THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
Time Snatchers
Snatchers? That will never make a good Doctor Who type of phrase. Snatching at time suggests that all you can steal is a few seconds that won't be missed by anybody. This however is not the case. Whole days have gone missing this week and I don't know where to. What I do know is that a LOT of things have pissed me off this week.
I'm not one to rubbish people in public - (honest) - but recently I've found myself working alongside some piss-ant little boy who looks like a monkey puppet a small child forgot to finish and then threw in the road to be rained on and forgotten about. Anyway, handsomeness aside, there's been this mini-project going on at the moment to design some adverts. I'm not the greatest designer in the world but I'm not the worst either. He however, is. So imagine my genuine surprise this morning when in my inbox I discovered an email praising my work with the tagline of "well done" at the end. Some of you will have seen me cross before, but this well and truly rattled the Smith-Cage.
The oddest thing about it was that he had sent me his designs so I could look at them suggesting I could look at the fonts for him along with some of the design parts. I threw it in the trash faster than you can read this. In this scenario my simian pal, what exactly are you bringing to the party? The sheet of blank paper it goes on? Jesus...
Then there was the two fuckhead estate agents who think they are all so big and clever by confronting me with the fact that I am a smoker when the property I had just viewed was advertised as non-smoking. I asked him if it was a problem and he said that it could become a problem...
My first response was that I may be a smoker but I didn't look like a child molester. Neither do I mainline heroin, break into houses, drink-drive, smack bitches up or charge vastly inflated administration charges for doing pretty much NOTHING AT ALL TO HELP ME. So, as much as I really like their property and would dearly love to live there, they can kiss my exhaust.
The shit list is long this week, but I shall stop there lest I get into trouble - I actually feel better now. I'll hang onto the other fuckers in case I need to vent again tomorrow.
Fact. I've been in the shittiest week long mood I have ever been in. Tomorrow I'm going to make an attempt to fake my way out of it until it becomes real. This is mostly because I think I thought my way into it, so there must be a similar way out.
The Coffee Table...
Putting some more finishing touches to Burn 13 tonight and I am so far behind, I've started to shame even myself which is quite a feat. Anyway, on my travels, I've come across some seriously good artwork on book covers that I thought I'd share here in case the whole project falls apart before I get to the end.
The first one is a Spanish cover for one of the issues of The Umbrella Academy. I don't know what it is about this, but I'd hang this in my house any day of the week and stop in front of it regularly.
Comics seem to be getting far too generic these days, almost obliterating the whole reason they were created in the first place, which surely was to let an artist do whatever they please.
I like the Marvel/DC state of mind a lot because it's keeping the standard high and that's always welcome, but now and then, I think I need to see something a little out of the box and this, apparently, is ticking qall of my boxes.
I was also looking for the cover of the edition of Factotum from Bukowski that I ordered from amazon this week, but then I found this one. Again, I don't know what it is about it that's rattling my cage - and I wish I could get hold of it somewhere - but this is a real peach in the book cover department.
I've not seen a book cover for a long time that said more about the book than the blurb on the back did. I must watch out for a copy of this somewhere along the line...
Slightly off from the book cover train of thought, is this excellent pastiche of TinTin called ThingThing - or, how Herge would have illustrated the Fantastic Four. Again, I would hang this in my house simply because it's so undeniably brilliant. The whole story behind it is here at Dustin Weaver's blog.
Finally, Eleanor sent me this just because it's really dumb fun. Dan McCarthy has loads more neat stuff here. I'm thinking that maybe I should get in touch and rustle up an interview for the next issue of Burn.
Nice.
That's me done for today.
Fucking hammered, to coin a phrase.
From Dusk Till Dawn
In The Guardian at the weekend - at least I think it's the weekend, the damn thing always takes me days to get through - they publish this half page filler piece called "My Writing Desk" or possibly "My Writing Room". I forget which, but you get the picture. It's basically a picture of a writer's desk and inevitably it's always some huge hulking beast of a mahogany thing with a soft leather top.
Sometimes they're neat and tidy, sometimes they're a royal mess of a thing, but they are always big and are surrounded by special things that the writer may look at for inspiration. So I thought it would be fun to take a picture of my writing desk, which as you'll see is neither large nor inlaid with leather. Luckily though, it does the same job as those big fuckers - it lets me write.
The great thing about my desk is that on a daily basis, it's never the same. It's always in the same place (facing the wall so that I can't look out of the window) but tomorrow, discounting the iBook and the Dalek mug, it's highly unlikely that any of this stuff will still be there, and I like that. A better picture would probably be the almighty mess of things behind me where I clear the desk and stack them on the floor, the bookshelf, the fridge and so on, but that would reveal me to be more messy than I really am.
Honest.
I need to finish Burn 13 tonight but I'm more in the mood for finishing off a short story, so it might turn out to be a long one...
The Dark Lord Is Risen (1)
In the darkest of foul moods today. Tried to push it down but it kept coming back up to haunt. The day decided to get along with its life with or without me though, thus:
Propelled by yesterdays purchase of Ham on Rye, I figured I hadn't been over to Rye for a good couple of years, so jumped in the car to make sure it was still as sleepy as it should be - and it was.
I even found an indie bookstore that didn't suck. It's called Martello Books, which is a name that does suck, but their stock is pretty good, sporting lots of things not on the chain-store shelves including a copy of Warren Ellis's Crooked Little Vein which superficially looks like something I would go on about for months, so it had better be.
I also picked up a flyer for an exhibition that I must go to - that's a worrying two in two days - but this one is a no brainer. Dave McKean and Brigitte Evill have Narative Arcs going on at the Rye Art Gallery from 12 September to 11 October. Don't question it. If you're in the area, drop in - Dave McKean is simply the best in the business.
Been thinking over the weekend about organising a calendar for next year... or maybe even the back end of this, doing some readings at festivals and some other similar events. There seem to be more festivals than ever this year and I don't doubt that there will be even more kicking in next year. I know nothing whatsoever about any of them, so this will be a nice learning curve with maybe even some kind of payoff at the end.
On a similar subject, Eleanor and I were discussing poetry yesterday ('discussing' makes it sound more intelligent than it probably was), and what the hell I was going to do with all these scraps of paper and notebooks I have lying around. So I'm going to collect them all in one book and publish them pretty much as I'm doing with Wasteland and Blackout. What it shall be called I'm not sure but it's all here to put out so it may come quicker than expected. Alongside of that, she suspected that poetry was going to swing around and become very cool again over the next year or so. I'm no coat tail rider, but in that instance, I have no qualms about hitching a ride especially as it's not my main thing.
That's my day - more or less. Looking back over the post, it doesn't seem like I was in that dark place at all - but I was. Maybe still am but I've got an unbelievable amount of mag editing to do this evening for Burn and I guess I should really start getting my hands dirty in those poetry boxes...
...but first I am going to watch the new Torchwood Children of Earth trailer for the seventh time
Currently decided to read: Crooked Little Vein (Ham on Rye can wait I think)
Naming and shaming an awful book: Love and other Near Death Experiences by Mil Millington. It sounded good on the surface and ultimately delivered one of those sticky wet fireworks you get every now and again. Any publicity is good publicity but this is shit.
Binge Reading
Another week has passed me by with a lot less posting than I would like...
I got up this morning and decided I seriously needed to binge read over the weekend so I went to every decent bookstore I could find in search of a hit. It's a shitty and sad state of affairs out there at the moment. My adoration of crime thrillers is quickly becoming an albatross around my neck as the only authors on display are either those who I have chewed up and spat out already or those I have buried in a ditch out of disgust separated only by those who have let their books into the big bad world with awful cover designs and will therefore never be bough by me or anybody else. As a slight aside to this, I have totally given up on horror. If somebody could get their ass into gear and publish something good, they would clean up. Nothing good has come out of that stable since Barker pimped out Gallilee... what's that? Ten years ago?
Please don't bother leaving a comment that says "why not try Joe Hill". I'll tell you why - he sucks that's why. He might be Stephen King's son but that counts for nothing on the shelf. Heart Shaped Box was the most disappointing book in living memory.
Where was I? Ah - the bookstore. We have two branches of Waterstones in Canterbury. One is going downhill faster than a stream and the other is faring slightly better as it either a) has more choice or b) has the same choice but is better laid out. However, the first thing I see in the slightly better store is the staff's 'Desert Island Choice' which included Wuthering Heights and Catch 22. That my friends is one suck-ass desert island library to be stuck with. I think I would rather have Joe Hill.
Anyway, I settled on a copy of Bukowski's Ham On Rye (who is fast becoming a favourite around here) and I thought I would go with a gut instinct and also picked up Bringing It All Back Home by Ian Clayton. I was in the mood for coming back with a big stack to wade through but this was not to be. I think I'll throw the book money in a big pot instead and when The Lovers comes out, go and buy it from an indie book store at full jacket price as a (useless) gesture at the chain stores.
I hope this isn't all going the same way as record stores...
Some other cool stuff infiltrated my life today as well. I have always liked the thought of liking art - art that you hang on the wall, not art in a comic book - but I've never really been that good at appreciating anything about it. I tend to run on instinct and therefore like only Bosch (who hit me where it hurt first time round), a fair amount of pre-Raphaelite guys and whatever the name of the guy is who painted the Samurai on a Horse print that I have - yeah, I should probably find that out.
Anyway, I saw this picture up for sale and fell in love instantly - and also discovered that the artist, Govinder Nazran (now sadly no longer with us), has an exhibition on until mid-June. I should probably go. Stuff like this doesn't come along too often for me.
So apart from being accosted by a woman in the street for saying the Christian bookshop would never close down like all of the regular bookstores because it was funded by blood money (which was pretty funny really), being exceptionally disappointed by the zodiac floor I had based a whole book on in Canterbury Cathedral (but was still pretty damn killer for a million other reasons) and not being asked to be the new frontman for Queen (which I only want to be asked to do so that I can say no), I just had the best day I can remember for years on end.
Life is good. Let's go to work...
Currently reading: one of those books I mentioned earlier.
Currently watching: Nothing. Everything has finished for the summer. This is probably a good thing.
Currently listening to: Shinedown: The Sound of Madness and Jani Lane: Back Down To One
2: The Smoking Gun
I've smoked cigarettes since I was 18. It started out as being all about image. All the bad boys of rock n roll smoked, or at least all the cool people did. This elite group would never be seen dead with anything but Marlboro in their hands, so there was little other choice. Anyway, even with my poor math, I can work out that's 23 years, which is a long old time in anybody's book. On the plus side though, I think it shows great commitment. I started out with JPS Black but rumour had it that they had asbestos in the filter, so I changed pretty damn quickly to something far less "dangerous". It's hard work choosing a brand that says a lot about you - and this was a prerequisite for me.
In choosing a brand of cigarette, what you're essentially doing is making a life choice and if it's not thought out carefully, your entire life can be mapped out before you in entirely the wrong way. To illustrate, here's a brief summary of what the world thinks of you if you have chosen one of the following:
JPS Black: I want to die. Fast. Preferably now.
Marlboro Red: I want to die and love rock n roll.
Marlboro Lights: I want to die but not quite so fast as I made it past 28. I like rock n roll and stand-up comedy.
Camel: Other smokers don't even like me smoking around them.
Benson & Hedges: I am a genetic smoker. My mum smokes them and I steal them.
Black Cat/Raffles: I am so hooked, I smoke 60 a day as this is all I can afford.
Silk Cut: I am not really a smoker
Silk Cut Ultra Low: Smoking prolongs my life.
Roll your own: I fell on hard times.
Dunhill: My company pays me to smoke.
Embassy No 6/Regal: I am an absolute fucking dog and don't care what people think of me. I have no close friends.
Lambert & Butler: I am the dictionary definition of scum.
