this morning, An Idea With Legs passed through my head but I was out with Hector and the idea was gone before I could catch it. That’s how writing works sometimes and that’s OK. Maybe another writer will fish it out of the sky and do something with it. Maybe it will land on a mountain in Japan and not be found for five years.
If you find yourself unable to write: take the dog out, go do the food shopping, do something Joe Wicks tells you to for 20 minutes. Have a shave, look at yourself naked in a mirror and wonder what happened… but never, ever seek out the company of others. By being a writer, there are parts of your brain that are hard-wired to act like buckets put under a leaking roof. What you don’t want is other people throwing their ideas into your buckets… that’s called being a journalist and is a very different thing.
I guess the best way to sum it up is to steal something valuable from the past. Something like this:
"There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays."
Toni Morrison
Footnote: While I was looking for that pic above for DD&M, I found this:
Brilliant. Nobody sat around staring at a sheet of paper to create that. I guarantee such a thing turned up while this artist was washing the car or putting a wardrobe together.
Fact.
Sheep In Wolf's Clothing
Over the last few months - which might even drift into years - there's been much talk of how nobody reads blogs anymore. I have thoroughly wholesome opinions on this. There are many good reasons this is happening and the best of them all is that a huge percentage of blogs are nothing more than self serving posturing, devoid of content and treat their readers like idiot sheep... and your first mistake would be to think I was one of them.
A quick tour of some book review sites, for example, would have you believe that in order to get the maximum reading enjoyment from a book, you need pristine white sheets, a brand new mug filled with freshly brewed coffee everyday and flowers. I do not lie:
I for one, do not treat my books like this. If it's worthy of my time, I scowl at those pages from start to finish until they give up their secrets. My bed does not look like the one pictured above - it has paws prints on it today - and I sure as hell wouldn't leave a new friend by the riverbank with a broken spine just so that my blog looked sexy.
What kind of person breaks the spine of a friend for a photo opportunity anyway?
Welcome to the new dawn in which you can invite yourself to any party you choose and pretend to be the host as devoted followers fawn at your feet.
There was once a time when you hosted a blog because you had something to say, then, as ever, bright sparks rubbed together and figured out how to make money from it and now they are full of keywords disguised as paragraphs. Their only purpose is to drive people to the cliff and eventually take their money or get numbers up for some reason - usually both.
Most of the people I would like to read a few posts a week from have hung up their gloves. Neil Gaiman is barely hanging on in there, Nick Hornby was self admittedly awful at it. Joe Hill killed his off. Many have drifted off to instagram, tumblr and twitter to say their piece - probably because they’re easy platforms with decent apps on the phone - but the problem with that is the problem of all social media... your reader can, and will, wander off to another party in the blink of an eye and forget you existed in a second. These people I mention probably have better things to do with their lives than post regularly and are therefore bad examples, but somewhere out there, there must be people who can write who have something to say. Surely the idea of the blog is not dead beyond repair. (Edit: Cherie Priest is pretty good at it still and she writes good books too, so the concept is not totally dead.)
It's not only book bloggers though - there are far worse culprits. I see my fair share of tattoo bloggers doing the same thing. Music bloggers are equally guilty. Take away the pretty pictures and what you're left with is a hollow shell of a person with a keyboard and a camera at their disposal standing naked in the shop window with a sign hanging around their neck that says "I Want To Be In The Industry Of Cool" - on the back it will say "And I Will Do Anything To Be Part Of It."
My friend John recently dived into his garage to rescue hundreds of vinyl albums that had been in storage and had gone mouldy. It took him a few days to sort out, clean them up and sadly, some of the classics didn't make it. The pictures ain't sexy and damn, that would be a great blog/website. Album by album: did it survive? How much of a heartbreak is it to watch it go into the bin? Why did I buy it in the first place? Is this record even mine? He has better things to do than this however, but you get the drift. I would sign up for a blog like that pronto.
The dam however, is broken. You'll never get the beaten up genie back in the bottle and while I thoroughly endorse anybody with the inclination to put up a site and spend their time building a presence for their passion, I - and the rest of the sentient world - would appreciate it very much if you dug with a spade for treasure instead of kneeling in the sand licking rocks.
Posing for pretty pictures is not what books like to do with their lifespan.
THE JANUARY MAN
“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas."
– George Orwell, Down And Out In Paris And London
Outside, we are three days into 2019. I didn’t do a whole lot on the 1st, but over the last couple of days, this has taken up the night shift like a sponge - and for once, all of that cover blurb is pretty accurate. I’m enjoying it very much… it’s good for the soul to visit a different country for my noir kicks too. Scandinavia was starting to get just a little bit claustrophobic.
I kind of like January for the same reason I think The Fellowship of the Ring is the best in the Lord of the Rings sequence. It is fuelled by Hope.
Hope for a better tomorrow is as good as the human psyche can possibly get. Nothing beats hope. It’s the one emotion we don’t share with the rest of the animal kingdom. If you were of a cynical mind, I guess you could say hope was nothing more than lying to yourself, but it’s way more than that.
January comes around and if last year sucked diesel through a plastic straw for you, you can square it off, stuff it in a box and forget it ever happened. Hope is good like that. Hope is the universe’s way of forcing you to take a lungful of sea air when all you had been sniffing before was fumes.
Thus, I have hope. Hope that this year, I can work smarter (and therefore faster) than I did last year (during which I thought about things way too much) and commit more of the things stewing inside my head to paper or guitar. Hell, there was so much hope lying around the house a couple of days ago, we even scoped out some houses in Normandy for a possible future move. That’s not a place I had ever considered living at all, but now I’ve had a look around at what’s available, I have ummm… hope.
As is also traditional around this time of year, I laid out some of those things called ‘plans’. So far, it’s amounted to making a few travel plans that will take in my annual ‘sabbatical’ to Florence sometime in October, repeated trips to Poland and Belgium for work and I’m scoping out some new places to investigate simply because I should. Considering Copenhagen is one of my favourite places on Earth, it’s been a while since I’ve been over, so I’d like to include that too.
Writing wise, there are old plans, current plans, future plans… I have so many things in the pipeline, I usually don’t know where to start but I have learned much in the last year or two, the biggest one being to start at the beginning. So this morning I did just that. One project on the desk… nothing else until at least a first draft of that is finished.
Meanwhile, I have a new addition to the family…
…and it’s fitted into the pantheon real well. Another thing I started a couple of days ago was to record myself playing the proposed Deadbirds setlist. Once a day, every day. All original material interspersed with a few covers I’ve been toying with. It’s proving to be an interesting experiment in ‘getting better’ that’s for sure.
Anyway, here comes 2019. May it be everything all the other years were supposed to be for you. I’ll leave you with this - which is wise in the extreme:
From Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
BIRDS
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie worth talking about but this evening I came across BIRDBOX on Netflix. it’s a little bit Day of the Triffids, a little bit Monsters and it’s everything a monster movie should be in 2018. Well written and scripted, brilliantly acted, tense from start to finish and Sandra Bullock is The Bomb.... just the kind of thing a man like me needs to be spending his time on across Christmas Eve.
I saw a story this week about how Netflix was giving the cinema chains a run for their money - based on BIRDBOX and a few other things I’ve seen along the way, that may not be far from the truth. They don’t hit the mark every single time but they’re on target often enough to make that news story a warning shot for those who think they can get away with churning out movies for the sake of it.
The world is changing fast huh.
Hopefully not as fast as it does in this movie though. I’ve still got things to do...