Time. Always Waiting In The Wings.

I went to see Kiss last night. I've been a Kiss fan since 1979 but I think that was mostly because things used to take a long time to filter down the line back then - I could have jumped on slightly earlier with better media at my disposal and maybe a bit of extra cash. Still, it's a fair old whack of time and I have never once regretted my allegiance and still don't. It was good to see them again. Most telling however: I took Rhiannon with me to see what she would make of it and if I say she used up all her phone storage before she killed her battery by taking photos and videos, that's probably a good indication of how that side of it went. 

There's a lot of detractors around - as there always has been - to which I say: what will you be doing when you're looking down the barrel of 70? 

I also got mistaken for Robert Plant. Twice. I'm sure Mr Plant spends a lot of time hanging out by the doors of large indoor venues. Go figure. Then again, there are very few other people I would like to be mistaken for.

Meantime, this morning I was looking at doing some reviews for a couple of sites I like and saw a request for a review of a movie called A Ghost Story (when it's finally released which I believe is sometime in August) and having watched the trailer (which you can find here) I like the look of this in a big way.

It looks super-smart, elegant, classy and so far up my street, it's in my house. 

Yeah... it better be as good as it looks.

My beloved Big Bear Rescue project is slowly grinding to a halt and I don't know how to deal with it. I guess there a million good causes out there and bears don't feature very highly on the list of people who live where there are no bears. When you have a social media campaign that has a reasonable support behind it but it fails to translate into sales of the shirts - which are fantastic no matter how successful the campaign is - well... I'm struggling to see a way to make it work in both the long term and the short.

As I was thinking about pulling the plug after the current run, this landed in my inbox:

Chowti is completely blind. But that didn’t stop her owner forcing her to fight for money. Time and again this small black bear was tied to a stake, and mauled by trained attack dogs. People paid to make bets on whether Chowti, already blinded by abuse and neglect, could be dragged to the ground.

Like most baited bears, Chowti’s teeth were pulled out without anaesthetic. She had little defence against the snapping jaws trained to tear into her sensitive muzzle, causing agonising injuries. But the fight was always stopped before the wounds became fatal – a dead bear doesn’t make much profit, and Chowti would be needed to fight again.

In fact, she was forced to endure this torture almost every week – not even long enough for her wounds to heal properly before she was thrown into the baiting ring to fight for her life once again.

Sadly, the many injuries and sheer trauma of their repeated ordeals mean that baited bears often die tragically young...

Which leaves me somewhere between a rock and hard place. I don't want to walk away from something I started with the good - even great - intentions but I don't mind announcing right here that working this is fucking frustrating in the extreme.

Time to rethink the rethink. I dare say I need a profile of Gaiman-like proportions to catch the attention of the public and make it work. I just never wanted to be one of those people pointing at the fire watching shit burn to the ground while I was quite capable of carrying a bucket of water. Perhaps mothballs are called for.

World Animal Protection has a page here where you can donate some cash to the root of this story if you feel so inclined. 

Now... back to work.

Back Into The Deep

As promised a month or so back, I took some time to rework the Big Bear Rescue project for maximum effect. Thanks to Everpress for getting with the programme and making it easier for me to do just that. So...

The third Big Bear Rescue shirt is now alive and kicking and you can buy it right here. It was created by my most excellent friend Federico Amaterasu and it warms my heart to see this one out in the world. Please buy thousands of them just because it's that wonderful... I'll take care of the rest. It looks like this and for maximum impact down the line, is available for women and men in white only... it suits the design and gives the best kickback in the financials - and that's what its all about. If you want a red one, wash it with your pants. If you want a blue one, wash it with different colour pants. Simple.

A fair old whack of time ago, some of you might remember I adopted a Hammerhead Shark - I still 'have' it, though in the real world, it's taken a back seat to the bears when it comes to figuring stuff out. Today, I found this great story about Hammerhead DNA and wound healing which includes the quote:

“The immune system of sharks and rays has been battle-tested and evolved over hundreds of millions of years”

Which gives me licence to post a pic of one of my favourite creatures of the deep:

Posting a picture of a shark is always a good way to start the week don't you think? Maybe soon - once I'm into a good routine with the bears - I'll investigate how to get back on track with some ocean conservation.

For now... Le Fin. 

Burn Baby, Burn

On my quest to find a new home for the Big Bear Rescue t-shirt store, I found a great one - or at least I think I did. I figured I would test it out first just to be sure... and I decided to test it out with this, just because I could. 

Looks sharp on the screen and all the right things are in place... profits are bigger (that's item number 1 from the earlier post ticked off), the shirts ship within a day (and item number 2 ticked off), they're printed with 100% non-toxic vegan friendly inks... on 100% organic shirts and the company also sport a carbon neutral footprint. That's more boxes ticked that I bargained on.

So, I ordered myself this very shirt sporting the logo of my expired, yet somehow, legendary magazine and it will be here before the weekend. If you're interested in one, they're up for just two weeks (until January 25th) at £10 which is a low as I could make it for a trial and you can find it right here.

...and now, I need to figure out how to make the Big Bear Rescue project work more smoothly. Things sure move fast when you've got a wasp in your hair. The Bear navigation tab up top will now give you a page - that links to www.bigbearrescue.com that will act as a hub for whatever there is on the table. 

I feel like progress has been made.

And now I need to write. In fact, I need to kick the writing up a notch. Today, I have a few things I need to take care of at the magazine, then, I am going into a very different kind of editor mode with my own work to figure out what's great, what needs work and what's drivel. My plan now is to hone (people don't use that word enough these days) my work into a very definite style and not waste time trying to be anything I'm not... not that I do, but sometimes you can catch me thinking such thoughts.

If you asked me to describe it, I would say it was minimalist dirty realism. That suits me just fine. It's what I do - though sometimes, I am guilty of drifting off into minimalist dirty magical realism. That's not even a thing - and because it doesn't exist, I'm finding it very attractive. I'll stick with the first description but that's warning enough that if a talking dog turns up somewhere, it's because it felt like the right thing to do and is more than likely an analogy for something.

I saw yesterday that somebody had described Murakami's work like this: "It is frequently surrealistic and melancholic or fatalistic, marked by a Kafkaesque rendition of the recurrent themes of alienation and loneliness he weaves into his narratives." 

Yeah. Try pitching that to a publisher and telling them the world will go crazy over it, so I'm not going to worry my head over it. Sometimes, you just have do what it is you do.

The world will figure the rest out by itself.

Monsters And Bears

To catch up on yesterday, I mentioned I wrote a review of A Monster Calls - you can find that right here. Leaving lots of comments and sharing it wherever you can will make my buddy Mike happy, so do that.

Big Bear Rescue:

I'm going to take the rest of January off from the bear rescue mission to move the store somewhere else. From the two t-shirts that have been on sale so far, we did OK. They were great shirts and the idea is still super-solid but what needs to happen next is 1: Getting a better return on each item - something I discovered wasn't the case as soon as the range was expanded beyond a white shirt and 2: Getting the shirt mailed out a lot faster. Using the current store, if you buy a shirt at the beginning of the campaign, you have to wait until the end to get your shirts. When I began, that seemed fair... but as I move along, it probably isn't doing us any favours.

You live and you learn. I think I know where I'm going to take it next and if I can get a decent business head on with it all, I can fix 1 and 2 above and have it knock on to 3: Even more eco-friendly shirts into the bargain. 

The next two shirt designs are ready to go already by a great artist and it needs to be out there as soon as humanly possible... file under pending but hopefully, not very pending at all. To dot the i's and cross the t's, I'm moving the bear blog from the 'Bears' tab above into this main drag.

Here's one of two bears trapped in a shitty cage in Russia as 'restaurant entertainment' where he was fed beer and cake by not so helpful visitors...

This story however, doesn't end with tears which makes a change. 130,000 people (that's a lot) got on board and the bears (the 'Sochi Bears' as they became known) were relocated to the Libearty Sanctuary in Romania.

20 years is a long old time to spend in a cage though. The bears got real old in there but you do what you can and in a couple of short months, the Big Bear Rescue fund has already helped chip away at similar cases. 

If you're moved to help me out, the bear shirts will be back soon enough but meanwhile, here's a link to the online collection where you can throw in some spare change if you have the mind.

Huge thanks to everybody whose come along for the ride with me so far. We've done good things.

