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…

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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

TROUBADOURS

I went on a shopping mission this morning. I felt the need to lounge around in the swamp with the greats and came away armed with this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

The conclusion that I have come to before opening any of them is that these artists were successful because they went out on a limb and did their own thing. Interestingly perhaps in the big scheme of things, I would say that none of them will ever be in the Top 100 singers of any list, ever (Kate could scrape it maybe) but they should all be in the Top Five of any list that looks at storytelling songwriters. Call it poetry if you like but it’s more than that. It’s full on Troubadourness (I don’t think that’s an actual word but it is now) and I never really noticed that about myself before - that storytellers in music are my ‘thing’. This is a good thing to know about myself as I push forward with the whole Deadbirds project.

(Note: because Troubadour is an ancient word, it is thus the male description of one. A female troubadour is called a Trobairitz.)

Given that my love for him is boundless and such a thing does not exist, I got to thinking that maybe I should put together an authorised (which might take a while) complete lyric book of Alice Cooper’s work. He is one of the best the world has ever seen without question and that talent is absolutely overshadowed by escapades with chickens and guillotines… and he also falls neatly into my ‘not the best singer in the world’ thesis. I’m not saying none of these guys can sing - I’m just talking technically. More to the point, I don’t think any of them ever cared either. The point is to deliver the song and tell the story not to shatter a glass at twenty paces.

Maybe that’s the payoff? It’s sure as hell a payoff I would take every day of the week over somebody fawning over my voice - not that such a thing is ever likely to happen.

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Not relevant to any of that, but did you know there was a theory that Scooby Doo is a collective hallucination of The Gang who are all tripping on LSD? I thought I was well versed in pop culture but that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that floated down the river. We can only assume it was a bad batch of CIA infused drugs when somebody threw Scrappy into the arena and spoiled the fun forever.

Just say no, right?

Finally… I’m not really a t-shirt kinda guy anymore but this looks like a valuable addition to a limited wardrobe:

The Comedy And The Tragedy

Sunday. A mega-ton of household jobs seem to have stacked up behind me. I wondered to myself whether Alice Cooper has household jobs stacking up behind him, but probably not because he never seems to be home. Being as he's on the road so relentlessly, maybe he has a housekeeper to take care of all the things that shouldn't really need taking care of because he's never there. 

Anyway, I did them and figured I might just bomb out in the sofa before I go in for Round Two in front of The Typewriter Machine. I got to Channel 78,663 and there was nothing on - though I guess if I had gone back to the start, there would be different shows on to when I first begun. Instead, I decided to revisit something that used to make me happy beyond belief and I dropped on the Laurel and Hardy movie, Swiss Miss. 

So far as I recall, they used to be a lot funnier than this. When the hell did Laurel and Hardy become unfunny? That's like asking when Aerosmith stopped being a giant killer of a band (except I know the answer to that: 1979). What can possibly have happened in the years since I used to roll around until my stomach hurt, that had me sit in front of the TV waiting for the movie to take over my nervous system?

Maybe they did get unfunny. Maybe it just wore off. Maybe comedy got sophisticated to a point that I can no longer go back to a more innocent time.

Or maybe I just got to be miserable - except I'm not. I was really game for it. Pensive, even.

Thats a real sad state of affairs. I'll try a few shorts from them across the week and so how they pan out, and if that doesn't work, I'll hunt down some Harold Lloyd movies and back them up with a couple from Will Hay just to be sure.  

If none of those work either, I'm officially broken. 

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I don't tend to admire many writers these days but Karl Ove Knausgård is a huge exception for me. The world has dubbed him a literary sensation over the last few years but you know what... I suspect it could have equally gone the other way for him and he would still have carried on writing whatever he wanted. I not only like his books but I also like the way he puts himself across in interviews - which is just as honest as his novels.

This week there's a neat documentary on iPlayer in which Knausgård interviews/gets interviewed by neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh. If you're feeling cultural, it worth your time for a whole number of reasons.

But then you must go read at least the first ten pages of A Death In The Family. After that, you'll know if you're in the mood for thousands of pages of autobiographical revelation from the man. It's pretty addictive. There's also an extract here at The Vice. 

Anyway, you have been warned.

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Later this same day, this Great Dane came up for adoption. Sigh... what to do?

Not sure somebody else would be very impressed with a new house-mate though...

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Finally today - this probably sums up more than any of us writers would care to admit and did make me laugh.

Check Grant Snider out on twitter @grantdraws

Doctor Who Monsters! Book Covers! Words On Paper!

You know what, I love tumblr, I really do. It's a great blogging device but in spite of everything, I just can't bring myself to post there. I need to shut it down once and for all no matter how much the fashionable authors of the day like to play there. Besides, regular passers-by here would miss things like this:

As they tend to say in the cool and hip places around the universe, FUCK YEAH, ZYGONS!

That's pretty exciting, it's not even recent news (it's a couple of days old now), no idea how I missed it because that's a big deal. Certainly more so that Number Nine and Rose returning - that was pretty much expected, but Zygons? Nope - I never saw that coming. Being as it's been announced this far ahead of time, I can only assume that it's probably some kind of minor part because you sure wouldn't fire your biggest guns this far away from the big event.

