It’s about a guy trying to keep it together while falling apart. It’s about life, love, fathers and daughters and the ever lurking presence of the Grim fucking Reaper...
A Little Stephen King Magic...
These are far too beautiful a find to let them slip through the fingers of my memory - then again, that’s what blogs are for. So that you don’t forget great stuff. These sets of Stephen King covers comes from the mind and hands of Stuart Bache. Click around his site for close-ups and backstories. Good work dude...
Here Come The Beats...
Groovy set of jacket designs for some of the Beat greats. These from Lucy Stephens. I might have to get in touch and ask her to do some work on Almost Human for me… I fucking love these.
(Just two more posts to go before I've pulled all of the tumblr blog in...)
Monsters in the Head
I started writing a song this evening. I haven't written a song in a very long time and having spent a very long time being a writer of songs (albeit with little to show for it in the long run), I was a little more than 'slightly' disappointed to find how rusty I was. Then again, once I'd started, things began to come back pretty quickly. I've got a couple of days to myself at the end of the week - let's see what happens - and out of interest, along the way I'll give GarageBand a damn good hammering. More intriguing than how rusty I was, is how as artists, we move on without realising it. I dug out the recordings of the last time I put anything of value down and found that lyrically, I really didn't think the same way anymore. Not even close. That means there's going to be an awful lot of material on the cutting room floor before I find my train of thought again.
This rekindled activity comes courtesy of my buddy JJ who is currently building a studio. Actually that's not strictly true. The studio is already there in the shape of Aerial Studios and fully functioning but there are more rooms in the studio space still to be built. A couple of weeks back, we met, we talked, we laughed, we imagined and we looked out of the window and laughed again at how long it takes some dreams to come to fruition and when they do arrive, never come fully formed. They always have more work to be done - but that's OK otherwise it would probably look like somebody else's dream. Go check it out - and if you want to get something on, it's as easy as dropping the dude a line believe me.
Anyway, I was toying with the project name 'Black Like Sunday' but I don't like that anymore. It didn't stand the test of time and certainly doesn't fit the frame of mind that I'm working in. I guess we'll be revisiting this place regularly as winter turns slowly into spring...
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Lester Bangs. The one and only in action.
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As much as I have loved playing with tumblr this past year in a multitude of ways, I have decided to say goodbye. Not immediately, but soon enough - like the end of the week. The way things are shaping up right now, I need to pull my sphere of influence in around me (not that it's huge or anything) and not throw it at the four corners of the interverse. It's a time thing that's all. With lots to do and all of it coming along pretty well, even though I could, I don't want to spend my time blogging multiple times. In the real world, I think that call that a commitment - or maybe even a decision.
If you tumblr'd with me, thanks. Now you need tumble no more as all things that were headed for the blog space of never ending length, will now be sunk into posts here - which are more than long enough to handle it. It all forms part of the "12 months to get your online presence together" as promised all those months ago. By by calculations, I think I have just five weeks left to wrap that part of the plan up and I don't think tumblr will be the only casualty of the war either. To be honest, I think tumblr will be just fine without me, don't you?
Anyway, as part of my wrapping up on that front, here's a repost of one of my favourites that I'd posted there about a revamping of the covers of the greatest book of all time:
Here's what I originally wrote to go alongside:
Talking of Matt Roeser (which I was just a single post ago), I couldn’t let this one slip through the net without posting it here as a personal reminder. From the pen of Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is absolutely my favourite book of all time. I love this delicate re-imagining of it but I’m not sure it would have pulled me in initially.
Now yes. Then, perhaps not.
Seeing this is kind of like when your girlfriend has her hair cut really short after a lifetime of long… or something like that.
Just prior to this I also fawned all over his revamping of the Game of Thrones series:
And again, here's what I originally wrote to go with it:
Matt Roeser - essentially cool and very talented book designer from Boston - hit the revamp button on George Martin’s Game of Thrones series a while back and, to be frank, trumped all the designs I’ve ever seen launched onto the shelves. There are some people out there who I seriously need to work with in the future. These are stunning.
Tumblr - I shall miss you a tiny bit, but truth be told, not actually all that much... everybody else, go check out Matt's work. He's pretty cool. We should probably talk.
In the spirit of things, let's wrap up with this. It looked great before it had begun and hasn't faltered one iota so far...
Judging Books By Their Covers
It's no secret that I love book cover design and this little gem has got way more work going into it than it first appears.
It was designed by Rowan Stocks-Moore to 'celebrate the launch' of the Penguin Design Award, of which he knocked up a few but this is far and away the best. Oddly though, I'm not sure it works as a real world book cover. It's a great piece of design in a masterclass 101 kind of way, but I can't imagine it jumping on - or off - the shelf. That happens sometimes... but regardless, it's really clever and beautiful all the same.
Conversely, these bookmarks are really simple but supremely freaking cool.
They were designed by Ethem Onur Bilgiç who is from Istanbul (no, I can't pronounce it either) and you can find him and his other groovy stuff right here.
Over Christmas, I might have a bit of a whirl at designing some bookmarks myself. That sounds like a neat plan to me - and maybe I'll lovingly hand-craft them and give them away with every copy of a book sold here. So maybe they had better be good! No idea what to base them on though. Best enlist the collective aid of that powerhouse known as 'the children'.
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And that wraps that up.
