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

SOME THINGS ARE JUST WEIRD

I don't ever wonder what I'm going to be doing when I'm in my mid-sixties, that's a whole lifetime away, but if I were to kick back in a very soft beanbag one evening with a remote in my hand and daydream a few hours away, I'm not sure I could come up with something like this if somebody asked me to. I don't even know what I think of it or what it's about:

It's OK... I wasn't looking for an answer, I only went to see if Kiss has released any dates for somewhere I might be this year and this is what I found. I don't really question it anymore. You can criticise all you like, but it beats sitting around watching daytime TV when they tell you you're too old to work anymore.

Nice artwork for the cover of the single though:

I know I said I wasn't looking for answers but if anybody has a clue as to what's going on here or who these girls are, I'd be mighty interested - but apparently not so interested that I'll go and look it up myself...

•••

Had an interesting two-way with Scott (Cole) this morning... in which he flashed me over this article on HST. The important part is this:

When photography gets so technical as to intimidate people, the element of simple enjoyment is bound to suffer. Any man who can see what he wants to get on film will usually find some way to get it; and a man who thinks his equipment is going to see for him is not going to get much of anything.

The same goes for writing - and more than likely anything else you might want to fix your sights on. Everything is as complicated as you want to make it - which also means it's frighteningly simple at the other end of the scale. Everybody has access to a pencil and some paper. Grand total to invest in what you want to do? Around £1 if you're broke as hell - you could probably steal a lifetimes worth of pencils from Argos if you're really desperate. As for paper? There's always something to write on. If you're still not writing with these basics, maybe that's not what you're supposed to be doing.

Honestly, if you're struggling with any of this - don't get too caught up in having the latest tools - it's not worth it. It eats all your time, makes you feel inferior and sucks the soul out of your bones. 

Tomorrow, there will be a new tool, a new lens - there's always something you can't afford that you think will make you feel more like the person you want to be.

This is what I think I need right now to make myself feel like a real writer:

But the only tools you need to know how to use properly are the ones inside your head.

EAT YOUR HEART OUT, MICHEL DE NOSTREDAME - AND A RHINO

Sometime ago, I predicted that with the advent and progression of digital reading, more art books would come to the fore leaving people who loved books with their love of stories intact and satiated digitally. Thus, without the need to pile cheap paperbacks with no actual artistic value beyond the story itself sky high in their libraries, the literary world would become not only a better place to be, but a nicer thing to look at as well. Since I said that, I have also come to realise that digital reading is much closer to the ancient traditions of storytelling and audio books, even more so - but that's a whole other blog post. I didn't see myself becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy but here I am. I do indeed have less fiction titles around the house but now, I also have some monstrous tomes in my life. By the very nature of what I do in the day, I have quite a lot of titles from Edition Reuss. Their books are second to none production wise and if you ever wanted to know how to publish a book to impress, just get a hold of one and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, while hunting down some items for some friends for Christmas, I stumbled across the Kiss Kompendium. It looked pretty big and I figured an official collection of every Kiss comic might be a neat curio to have around the house. I thought it would be a solid book. I didn't however expect it blow my face off. It's twice the size of any of the Edition Reuss books, which is a feat in itself. It has well over 1000 quality pages and to be honest, for £30 (here's the amazon link) is more than great value for money.

I should have known better - hand on heart, this is the best slice of Kiss I've laid my hands on in an incredibly long time. How it made it past my Kiss radar, I'll never know - it's been out for a while.

Talking of Kiss - which I seem to be doing a lot lately - here's a great news story for you.

Eleanor flies to Shanghai tomorrow morning for a week, so the rest of the day will be full of packing stuff and hunting down things that are probably still unpacked from the house move. This leaves me with a week left to my own devices. I plan on the first couple of days being about 23 hours long in full on work mode. It's time to let a couple of cats out of the bag.

Finally, no blog post is surely complete without some video footage of a rhino being airlifted to safety from poachers...