AN EXTRACT FROM CITIES OF THE DEAD - PARIS

I’ve decided not to do any reprints of Cities of the Dead, though there are few copies left. It’s not that I don’t think it’s good–I think it’s great but it was never long enough. Just as I was hitting my stride with it, the old lockdown hit and the wheels came off the travel. Now that the world is normal once more (although that rather depends where you’re standing), I find myself in a place to pick up the pieces again. Anyway, I figured I’d let a few pieces roam for free here on the blog and what better place to begin than Paris. Let’s do this:

Photograph courtesy of my good friend Dirk Behlau

Until a few moments ago, I would have poured scorn upon any grown adult too timid to grab life by the horns and shake it upside down to see what fell out of its pockets, but as I perch here on a ‘seen better days bed' in a Parisian hotel that's barely one step up from somewhere George Orwell might have stayed, spreading cream cheese onto a bread roll using my finger as a knife, maybe I am the one who got it wrong.

I have taken an impromptu road trip to play in the Garden of the Reaper. There's something about the memorials the living set up for their dead that draws a bow across the soul-strings of our own mortality. 

I have little doubt that across the world, there are millions of people who think about running away from their current lives every single day of the week. There will be those who think about little else to the point of distraction but are powerless to act through a lack of either resources or imagination. 

There are likely to be just as many who don't act because the fear of the unknown holds them back. It is said that every man should know what he's running from and what he's running to - which is a simple enough equation as it stands, but believe it or not, most are too afraid to even look over the wall to see what shade of green the grass is. 

I digress. Let’s go back to the beginning:

I woke this morning with an overwhelming desire to make the day count. I needed to do something to announce that I was still alive and not simply a slave to technology, children and dogs - and the best way to confirm blood was still flowing through my veins was by moving this body of flesh and blood to a place in which such things had run out. For this, I needed the assistance of a cemetery and the bigger the better. I made a few calls and little more than an hour later, I was in the familiar company of a designer cup of styrofoam coffee at Ashford International waiting for the Eurostar.

Destination? Paris. 

To be more exact, Père Lachaise and the final resting place of a Mr James Douglas Morrison. If the name is unfamiliar to you, it's probably best that you walk away now. Having made that sweeping statement, we will also meet others along the way who may be also be interesting, so maybe it is worth sticking around.

Ashford International is satisfactory to say the least. Nothing more and nothing less than a place at which you show your ticket and then wait, clinically, for what ought to be one of the greatest trains on the planet to arrive.

The Eurostar is not a major event to tell your friends and family about in the way that say, the Orient Express is, but it's as good as it gets in the substance over style world we now live in. That it flies beneath the English Channel so fast that France is a reality in less time than it would take me to drive into London, is absolutely its biggest draw but it's not without its flaws. 

Today, there is a very large man sitting in my booked seat. When I challenge him, he produces an equally valid ticket for the exact same seat - which rained on my parade somewhat. There are dozens of other empty seats in the same carriage so I sit in one of those instead. This has worked out fine. I get to sit by myself and the other guy? He keeps glancing over at me far too often, seething that the long haired one doesn’t have to sit with three strangers, all of whom are reading broadsheets and taking up far more room than the Bill of Human Rights should allow. Moving out of his line of sight, I shuffle across to the window so that he can't look at me anymore. 

Today, I am travelling so light, I should be arrested. I packed no luggage - a suit will suffice. It has enough pockets to carry money, cigarettes, a passport and my phone. Does anybody really need any more than this for a two day trip? Any work that cannot be accomplished on a phone is not work that I want any part of. As for a change of clothes? I’m sure the suit can handle two days in Paris. Tomorrow, I will go shopping, buy a new set of underwear and a shirt and leave the old in the hotel - or maybe I will see if any of the homeless along the bank of the river would appreciate it. 

The homeless who live on the Seine could not be more different than those of London. It looks very community minded and there are men shaving in mirrors. Only in Paris could it be imperative that you shave for your homeless day ahead. If I had more time here, I would like to talk to some of them and see if life here is really as it appears from up on the bridge - or as I suspect it to be, merely a brutal rest-stop between life and death in the garden.

I’ve travelled enough to know that the best way to discover the heart of a city - particular one that wears it on its sleeve - is to get well and truly lost in a Thomas O’Malley kind of way.  The first thing you can’t help but notice is that certain companies have made it everywhere. Some, such as Starbucks are more than welcome for no other reason than I like their coffee. Others seem out of place. Why would Paris be accepting of a branch of Clare’s Accessories? If there was one thing Paris doesn’t need, it’s bringing down to that level but thinking about it, you would think the same if you were Parisian and found yourself in London. Which only really goes to prove that young girls across the whole of Europe like to be able to lay their hands on cheap garbage whenever possible. 

The decline of western civilisation has settled in for the long haul.

I take a random turn into a side street and discover an art shop selling beautiful original oils and watercolours by local artists who will not be famous when they are dead - but that’s not to say the talent isn’t there because it certainly is. It’s not the first art shop I’ve dropped into since I arrived. None of them are average. They are all un-routinely beautiful and wonderful in their own way. The bigger problem is choice. If you are seriously in the market for a painting anywhere in Paris, you will struggle to commit - with each subsequent visit throwing up further canvases that will make you windswept and interesting by association. By the time you get all the way to the other side of the city, you’ll be too lost and too tired to go back and pick up the one you really wanted. If you want my advice, buy the first picture you fall for and make plans to come back for more.

The same cannot be said for the standard of chocolate for sale in Paris. The city has more than its fair share of places more than willing to contribute to your waist. The saving grace in all of this being if you choose to take on Paris by foot, you can walk most of it off along the way. 

Jean-Paul Hévin is one store that I’d certainly recommend stepping into. I didn’t quite spend as much time in there as I would in, say, a bookstore, but walking in through one of his doors (there are several branches in the city) is a little like falling into a hot pool after walking the dog on a winter morning. Sampling is allowed and indeed totally encouraged by the staff which leaves you with a little guilt over not intending to buy anything. I don’t like to be thought of as a bad person - particularly in Paris as I have every intention of coming back here many times still - and I find myself leaving with a ‘barre aux épices' which I honestly have every intention of handing over to somebody as a gift when I return, but curiosity gets the better of me and this peculiar spicy bar finds itself non-existent very shortly. 

Surely, this must be the pinnacle of a chocolatiers career? I stand in the street trying to inconspicuously remove spice shrapnel from my teeth with my tongue and notice that above the stores on both sides of the Rue Saint Honore there are apartments, rising four maybe five levels up. I have no idea what renting an apartment in the centre of Paris costs. I would imagine it to be similar to that of London, but I don’t know what that costs either. In a population of something like two million people, I imagine the people who actually live up there to be ‘interesting’. It’s probably better to imagine that they are interesting than to know the truth - which is that they work so hard, when they get home, they turn on the television and flake out before doing it all again the next day.

Paris, as you can see, is full of distractions. I’d like to keep my appointment with the reaper before it gets dark and reorient myself. Weaving through the districts of the city known as the 3rd and 4th arrondissement, is time consuming but essential. All of life is here. I get properly lost more than once simply from not paying attention. One moment I am contemplating whether I would like to live and die in the Rue D’Orleans and the next I have become captivated by the number of Americans who are (still) flocking to the Louvre - not so much in the name of art but in the name of Dan Brown. They can be heard saying exactly that out loud. I love America and a lot of my great friends are American but I think the smart ones amongst them would be the first to admit that an appreciation of classical art is not the best export to come from there. 

I think Dan Brown may have achieved more for European tourism than the combined campaigns of all European nations since 1970. He has his distractors for sure, but I don’t see any of those people making Europe an exciting and fun place to be. That said, I can’t bring myself to go inside. I don’t have the time for it today. It’s certainly not a museum I would want to free-fall through in less than an hour, so I content myself with a few cigarettes and the fascinating street museum that is the human race itself.

The sound of a siren comes bearing down on me. The sirens in France sound like they mean business. They sound very important, like they have to be somewhere right now. Not shortly or as fast as they possibly can, but Right Now. I see the vehicle coming. I also see police hanging out of the side and the back of the van bearing arms. This is something I’ve never witnessed before. There isn’t even time to consider what they might be rushing to before the vehicle is long gone but it does allow me the luxury of being able to tell who the French people are in the vicinity. 

None of them look up - just the rest of us who don’t live here.

•••

The entrance to Père Lachaise - we’re now in the 20th arrondissement if you’re keeping track - is quite something. You certainly know that you’re about to enter a place of worth that’s for sure. Weighing in at around 110 acres, I raised an eyebrow to find that it’s not always been the biggest show in town. That honour belongs to the finely named Le Cimetière des Innocents - a fourth century creation and home to over six million Parisians. Most of these are in the form of mass graves courtesy of the plague. There’s a figure doing the rounds that says over a five week period in 1498, 50,000 bodies made it this far. When you buff it up against the celebrity clientele of Père Lachaise, that’s a lot of people who never got the chance to make something of their lives. This one was closed in 1780 (overpopulation) and in 1786 the bodies were exhumed and moved into the unused queries near Montparnasse - known much better to all of us as the Catacombs. 

If you think that’s pretty rough on the dead, whilst the exhumations were taking place, most of the bodies were almost wholly decomposed - meaning they had turned to magic acid (fat) which was carefully collected and promptly turned into candles and - hold your breath - soap. It also happens to be the cemetery where Armand hangs out in The Vampire Lestat, so all in all pretty harsh on the living as well.

Père Lachaise opened in 1804 on the site of a former Jesuit retreat and it’s estimated that over a million and a half people come to wander its 109 acres in an average year. I doubt that a very large percentage of those even visit the memorials of their own dead - a thought that made me feel a little guilty as I marvel at the magnitude of some of these memorials.

I know of more than a few people buried here and the shameful realisation that I have never been to Highgate muscles its way into my head. It has to be said that the memorial of Oscar Wilde is foul. He must be exhausted from rolling around in there. One of the first things you’ll notice here is that it appears to be standard practice to deface/scribble/graffiti - choose your own descriptor - the memorial of those you admire but this only applies to certain people. Chopin does not suffer this fate, so perhaps this says more about the living and how they choose to celebrate their icons than the dead themselves. 

Other members of this exclusive family include my favourite artist of all time, Gustave Dore (though I have never been able to track him down in here), Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Bizet, Marcel Proust, Camille Pissaro and Modigliani. Considering how many people are actually in here, I feel I should be more familiar with more names than this. 

Wandering without reason, I come across two Belgian sisters waving envelopes in their hands and looking as though they are about to do something wrong, or at the very least, foolish. When I asked what might be happening here, they tell me that to leave love letters in this crypt we’re all standing in front of, will bring them both true love in the future. They have no idea who this crypt belonged to and I had to figure it out when I got home. As of 1817, here lie the remains of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse d'Argenteuil - a philosopher and nun respectively whose love for each other is apparently legendary, though not so legendary that two Belgian sisters or myself have ever heard of them. 

Fame, along with death, is apparently transient and all rather depends on the perspective of those observing. 

I continue on my quest and discover along the way, families with picnics, young children who deem this to be the best mausoleum themed adventure playground ever and extremely old people paying respects to plots because you can still be buried here if you have the inclination.

There is much to love about how this cemetery is seemingly left to fend for itself but I suspect behind the scenes an incredible amount of work goes on to make it appear so. A man and his creative mind can easily get distracted for days in here if he’s not paying attention.

One thing is for sure. If you’re ever stuck for a cigarette in here, you can likely pick one up any time of the day from around Jim Morrison’s grave. This is the third time I’ve paid my respects to the man that taught me through music how much freedom meant to me. 

What can I tell you, I felt the need to get together one more time.

On my first visit, it was a culture shock to find the grave of a man I thought to be larger than life itself squeezed into a plot that you certainly wouldn’t pick out for yourself if you had a choice. You wouldn’t even think it was a plot. If it was a garden, you would struggle to grow more than twelve broccolis here. That first trip, I was a teenager and it was also the period when there was a bust of Jim created by Mladen Mikulin sitting on top. The bust arrived sometime in the early eighties I think and at various times has had cigarettes wedged in its mouth, been spray-painted, pissed on, coloured in and had LSD rubbed on its face until finally, it mysteriously disappeared in 1988. 

Assuming whoever stole it was in their twenties - which rather begs the question of how you can walk off with a marble bust without anybody noticing in the middle of a Parisian cemetery - that would make them in their forties now. Maybe one day in another forty years, somebody will be cleaning out an apartment above a chocolate shop and discover it. I hope it makes it back there one day. The bust was quite beautiful when it arrived. I’m not big on sentiment these days, but I hope Mikulin himself took it.

On my second visit, the plot was fenced off from the public with metal traffic barriers and there was nobody else here, which is possibly what I expected the first time. Not that you couldn’t have climbed over the barriers if you had really wanted to, despite the ‘Do Not Jump Over The Fence’ warning notice stuck to it. Maybe the thrill had gone out of my pilgrimage, maybe it was the incessant rain, but it seemed different on this occasion - aside from the missing bust. Jim appeared to have left the building for good. On that trip, it was nothing but a dirty headstone with a bin emptied out on top of it - there was certainly nothing respectful or homage like about it. In hindsight, maybe the Oliver Stone movie had pushed people over the edge. I wish I hadn’t gone and it took a long time before I wanted to go back again.

This visit is an altogether different experience. It is coincidentally five to one in the afternoon which pleases me more than it should - there are flowers and poems encased in cling-film and, as there always have been, some pictures of Jim left on top. Photocopies of pictures out of books. Just in case somebody who had got so lost in here happened to find themselves in this three foot by five foot plot and had never heard of him. Why that should apply to Jim and not the one million plus people who are memorialised here, who can say.

Visiting here as a teenager, and then in my late twenties and now in my forties, at no point did I feel the need to do anything other than acknowledge a man who gave me so much pleasure over the years (and still does). A salute is enough for me. No need to destroy the damn thing in the name of rebellion but I guess that says a lot about what Morrison means to many different people - though to be honest here, Jim would probably punch you in the mouth if he caught you wasting your time over such things. If you were listening properly, you’d know this.

A fitting end to this trip would be to walk out of the gates and feel melancholy about the whole thing, but the gates are miles away, so you have to pass by many other dead people and along the way, all of your melancholy will dissipate because Père Lachaise is not a sad place. 

It’s too big to be sad but it is absolutely big enough to remind you to live your life while it’s still within your control to do so. 

This photograph also courtesy of my good friend Dirk Behlau

Not A Halloween Post - Part One

It’s easy to take pot shots at newspaper articles but sometimes they deserve it. Yesterday The Guardian published an article titled Guardian writers on their scariest horror villains. All I was left with was a bitter taste in my mouth that suggested all of the writers involved didn't have a clue what they were talking about and had only ever seen three horror movies in their whole lives. When you’re one of the countries biggest newspapers, why not get somebody who knows what they’re talking about to write it? It makes me deeply suspicious of the rest of the content to be frank.

Annie Wilkes in Misery? Seriously? Nancy from The Craft? Rose the Hat from Doctor Sleep - a movie nobody has ever seen? Michael Myers? The lamest horror movie villain ever created (until Rob Zombie remade it into a genuinely great movie)? I don’t think so.

Thus, I spent all day thinking about where it had gone wrong for them. Determined to make a far superior list by drawing on my 40 odd years of horror flicks, I ended up with nothing more than a wall full of post-it notes for most of the day but eventually, I whittled it down to a top ten that at least satisfies me… and will allow my friends to text me saying: “you don’t know what you’re talking about…”

This is the way the world works.

In no particular order, let’s get it on:

Pinhead (or The Engineer to give him his original name)

Let’s focus here on the original 1987 movie not any of its nine (nine!) sequels nor the recent ‘reimagining’. By 1987, I’d watched pretty much everything that was available in every video shop in town - and a fair few that weren't too thanks to the back pages of Exchange & Mart where a spurious trade in bootleg tapes of video nasties lurked.

Already a big Clive Barker fan (mostly because I thought Rawhead Rex was fantastic but I might have been alone on that front), Hellraiser was a no-brainer to go and see - one look at the movie poster and I was all in. It just seemed different:

I’d never seen anything like it. It was everything I wanted in a horror movie. It looked cheap, it was dirty, all of the human characters were unlikable in the extreme, so by the time the Cenobites show up to take what’s theirs, you were rooting for them all the way and they didn't disappoint. Much like my first experience of a Harryhausen movie, the creatures don’t make any sense and that’s always a win in my book.

Pinhead also had all the best lines in the movie, including:

"Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell!"

“No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering.”

and of course:

Hellraiser made over $14 million in the US but only £763,412 in the United Kingdom - £763,000 of which I suspect was my money. Genius always needs repeat viewings.

(A year or so later when it came out on VHS, I managed to convince the owner of the largest video store in town to sell me a promotional cardboard cutout of Pinhead which I appropriately nailed to the door of a cupboard. I miss the 1908s more than you’ll ever know..)

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Black Phillip

One of the great things about horror movies is most of the great ones only have a very small cast - in the case of The Witch, if memory serves correctly, there are four… and a monstrous black goat called Black Phillip. Not strictly speaking the villain of the movie, but close enough, Phillip is made all the more wonderful owing to the fact that he’s a real goat. No CGI or costume (although he is substituted with a puppet at one point), just a monster goat. Even if you hate horror movies, you should read about him here. Such is his legend that I own a Black Phillip t-shirt and my buddy Nate has a Funko Pop! of him on his dashboard:

Anyway, what a great movie. There’s nothing about it that’s not great - including the movie poster:

Folk horror is fast becoming The New Black - I wrote a few weeks back about Starve Acre, but The Witch (released in 2015) is probably the first movie since the 1970s that really tapped into how effective it is.

(Nobody wants to know his real name is Charlie either. All hail Black Phillip).

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The Babadook

I’m on a roll. This next choice is nothing more than a drawing in a kids book - and boy, what a scary movie this turned out to be. Another example of a fistful of people in the cast leaving so much room for the movie to play out properly, it’s a wonder nobody else has figured out that this is by far and away the best way to make a chiller.

The movie’s premise is actually an opportunity to explore parental grief but it’s so much more - including being the only Australian movie I rate. Ever… although I might give Picnic a Hanging Rock a nod of the head.

Babadook is the invention of the director Jennifer Kent and is improvised from the Serbo-Croatian word for the boogeyman: Babaroga. So good is this film that William Friedkin (director of The Exorcist) names it in his top five of all time.

I can’ resist it… here’s a clip:

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Pazuzu

Unless you’re a total horror nerd, the name probably doesn’t mean a lot to you but you absolutely know who he is. He lives inside of Regan in The Exorcist. An assimilation of Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, you don’t even get to see him and he still reigns supreme. (For the record, unlike most sequels, The Exorcist III has one of the spookiest moments known to man in it. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about.)

Here’s a pic of the old man… not an actual picture obviously. I’d get banned from the internet:

I don’t think I need to say anything else about The Exorcist. Let’s move on.

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The Pale Man

You can’t argue with this one. Let’s take a closer look at him:

We’re talking about one of the best movies ever made here. Not simply horror… but actually one of the best ever made - and it’s Spanish with no dubbing, making it a major win also. From the casting, to the creatures and screenplay, Del Toro made a masterpiece here and while Pan himself is the big draw, the Pale Man is uber-valuable to the telling of the story and the creepiest creature ever committed to cinema.

Spoiler: here’s the whole scene in which he appears:

Brilliant.

I’ll post the other half of the list tomorrow.

Time: Always Waiting In The Wings

This post is not about Kiss - but that’s how it begins.

A few weeks back, I signed up for what was the last ever Kiss show on Pay Per View. I figured that after spending my whole life in the Kiss Army, through thick and thin, it was the right thing to do. Was it enjoyable? Yep - it was great. I owe Kiss my teenage sanity, my tribe and probably my soul.

None of my Kiss friends were interested in it though and it ended up being an event I ‘attended’ alone - and I get it. Sometimes things belong in a certain time and place. In the real world, Kiss belong in 1977. If it had ended there, it would have been perfect but it didn't. (There are plenty of full 1977 concerts on YouTube if you’re interested). They were on fire. Scary. Powerful. They had the world at their feet. I was 10 years old and I loved them.

But that was then and this is now. Last night, I watched the Taylor Swift Eras tour video (it’s currently up on Amazon to purchase) and it crushed me into a small block of paste. It made Kiss (who, whether you like them or not, are well known for their show) look like small children who had been given some Lego for Christmas. This made me cross because it could have been so much better than it actually was, even though it really was great.

I first saw Taylor on the Speak Now tour about 13 years back (I’m sure somebody will correct me on that) and it was fantastic. I took my daughter under duress and came out a believer - but this latest tour is beyond anything I’ve ever seen - and I’ve seen a lot.

Sure, the movie has been made for a cinematic release but really… wow!
A three and half hour set. Check. Changing sets (including a forest and a swimming pool). Check.
Technology pushed to the max. Check.
No lyric monitors in sight - this is important to me because a lot of bands in the rock world use them and I think it sucks - you’ve got one job. Learn your songs. Err: Check.

Anyway - here’s what it looks like and it makes 99.99999% of all other areas bands look like they’re pretending:

There are deep dive articles into Taylor’s set (and the theatrical release) on a hundred other websites because writing about her practically guarantees double readership but that’s not what I’m here for.

This is a landmark moment in music/concert attendance because it sets a bar so high, it must be impossible to reach it. It’s like the world record of pole vaulting where you watch it happen at a championship level and wonder just how the hell anybody is ever going to jump that high again.

Sure, world records get broken all the time, but I just don’t see how this one will be. It’s more than about the music - which is of the highest order whether you like her or not. If you can’t see that, you’re just being tribal about your own thing. It’s more than going to a show as well. This whole “thing” is built on the shoulders of the fans. They are rabid. They’re supportive. They’re warriors. They’re influencers. They’re loyal.

They’re also mostly young and bankrolled - Taylor speaks their language. You might be remortgaging your house for a ticket but damn… a lot of that money was put back where it belonged. She’s on tour over here this year but I missed that fact and I too scared to look and see what my chances of getting a ticket are. You snooze you lose in 2024.

It will be a long time until something like this happens again at this level but there will come a time - and it may not actually be a million years away - in which virtual reality or A.I (maybe both) will be so accessible that a whole new concert experience will be available. If you’re a young kid right now - or not even born yet - this could well be the norm by the time you’re allowed out of the house by yourself.

Maybe with the assistance of VR, you could be there and at home at the same time - I know it sounds like hell for those of us who grew up getting our feet stuck to beer stained floors but something like this is coming whether you like it or not.

And yet - one of the best shows I’ve been to in the last five years was Steve Conte at The Slaughtered Lamb in London. Venue capacity: 120 sweaty people - standing. Here’s then only clip of him I can find online from that night doing Teenage Kicks with Duncan Reid (from The Boys):

All of which goes to prove that time changes everything. One minute you can be ruling the world but at some point, somebody younger and slicker than you will come along and stand on your shoulders to do their thing, that’s kind of like your thing, only better and for different people.

It also proves that even though I admire what Taylor Swift has achieved and would count myself as a pretty big fan, I’d still prefer to be with 119 like minded souls in the basement of a bar in Clerkenwell. You can take the man out of the club but you can’t take the club out of the man.

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Meanwhile:

I’ve got The Secret Hours from Mick Herron on the boil at the moment and it’s excellent:

The Slow Horses series is superb (and hats off to the Apple TV adaptation too which is one of the best shows around by quite some margin) but these stand alone novels are just as good. I’m about halfway through this but it’s already propelled itself to the top of the ‘not Slow Horses’ series. One day, in the not so distant future, the critics will figure out that Herron is every bit as good as LeCarre - if not better because the world is now a far more complex place to be spying than it used to be.

[Side note: All these years later, I still don’t quite understand how something can have The Number One Bestseller printed on it before it’s been published. A little research suggests that a reasonable sales figure for a hardback is between 250 and 2000 in the UK. This of course, might be relative and therefore, it is indeed a bestseller but it still seems a bit low to me when you compare it to say, an Arsenal match where 50,000+ will turn up...every week. That would be a good subject for a podcast don’t you think?]

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The new Duran Duran album, Danse Macabre, has also been making its presence felt as the soundtrack to the week:

They might not be setting the chart on fire, because the passage of time is always a cruel thing at the best of times, but the original songs on the album are fantastic - especially with some volume behind them. The second half of the album comprises a fistful of well known covers which all bring something new to the party too - with the exception of Ghost Town, which I have always hated, but the beauty of streaming is I can delete it from ‘my’ album and never have to think of it again.

In The Heat Of The Night

So there I was, sitting in an airport departure lounge with my crime novel, minding my own business when a ‘famous person’ came to sit down next to me. I should point out this is because it was the only chair available and not because she thought I would be great company while we waited for the boarding gates to open.
I spotted her coming halfway across the room but kept my eyes more or less glued into the pages where Steve Carella was doing something very important for his deaf and mute wife, Teddy. 

Steve Carella works for the 87th Precinct and is the best detective on the squad. He's more than likely the best fictional detective of all time, but this is not a fact that has been allowed to gain traction out in the wider world. If you took a poll of 100 crime fiction lovers, his name probably wouldn't even come up once - unless I happened to be one of them I guess. Once upon a time, I thought he was so cool, I wanted to be him - I even wanted a deaf and mute wife to get closer to the dream but then, I was only 14 and we’re allowed such odd ways of looking at the world at that age.

So, there I sat with my eyes firmly planted inside of Give the Boys a Great Big Hand because to raise them and say hello would mean to acknowledge I ‘know’ who she is, when actually, she is famous for No Reason At All. No respectful reason anyway… and if she was that damn famous, she sure wouldn’t be flying with BuzzAir and sitting in a fake comfortable chair next to me.

Anyway, she’s hammering away at her biblically sized phone with fingernails she bought from a shop and, from the corner of my eye, I see that she has booted up her camera app. I assume she is going to take a selfie, which she does - two or three of them - because nobody that gets their fingernails from a shop can go longer than five minutes without taking one. Then, she tries to take a picture of the tattoos on my arms without me noticing. Well, I think that’s what it was all about… either it was the tattoos or she liked my watch or she quite fancied the look of my book.

She muscled all of these things into one shot and she pauses as she is about to share it with her Magical World Of Friends in which she is followed by 375,856,053 people, when I interrupt:

“What are you going to do with that now?”

She flinches. Rumbled.

“I liked your tattoos. I was going to share it with my friends. Can I tag you in?

“Sure. Why the hell not.”

“What’s your name?”

“Steve Carella. C-a-r-e-l-l-a.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a detective.”

“Really? You don’t look like one.”

“I wouldn’t be a very good detective if I looked like one, would I.”

“I guess. Wow. That’s really cool.”

“Don’t come crying to me if you get a visit from my boss after you’ve shared that.”

Fingernail Spice hovers her nail above the ‘post’ button.

“How come?”

“I can’t tell you. Undercover - but these aren’t real tattoos.”

“Oh.”

“This isn’t even my real hair.”

On which note, I find myself no longer a person of interest and my picture is deleted from appearing in The Timeline Of The Universe.

But for one fleeting moment there I was Steve Carella.

Dreams still grow even when you forget to wish.

Heroes

You ever have a hero? One you could rely on deep into the grave? In the last ten years or so, the term ‘hero’ has been taken away from people we idolise and handed back to people who do things like spread themselves across live grenades so as a bus load of school kids don’t have early funerals… and rightly so, but for the purposes of this piece, I’m rolling with the former because choosing something else doesn’t come close for me.

I’ve had a few and as the years have gone by, they’ve never let me down. Some are so obvious, they’re hardly worth mentioning if you know me. Paul Stanley from Kiss and Alice Cooper are the big guns. Their philosophy is not so different despite their (seeming) rivalry.

There’s also been a few that were a sign of the times - that I picked up and put down as I needed them - which might actually be the whole point of even having a hero.

I was obsessive about Bjorn Borg for a while simply because he was the ‘whole game’. I’m not sure what I got out of it but there it is. Boris Karloff was another… again, because when it came to monster movies, he was also ‘the whole game’. Bret ‘Hitman’ Hart - the whole game. There are a few others like this. Short life-spans with no other purpose but to dam the river when needed

But when it comes to books, it’s not so simple for me. Neil Gaiman came close, not least because I once picked up The Doll’s House Sandman graphic novel on a whim one Saturday afternoon back in something like ‘90/’91 (whenever it came out) when I was headed to a weekend-long party and was early for the train. (Of note here is that the money I spent on the book was supposed be money set aside for booze… go figure).

It had all the makings of the kind of party everybody talked about for years but I wouldn’t know. I spent the entire two days with my head in that book, drinking tea and eating whatever food my then (very understanding) girlfriend chose to put in front of me. Having presumably finished the book, I vaguely recall something about being chased by a horse in the dark and going home alone (natch). It was a long time ago but Gaiman has been pretty consistent and I’m still with him… but so is the rest of the world and that makes him a lot less attractive these days as a name to bandy about. These days I’m more likely to waft Michael Chabon’s name in front of your face as a name of somebody you should be reading. Mr Gaiman needs no more assistance from me at the moment.

Stephen King came close to a lifelong thing but wobbled too much and got replaced by Clive Barker… who also wobbled, but when I went back to King he was still too unstable for me. I keep up with them both still but it’s probably unreasonable to expect either to still be on their respective mountain tops, standing on one leg and juggling a very singular crown - particularly when John Connolly came along and whitewashed both of them for me.

Anyway, as the years have trickled by, those I didn’t recognise as heroes for the longest time have risen to the surface. Most of them were dead by the time I figured this out which gives it a certain kind of closure. It’s unlikely that they will become zeroes anymore - the work is complete. Raymond Carver, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Orwell and Dylan Thomas have weathered that storm with a certain grace I can only dream of but then, there’s this man:

One of the really big deals for me out in the world is J.D. Salinger. Aside from his books being some kind of misinterpreted influential template for my own work, I liked the way he went to his grave with two fingers in the air over never having his books made into films and how digital books could kiss his ass. It’s not how he wanted things to be and credit where it’s due, his estate continued to pipe cement into that wall since he died.

Until a year or so back:

His son, Matt, the very man who been mixing that cement since 2010, was interviewed by the New York Times and the article brought up some important things - namely, this:

‘…during a trip to China earlier this year, he realized that many young people overseas read exclusively on phones and digital devices, and that e-books were the only way to get his father’s writing in front of them.’

and from the horses mouth:

“He wouldn’t want people to not be able to read his stuff.”

And while we can sit here all day and argue that both Catcher In The Rye (55 million copies in 30 languages!) and Franny and Zooey are both still widely available in paperback (show me a bookshop without either and I’ll show you a bookshop without clue), the world has changed - and continues to change - bringing into sharp perspective my own observation that a book isn’t a book unless it’s actually being read. If somebody is not devouring the story, it’s just some paper with some thicker paper on the outside that lives on a shelf to show other people what sort of person you’d like them to think you are.

It brings up all kinds of horrible questions I never want to have to answer about what constitutes as ‘reading’.

But in the end, he’s right and if that’s the opinion of the last bastion of something I hold so dear, I need to swallow a plateful of humble pie topped with pride and also get to work on making things available digitally. It’s not so long ago that I seem to recall saying “Once you can read a book on your phone, the game will be over” and I would have been at least partially right.

There will always be those who love a physical book, how it feels in their hands, what it means to them and how they remember where they bought it from. Those are my kind of people but I’m damn sure that whole Gaiman episode I described above would never have happened if I had downloaded The Doll’s House to a portable reading device. Things change and time moves with it eventually crushing everything in its path that doesn’t want to ‘flow’.

It’s sad, but I guess it’s not sad at all if you’re under thirty. If you’re under thirty, it’s just the way things are and the way they’ve always been.

Out there in the world somewhere, there are most likely people for whom eight track was the Bees Knees too.

Time, huh. Can’t live with it…

---

Footnote: Salinger also had a good line in quotes, so here’s a few of my favourites - all of which sound a lot like things that come out of my own mouth…

I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to

There are still a few men who love desperately

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don’t watch it, you start showing off. And then you’re not as good anymore

HUNDRED YEAR OLD WISDOM

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.”

(Franz Kafka in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, 27. January 1905)

ALL WE NEED IS JUST A LITTLE PATIENCE

Expectation. The Mother of all Disappointment. I should keep a lid on it, right?

Once upon a time, I picked up Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell at an airport as I was on my way to some far away beach for a two week break. It was a monster of a hardback and frankly, I might as well have stayed at home because all I did for those two weeks was stick my head between its pages and eat crepes.

When I was done, I pronounced it to be the best book ever written (finally unseating Clive Barker’s Imajica which had held the spot ever since ummm… whenever that came out). Honestly, it blew my mind in every way: the craft, the story, the patience, the vision… it was all there, punch after punch.

I even wondered why anybody would even try to write another book if they had read it.

Fast forward far too many years (and a pretty good TV series later) and her next novel - Piranesi - is finally making an appearance… in September. That’s six months away!

Meanwhile, the greatest crime writer of the last twenty years - John Connolly - has also has his latest shoved to the back end of the summer as well:

What’s a man supposed to do?

Throw in the postponement of the Bond movie as well to around the same time and September/October is starting to look pretty busy.

Tolkien had it bang on the money when he said: “All you have to is decide what to do with the time you are given between now and when No Time To Die is released”.

I think that’s how it went anyway.

WAR-CHEST

Today is Day 17 of the 30 day 50 press-up challenge. It’s tough (and it really shouldn’t be) but the challenge is still alive and that’s the important part. I actually feel a bit of a pussy for not being able to simply drop and burn off 50 press-ups in the first place but I wonder what percentage of 50 year olds can anyway. I suspect it’s pretty low. Maybe even less than 1% of the population.
I’ll just continue. Mr Downes - my challenge partner - suggested we video the last day of doing 50 all at once but I’m not so sure about that. I can live without a million people pointing out incorrect form… assuming I don’t fall apart before the end.

Meantime, it’s hard to get things moving around here right now… it’s probably the same everywhere. My calendar says that today was the day I was supposed to book myself a rehearsal space to lay down some vocals on a few songs but that’s not going to happen. I could do it at home in a more basic format so maybe I will. No excuses but it’s kinda rough when your dog loses it every time somebody walks past the window. I guess I’ll set up the gear and just be opportunistic about it.

It’s pretty scary how quickly time slips through your fingers though. I shot a phone video of myself running through a version of Gretchen Peters’ Blackbirds a few weeks ago… only to discover When I came to look back on that it was actually in November. That’s not good. I’ll post it over on the Deadbirds page later when I get back on a Big Machine.

Why it’s hard to get things moving is a mystery. All of us who are in good health and not working should have amazing amounts of time on our hands. I should be picking a song I love every day and throwing a cover version out just because I can. Then again, everybody who is/was ever in a band should also be picking up an acoustic and posting daily goodness somewhere online. It would be good for careers, good for morale and they’d make one hell of a lot of new fans along the way… but mostly because I want them to.

Maybe they all have dogs who don’t like people walking past the window too.

CHECK-IN

I’ve become… no, that’s a lie. I am getting pretty good at multi-tasking. It took me a few days to grasp hold of how to do it properly but I’m getting there. The key is figuring out what’s ‘manual labour’ and what’s not. Here’s a great example. A week or so ago I challenged a friend to this (today is day nine):

That’s a manual labour kind of thing - so what can you do while that’s going on? Today, it’s accompanied by Joe Rogan talking to Brian Greene (theoretical physicist, mathematician and string theorist - sounds dull but far from it). Push-Ups don’t take too long though (though some days, it seems like they do and I don’t expect it to get any easier) so that’s followed up with Tai Chi. Probably not ideal background noise for it but after a while, you could do your Tai Chi on a building site because you do get good at separating what you’re doing physically from what you’re doing mentally. I think so long as you do take some time out to do it in silence or whatever your music of choice is, then that’s OK. Doing it at home rather than in a class is more about ironing out the things I’m doing wrong or tweaking them to be better - or at least it is for me.

Air-bud in the ear - just the one - Mr Rogan comes on the dog-walk. It’s weird out there at the moment. The people we sometimes stop to talk to are keeping their distance but the dogs could care less, so that’s a good thing. Sometimes, Rogan comes with us, most days though, it’s music... which also doubles as time for learning lyrics. I have a real hatred for anybody playing live and reading lyrics off a sheet. It just seems wrong.

For some reason, I don’t get on with audiobooks on dog walks. Not sure if that’s my fault or the narrator but perhaps it has something to do with pacing.

The dog walks have been long lately too. An hour and a half is not unheard of. Might not seem a lot to some of you dog-people out there but we go and do the same thing again about 3 o’clock which clocks up about 6 miles a day. That’s a lot of lyric learning while you’re doing something else.

By the time we’ve done the dog food thing, the coffee thing, the breakfast thing and whatever other satellite things there are to take care of, it’s pretty much noon - which is the time I like to start work. Why anybody would want to start work before this I have no idea. From what I recall of the normality of 10+ years ago, people just zombie around doing nothing before lunch.

Not a bad morning so far. They’re not all the same but that’s the kind of groove I’m in. There’s also some space in there for clearing the decks too. Throwing washing in the machine takes about two minutes and the point of that is how much it clears out the day of junk so that I can get on with things that are important.

Which is what? My mag died back in February which left me with some time on my hands to say the least. I kicked back for a couple of weeks and as I came out of that, the world started to get weird. It was pretty strange having your identity as a magazine editor stripped away (and then it just got stranger) but it also seemed like a good time to move things around and put things in place for whatever comes next for both me and the way the world will be.

It begs the question of exactly what it is you want to do with your life and you should really try and answer it because it’s your life. I came up with a simple list and though it would be great to only want to do one single very important thing, I don’t think the world is geared up for that kind of laser focus anymore. So my list, contains two or three things that are all related:

Write the books I want to read
Write songs only I can write (lyrically speaking)
Design books I would pick up based on the cover
Write songs for other artists

And that’s pretty much it - and they are all the same because they all start with a pencil and a piece of paper, sometimes this means also picking up a guitar or booting up InDesign, but mostly, for me, it’s all the same thing with different tangents.

And as much as I loved my job, it made me lax at doing the things I wanted to do because there was no urgency. There never is all the time you are being paid and your existence is being taken care of. As bad as it is out there right now, it does provide a monster of an opportunity to grab a hold of your life and get moving. If you want to be the new Ray Harryhousen, there’s time on your hands to get moving - that’s a good example because I can’t think of anything else that takes up so much time whilst it appears that you’re not going anywhere very fast at all… and any opportunity I have to introduce his work to somebody who may not know who he is, I’ll take it.

More tomorrow.

THE GODS OF LITERATURE ARE SMILING UPON ME

Being ‘busy’ can be an excuse for anything but it’s not a good excuse when it comes to missing out on a nugget of news that you’d normally file under ‘life or death’.

In this case, the news that Susanna Clarke has a new novel coming in September. It may have taken her ten years to write Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell but from where I was sitting when I disappeared for two weeks to Fuerteventura to do nothing but read that, swim and drink orange juice, it was worth every day.

Have I proclaimed it to be the greatest novel ever written? Yes. Many times over.

Anyway, assuming you missed it too (and assuming you care) it’s called Piranesi and so far as I can gather, it: follows the story of its eponymous hero, who lives in the House, a building with “hundreds if not thousands of rooms and corridors, imprisoning an ocean. A watery labyrinth.” Occasionally, he sees his friend, The Other, who is doing scientific research into “A Great and Secret Knowledge”. Piranesi records his findings in his journal, but then messages begin to appear, and “a terrible truth unravels as evidence emerges of another person and perhaps even another world outside the House’s walls.

Count me in all the way up to my shoulders.

Off the record, I’m going to put some (ie: a lot of) work into the cover art for it because out there in the big world, stranger things have happened.

They really have. Be careful what you wish for because you might spend the next ten years of your life at it.

WE WILL WALK

It was Eleanor’s birthday yesterday and we found ourselves at the Turner where they were hosting an exhibition called We Will Walk:

Not the kind of exhibit I’d normally get a kick out of but it’s probably the best one I’ve been to in a really long time. Here’s the official line:

We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South is the first exhibition of its kind in the UK and reveals a little-known history shaped by the Civil Rights period in the 1950s and 60s.

It brings together sculptural assemblages, paintings and quilts by more than 20 African American artists from Alabama and surrounding states. The artists represented in the exhibition lived through the Civil Rights struggle and its aftermath, often in conditions of poverty.  This art is characterised by the remaking and reuse of materials through necessity, custom, culture and innovation as well as a vital connection to place and nature. The exhibition also features Civil Rights music and documentary photographs that reveal the links between the art and its context.

I didn’t think I would enjoy it simply because my roots don’t lie anywhere near Alabama… but maybe that was the point. I don’t normally have my eyes opened by exhibitions (I guess you can see one too many) but this one is well worth talking about.

I came away with a new found respect for how, when people need to make art as a means of self-expression, they will find any means necessary - no matter what colour their skin. You can get very used to pressing some buttons at amazon to have supplies delivered as fast as humanly possible… and that can take away exactly how urgently you need to create to the point that you might be creating for the sake of it.

When the work you did on the back of a cardboard box over 100 years ago can move a man who’s not from your culture with no real understanding of what you went through, you really did something right.

IN THE MUSIC ZONE TODAY

The year has started slowly - my own fault. I took a few weeks to recalibrate myself and when I came up for air, I was looking down the barrel of a magazine that needed to be put together very quickly indeed… and now it is done (more or less anyway) I need to get my head around the coming year. Not that I do things in ‘years’ but it seems like a good way to look at things from the point of view of a blog.

I was about to write: “I need to get my ass in the get stuff done lane” but that would suggest I’ve done nothing at all and that’s not true. I’ve developed a taste for playing guitar like Colter Wall and it’s not natural to me in any way, so many hours of many weeks have been dedicated to pursuing the Holy Grail of January. Here’s the clip that got my most watering like a leaky hose.

I’m writing, so that’s a good start but the downside of playing a lot of guitar, chiselling away at a book idea and keeping The Mag on track is that aside from Tai Chi and walking Hector, I haven’t been anywhere to talk about anything.

A few new albums have turned up to keep me company though (probably posted on instagram because it’s not much use for anything else) but to help me along, I’m on a big news/TV blackout and instead of letting what hours are available slip away through the remote control, I’ve been cooking meals - the kind of meals that human beings are supposed to eat - which is pretty cool actually.

Meanwhile, being as it’s Saturday and everything, here’s a couple of movies/docs that look like they might be worth tracking down:

A DEAD ZONE

I took almost a year off from blogging. I figured I’d drop this in here to explain why there’s a hole the size of Norway in the timeline.

Did I enjoy not writing here? Not particularly, but sometimes you can do something for so long and forget why you where doing it at all - that’s what happened.

FIRE IN THE HOLE

I was in my studio playing a little guitar when, from across the gardens at the back of the house came the smell of a barbecue and the sound of something called ‘we’ve got friends round’.

I pressed on with figuring out Chelsea Hotel #2 until it got harder and harder to concentrate what with the uber volume of football talk/latest fashion talk and the smell of 300 sausages rocking their skins off on a grill.

I sat there for a while with Bess on my lap and tuned her up again while half listening to the conversation.

I guess stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason. A bunch of guys talking about the game and a bunch of girls talking about their dresses. Not the amazon burning down, not Christmas, not what books they were reading or even the weather. Football and dresses.

Maybe that’s why we never have barbecues or friends round - because we don’t have the necessary social skills to pull one off with any grace.

Then again, I would have been straight over there if words had come sailing over the fence about how much everybody thought the latest Bosch novel was better than the last or how one of them had rummaged out Albert Finney’s Wolven and was doing cartwheels because it was as good as they remembered it to be.

Anyway, I persisted with Bess for a while and then called it a day because the smell of those sausages had set off that thing inside me that says I too must eat - but first I figured I’d have a cigarette with my dog at my feet.

Down at the other end of the garden, I could see the barbecue party in full swing over the fence and I guess it’s relevant at this point to say that the guy who lives up the street is a fireman. At least I think he’s a fireman - something like that - and all of his buddies over for sausages? They appear to be firemen too.

Either that or they’re all members of The Avengers.

Gym. Check.

Running. Check.

More gym. Check.

Football. Check.

Multiple fighting arts. Check.

Tops off.

Tops off? Jealous? Me?

I can’t remember the last time I went out in public with my top off. I’ve been swimming now and again but aside from that the last time I can 100% remember having a naked torso in public was 1989 at a party.

I’d left my cigarettes downstairs and for some reason, couldn’t find my clothes (best not ask why I was naked in the first place) and went down to get them with nothing but a sock on so as I didn’t scare anybody… hey, it was a long time ago and a rock n roll party. I guess parties like that don’t happen anymore unless you’re a bunch of middle-aged swingers or something. So far as I can tell from my kids, parties in 2019 consist of sitting around with a few beers and looking at Facebook on your phone - ironically, something I’m pretty grateful about.

Anyway, I’m giving it some side-eye over the fence and there are all these firemen in nothing but shorts looking fine, fine, fine. I must have hit my head on something because there’s women there too, but there I was looking at firemen.

“You’re jealous!”

Yep. That’s what the voice in my head told me and I couldn’t find a single rung to stand on in my own defence. I’ve never looked like those guys in my life. The only reason I had the grit to go downstairs naked at that party was because back then, a Space Raider sandwich a day was as good as it got when all your other money went on cigarettes, books and pyro for your band. Total calories a day? About 200. I wouldn’t recommended it as a healthy diet but it worked.

And it’s not like I’ve spent my whole life sitting on my ass either. I’ve joined gyms, martial arts training (even fought a guy from Russia in a competition once who looked like Dolph Lundgren and made it out in one piece), walked one hell of a lot of miles but still… I have never, ever looked like a fireman (or whatever it is those guys at the barbecue do).

I closed the curtains and stripped down to my pants. The dog is wondering what the hell I’m doing because standing in front of the mirror in your pants sure as hell doesn’t look like heading out into the hills.

It could be worse. It could be a lot worse - but it could also be better. I look like a man on fire not a fireman.

Do I even know this person anymore? Maybe the sock would be the only thing that still fits me from back then and that’s probably wishful thinking as well.

I need to do something about it. I don’t think I’ll ever look like a fireman and maybe I don’t need to because I have no intention of carrying people down a ladder in the middle of the night, hacking down a door with an axe or making a calendar for charity, but somewhere inside my head there’s a little voice saying ‘figure it out before it’s too late’.

Then again, I have got more hair than all of them put together, a dog that doesn’t fit into a handbag and come midnight, I won’t be wondering how to get rid of everybody from my garden because I want to read a book either.

Gratitude. I’m working on it.

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.