I'm not really sure how to follow that, so ummm... more later.

Open All Night

It's a weird feeling taking time off from your day gig. It takes a long time to acclimatise to it and then, just when you're really into it, it's over again. Luckily the day gig is something I still love, but still, downtime is invaluable for figuring out what's a tree and what's the wood.  

Downtime does not mean days on end of box-sets though. Around here it means a clear runway at chipping away at the big pile of ideas that need wrapping up for my own sanity. First out of the blocks was Cities of the Dead and now, I've turned my attention back to my first love of music to hopefully wrap up a thick old thing that will probably be known as HOWL. I'm determined to get it at least finished by the end of the year - it's been the red-headed stepchild kept under the stairs for far too long.

I also unearthed an unfinished project I had 'put to one side' and then accidentally buried under a big pile of paper. I've mentioned it here before and that would be the Black Dye White Noise photo-book I was working on with my hyper-talented friend Chiaki Nozu. From only the initial few pages of design proofs, I can see it's way too good to leave lying at the side of the road, so let's see if we can't make some serious advances over the next few months. The cover looks a lot like this:

And because I think it's cool as the breeze, here's the first spread from the tour with Backyard Babies:

There will be words along the way too. This simply needs doing! 

There's also a lot of Bear action going on today. I decided to bring the bigbearrescue.com concept back here to run as a blog instead of leaving it as some two bit site that didn't do anything by itself. Mostly on that front though, a new shirt designed by WolfSkullJack goes on sale in the morning - just check out the Bears tab above for that. It's a peach - here's an extreme close-up of the initial sketch just for the record:

We Are Oceanic

Humpback Whales. If you were in that boat, you would spend the rest of your life knowing just how pointless it is to walk the planet fearing what might come next or worrying about the day ahead. 

Beautiful monsters.  

Being away last weekend means I missed out on posting the latest Burn Baby, Burn playlist - volume ten! Who would have thought! If it's becoming part of your week, here the link for those of you playing at Apple Music... and because some of you are missing it on Spotify, I appear to still have some free version of the account, so here is Burn Baby, Burn over there - I see no reason why it shouldn't work. Knock yourself out!

Over at the Big Bear Rescue t-shirt project, there's still a good 20 days or so to go before the limited editions are withdrawn from sale - if you were ever intending to buy a shirt there, now would be a good time. Another eleven shirts in the bank means we all get jolted up a notch to superior printing free of charge - so if you placed an order, now is a great time to shake some of your friends into action as well and get a better product for very little effort. 

This past weekend away also put some fantastic artists in the bank as we go along. I'm working on how to play it best but I am not displeased with the direction it's taken... not at all.

More tomorrow... lots to tell and I'm finally catching up with myself here. 

Into The Woods

Today, I hit the Big Red Button on the Big Bear Rescue t-shirt store. The design is available for 30 days only and then it will be withdrawn and replaced with the next in the series. This first one is from my buddy Matt Henbo Henning who you can find here and I love it. 

There's a kids shirt too over at the store but it looks the same as the one on the left here and I thought that might be confusing. The shirts are all organically made and tick as many boxes as I could damn well find on the eco-front. All help appreciated with retweets and things like that. Here's some social media places were you can find the project:

twitter • instagram • tumblr • facebook • justgiving

I'm guessing that some of you may raise an eyebrow over me including f***b**k here as a link. I chewed it over for a long time before I entered Satan's Kitchen and then decided it was a worthy cause to bow down to and when I thought about a little more again, I figured it would be a neat thing to hand over to my small person to manage. She's 15 and must spend half her life on there. That's not been instigated yet... in fact I haven't even asked her but we're approaching School's Out and I figured being a 'social media manager' of a global fund-raising project would look pretty decent when it's time for the bullet to hit the bone.

It sounds like a good plan in my head - I'll keep you clued in. Meanwhile... if you happen to buy a shirt, take a pic of yourself in it and we'll get something cool rolling.

Burn Baby, Burn is now up for whatever it is you like to do with it - though you'll find it coming from Apple rather than Spotify just like I said earlier this week. Let me know what you think - but if you think it sucks, I don't really need to know that, so we can skip that part absolutely. Feels good to be back with Apple. That will teach me a good lesson.