Well, I was excited anyway... roll with it.

•••

I've decided to stop buying books - this is a promise that will last a whole six weeks. I need to get some writing done and also finish the stack that's threatening to topple over if I don't do something about it. This week - and these are my last two purchases - I picked these up. The first for obvious reasons and the second because after I'd read the first five pages in the bookstore, the deal was already sealed with wax:

...and then, nothing. No books for me. The day I come back to reading will be the day Dan Brown releases a new book. Luckily, I know exactly when that is. With the wind behind me, there'll be a tasty new graphic on the blog letting y'all know about my new thing.

Also on my travels this week, I found this painting of Alice Cooper:

 If you're a big Alice fan, this KickStarter might be of interest to you (though this painting has sadly gone - not that I had $7.5k to hand over no matter how much I like it). An interesting project that's for sure and one I'll be following a lot more earnestly than the Kiss Kids comic. Yeah - read it and weep. I did.

So - quite a profitable day all in all. Doctor Who monsters, Alice Cooper, cool books with great covers. Even the sun came out for a couple of hours this afternoon. Sometimes, that's all you get - and sometimes, that's just enough.

Bare Necessities (Part Two)

Where was I? Oh yeah, thousands of miles away from home. The show itself was top shelf as expected. Good to catch up with some people I've not seen for a while. Always a pleasure to hang out with Jesse Smith that's for sure but made some new friends too - notably Frank La Natra and Gene Coffey. If you want to know more about the show, you're gonna have to pick up a magazine. Not this one - maybe the next, there's still a lot of material to come in. Anyway, America. We took a weird route to get there and stopped at Philadelphia on the way. Through the window of the plane, it looks like a interesting, sprawling place to visit. We did go outside for ten minutes to see what it was like and - as in any city - if you want to know what's going, a cab driver is a good place to start. Can you believe that he didn't know where the Rocky statue was. The next two said the same thing as well. It was only though persistence that we found somebody who did know it was about twenty minutes from the airport. How do people live places where they don't know what's going on?

But it shouldn't have been a surprise. Going through customs and security I was repeatedly asked where I was staying and got the "liar" look for my trouble when I told them Keystone in Colorado. "I don't know where that is" she says to me. Well lady, you'll probably find that's the case with 99% of all place names if you don't look any further than the car park and the cake shop. Is it a standard response to see how you react? A trick question? Security in the U.S. is still very paranoid - which is fair enough I guess but it doesn't make for the most pleasant of arrivals in the Holy Land. All it takes is one man to try and bury a bomb in his shoe and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet have to take their shoes off for the rest of their lives. When I hit New York for the first time back in '94, the guy didn't even look up from the comic he was reading when he stamped me in.

I think somewhere in the middle might be a good idea.

Talking of airports, once you've gone through all of the official nonsense, they're actually a pretty good place to pick up stuff you don't get to see very often. On the way home, I found this:

Sounded good, nice cover... never heard of it before and it's totally excellent. You can find Mike's site here but just go read the book because it's a firecracker. Talking of which, people don't usually give me good book recommendations that I pay attention to but yesterday, my writer buddy Barbara shoved this in front of my face:

I don't think that's the official cover that they ran with when it came out but it's the one I like the best (natch) - you can grab it at amazon here - I shall be starting in on it this very evening - just as soon as I'm done with Up Jumps The Devil. I'll let you know. There's also a pretty cool website to go along with it here.

COMMERCIAL BREAK:

(A note on the above clip - was that for real? I guess it was. The dark ages were not so far away huh?)

My tickets for Alice Cooper turned up this morning. I'd actually forgotten that I'd bought them - those guys at TicketMaster, ClearChannel and Live Nation sure know how to take the fun out of everything. Buy the tickets months in advance and forget, then send them out far enough in advance for you to forget about it again. And you know what else - back when I was a kid, concert tickets used to be worth keeping - not much, but enough. I still have my Alice Cooper ticket from the Constrictor tour somewhere.

Here's the graphic they designed for the tour:

and here's the tickets for the event:

Would it have be so hard to make something that looked like an effort? It will get me in - as it should because I paid for it but is that it? Is that really good enough for you? You know what - I think it is. Give it a couple of years and you'll probably be able to collect ClubCard or Nectar points when you make a vague attempt at going to a rock n roll show. Then you'll be able to drop by the supermarket on the way home and pick up that "Dad Rock" CD they put out every year at a slightly discounted price for your trouble.

I can hear Jim rolling in his grave from here. Sigh...

The Nightmare Returns

One more time on the ride? Just for the hell of it?

Bournemouth sounds nice...

October 27th?

Let's do this thing...

You too can do this thing - it doesn't even have to be Bournemouth. There's other places you can go...

I think this will be something like the fifteenth time on the ride, but that's OK. I've had about 30 years to fit them all in. Never fails to be anything less than a wonderful experience either...