Even from this small and incomplete list, you can see that your choice of brand speaks volumes about you. Think carefully if you're about to start. If you're already knee deep, maybe you should consider switching brands to one of the cooler varieties - it's never too late for an image upgrade.
Now - here's the killing joke. We all know smoking will kill us. Smokers don't care, but I don't think it needs to quite so soon. Let's look at Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) for a moment.
The theory behind NLP is that you can rewire your brain to function in a different way by feeding it subliminal messages. If you are scared of flying for instance, NLP can sort you out with a few well placed subliminal messages and presto - two weeks in the Med coming right up.
I'm a big advocate of NLP, but consider this. On a daily basis, smokers are fed 'death messages' in the form of "Smoking kills" or "Smoking can seriously damage your heath". After 23 years of this, those messages must surely now be hardwired into my brain. Using the tried and tested NLP model, this must be causing my body to think it is sick and thus, begin killing me of its own accord. That's not the cigarette at work. That's the packaging - and in case some of the lower grade smokers (see earlier list) be unable to read or need it spelling out to them, we now have pictures on the packets to help us along. If NLP was taken as seriously as it should be, somebody should surely bring the government to hand over their part in this mass genocide.
Everybody knows the negative side of smoking, but it really is little more than the death which comes to us all. There are some positives if you know where to look - or at least there used to be before we were turned into outcasts. At a company I used to work at, we had free rein to walk outside and smoke whenever we liked. Naturally, this evolved into quite a social routine, so at various times during the day, I would be out there with, amongst others, the I.T. manager and even the H.R. manager. Having a relationship with these people gave me access to such items as a better PC than the guy who sat next to me and in one extreme, advance notice of oncoming redundancies. These are two valuable examples that will never be seen again in any company for the length and breadth of this Isle.
I've also met people all over the world who I would otherwise never have spoken to, formed alliances and long lasting friendships with smoking at its root and I would even go so far as to say when interviewing other smokers, that it's a huge ice breaker. Establishing common ground quickly can never be a bad thing in these circumstances.
For instance, one morning on Euston station, an American in a suit came over to me and asked if he could have one of my cigarettes. Always sympathetic to another smoker in a predicament, I gave him one and he asked me:
"What are you angry about today?"
I told him that I wasn't angry about anything, I was just waiting for a train, to which he replied:
"Everybody is angry about something," and he handed me his business card saying, "when you remember what it is, give me a call, I'd like to know. Then he walked away. Looking at the card afterward, apart from the address and phone numbers, it said in big letters right across the middle:
Since the internet came along, I have looked for John Silver many times out of curiosity but to no avail. I suspect he has probably died of cancer by now.
To my mind, there is a far more dangerous side to smoking than the ones we are warned about on the packets. I've set my hair on fire countless times, nearly blinded myself with stray ash once or twice and on one occasion (I can only venture I was hopelessly drunk at the time - or at least I hope I was), burnt my penis whilst going to the toilet. That was just damn careless and in my defence, it was in the very early days.
Yet smoking accidents come in all shapes and sizes. Mine, apart from the penis incident, all come with the territory but I know of a couple of guys who were simply stupid. One, whose name I honestly forget, set fire to his face and torso smoking over a bucket of petrol he was sniffing. Those burns were bad and nobody deserves that, but if I recall correctly, there wasn't a lot of sympathy for him either. The other guy I know, whose name I do remember but choose not to mention, spent his whole life drugged up on whatever he could get his hands on. He eventually cleaned himself up, got a job, a decent place to live and even a girlfriend. Then he went and fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand. That's not a nice way to go at all. Perhaps, these warnings should form part of the packaging - they're far more useful than feeding us information we already know.
At the other extreme, I once found myself in a shopping mall in Syracuse on an absolutely freezing afternoon. Waiting for my friend, I sat down on a bench and lit one up only to be pounced upon by a security guard who told me I couldn't do that. On offering a truly indignant "What are you going to do, arrest me?", his hand went to the butt of his holstered gun and he replied "I can if you want." This is thoroughly uncalled for in any circumstances, but in hindsight, I wish I'd pushed him now to see how far he really would have gone with that itchy finger.
Yet, for all my commitment, I feel like it's time to call it a day. Not for any health reasons and certainly not because it's now so expensive I'll soon have to start housebreaking to afford it. Like an old friend that you simply have nothing in common with anymore, I think it's time to say goodbye.
We may run into each other on holiday sometimes and I may even call him in a moment of extreme need, but I feel as though our day to day relationship is at an end. We don't really have anything to say to each other anymore. The cigarette knows it will be smoked and I know I will smoke it - that's just taking each other for granted and is certainly no basis to live in each others pockets.
I wonder what kind of non-smoker I will be? After all, once a smoker, always a smoker. It just depends when you last had one. I know I won't be one of those people who sneers at a smoker when they're nearby because there aren't ever any smokers nearby anymore. There are no places you can smoke anymore in the company of friends or strangers. I certainly won't be one of those who says to everybody he meets that they should give up either.
What I do know is that when we part, there will be no substitute. The will be no gum or a patch because nothing can replace my friend. There will be no sweet sucking, nail biting, worry beads or knuckle cracking. I will identify the last one in the packet, we will go somewhere quiet together and part with dignity - although I must admit to being very tempted to light up in the middle of Marks and Spencer or Holland and Barrett, just to stick two fingers up at the world we have found ourselves living in.
It's simply just time. I watched my Dad's father smoke himself to death in the most disgusting way. He was a huge man who got Emphysema and spent his final weeks coughing up dirt and spitting it into a glass in between taking another drag, until eventually, I think the Reaper just took pity and came to take him away. My Dad's mother who was also a smoker, fared slightly better but eventually went in exactly the same way. They were both in their eighties though. I have no doubt that my Mother's father would have gone the same way from his pipe habit but my Gran nagged so much that he stopped - however, I think he would sometimes have preferred the pipe death to the nagging variety.
We - my brother and two sisters - were all brought up knowing that if we smoked, we all faced the beating of our lives. Yet somehow, we all wound up in this place - well, my sister with Down's Syndrome didn't. If fact, I don't think I've ever seen anybody with Down's Syndrome smoking which begs the question - who's really the one with the missing chromosome?
Next: Chapter 3: The Books of the Dead
Posting 15th June
Footnote: please feel free to leave comments, factual errors, report typos etc. Anything that will sharpen this up is much appreciated.
New posting: The Wasteland 2 | The Smoking Gun
With 16 minutes to spare, The Smoking Gun - chapter two of The Wasteland - is now available for chewing up and spitting back out...
Trip Rider
We also went out for the best picnic ever by the river here - well, a little bit along from there, but you get the picture - which was absolutely the highlight of the weekend - unlike discovering that junction 8 of the M6 was closed and being diverted through Birmingham on the way home, which wasn't.
I've seriously begun to love going away for the weekend, so much so that 'the road' has become something of a friend - lousy motorway coffee and all. It seems to create a whole ruck of fully formed ideas and a time for putting previously random thoughts in some kind of order.
Speaking of random, on a hit n run tour of the web, I found this unopened Marathon Bar for sale. Nice. If I had won it, I would have had to open it and see what it tasted like. Does chocolate go off?
...and for those of you sitting around waiting to blast me a cannonball for not posting The Smoking Gun over at The Wasteland when I said I would, it's on its way! Just a few last minute carve-ups and we should be there.
Oh ye of little faith.
Ring My Bell
Back to the morning blog again? This could get to be a nasty habit and I'm in the mood for emptying my head, so this is as much for me as anybody:
I'm launching a new online project this week called Letters from the Zodiac Lung. It won't take a huge stretch of the imagination to guess what will be going on there either and I hope all the people who will be involved play nicely with me. We don't want any unnecessary blood on the tracks. First posting will be either tonight or tomorrow night...
My deadline for The Smoking Gun - the next chapter of The Wasteland - is looming over my head like a... like a... (enter own descriptive word here). After opting to go back and write the whole thing from scratch again I now have to re-edit and make her look pretty for posting on Monday.
With a bit of luck and the wind behind me, Charlotte won't have been killed by the Prime Minister of Mexico, won't have Cuban drug barons etching her name in silver bullets and nor will she have sold her laptop to bring in enough money to buy more cake. No - with some luck, she will be pleased to hear from me and welcome my plans to get the hell on with the next issue of Too Hot For Dogs, although I rather suspect she will tell me to go swing from a rope for leaving it so long!
That's all the projects I have at the front of my head right now - more of an update sometime during the day.
The Softmint in the Woods
The following letter was mailed out to these nice people this morning. Let's see what they make of it. I'll edit any response back into the post to keep everything together... it might get a little busy around here!
Dear Trebor Mint People
Last week I was taking a walk in the woods with my girlfriend when we decided to take a detour off the path and explore the woods for real - actually, it's probably best if I stop right there about that part of the story...
Anyway, we had not gone two hundred yards when we came to a clearing where somebody had begun to make a small woodland dwelling. The man - at least I assume it to be a man - was not there but he had already put together somewhere to sleep and appeared to be in the process of making a lounge out of a wigwam type structure, there were also the remnants of a fire that had been used a few times already and various other types of "branch scaffolding" where "construction" work was already underway.
I digress. At the foot of what was possibly his proposed kitchen type structure, he had left a rune stone. It was the rune stone for Dagaz - which is two triangles with the pointed ends facing each other. A quick search on the internet will reveal its meaning but basically Dagaz refers to a shamanic state in which polarities of energy come together. This may be a time of enlightenment and awakening. It means not only the harnessing of the powerful fire energy that gets things done, but the wisdom to best use these energies...
Being somewhat of a pagan type, I saw the rune for what it was, and as I too am currently rebuilding my life, thought the rune could be used for my own purposes, so I took it.
I then felt quite bad about taking it, so I returned to put it back where I found it. Putting my hand in my pocket, I pulled out the runestone only to find that it was a renegade Softmint (spearmint) that must have fallen out of the packet.
I rummaged out the rune as well and stood perplexed with the rune in one hand and a Softmint in the other, wondering which one the homeless man would be most pleased to see.
I chose to leave him the Softmint - and I even considered drawing a Dagaz symbol on there for him so he had the best of both worlds but didn't. I didn't think he would eat a Softmint that had been drawn on. Mind you, thinking about it now, I don't suppose he would eat a Softmint that he found on a leaf where his rune used to either. Drawn on or not.
Don't you think this would make an excellent advert? If it's not too controversial for you, maybe you could release a limited edition RuneMint - obviously with runic symbols on board.
Letting these great mints sit on shelves and fend for themselves up and down the country next to Extra Strong Mints, gum of varying standards and pretenders to the Mint Throne, is a crying shame. Why not give them a boost - even just for a little while. The RuneMint is a killer idea and well you know it!
You don't even have to stop there. You could invade other sweets' territories and do a limited edition run of, say, LoveMints - each with a different loving message on such as "Suck Me"...
Thanks for your time. I hope you enjoyed my story. It's all true.
Best regards
Sion Smith
P.S. Who came up with that "minty bit stronger" tagline? I hope he no longer works there. He probably had a degree didn't he - and earned £40k+ a year. A six year old child could have thought of that. It's truly awful and uninspired to say the least.
Maybe he got the sack and lost his home and now has to live in the woods...
Slow Chemicals
Time to catch up on some inanity before I load up on real work... sometimes though, you have to wonder which is harder.
Last week, I found I had a puncture in one of the tyres on the Saab. Not the first and probably won't be the last either, but it's certainly the first time I've ever been spiked by a drill bit! Damn thing is a good four inches long - pretty impressive if I say so myself. I don't recall driving on a dead tyre... sabotage? Could be!
Also this week, walking past a fishing tackle shop, there was this sign in the window. I keep meaning to find exactly where Kens Barber Shop is so as I could ask him what these rumours are all about, but so far it's eluded me. That's rumours in the plural. So there's more than one being spread! How exciting. What could Ken have possibly done that is so bad some people thought he was closing down? And what is his relationship with the guy that owns the tackle shop? Do they dig up worms together on a Sunday morning? Why must they inform us? What on earth could be so important that we have to know this information? Hasn't Ken seen my hair lately? If Ken's joint is such a haven of haircutting activity, how come I don't know where it is?
Too many questions for one man to answer that's for certain.
To wrap up the weeks peculiarities, on Friday I went to see Ellie perform in her school choir. The powers that be had organised a cross-bred English-French exchange for the day and so, half of te material was in English and half in French. Why is it that any nation in Europe can speak English much better than most of England? More importantly, why do all French songs sound like they didn't make the grade for a children's TV show?
From the programme of events I could see we were in for a treat by these children. Hotel California - a song about being so smacked out on heroin that you don't know if you're coming or going - was very odd, but not as odd as Smoke on the Water on a trombone. Man that sounds shit. Don't ever do it. The absolute pinnacle of Anglo-Francais relations however, has to be the - excuse my language - fucking killer rendition of AC/DC's Highway to Hell. When I saw it on there, I thought it may have been a mistake but they went for it - lock, stock and two smoking ones.
The decision to do this in itself was a bit of a rabbit punch, but nothing prepared me for the prettiest little French girl coming to the front to the deliver the killer lines:
Hey satan, payed my dues
Playing in a rocking band
Hey momma, look at me
Im on my way to the promised land
I really can't tell you enough how totally cool this was - so I took the liberty of taping it on my phone. It probably breaks the Geneva Convention somehow, but you can listen to the whole song here.
Right. Time for some work...
Currently reading: ah... editing own stuff. Shame, but necessary
Currently listening to: Our Lady Peace: Clumsy
Currently wondering: what the hell I'm going to do when Lost, 24, Supernatural and Fringe all finish this week. Get a life maybe...
Good Morning Headache
The night time blog seems to have fallen by the wayside due to "work demands" so I thought I'd see how posting in the morning went. Already I can see it's massively doomed to failure but that may be because I got up at 5 o'clock this morning. It's a bit stressful I can tell you... normally the only time I see 5 am is when I've forgotten to go to bed, but this morning I had an "errand" to run. All my head can manage is a rundown of events, so:
Issue 13 of Burn is shaping up well. I finally got the cover and format sorted out, figured out how to play with square pages and also pre-aligned the file for both printing and digital delivery - and to make it all worthwhile, not five minutes ago, I got an email from a photographer out in LA who has some exclusive shots of Steel Panther to mail across.
That's the good news, the bad news - for me at least - is that I still have a shitload of content to write and I should really finish the website today as well.
More later...
Death takes a holiday
Or maybe she was just feeling charitable this morning. Appointment with Doctor duly made, I sat with visibly sick people whilst waiting for whatever horrendous news was to come.
Doctor Charlatan from Lithuania (or similar) pulled up my notes on screen and asked why I was there - to which I of course replied "because you asked me to!" Checking again, she found the results of my triple threat treat (bloods, chest x-ray and ECG ) and said "blah, blah, blah - you're perfectly healthy. No bloods out of order, chest x-ray is clear and your heart is like that of a bull..." (It sounds better in a Lithuanian accent believe me).
So why the hell call me in with a freaking scary letter! Jeez. I have to admit to tidal waves of relief swathing over me though. I honestly thought they were going to tell me the worst... and I actually came out with good news too. A cholesterol level of 4.6. It's a bit high but it's nowhere near the 12+ I expected it to be. This, I believe, gives me licence to devour a double bacon McMuffin every morning for a week should I so desire.
After she finished up with the passing comment: "Maybe you should look at this as God giving you a second chance, I celebrated with a cigarette and then spent the rest of the afternoon plotting out the next chapter of The Wasteland - The Collapse of the Holy Trinity - which isn't about what it appears to be about. I'm looking forward to writing that one. Controversial might be a good description. First, I must edit The Smoking Gun ready for posting. The Wasteland will be finished if it kills me... which it won't because I am The Amazing Indestructible Man!
Yeah, yeah... I know... pride comes before a fall and other cliches...
Death shall come on swift wings...
I came home tonight to find a letter from the doctor (as opposed the Doctor which would have been excellent), requesting I make an appointment as soon as possible to discuss the results of my blood test/chest x-ray/ECG. This is probably not the greatest news in the world. On the plus side, I forgot to hand in my ECG results which means it's either the lungs or the blood. I'm hoping for a blood result as that sounds to me like it might be the easiest to fix or at least control... but all those years cavorting with cigarettes. That can't be good can it? On the negative side, I guess it could be anything. I suppose I should go and see him tomorrow.
Being a glass half full kind of guy, I figure if it's really, really bad, at least I'll have something new to write about. Thus, slightly disrupted from work this evening. Totally disrupted truth be told. I have done nothing. I think that's allowed once in a while.
If I should die before I wake, I should state for the record here that Kahn has bagged whatever CDs I have left, which is fine by me. He's still in need of a musical education. Ian can have my complete boxsets of Starsky and Hutch simply because he's the only other person I know who might enjoy them... and as for my car. Bury me in it. Just make sure the volume is turned up while you're throwing the dirt on.
Enough. I must sleep for once. What you don't know sure can hurt you...
1: Oh My God, He's Ripped His Head Off...
Of all the cultural landscapes lined up for this book, wrestling is guaranteed to be the least understood of all of them.
It's even quite possibly the lowest rung on anybody's cultural ladder of things you could find exciting (apart from porn maybe), and yet it continues to be the gift that keeps on giving as it re-frames its points of reference often enough to remain as important to me today as it was when I was first introduced to it 35 years ago. Man that makes me feel old.