Meanwhile... I'm coming into the final stretch of some writing here. It must be finished by next Thursday and I will throw back the curtain. More tomorrow. I've got an unholy ton of things here to be posting about.

Bear With A Sore Head

I have in my hands, the first design for the range of Big Bear Rescue t-shirts (designed by my buddy Henbo who you can find here) that will be launching soon - I'm hoping the end of September will see this go live but I have my work cut out on that front. This week, I have a store to build and eco-shirts to source and probably a whole ton of other things that I haven't even thought about yet but now the design is in (and man, is it ever great) everything can progress at a speed only dictated to by how much sleep I need. 

I'll preview it here next week when I'm happy with the end result. I probably need to do things to it that mean it can't be stolen too. Things like load up bad-ass occult symbols in invisible layers in Photoshop. 

That ought to do it.

I figured we needed a decent logo as we go forwards as well, so I came up with this:

...so that's two things done this week. Two steps in the right direction and now I need to start piecing them together to make sense to the world.

This week, the story is about Maya. Maya is a dancing bear. That means she would have been stolen from her mother as a tiny cub. Then she was tortured until she learned to perform a pitiful hop that looks as if she’s dancing.

When they’re little cubs, dancing bears like Maya have their paws burned repeatedly to make them hop in time to music. But the audience don’t see this part of the deal. They don’t see the traumatised, frightened animal, controlled by the pain of a cruel ring that's been drilled through her muzzle. Being as words are sometimes too easy to walk away from, here:

In my own inimitable sales rep kind of way, you either give a damn or you don't. Giving a damn means doing something about it - in this case throwing some money into the pot here. Not giving a damn means moving right along the bus and pretending I never said anything. Makes no difference to me, but to the bear - and she is just one of many - it means a lot.

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The Wild Life

Why aren't the Elves doing their job? I've followed all of the rules about staying up and falling asleep with your head on the workbench with an unfinished pair of shoes in front of me but nothing. I guess I'll have to do it myself then. So be it. 

This is one of those entries which is as much for my own sanity as anything. 

Submissions are out in the world, which is a good thing. While I wait, there are other things on the table (these are the things the Elves are being lazy with) and time will judge them as it judges everything.

Sometime next week, a 'thing' that I've been working on with 'someone' for the Big Bear Rescue project should see the light of day. Everybody is really busy and it's been pushed too far onto the back-burner for my liking but this particular octopus arm appears to be coming up for air and I'm looking forward to unleashing it. Thou shalt not be disappointed... well, not if you like bears anyway.

Meanwhile, we've found a new place to take Hector. It's like walking him on a Lord Of The Rings movie set: 

This week, I also found what I consider to be one of the most important sentences ever written (by James Baldwin) about writing: 

The importance of a writer is continuous… His importance, I think, is that he is here to describe things which other people are too busy to describe.

Nobody (aside from you) will know how much I needed to hear that this week. It struck right at the heart of a whole bunch of things I've been wrestling with recently... and oh, how I wrestle. If you're a writer - or any kind of creative - and you have these wrestling days, you are not alone.

(George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it" - which is a completely different thing altogether but still important. Trust me on that. I grew up with pigs around the place.)

Running back through my photos here, I see I didn't post my close encounter with a lemur. Not so much an encounter perhaps as an 'adoption' - by her not me. There I was just hanging out at the zoo checking to see how Brutus and Clarence (the two rescued circus lions) were doing - and she came bounding over to me and... well...

That was about the best I could do with one hand - my left hand at that - but I got rescued and we also came up with this... there's a baby lemur somewhere under there too

In my never ending quest to find, umm... not so much 'better' ways of doing things but absolutely more minimal and sexier ways of doing things, I found this watch built by a company called Slow. It has just the one hand, makes you think about time differently and is, frankly, as cool as the breeze. I kinda like this one: 

It's about as far removed from a smart watch as I can imagine - aside from not actually having a watch. I might gift myself one as a present one of these days. I mean, how late can you actually be for anything?

Finally, on the subject of The Wild Life, I had to cancel my proposed trip to NYC this coming weekend - but all is not lost - there's a substitution in the wings somewhere in the mountains of Massachusetts... and that could prove to be a real kick in the pants.

