THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
The World All At Once (1)
I figured that I had better get my act together and start writing some long pieces for my blog here and spent some time last night racking the grey matter as to how to do it properly. The World All At Once will, more or less, crush my week of pop-culture consumption into a slick view on the week that just went by. I'll aim for Saturday or Sunday for posting it, but let's see how it settles in... Yesterday, I got the word that Black Dye, White Noise and The Language of Thieves and Vagabonds had both been release on itunes/ibooks and at Barnes & Noble for the nook. Thus began an afternoon of downloading and checking - and as a bi-product of this cocking about, came across a couple of really good books for ibooks (and probably the kindle too but I couldn't be bothered looking). They're both by the same person, both self-published and both really freaking good. Honest. Take it from somebody who throws books out of the car window if they suck before the end of the second chapter.
The author in question is Saffina Desforges - the books are called Snow White and Sugar & Spice - and if I'm not very much mistaken, she lives somewhere not so far away from me either. I thought I might get in touch, but then I read her blog and was put off by the fact that she seems angry and self-righteous about everything. All the time. Been there, done that and it will come and bite you on the ass no matter how good your book is. Then again, like one of my old bosses said to me: 'you're not here to be liked - you're here to get the job done.' Maybe I'll just read her books and leave it at that - though it's worth pointing you also to a page on her site where she details nefarious tactics by agents who really should know better.
Nice cover for Snow White - I really like both that and the forthcoming Rapunzel.
There's some other interesting books on there too that look like they might be worth the time of day - one thing at a time though. I already have a stack of books that I'm not getting through very quickly at all. That means Skin Deep is being shipped to print in the middle of the week so there's not going to be much going on except burying my head in that - on which subject, I interviewed Jovanka Vuckovic last night. What a fantastic lady - one I am now pleased to call a friend. We have much in common. More on that some other time. I might publish the full interview here later in the month as we spoke of many, many things - not all of it relevant to the mag.
Not strictly something from this week, but rather from last month. I picked up a copy of Vanity Fair magazine a few weeks back. I always thought it was a 'mag for women' but as it turns out - if you can see past the top-end advertising and the lure of celebrity for its own sake - it's a great read. The writing is top-notch and the variety of material in there is quite inspiring. Their ipad app is beautiful as well - better than the print copy I think. It didn't take long to win me over on it either, so we'll drop that name in the 'win' column for the foreseeable future. Nice work.
The new Marilyn Manson album is kind of strange. I wanted to love it like I loved Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals. Love it for all of its wanton destruction and no small amount of effort put into the minutiae of the project. What I got however was an album of songs that sound like Marilyn Manson might sound when everything had got a little grey around the edges. An album he might make when he knows he's on the rocks. Maybe one in which the headlines are slipping away but he needs to put a product out all the same so that it doesn't appear to be too long between albums when you look in the history books.
He can do better than this. You know what he should have done? He should have sat on a beach for a couple of weeks (or perhaps a dank cave - either will do) and fleshed himself out a plan like Amanda Palmer did. A plan that would redefine Manson to the world forever. If anybody could have pulled this off, he could. I don't know anymore. Maybe it's just too much work once you don't have to worry if there will be breakfast on the table tomorrow. There's a lot to be said for staying hungry.
Thus, disappointed with the thing that should have been a supernova this week, I reverted to type and dug into itunes to find something of value, only the truth is that I couldn't be bothered looking that hard, so I let it ramble on shuffle like I do most days - then I remembered that earlier in the week, I'd found a nugget of vinyl on ebay that I'd bought but not paid for - which would explain why it hadn't arrived yet. I must have been through at least half a dozen copies of In The Dynamite Jet Saloon (Dogs D'Amour) over the years - this should be the last time I ever buy it again. It's getting hard to find great vinyl on ebay - everybody thinks their shit is worth a lot more than it is - or at least to somebody who wants to listen to it rather than collect the damn stuff. There's a record fair on next Saturday so we'll see what gives out there. The last one I went to, I picked up about seven albums for under £20, which is really how it should be...
