THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
Reap The Whirlwind.
Via the magic of cross pollination somewhere on the web, I came across this today:
The Tiny Wife is one of the greatest books ever written. It should only take you a few hours to whip through it but what it says will stay with you for the rest of your years. I've already bought two copies of this in the last year and given them both away. I have no doubt at all that the one I still have will go the same way eventually. It's an Andrew Kaufman masterpiece that quashes even the incredible All My Friends Are Superheroes. Tom Percival's art only adds to the experience.
One thing I didn't know was that Tom also does the cover art for Skullduggery Pleasant - on which note, if you're not familiar with, you need to get in the car sometime today and get the hell on with it. One day, when I get myself some money, Tom's is one of the first doors I will be knocking on.
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Also on my travels this morning, I see that Rob Zombie's new movie Lords of Salem is almost upon us:
The guy is a genius film-maker. If you've never seen his reworking of Halloween, it totally grounds the original premise into the ground - and as he moves forward, he only gets better and better. The reason for these two things appearing here is 'inspiration'. So long as there are always people out in the world raising the standard all the time of what's achievable, I'll always have something to push against.
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Which brings me neatly onto what the hell is going on here. Last night, as stated, the tumblr feed began to be whittled away at, the eagle eyed amongst you will see that the 'social' widget has also disappeared. It doesn't make me anti-social, honest! I think I have seen the light though. The temptation with building an online HQ is to reach as many people as possible in the hope that your name will spread and help you along the way, but it doesn't work how you think it does.
Having given it a push for a good few months, I found myself trying to feed smaller and smaller parts of myself into the grinder - and that's not what I do. There's a few scraps still lying around that need addressing but over the following weeks, I look forward to eeeking them out as well. It's surprising how you can get dragged into the psyche of the world and what it thinks is a good idea.
Anyway, that decision is made. It's a good decision too. Let me tell you why. Take a look at this graphic.
Every single one of those orange rectangles is time taken away from spending it with people I love, time for writing big things - or small things even. Hell, there are eleven rectangles there and you can probably add a few more for every year that goes by. The last sentence on that slide is a lie. People are inherently lazy and don't back track - certainly not from a space like flickr. People are also easily distracted and every single one of those places will pimp something sexy at you to keep you within their own space at the single click of a button. This is business for these people.
I feel better having written that.
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Being as I've already posted two clips for you to watch while you pretend you're doing something else today, figured this would be a fine place to pull in an old tumblr post.
The great Robert McGinnis - all of which have been used as classic pulp covers - I kinda like how they look in their original form, so here they are… I believe Robert is still working - for Hardcase Crime.
Good work Mr Smith. More later... maybe.
Monsters in the Head
I started writing a song this evening. I haven't written a song in a very long time and having spent a very long time being a writer of songs (albeit with little to show for it in the long run), I was a little more than 'slightly' disappointed to find how rusty I was. Then again, once I'd started, things began to come back pretty quickly. I've got a couple of days to myself at the end of the week - let's see what happens - and out of interest, along the way I'll give GarageBand a damn good hammering. More intriguing than how rusty I was, is how as artists, we move on without realising it. I dug out the recordings of the last time I put anything of value down and found that lyrically, I really didn't think the same way anymore. Not even close. That means there's going to be an awful lot of material on the cutting room floor before I find my train of thought again.
This rekindled activity comes courtesy of my buddy JJ who is currently building a studio. Actually that's not strictly true. The studio is already there in the shape of Aerial Studios and fully functioning but there are more rooms in the studio space still to be built. A couple of weeks back, we met, we talked, we laughed, we imagined and we looked out of the window and laughed again at how long it takes some dreams to come to fruition and when they do arrive, never come fully formed. They always have more work to be done - but that's OK otherwise it would probably look like somebody else's dream. Go check it out - and if you want to get something on, it's as easy as dropping the dude a line believe me.
Anyway, I was toying with the project name 'Black Like Sunday' but I don't like that anymore. It didn't stand the test of time and certainly doesn't fit the frame of mind that I'm working in. I guess we'll be revisiting this place regularly as winter turns slowly into spring...
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COMMERCIAL BREAK:
Lester Bangs. The one and only in action.