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A friend (Hi Tim) mailed me a story this morning about David Byrne (the Talking Heads dude) and his quest to produce a digital book of some value to people and the roadblocks that amazon et al put in the way. You can read the whole article by clicking here and always a good read, you can check into Byrne's personal blog here. Anyway, read that first and come back - there's a section at the end where Mr Byrne says;
Books, when well made and beautifully designed, are lovely to hold and behold. There is pleasure in reading a well designed book. A little bit of beauty is added to one’s life—something that can’t be measured in terms of pure information. I also have a funny feeling that, like much of our world that is disappearing onto servers and clouds, eBooks will become ephemeral. I have a sneaking feeling that like lost languages and manuscripts, most digital information will be lost to random glitches and changing formats.”
I tend to agree and that shocks me a little. I have come full circle from being a pro-digital kind of person to seeing so many of them, that they mean nothing. A quick look around myself right now will reveal a lot of business type books and books I have outgrown but couldn't let go of sitting on my various bits of tech. Big novels that I will never read twice can be found on audio because a) I can sometimes work and listen, b) I am in the car a lot and c) I actually quite like being read to when it's done properly - when you look at words all day long, sometimes it's really nice. Latest additions to this audio list are James Herbert's Ash and Rankin's Standing In Another Man's Grave. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by reading them like this.
When I look around my shelves however, I am still buying books at a heavy rate. Yesterday, I picked up Winter Ghosts from Kate Mosse, I'm on the road tomorrow. I know I'll buy another even though I'm armed with audio. I did give away a lot of books a while back - I have no idea what they were anymore but anything deemed important is still with me. Big art books, books with great covers, books I've had since I was a kid. The list goes on.
I am beginning to know myself more than I should - I mean, you hit certain times in your life and you should have it all figured out, right? Albums come and albums go. My rdio collection online grows by about six albums a day but I still bought the Soundgarden album on vinyl last week. Why? Because some animals will always be more equal than others. A beautifully designed Bukowski novel will never be archived to digital around here. It doesn't work.
Eventually, I think we'll all figure this out for ourselves. It's not going away. I don't want it to go away - it's cool and useful in some instances. I don't want bookshops to go the same way as record stores but it's already too late. We're headed down to a critical fork in the road. The only thing anybody really knows for sure right now is that it's a fucking mess. If you want books, albums and films to go the same way as the motor industry in which all cars look the same and are classified as to whether they're small, big or really big, then carry on doing the digital thing. If you got this far - you're already too late. The movie industry is already there.
Slick is very cool but nobody will look back fondly at any digital product like they do a Cortina or an Impala - they don't have a memory attached to them. Nobody will sit around and say "Hey, remember that day we stood in the kitchen and downloaded the new John Connolly book" - it doesn't have a sense of occasion attached to it. I used to have a Triumph Spitfire. It was a piece of junk but it had more character than any car I've had since. That had a sense of occasion about every freaking journey...
We're in the midst of a trauma here. Here's some questions for you to mull over if you care to:
AC/DC recently gave in and allowed iTunes downloads. This is a shame. Want an AC/DC album? Just go and buy one - it's not hard. Anybody that cares that much must have their catalogue anyway. I don't know if Led Zeppelin have released their catalogue to digital outlets but I hope not. Want a Led Zep album? Simply go and buy one. There's a certain way a few bands should be listened to because it's not about the money. It's about the songs. I rather think it's not the bands that think this is a great idea.
People like Stephen King, Rowling - all those guys at the top. We don't need ebooks from them. People may moan a lot and request them but ultimately, if you want to read those authors, go buy a fucking book. You get what you're given... if there's no audiobook available, damn right I'll read it instead of listening.
And there's the crux. We can all have so much now that even something as dumb as being able to own a dog, people think comes under a basic human right. It's going to take a publishing company with balls of steel to hang in there and say 'no, fuck you, buy a book' - and that's exactly when it will become special again. It's all pretty confusing. I wouldn't like to be the historian who looks back and tries to make sense of it.
(I'm not sure I actually said anything during that part of the post, but I feel better. Thanks for listening!)
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Closing with a classic is getting harder everyday. Time to take a left turn and just flaunt something I like and reboot from there:
BOOKS OF MAGIC (1)
This collection of redesigned Clive Barker covers are from Jeannette Kaczorowski - not sure if they were ever actually published (and I think I would know if they had been) but they certainly add a little class where quite often, publishers like to make Barker look like a cheap horror merchant - which as well know, is very untrue.
Books of Magic: 6
Went out for dinner this evening. Fantastic meal. Goats cheese panini and a latte in Costa Coffee. Very tasty indeed. On the way back to the car, dropped into Smiths and found a neat little display of the re-released Doctor Who books (originally published by Arrow I believe) from way back. To be fair to Smiths, who would normally sell your mother to squeeze an extra couple of pence out of you, they have a reasonable offer on. A buy one get one half price. Given that they’re a decent £4.99 each to start with, I thought I might try a couple out.
This first of these, Doctor Who and the Daleks, comes under my Books of Magic banner. My Ma bought it for Christmas for me one year and that was when I fell in love with the Doctor. It’s nice to see you again old friend.
I wasn’t really sure which if the others to pick up to go with it, so I closed by eyes, stuck my hand out and came back with this:
I guess I may as well pick all of the others up too - no doubt if I look on amazon, I can pick them all up for about £5. This is what they look like:
