This morning I began to pull together an interview with one of my favourite tattoo artists in the world: Noon. You can find his blog here but for the sake of getting this post off to a good looking start, here's one of his recent pieces:
It always surprises me that almost 100 issues on (just 15 more to go) from when I started, I can still find great things to talk about. Or at least I can when my co-conspirator is still passionate when it comes to their end of the bargain. Noon is one of those guys. I'm hoping it will be every bit as good as I want it to be when I'm done.
File under pending... for a couple of weeks.
Aside from magazine things, this week I've been pounding the keys on a script that I believe has legs. Another couple of days and I'll be done with the second draft... writing such a thing (one day I'd like to be able to point you back to this post with hindsight as my friend) has left me with a lot of off-cuts. There's so much on the cutting-room floor, if I'm still feeling uber-positive about the whole thing after the weekend (because these things have a tendency to back you into a corner) I might carry on into next week and see where those bits might take me because what I really need right now is another project to stare at me and ask when I'm going to pay it some more attention... honest it is.
Earlier this evening, my mother sent me a text. One of those mysterious ones out of the blue that suggests the whole thing would become much clearer if you had been in the room with her while she wrote it. This has happened a lot more than it used to since she got an iPhone.
The content of the message went like this:
"You will look like Billy Connolly when you get old"
My best guess is that he happened to be on TV at the time. I did see something a couple of days ago about some paintings of him that had turned up in Glasgow (I think) so I'll assume that was the trigger... but I haven't seen a pic of Billy for a long time - so I went to find one.
So first, Robert Plant (as detailed here) and now Billy Connolly. I'm starting to see a pattern of hair + beard emerging.
Billy is 74. I could live with that look. It's coming down the line regardless. My mother knows me well.
Items Of Interest From Other People Whose Work I Dig:
I saw today that Jonathan Carroll has a new book out in August - this has jettisoned itself to the top of the wish list with ease. If you're not familiar with his work, he posts regularly on Medium and it's always worth the trip.
But... you don't have to wait if you're intrigued. The man has a huge backlist and never disappoints. If you're looking for something new to help pass the evenings under the quilt with a torch, this is a good place to be.
On the music front, I tried to be adventurous at the start of the week and listened to the new Katy Perry album for some reason and wished I hadn't then diverted myself back to more familiar territory. There's a new Goo Goo Dolls EP on the racks but when I had finished with it (twice), I couldn't remember a thing about it. Putting music out because you can and not because you have something to say is wrong in every way you can think of.
Then a bird came into the kitchen, knocked a box of dog snacks off the shelf and I remembered Cheap Trick have an album out... it's not all out yet, but there are some advance tracks strutting their stuff. It looks like this:
But while I was hunting down that album cover, I saw there was also an album out last year which had totally passed me by in every way you can think of... and it's all there. Cheap Trick have lost nothing over the years. Nothing at all. That one looks like this:
Life is good when Cheap Trick are around.