I found out a few years ago that my mother once went out with a guy in the wrestling business. Sadly, the wrestling scene in North Wales in the late-sixties was not the same as that of the WWF (hereafter known by its new trading name: WWE) in the late-eighties. Indeed, she dated some guy who used to carry a spit bucket. This in itself sits fine with me. I understand that the alternative was either some kid who rode the bakers bicycle or somebody who could build a dry-stone wall.
My love affair began around 1973 when I was exposed on a weekly basis to the UK scene. For the next ten years or so, I was fascinated with the lifestyle I thought these guys lived. To me, this was the pinnacle of fame and ambition. Hey, I was seven years old when it began - most people probably don't realise that all you can ever aspire to in this life is what's visible on the ladder in front of you. I know there's a school of thought that says your heroes should be real people like your Dad or maybe an uncle but in the absence of anybody worthwhile to look up to, my mind sought out the highest denominator possible and like a beanstalk, in front of me it grew tall and strong.
I had it figured out pretty early on that the big names were normally the guys with the least talent and it amazes me today that people still accept this. The legends that are Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks (as this is the era we're talking about) proved this to be true week after week. Looking back, it's hard to see how captivating two behemoths running slowly at each other can actually be, but for a time, they were.
Inside of this Saturday afternoon televised show were two guys I couldn't get enough of: Marc 'Rollerball' Rocco and the immortal Kendo Nagasaki (though not I suspect, literally. If memory serves me correctly, he owns a chain of carpet stores somewhere in the Midlands). Rocco had massive amounts of talent as a technical wrestler and all the charisma he probably needed to take his career over to the States in search of the big money should he have chosen to. He could have made a bigger name for himself here at home if he had been a babyface (that would be a "good guy" for the uninitiated) but he made such a good heel (and that would be the "bad guy" term), that his whole demeanor would have been destroyed had he done so. Kendo Nagasaki on the other hand, possessed something else entirely.
Choosing to hide his face behind - you guessed it - a kendo mask, the first time I saw him I was sold on the entire concept. He was a bloody good wrestler too, one of the best but as anybody who has ever used a mask in their career will know, when you live by the mask, you die by the mask.
All of this did nothing to help me at school. See, I also learned from wrestling that when you're in a team, others can let you down heavily and you can lose, even when it's not your doing. Personally, I'm no stranger to losing but at least there's a certain nobility in screwing up on your own terms. When you like wrestling and choose to sing the praises of a slightly out of shape man in a mask, your teachers simply don't get it. I could have chosen a footballer, a rugby player or maybe a tennis hot-shot and any of those would have been OK with the gimps but alas, I was more likely to get lessons in how to bring down the Cuban Government than learn how to slap on a Full Nelson. Today - still - football is king and those who control the ball , control the top of the ladder, but there is a way out. You simply choose to be king of the gutter as opposed to the ladder in order to cultivate any kind of cultural survival mechanism at all.
In my year at school, as there was before and after my time in every school across the land, there were two guys that ruled said football ladder. They looked, acted and swore they were destined for the big time. All these years on, one of them still works in the DIY store that he worked in back then. He is around seven stone heavier than me and that's pretty much it for him I guess. The other had a couple of years on the B team of one of the better teams in the national league and now works in one of those "Hand Car Wash" franchises that have sprung up in every supermarket car park in the country. I like this story because, while I wouldn't have begrudged them any success at all - it would have made no difference to me whatsoever - I feel that it provides a light in the tunnel for anybody who is utterly shit at sports and persecuted by games teachers across the land for being so. Let's look at the facts here anyway - anybody who chooses to be a sports teacher at school obviously wasn't good enough to do the sport they loved for a living. This is why they make others lives into a living hell.
I digress. This affair with Saturday afternoon World of Sport wrestling lasted until they took it of the air. Some many years later, the ITV network began screening the WWE show "Superstars of Wrestling" at 4am. I had left home by this time and while I did have a television, it was the smallest TV in the world with an aerial that was little better than a stick stuck in the back of it. But some things are worth persisting with and I discovered that if I built a tower out of nearly all of my albums and books, then balanced the aerial on top, said Superstars of Wrestling was watchable - but I do use the term loosely. It did however give me an introduction into the likes of Curt Hennig and Bret Hart. It probably should have given me an introduction to Hulk Hogan as well but he was far too 'famous' and 'important' to appear on the weekly house shows. Go figure.
As the years went by, I made friends with others who were similarly culturally challenged, until eventually, the WWE cut through into the mainstream via the magic of BSkyB satellite and cable network. My dirty little secret was no longer culturally insignificant - over the following years we became a veritable army. At one point, it was the most culturally significant thing on the planet for no other reason than - love it or hate it - it was great for journalists to write about. There was always some scandal or other for a journalist to dip their pen into. Despite its mainstream popularity, I stuck with it (which is unlike me) because there was no alternative. Through thick and thin, scandal and bad business, I was by their side standing tall brandishing a foam finger at anybody who would listen.
Then one day, the penny I had put in the wrestling slot decided to pay out a jackpot...
On one of the first major UK tours they ever undertook, I thought I'd check it out in the flesh - and it was pretty hot. This was in the years when nobody was really sure if it was 'fake' or not. Knowing what I know now, despite its 'set-up' of storylines, it's more brutal than you could ever imagine. (When the lid was lifted on this, it got even better for me because then you had to consider how good these guys were at not hurting each other and how the hell some of the moves were worked out). For some reason on this particular evening, I had chosen to hit Birmingham instead of London. That's a cultural suicide in itself as I can honestly say that I despise Birmingham more than any other place on earth.
When the show was over, I found that I had missed the last coach home (the car had a hole in the exhaust the size of Texas), and with the next one being at 5am, I was faced with the prospect of walking around my least favourite city for the next six hours. If I had turned a different corner that night, we never would have met - Andre the Giant and I that is. Well, we never actually met but I saw him hobbling on his giant crutches through the lobby of a hotel I was passing by. Going inside for closer inspection, I discovered a couple of others minor wrestlers holed up in the bar. This was good enough for me, but with only enough money for one drink, my prospects of sitting the whole night out there were pretty damn slim...
It turned out to be the most revealing night I have ever spent anywhere. As I sat in this innocuous hotel bar trying my very best to be inconspicuous (which in this case - and this case alone - turned out to be remarkably easy), almost every single wrestler on that tour appeared over the course of the following hour.
With the exception of the Nasty Boys and Davey Boy Smith, who were the biggest dicks I've ever met, every single one of those insane gargantuans was a pleasure to meet, but I really could have lived without seeing the Undertaker in a tracksuit. Two people genuinely surprised me that night. The first was the Texas Tornado, Kerry Von Erich who, of his own free will, came and sat next to me and shot the breeze simply because he wanted to. We talked about nothing and everything. Classy. The other guy who knocked me out was Ric Flair, who offered to buy me a drink, asked if I'd enjoyed the show and was pretty humble all things considered. While the rest of the troupe wandered around in track suits, Ric had come down in a suit - it was most bizarre.
Whilst Ric Flair appears to have escaped the circus with his legend intact, Von Erich was not so fortunate. In 1986, he was involved in a motorcycle accident that almost killed him. The damage sustained to his foot was so bad that doctors amputated it. Wrestlers being the tenacious breed they are, he opted to continue his career with a prosthetic foot. Sadly, life was a bit too much for Kerry in the end and he shot himself in the heart. I find this incredibly sad for somebody who was capable of carrying in in the face of such odds. As a matter of further interest, two of his brothers, Mike and Chris, also committed suicide. They were wrestlers too.
Two things of interest here. Is there any other job in the world where so many people die before their time should be up? Of this particular line-up, over 50 percent of the people I met that night are now dead. Can you imagine if that was your place of work?
The list of wrestling casualties outside of that tour is simply phenomenal. Wrestlers are dangerous people to have as role models and heroes. Whilst Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks also died, their lives simply ran out because of their size. Indeed, I doubt whether anybody on the World of Sport roster could afford cocaine, let alone anabolic steroids and the seemingly endless list of painkillers that the WWF guys were toting.
To bring it into focus, let me elaborate on three icons of this once very private world. Lex Luger was the consummate underachiever. He was a man who could have had the world at his feet but the bottom line was a combination of being extremely dull and the fact that he didn't appear that he could be bothered. After something like his seventh run at the pot of gold, he got further into trouble and during the period 2003 to 2005, found himself involved in gun crime and DUI offences whilst his girlfriend - Miss Elizabeth, the kind of woman in whose mouth butter would be quite safe in - died from a lethal cocktail of pills for which he was charged with 14 drug possession counts. As so many of his peers have done, in 2006 he signed himself over to God and became a born again Christian. God, seemingly bored with the amount of them coming to see him for aid, had seen enough and in 2007 Luger suffered a nerve inpingement and wound up quadraplegic.
Most of this is not common knowledge, unlike the case of Chris Benoit, who after years of hard slog finally became a main event superstar of actual value. The guy is one of the top five technical wrestlers of all time. Nobody with an ounce of wrestling knowledge will disagree with this statement. He may even be the best wrestler ever. So what would make a man at the top of his game get up one day and decide to kill his wife and seven year old son and then hang himself? The well documented case of drug and steroid abuse aside, tests were eventually made on Benoit's brain by a neurosurgeon in West Virginia who stated "Benoits's brain was so severely damaged, it resembled the brain of an 85 year old Alzheimers patient." The actions and death of Chris Benoit was a real low point for me. The guy was the best of the best and I said so innumerable times to as many people who would care to listen. Not quite so bad as maybe finding out your hero is a child molester, but it's not that far off either.
The saddest story of all though was told to me by Bret Hart at a hotel in Chelsea one morning. Despite Bret's brother Owen dying in the ring in the most obscene circumstances, he looked genuinely sad when he told of the death of Ray Traylor - better known as the Big Bossman - who simply sat down on a sofa. When his wife returned to the room moments later, she simply found him sitting there, dead.
These stories are the tip of a huge iceberg. For a sport that is as "fixed" as it is, it sure isn't "fixed" very well or securely but still, whenever I say those immortal words "I like wrestling", I get "the look" closely followed by thw words "Big Daddy!" and/or "Hulk Hogan!" - which is a bit like somebody saying they like football and me shouting "George Best!" and "1966 - what a year!", ie: fucking stupid.
So, wrestling is a hard life - the rewards can be incredible but the price some pay is way beyond reasonable. In fact, for a sport with relatively few athletes performing professionally, a quick Google search on the subject reveals the number of pros to die since 1985 and before the age of 60 is 88. Can you imagine the same relative statistics in football? Out of those 88, 41 of them died before they had even hit 40 - all in the name of what? Entertainment?
We've has come a long way since the days of the spit bucket story. Apart from the obvious here, it's a part of what I genuinely find appealing about wrestling - you never quite know what's about to happen next, which really is saying something about the most predetermined sport in the world. Could opera survive these killing blows? Tennis? Theatre? No, I don't think so, but despite most of the players in the wrestling game willing to put their lives (willingly or not) on the line every night of the year, why do I still feel like a cultural fraud?
Is singing in Italian at a volume dogs run away from really a more valuable cultural skill than delivering a Hurricanrana off the top rope? Is cricket really a better sport? It has no right to lord it over another sport like it does because at it's base level, anybody can play it. At best, it's a game of hitting a ball with a stick of wood. I never once got chosen first to play rugby or football, but in cricket you can get a game every time! Anybody can stand far away from the action and maybe catch a ball.
Admittedly, that bowling technique is hard as nails but so is slipping on a figure four leglock without getting the legs mixed up.
Next: Chapter 2: The Smoking Gun
Posting 25th May
Footnote: please feel free to leave comments, factual errors, report typos etc. Anything that will sharpen this up is much appreciated.
An old list resurfaces...
While sifting through some old notebooks tonight, I found the one I was going to use when I thought 101 things in 1001 days was a good idea. What else is a man going to do but look inside it. I found that I've actually done some of these things, so for the sake of argument (ie: it's very possible that I may resurrect it, or even just do it stealth-like on myself), here they are:
12. Lose a stone in weight. (I've actually lost two) 21. Give away all of my unwanted stuff. (Pending, but there really is hardly anything left and it can probably all go in the trash) 23. Donate monthly to WSPA. 24. Donate monthly to NSPCC. 48. Empty the loft of crap.
I know it's not many and they're all superficial rubbish, but hey, I was (sort of) impressed. I hadn't even finished the list but somehow, now feel compelled to do just that. We'll see. I think there's a huge cavalcade of things that can be crossed off there over the next seven days too, but more about that some other time.
Currently listening to: Lords of the New Church
Currently reading: The Wasteland edits
2 + 2 = whatever the government feel like
So what's a couple of weeks between friends? I do have half a good excuse for no blogging activity. I went away for a week to catch some surf in Devon. Sadly, the surf had other ideas and insisted on breaking up underneath me for the whole week. Sadder still, the damn place is so remote that wi-fi does not exist. On the positive side, it did give me a chance to step away from doing work and spend some time actually thinking about what I was doing - the results of which will filter out over the next few days. ...and the other half of the excuse? I meant to do a catch up blog, but then I realised that nobody actually cares, so I'll just come back to the table and plunder today and yesterday for stories.
Found myself most disturbed by primary school mathematics today. Trying to help with simple homework is harder than dealing with homework you don't understand! To do simple multiplication these days, you have to "partition". Bear with me!
To multiply 12 x 3, you have to identify the tens and units, then you times the ten by the number and then then unit by the number, add them together and you have your answer, but you can't do it like this anymore:
12 3x
and do it in simple columns that you can see - and therefore use when you're faced with a sum like 4,564 x 7. Instead, you do them in a line. I think I am being stupid. Obviously the answer to that sum is 36 but if you do the tens multiplication it comes to 3 and the units then comes to 6, but when you add them together it makes 9. The only way I can see that it will make 36 is if you simply sit the numbers next to each other!
This, I know cannot be right, but trying to explain this to an eight year old is even harder than grasping what they're actually trying to teach! I can see I will need to go to into school and have it explained to me - which is all rather embarrassing because I am not really that stupid! To make it worse, Rhiannon knew what the answer was as she did it in her head like me but she couldn't show her working out. Absolute hell is still to come: if I remember correctly, the chunking method of division is the most stupid tactical assault on dividing numbers I have ever seen. Google it... it's full of holes I guarantee.
Anyway, we walked away from that and went to see Monsters vs Aliens - which is excellent fun. Not essential, but if you're badgered to go and see it, it's pretty damn good. Kind of like Monsters Inc, but better. The rest of the day then disappeared in a mess of PhotoShop files and other design type stuff.
I also notice that I'm due to post chapter one of The Wasteland tomorrow - and this time I'm ready for it! It's all here ready to roll out. I've not looked at it for a week now, so one last proof read tomorrow evening and that can go up. The Wasteland project is growing on me and more ideas keep coming in to build it. I will try to keep my head with it, finish it and make it into something decent instead of it sitting around unfinished for a change.
I've spent 90% of the weekend working, 5% sleeping and the other 5% catching up on Lost, 24, Fringe and Supernatural - I think I might be quite tired now so apologies if there are bigholes here. Oddly though, I'm not tired - merely enthused to keep going, but I'm making mistakes more than I normally do, so it really is time to walk away.
Currently listening to: Sea Hags, Electric Angels, Junkyard and Jetboy. I blame Steel Panther...
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5tl2_K-d-g]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMSEeNJpHrk]
Currently reading: Ian Rankin: Exit Music - I know I was reading this before but I got waylaid by Bret Hart's Hitman and some back issues of a cool magazine.
More hit and run action...
Lots of real work going on here still and my brain has settled into a weird routine. Every time I try to go to sleep at night, it comes up with something new for me think about and the last three nights, it's made me get up and do something with them. Note taking is not enough apparently.
The worst thing it's come up with is a dilemma and a half. When you begin writing, at the back of your mind, the ideal is that a publisher will pick you up and do the 'right thing' with you (ie: give you some money and then spend some money in the hope that they can make some money). A by-product of this is a second book... unless of course your first book fails to perform adequately and then you will be back at square one with a bad taste in your mouth, no hope and a reputation among other publishers that your first publisher dropped you.
Is this a reasonable assumption? I think so, which is why I find doing it yourself so damned appealing. There are two really important things to bear in mind though:
1. Is your writing good enough? Always a good idea to get somebody who knows what they are talking about to get a look over it first. There's all manner of shit that can come back and bite you on the ass. Spelling, continuity, rambling... I'll stop there. At the end of that long list though is the fact that you have to be able to take the criticism and do something with it. Accept or reject. It's your call, but if you can't take it from one person you trust, stop right now because once people start buying your product, your whole future will involve people commenting on your stuff.
2. The second and more important point was given that you have enough technical knowledge to get the product made and looking as good - if not better than the big guns can do - your main stumbling block is getting enough people to know about your product and convince the vast majority of them to part with their money. This one has scrawled a frown across my face for a long time now... I don't have any answers - yet. But I will find them...
More later.
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
Dirty Work
The thing with saying you're going to write something ultimately means that, eventually, you have to actually write something.
So that's what I've been doing. Still, it was a bit of a shock to find I hadn't posted here for over a week. Where did all the time go? Ah well... as you'll see if you've got a screen big enough to handle it (if not you might need to do some scrolling), the beginnings of The Wasteland have begun to appear - and as if by magic, a totally new project presented itself to me called Blackout in the Red Room. That one's being just a little demanding - it wants to run and run and run. Five chapters down, seven more to go and rolling like thunder with it!
There's lot's of admin type stuff going on with it as well which is a bit of a time soaker, but I should be clear soon.
This should be a good thing, right? Doing proper work instead of posting here, so why do I feel guilty?
