Friday! Burn Baby, Burn IV is up and Ready To Rumble... and while you tune in, there's a whole load of other great swag to be found in the world. Let's do it:

I have no idea what this is, but I thought I would post it here anyway. Honest I don't.

I picked this up earlier in the week:

...and it's quite fantastic. Nice cover too. If you like (and know your) noir, Blood Count is up there with the greats and that's not something I'd say lightly every day of the week. Reggie is a new name on me though and there are eight previous books in this series that features Artie Cohen too. That should take me to the end of the year. I'll stick that in the win column.

Ummm. Check the hell out of this from Reignwolf:

In other things to get excited about, sometime in the last week, Jack White released this album of acoustic recordings.

Meanwhile, Roadies finally turned up on Amazon Video this week. I had abandoned TV for the foreseeable future but I've been looking forward to this for months - so you'll forgive me if I Go Dark for a few hours at a time while I plough through it.

I also found this. I'm not big on YouTube and how it delivers content, but perhaps if it was all like this, I could be converted quite easily. This is a great book review of Roberto Bolano's 2666 by a damn talented reviewer. That aside, if you fancy yourself a reading challenge that reaps rewards beyond what you should get for the price of a paperback, knock yourself out. If you fancy a slightly slimmer challenge, check out The Savage Detectives instead.

Then I made an appointment for a new tattoo. Big thing. More on that some other time. Have a beautiful weekend lovely people. Time to write.

Who wouldn't want to go into work when it looks like this:

There are worse walls to find yourself staring at. Just the kind of place to be getting along with Project X - so that's exactly what I did. I might even have some details about that to talk about soon... maybe even a sketch. Very excited by this - as soon as it's a little bit further down the line, I'll reveal what I can.

In other news, I've been looking around for months - seriously, it has been months - for a place to contribute material online. I've considered a few literary magazine type places, some pop culture websites but they all seem to fall short just where I need them not to. When business and art clash, boy do they clash heavily. Anyway, I've done my time of reviewing music and books. In a world where reviews are populated by people that can bothered clicking on some stars if they like or dislike something in the extreme, there's not a whole lot of enthusiasm from this quarter to correct that particular human trait.

Cutting to the chase, a few years back, I did some work with Sean Herman - a tattoo artist from Alabama - and this week discovered he has launched a spin-off site to his 'day-job' called The Serpents Of Bienville. It's all kinds of things. It's a site/blog about life and death, art, horror movies, music... and who knows where he will take it next - I love it. I figured it might make a good home for some words and so, we talked, talked some more and well... I'll let you know when the delivery is made and there's something to look at. For my part, I've decided to write about things I don't normally and I'm excited about where it will take me as a writer. Sometimes we all need a little push right?

So, days are good right now. I put another issue of The Mag to bed tomorrow - even though I'm pretty sure I only put the last one to bed a week ago - and then I have, not a week off as such, but a week in which I can be creative, organise things and roar through all the things I've been to busy to roar through for a while. I've got all the things I've mentioned at least a hundred times here to finish - maybe some will get figured out and maybe it's time to retire others for the immediate future but there are also very live things flipping about. The things that are flipping about are exciting... maybe the others were nothing more than good ideas at the time. I have come to realise that there is no harm or shame to change your mind about something. That's what a mind is for. One day something can be the greatest idea in the world, the next you can come at it from a different angle and see something totally different.

In fact, it would be stupid in the extreme to not change your mind about something if you wanted to... if you've become bored or disillusioned with them. That's what a mind is for. Thinking about stuff. I don't particularly want projects around that are going to find themselves a home at the back end of the album.

Did you buy Slippery When Wet when it came out? I bet you a substantial amount of money that Wild In The Streets is not your favourite track on it.

This week has been mostly fuelled by Steven Tyler's new album - We're All Somebody From Somewhere - and I like it a lot. I didn't fall in love with it immediately, but after a week of hanging out with it, it has grown on me like ivy. If you're looking for something to keep you company through the day, give it a whirl. I'm also liking the new Switchfoot album which is called Where The Light Shines Through. Try that too. Just because they're Christian doesn't mean they don't write good songs.

Talking of culture-type things, also on the horizon to hopefully fill a Californication sized hole are a couple of new shows heading our way. This one had better be all it should be considering where it comes from (and how long he's had to think about it):

Meanwhile, there's also this:

One of them must be worth making a song and dance about, surely. Looks like a good week for writing and rock n roll from where I'm standing.

Le Fin.