Footnote:

I forgot to mention, I have begun work on this:

Cover art (the drawing is by Thomas Serginson) is pending a review and agreement of terms (and other boring stuff) but you get the drift... 

Insert smiley face emoticon if you wish. I would.

Life: Reclaimed

As a part of my minimalist approach to life, this week I decided to add something instead of taking away. That thing is an alarm clock. It might not seem like a big deal, but 'installing' this little puppy at the side of the bed means I can leave those things otherwise delivered via wi-fi while I'm asleep downstairs and keep them the hell away from me first thing in the morning.

I'm quite liking the look of this. When it makes a noise, simply reach out and drop your hand on the button to silence it. I know it's a relatively simple thing not to see if you've had any messages while you were sleeping when you wake up... but I don't, so this is my solution.

The phone thing can stay downstairs in the fruit bowl with the bananas and the car keys and in my book, that's known as a good start.

I got wind of a new show this week that appears to be right up my street - though how it passed me by, I'll never know. Over on Sky Atlantic, Vinyl (from HBO) has recently started. I'm hoping it's got a touch of Californication about it but I'll take it at face value and funnel in news when I've tracked it down. I must know somebody with the damn station that can do magic. 

If you happen to be wondering how the creation of words that will one day find their way into a book is going, it's going pretty good. 

Slightly derailed by a magazine going to print across the next 24 hours, two birthdays within four days of each other, a dog haircut and a broken finger that seems to be getting worse instead of better, but it's going good.

I'm starting to think I should maybe take a trip to the doctor or hospital over this finger instead of my current method of home-surgery that makes use of those two well known traditional body fixers: fire and salt.

Maybe tomorrow. 

Finally, gotta love a bear in the wild:

Feel free to share this page link around. Thanks.

Bring Up The Bodies... And Some Bears.

What started out as a day with not much ahead of me but compiling interview questions and transcribing things recorded in totally unsuitable environments, by lunchtime, it had actually gotten pretty interesting. I found that I have a reasonable amount of essays about travel to start pushing them out a little - does that make me a travel writer? That has to be one of the coolest job titles in the world. Anyway, I thought I would try a little experiment and if you're observant, you'll see a tab up there that says Travel Writing and it hooks up to a page on the relatively new platform of Medium. It's been there a whole day now and already I'm thinking of walking away, pulling it down and bringing it back home. Not that there is anything wrong with Medium - it's a beautiful platform to work on and when it started out it was full of great ideas and writing that shone. Having come back to it today, I find that it's turning into more or less the same platform as every other on the web. In order to keep people interested and active, readers are now able to comment on the writing on a paragraph by paragraph basis. Typically, this happens a lot, so now, great writing is set upon with minute sleeve notes by people arguing over an otherwise lovely piece of work. People need to understand that just because you don't agree with something, doesn't mean you have to comment on it. The builders at Medium should have known better. It was originally a nice magazine - now it's a magazine with big margins and a pen on a string so that others can deface work or extract a tiny amount of ego for themselves from somebody else's work. People have too much time on their hands - if you don't like something, walk away. If you do, tell somebody else about it.

Everyone's a critic these days. Maybe they always have been. Maybe I'll boot up a separate blog for it but that kind of negates my rule of "find all the things you need in my own house" rule.

File under pending... but only overnight. These things need sharp decisions!

•••

Something else happened today that I can't talk about but it's very exciting - and I don't get excited about much at all. When I heard my name mentioned in the same sentence as Hilary Mantel, it made my day complete. It's probably nothing at all like anything you would ever imagine either - but it is, without question, super cool in the extreme. I shall wait until something happens before revealing anything about it but rest assured, just writing this here even for myself makes me smile.

•••

The guys at WSPA finally got back to me about my Big Bear Rescue project - and I missed the damn call. I re-left messages at all the right places to say I was returning calls but everybody seemed to have gone home by mid-afternoon. Maybe tomorrow. I had almost given up but the flame is still alight. Not quite so bright that you could navigate yourself from one side of the Grimpen Mire to the other without getting sucked in, but it's alight all the same.

Topically, this Doctor Who/ Sherlock fan made video is absolutely ton notch if it really is constructed with no assistance. In fact, amazing would be absolutely fair: