Introduction | I See The Ruins
I'd been struggling to find a solid hook to hang the entire premise of this book on for a long time and one day a sentence jumped out of another book and landed me one of the nose. In Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself To Live, he sums up how popular culture works (and you could even take the 'popular' out of that sentence) as follows:
"You allow yourself to be convinced you're sharing a reality that doesn't exist."
That's just about the most succinct and brilliant sentence ever written about anything.
Pop culture is a funny and extremely movable feast. I've tried so hard throughout my life to get with the programme but it's not happening for me and I don't think it ever will. For every Thomas Hardy thrust in front of my face, there's an epic Clive Barker that I would much rather curl up with. For every slab of "you must listen to this" that's been shoveled in front of me, I can find 100 better albums that move me. In fact, show me a top 100 list of apparently worthwhile cultural things that all intelligent people should be into and I will hold up the mirror.
I began to wonder if it was me. Am I so devoid of culture that I have actually become anti-culture? Is there such a thing as anti-counter-culture? What is it that makes one thing high culture and the other low? There may have been other books written like this one but wouldn't you just know it, I'm too uncultured to have read them or even know they exist, so I kept on writing.
And yet, here's an example of how even low culture has it limits. I was in a town today that I've never been to before - although on my way out of the town, I remembered that I had actually been there before. We played a gig there supporting Gun but I was too drunk before, during and after to notice where I was at the time. I think the venue was called the Crypt, although I couldn't swear to it. Anyway, I came across this store called Albion Books. Inside, it looked like my house. Book on the shelves, on the floor, on the windowsill. Books on books, magazines on books - you get the picture. It's like a book graveyard.
This store should have been the Shangri-La of book shops for a low culture swab like myself, but it was marred indelibly by the guy behind the counter in a pair of brogues unmatched with tracksuit bottoms. Couple that with the smell of "I've not showered for well over a week - in fact I might even live in the shop" and the bits falling off his head and I suddenly didn't want to buy anything in Shangri-La.
In fact, I found no less than eight copies of my friend Lorenzo Sperlonga's The Art of Lorenzo Sperlonga (natch) in there. I have never seen even one copy of that book before and was so stricken by the condition of the store owner that I actually forgot to buy one.
I hope he was the store owner. If he wasn't, I don't ever want to meet the real guy.
You see, even low culture has its limits.
The ten essays - I guess that what you could call them - that I'm about to parade in front of you, take ten subjects and dive headfirst into the jelly mould and recount tales of personal involvement, third party observation and possibly even questionable behaviour in the name of science. (I use the term so loosely it may fall off. I don't ever see The Wasteland making it onto a list of academic must reads and if it did I would take it out of circulation immediately!).
This is also as good a place as any to state that none of this is seeking justification for my love or hate of any of these subjects because whatever answers I find will not change what's true in my heart. I was simply interested in how we work as individuals, partners, teams and tribes. Whether there are any answer at the end of it, I don't know. Answers are not the reason you get on a roller coaster.
Next: Chapter One
"Oh My God, He's Ripped His Head Off!"
An extremely thorough discourse into the world of professional wrestling and not so professional wrestling.
Scheduled posting: 4 May, 2009