The Devil Inside.
For those of you perhaps who are not so eagle-eyed, I've posted a couple of new stories up in the last week. You'll find a tab in the navigation bar titled Pulp Fiction which has a drop down menu where you'll find Swarm and The Angel Who Overslept. Now that they're alive in the world and I can see them from the outside in, there are perhaps a couple of little changes I might make, but for all intents and purposes, knock yourselves out... The odds on you chancing by here as opposed to Neil Gaiman's pages (which is the only thing on the entire web that I check on every single day) are slim. Slim still means an opportunity in my mind, thus, today, I relink to his story about Maurice Sendak, Art Spiegelman and the New Yorker - simply because everybody who is interested in life, being a parent and being a human, should read it and soak up its knowledge.
A chance sequence of events last night, forced my hand to be curious about a writer who goes by the name of Donald Ray Pollock (probably because that really is his name). I predict rather great things ahead for Mister Donald - and am more than impressed/encouraged that he appears to have started writing a little later in life than most. Not that he should give a damn what I actually think though - he's doing just fine by himself.
The world is full of PR and marketing people who like to bandy about phrases such as "...great book and he is only 24". I had absolutely nothing of interest to say to the world at 24. 34 too if I'm really honest with myself, but a few years on, I'd like to think it's finally coming together.
With my curiosity piqued by reviews, respected comments and a great looking cover for The Devil All The Time, I bought in. For the first time ever, I bought the ebooks for my pad/kindle and also ordered hard copies too. The first bit because I couldn't wait and the second because er... I'm not entirely sure why I did that but it feels right and the sort of thing I would pick up in a bookstore off the cuff. Anyway, this is good stuff if you like that American 'road' style. There's an excerpt here at Scribd that will tell you at least what you're getting yourself into.
Whenever I find a good published author with the weight of a big company behind them, it's always great to see them do a nice job on the guys site. Donald's is certainly one of the much better ones out there - which pretty annoyingly makes me look at this one all over again. One day, I'll be happy with it for more than a few weeks at a time.
It's kind of heart-warming to see an author who you can point at and say "they do this sort of thing."
I tried and I failed. I simply don't just do "one sort of thing".
Is that so wrong?
Hulk Smash Loki: Job Done.
If you've not seen Avengers Assemble yet, don't go anywhere near the play button. On the other hand - if you have, you might well appreciate this little 'reworked' set piece. If the clip disappears, don't blame me - I can't believe it's even still up there.
Soundgarden: Avengers Assemble Video Pimp
After the little preview post from a few days back, here's the beast in all its glory...
My work here is done. Go see it.
Pictures for Pleasure.
This morning, the postman arrived with no bills - I repeat - no bills, and a copy of Charlie Sexton's Pictures for Pleasure. I had actually ordered it - he didn't just drop it off out of the goodness of his heart, but wouldn't the world be a totally brilliant place if that sort of thing happened.
I love this album. Always have and I hope I always will (no reason why I shouldn't). Check out the video clip at the bottom of the post if you're curious. I often wondered why he didn't explode in the sky off the back of this (and I can't quite accept the fact that it goes all the way back to 1985) but he seems to have followed a path that worked for him at heart. That's always more important than doing what the record company tell you to do - which I think was much the case here.
This buying vinyl lark has had much scorn poured on it by my friends (I use the plural loosely), but seriously, if you have even the slightest motivation to go down that road, the experience is so totally different from clicking a few buttons in itunes, particularly if you're old enough to remember what it was like originally. For the rest of you, maybe not so much. My kids think I have lost the plot totally, but they will learn...
Here's this weeks reading list - and next week as well probably. A little bit different from normal. Not sure I'll get through it all but the heart is willing. Whenever I talk about books with people, I normally get met with lame ass responses like "I don't have time to read anymore". Which rather begs the question, "What do you do?" I have two kids, a full on day-job, an awful TV addiction and a ton of other stuff that needs constant attention. I rather think that right here, right now, in 2012, people sleep far too much for their own good.
Rubbish in, rubbish out. Nothing in, nothing out. There's an equation for the rest of your life.
I sort of got invited to the Train show in London tomorrow night via an interview I was going to do with their support act Matt Nathanson (previously mentioned here) who is supporting. Turns out Matt got sick today - which is a big pain in the ass but if he hadn't caught it today, I would have given it to him tomorrow - I feel freaking awful. I don't think cancelling the show is on the cards (Matt not me), so don't go around saying that's what you read here. I will however say this out loud in case anybody important is listening. Despite my best attempts to get 'a somebody' to agree to Matt and myself doing a decent interview over a coffee during the day, until about three hours ago, they were still angling for me to do it in the dressing room of the Hammersmith Apollo sometime in the evening. Frankly, that's a shitty idea and a crappy way to treat somebody who actually wants to help promote your artist long term and will get behind him in every way possible. Besides which, I've been in that dressing room before to do important stuff. It's not big and it's not clever in there...
Towards the end of the Fin Costello interview in Black Dye, White Noise, there's a passage where Fin talks about exactly the same thing when he was on assignment to shoot Train back when Drops of Jupiter came out. Maybe it comes with the territory. Is nobody wanting to take a stand in the music business out there and take things back to being done the right way for all concerned? It's no wonder everybody is running scared.
The new Train album - California 37 - is excellent by the way. To wrap up, here's that Charlie Sexton video I was talking about which sums up pretty much everything I'm thinking and feeling today:
Published and Damned.
What a crazy week. This past weekend we hosted the Great British Tattoo Show at the Kensington Olympia where lots of people got tattooed (self included), lots of people got their photo taken with other people and a good time was had by all. There'll be a ton of material kicking about from that over the next few days - we're just collecting all the photo shoots together, but some bright spark forgot we were moving offices this week as well, so that kind of threw a bit of a spanner in the works. File under pending for a little while longer.
The good news on that front was that earlier this week I had the opportunity to get on top of some of my own things. I took delivery of a big stack of limited edition hardback and softcover editions of Black Dye, White Noise which look brilliant. I'm pretty damn pleased with that all round - so much so that I even stayed up all of Tuesday night figuring out how to format correctly load up for the kindle, ibooks and Barnes & Noble. The kindle version went live this morning - the other two will apparently take a little longer. How much longer I'm not sure but I've heard it can be a few weeks. Once I know, I'll rustle up a post because it's pretty stupid for one route to take about 10 hours and the other to take hundreds of hours.
That leaves me free to get on with Raised On Radio next and figure out what the rest of the year has in store. I'm also working on two freaking huge monster book projects. If I can pull it off, they will be quite something to have in the arsenal. One of them has a publisher attached already, the other is a personal project that's going to take some real hard work to pull together but it will be more than worth it.
Sometimes I think that sleeping might be a good idea but that never got anybody anywhere in the twenty first century.
Anyway, while I was running up e-reader docs for Black Dye, I remembered that the red-headed step-child that is The Language of Thieves & Vagabonds had never really been pushed, so I did that too. Here's the link for it on the kindle - same thing applies for ibooks and the nook as above. I'll let you know. If anybody out there is clued in the ebook front, perhaps you could drop me a line over whether it's even worth bothering with the kobo thing?
I've said my piece on smashwords already. Using that as a shop front for your material is a joke. It might be easy and it might be free, but taking something I've worked my ass off on for months on end and handing it over to a store that's happy looking like a junk shop is not for me.
Oddly, I've just realised that nobody on the face of the planet is talking about the Sony Reader anymore. I think we need to consider that product dead and buried.
HOT GIRLS HAVE PROBLEMS TOO - APPARENTLY
May the Goddess help me. May the Gods help us all. I have no idea if this is real or the greatest joke of all time - I'm not sure I care either way, it's the best thing I've seen all day and with it being nearly 11.30 pm, that's pretty good going. So, people of earth, I hope you enjoy what you have created. This one is going to virally ballistic so fast, you will be sick of it by Thursday.
Enjoy.
BANG BANG
I kind of missed having a tumblr account since I shut it down a few months back. Of all the blogging platforms, they're the ones that got it right. Not only for being easy to use but also for how interactive it is with others of the same mindset. So earlier this week, I resurrected in and played around with exporting blog posts from here and also importing things I posted there to here. It kind of works but right now, the export widget thing is busy reposting every single post I ever made here to tumblr and using up my daily allowance while I sleep. There can't be that much left as it's already gone back at least three years... it's looking pretty good even though it has killed any images that were attached - so if a post doesn't make sense, that's probably why.
Meanwhile, this week has mostly consisted of putting the latest edition of the magazine to bed and finishing Tattoo Dynamite 2. This is only a mock version of the cover - the final version will be decided on sometime in the morning but for all intents and purposes, this is what it will look like when it's unleashed next week. I love doing these books but man, it's tough towards the end trying to make sure that you didn't forget anything. I especially dislike proofing my own work. There's nothing worse than looking for mistakes in a piece of work you've seen at least twenty times, but we're nearly there now. If anybody in it happens to be passing by here, thanks! That's all - thanks. Couldn't have done it without you.
And now that one is complete, it's back to normal with a regular run of magazines for a few months which should leave me with enough time to wrap up Raised on Radio before it starts getting hyper busy again. If you've been following the train of thought on here over the years, I'd also like to state for the record that Almost Human is now officially a work in progress as is a special edition of the Black Dye, White Noise project. Wait until you see it... it's an out and out peach.
So today, being as there's still work to do, I shall leave you with this:
IN WHICH DARK SHADOWS APPEAR...
"What's this new Johnny Depp movie about?"
"It's a vampire movie that happens to be a vampire movie rather because Depp's character is a vampire more than because it's about vampires. Does that make sense?"
"Not really. How old is Depp now anyway? He must be getting on for fifty."
"No - he's more around my age I think. 44? 45 maybe."
"That is nearly fifty."
I clammed up. The above is a conversation I had with Eleanor's dad yesterday when he found me hunched over an article in The Times about Dark Shadows. I don't think 44 is anywhere near 50. In the big scheme of things, sure, it's right there on top of it but in a life-span scheme of things, it's miles away. When you're 14, you're not 'nearly 20' - although that might be a bad example because most 14 year olds probable do wish that they were 20. 24 would be a better example. Nobody who is 24 wants to be 30 for any reason at all. Luckily, 24 is also not 'nearly 30'.
Neither is 34 'nearly 40'. A little part of me is wondering whether 54 is 'nearly 60', but it's not. Not even close. Although I have to admit, if I push the equation forward a little, I will run with the concept by admitting that 94 does sound awfully close to 100. I wonder what your opinion on that is if you are 94. Should I have any 94 year old readers, I'd love to hear from you.
Also of note this weekend, went to see Wrath of the Titans. It was OK. You're not missing anything if you don't see it at the cinema and you won't be missing anything if you don't see it on DVD later either. If you do happen across it by accident though, I'm sure you'll agree, it's OK. That's just about an honest review as you'll find of it anywhere in the world.
IN WHICH MR SMITH GOES OUT TO SEE CHER LLOYD...
Well, here's an unusual set of circumstances. I took my little girl - or not so little any more at eleven - to see Cher Lloyd this evening in Folkestone. It's a scenario loaded for disaster - let's stack it up.
I've seen Guns n Roses, Jane's Addiction and Nirvana on their UK debuts, seen Kiss 24 times, had my ears blown out permanently by Motorhead - twice - and witnessed just about every rock band worth a damn climbing or descending the rock n roll ladder. I know what I'm talking about - but in all that time, I've successfully managed to avoid live pop in all its forms.
Until a few hours ago.
Throughout the day, as I revealed my plans for the evening to those who crossed paths with me, I've been hit with just about every form of derision you can think of about Miss Lloyd - but a few weeks back, I caught her talking about online bullying on some TV show and I thought she was pretty decent. Decent enough to reserve my judgement anyway - which is unusual for me.
And you know what… I was impressed. More importantly, daughter number two loved it - and that's what it's all about.
Considering it was the first night of the tour, the show was well put together, her voice is in excellent shape and the band was tight and live. It was a little rough here and there, but a couple of years back, I saw Whitesnake being a bit rough here too. Even they will tell you it's not the greatest venue in the world for acoustics - you kind of have to be standing in the right place for it to sound right. Song-wise, there's some good stuff here. There's some I can take or leave too - it's not my kind of thing to be commenting on in the first place but I certainly didn't want to walk away to get away from it. Once or twice, I might even have caught myself moving about about but a sharp glance from small person warning me not to be embarrassing in front of her friends soon put a stop to that.
Here's the deal. Cher Lloyd is 18 and wants to be a singer more than anything and I'm standing there (in the VIP area that we broke into so that we could see and hear properly - teach 'em young I say), thinking to myself, 'this girl has got a great future ahead of her'. Why? Because here she is right now - tonight - doing exactly the thing she wants to. All those people who wrote her off today... what exactly were they doing tonight to push themselves to where they want to go? I could probably take an educated guess that half of them were sitting on their sofa cushion behinds with a remote control of some description in hand.
It doesn't even matter that it was a little rough. I could show you over 1000 rock bands that were more than rough on the first night of their tour. I can also show you another 1000 who are heralded as legends who were sometimes too out of it to even bother showing up on time. I know it's a different kind of thing altogether but if you're not listening, you'll miss the point and that makes you worse than stupid. It makes you ignorant.
There's a lot of garbage talked about bands not being given a chance to develop anymore, but here's Cher Lloyd doing exactly that. Seeing what the audience likes. Some things will work, some won't. It will get ironed out and then they'll start all over again. That's how a musicians career works and it's OK. It's how life works if you're paying attention.
These 'down on Cher' people I spoke about - they're my friends, but today they're wrong. All of them.
It may count for nothing, it may count for something but I'm going to stand right here and fight her corner. Cher Lloyd is not taking anything for granted and is out there doing what needs to be done and that's all that matters. When you start taking things for granted, you end your days in the stupid club with a gun in your mouth - and that's not where this story will end.
So yeah - nice work everybody. To everybody else, have a great day behind your desk in the morning…
You can also find this post at The Void where you can also pimp it to your friends - I don't normally duplicate my content, but this one kind of crossed over...
I DON'T NEED NO DOCTOR
Got back from the Doctor Who Expo in Cardiff late last night - I have to say, those guys really know how to put on a fantastic show. Slick is a good work to describe it but then I wouldn't expect anything less. There were a few surprises and some extremely solid seminar type things, notably the "how to dress up a monster" sessions that ran all day and Doctor Who Uncut. You'll no doubt find spoillery type things littering the web already from that, so I won't dive in here and add to it. It's probably enough to know that the next season simply looks wonderful. Anything else from the psycho-bloggers is nothing more than posturing for the masses. Anyway - had the good fortune to bump into Mark Sheppard along the way. We only had time to chew the fat briefly before a queue of amazing length descended upon him at the open autograph sessions. A great guy, I wish we could have chatted some more, but regardless of that, he'll always be Crowley to me and not an FBI agent but it was good to see I wasn't the only one who thought that. Must also say a word of thanks to Gary Russell who could be bothered to spend some time with me and dispel/enforce some myths I had going around in my head about writing for TV. Your input is much appreciated. Possibly more than you'll ever know.
It was a long day, but that didn't stop us going out in Cardiff for a meal. Man, that place is insane. There seemed to be about a dozen hen parties all going on at the same time and every restaurant we went to was jammed solid. Recession? What recession would that be? However much they've spent on the place since I was last there about 25 years ago has been totally worth it that's for sure.
...and now, having taken a proper weekend off, I now find an unhealthy amount of proper work stacked up behind the door with every little thing vying for my attention, but the stack wasn't quite big enough to stop me from checking out The River. If you've seen it, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, think LOST with the lessons of LOST learned and applied.
And what better way to end the post than by directing you to my review of the new Shinedown album, Amaryllis at The Void. You'll be hard pushed to find much else better than this for a very, very long time.
That's it. I'm out of here for today...
HOW TO WRITE A WRONG.
Just when you think you've found your voice - that true writing voice that you've been looking for all your life and thought you had a solid grip on - something small comes along to rock you on your heels a little. It was a tiny little something that I only caught a glimpse of so maybe it was nothing but I think I'll maybe keep an eye on it anyway. Over the last few weeks, out of nothing more than idle curiosity I've been checking out what the web delivers as a result of searching for great blogs and variants thereof. Hmm. Try it for yourself. You'll be shocked at how you're about to be ripped off. The problem, as if I didn't know it already - is the web itself. What you have now is clever people, writing blogs with very little passion/interest/value loaded with keywords that, over a pretty short period of time, propel them into the upper echelons of a google search. This quest for popularity and visibility via technology is no different in any way, shape or form to vanity publishing, only this way, you don't actually have to part with any money.
It has even less to do with actually writing.
A couple of times, I found myself drifting into that 'ratings' train of thought and caught myself at the last minute with a big reminder, that being popular or high in the rankings isn't why I'm on the planet. These people would be better off pimping themselves out as professional web developers than masquerading as writers.
Which brings me to the very act of writing itself. If you give 1,000 people a toolbox full of spanners and a car (read keyboard and broadband), they're all bound to gravitate towards playing with it. Undoing things they shouldn't, pottering about in there tightening up bolts to see what happens, some might even think they are qualified to build a car themselves from scratch. This is plainly a bad idea but likely to happen in these circumstances. The big question - the really big question - is if we took all of these toys away - no MacBook, no internet - how many of these people would be toting around Moleskine books, maybe five or six Moleskines at a time and dumping the contents of their head into them everyday using a pen? A pen that cost no small amount of money as a mark of respect for the craft perhaps.
I know maybe 50 bloggers who never wrote a word before free blogging platforms came along. This is probably the same sort of thing all you professional photographers find. Where did all these 'supposed' photographers come from? Just because there's a camera on your phone and flickr is easy to use, doesn't mean the world needs to see your life and it sure as hell doesn't make you a photographer.
I'm not being precious, I simply think millions of people the whole world over dabbling in things they shouldn't, has cheapened and under-valued pretty much everything. Granted it's very empowering to the masses, but it's not doing humanity any favours. The longer it goes on, the worse it will get. Everybody hates the gatekeepers of old, fuck - even I hated the gatekeepers of old, but man, they did a good job on keeping the shit out of sight - and what became of those the gatekeepers rejected that were truly talented? They broke through anyway and were all the stronger for it.
A FEEDING FRENZY
I hate getting up early, and yet whenever I do I always find it's actually a pretty good start to the day. Yesterday I got up early enough to catch the postman which meant I got handed my package instead of having to drive to the collection office. Package in question? A delicious mint condition vinyl copy of Queensryche's Operation Mindcrime. Today, having gotten up early again, I'm hoping that Empire - the next part of the deal - will turn up but if not, all is not lost. No - today I am sitting on two albums that I've been waiting on for so damn long, I don't know which to play first. Shinedown's last album has been one of the 'constant companions' in the car since it came out. I expect the same from Amaryllis. There's not a hope in hell that it's going to be bad, it's more a question of just how good is it. I might need to be in the mood for the other one. The new Mars Volta album - Noctourniquet - is going to need time and space to get to grips with. It deserves that much - and if you read any reviews of it that suddenly appear online this week, those writers are doing you an injustice. There's no way on earth that you can review a Mars Volta album properly without living with it for at least a month.
I think I ordered some old Mott the Hoople t-shirt as well. I should probably pay more attention to these things.
Anyway, that little swag will keep me company for the next few days - which are looking pretty busy. I've got some first drafts here of Raised on Radio that I need to look at, but I'll certainly miss the deadline of the end of March that I was working towards. April is fine though. I can live with that. Note to self: change the graphic on the home page. Meanwhile, its the Doctor Who bash this weekend. Am I ready for it? Well, kind of. Being as the writing crew will be there, it's more of a research trip than anything else, but I am prepared for any eventuality. The script is finished but still needs more work. That's OK - nobody is expecting it, it's a personal thing. I think the ending is weak and even though I can well imagine how ripped apart it would get in a real-life scenario, that's not the point. I may need a hair cut but I'm still a professional.
Video for today? In the spirit of the post, how about this:
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DISAPPEARING EYEBROWS
It's the call from upstairs everybody dreads. You never think it can happen to you but it can strike at any time. "Dad.. can you come upstairs now please!"
Figuring the worst - a smoking plug socket maybe or a flooded bathroom - I tore up the stairs (after ignoring the first cry for help just to make sure it really was important) to find Rhiannon sitting on her bed crying her eyes out.
"What's happened, honey?"
"I'm sorry! I've accidentally shaved my eyebrows off. I didn't mean to - I didn't know that your razor was turned on all the time..."
Do you know how hard it is to keep a straight face while trying to explain that a razor isn't actually turned on, it's just sharp all the time? She made me promise not to tell anybody but then went and told all her friends one by one anyway, so I don't feel bad about doing the same. Every time I think about how you can possibly shave your eyebrows off by accident, it makes me properly laugh out loud. Not in the text way... Laurel & Hardy laugh out loud. Was it wrong to tell her they will probably grow back in a few days?
•••
I don’t know why they do it. It’s probably to keep jobs when there is no need to keep jobs but when an artist is marketed in his home country when, given half the chance, the rest of the world would be interested as well, well it’s a waste. No, not a waste - it’s a crying shame.
In this instance, I’m talking about Matt Nathanson and wondering why I’ve only this weekend discovered him. For the record, it wasn’t a spoon-fed link, that’s for sure. I’ve stopped looking at all that data driven garbage. It was something I read. If I can remember where I saw it, I’ll add it later.
Anyway, here’s this guy - largely undiscovered by me and I assume many others - who has seven albums of the most glorious acoustic based material under his belt and I’m totally knocked out by him. You can find his back catalogue and anything you might need to know at his site if you find yourself in a similar boat (new album out now and a tour with Kelly Clarkson currently ongoing) but what I’m thinking as I look harder is how long it took him to do it his own way. The first album is almost twenty years old now but I adore the journey he has been on. It probably hasn’t been easy - if I know songwriters at all, he’s probably thought of throwing in the towel more than once but from a listening perspective, I’d like to let him know, I’m stoked that he didn’t.
This weekend has been a genuine pleasure to work my way through with Matt hanging around in the kitchen - figuratively speaking of course, although he's quite welcome to come and write here any time he wants. It’s not very often I find new material that I know will last. If you like acoustic based material, Matt’s the very guy to call on.
Still on the subject of not knowing ‘why they do it’, I was going to take the kids to check out John Carter this evening but I couldn’t find one single screening of it in a 40 mile radius that wasn’t still flogging the dead horse of 3D. Can’t we just go and see a movie because it’s great and not because things might appear to be ‘coming towards us’? All that’s happened in this scenario is that four people who would have gone to see it, didn’t - and for all the batterings it’s gotten in the press, I still think it looked pretty hot, so by my calculations, they really needed some people on their side.
Meantime, I leave you with a video clip of a song that I can't quite believe came out as long ago as it appears. 1990 I believe. Where on earth did all the time go?
Currently reading: Denise Mina, The Last Breath
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.