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As much as I have loved playing with tumblr this past year in a multitude of ways, I have decided to say goodbye. Not immediately, but soon enough - like the end of the week. The way things are shaping up right now, I need to pull my sphere of influence in around me (not that it's huge or anything) and not throw it at the four corners of the interverse. It's a time thing that's all. With lots to do and all of it coming along pretty well, even though I could, I don't want to spend my time blogging multiple times. In the real world, I think that call that a commitment - or maybe even a decision.
If you tumblr'd with me, thanks. Now you need tumble no more as all things that were headed for the blog space of never ending length, will now be sunk into posts here - which are more than long enough to handle it. It all forms part of the "12 months to get your online presence together" as promised all those months ago. By by calculations, I think I have just five weeks left to wrap that part of the plan up and I don't think tumblr will be the only casualty of the war either. To be honest, I think tumblr will be just fine without me, don't you?
Anyway, as part of my wrapping up on that front, here's a repost of one of my favourites that I'd posted there about a revamping of the covers of the greatest book of all time:
Here's what I originally wrote to go alongside:
Talking of Matt Roeser (which I was just a single post ago), I couldn’t let this one slip through the net without posting it here as a personal reminder. From the pen of Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is absolutely my favourite book of all time. I love this delicate re-imagining of it but I’m not sure it would have pulled me in initially.
Now yes. Then, perhaps not.
Seeing this is kind of like when your girlfriend has her hair cut really short after a lifetime of long… or something like that.
Just prior to this I also fawned all over his revamping of the Game of Thrones series:
And again, here's what I originally wrote to go with it:
Matt Roeser - essentially cool and very talented book designer from Boston - hit the revamp button on George Martin’s Game of Thrones series a while back and, to be frank, trumped all the designs I’ve ever seen launched onto the shelves. There are some people out there who I seriously need to work with in the future. These are stunning.
Tumblr - I shall miss you a tiny bit, but truth be told, not actually all that much... everybody else, go check out Matt's work. He's pretty cool. We should probably talk.
In the spirit of things, let's wrap up with this. It looked great before it had begun and hasn't faltered one iota so far...
Road Trip - Brussels
Funny how short trips can be just as tiring as long trips. I came back from Brussels last night and felt as though I had flown half way around the world. Slumping in front of the TV, all I could find was Jaws - I haven't watched that movie in something like ten years and it's still as great as it ever was, even after we've all seen the rubber shark. Aside from work stuff, I met up with my buddies Dirk and Jessica. Dirk has just put out a book of his (and a few of his friends) custom culture photography. It looks like this:
and I mention it here because a) he's my friend and b) the production values are just brilliant and whether you're into pimped up cars and tattooed people striking curious poses or not, it's a gorgeous book that took a long time to get right and it shows. You can find more info on it here... and now I have copied that link I remember that Jess took a photo of us which you can see there - and I have also remembered that I never said anything here about getting a hair cut last week. It was just time you know. I also got tired of trying to do the Fu Manchu thing (couple of posts back) so that got killed off too. Sometimes, you simply need to start from scratch.
Anyway - the book is a peach. Would make a killer Christmas gift for somebody y'know...
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I don't talk about food much here and that's probably because I don't eat out as often as I would like and when I do, it's never anything to write home about. This time though, a few of us found our way to what might be the best restaurant in the world - or certainly one of the best I have ever been to. It's a tiny place called In 't Spinnekopke and it looks like this:
Man, they cook the food to absolute perfection. I'm no culinary guru but when five well travelled people can all sit around a table and agree that it is indeed, one of the best restaurants they had ever been to, you won't be far from the truth. The fact that you don't have to remortgage your house to eat there is a bonus. If you're ever passing within striking distance, make the effort to stop by. You can find them here.
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One of the good things about going away is that time on a train/plane and in a hotel room by yourself means totally focussed writing time - and this trip I got through a good 15,000 words of a project. This made me very happy particularly as about half of it was under the steam of the calories taken in during the above meal. After Jaws, had finished I took a good hard look at all the things I've been working on and have definitely passed the 'point of no return'. Which is the real world is more sensibly translated as 'more than half way through all of it'.
COMMERCIAL BREAK:
One of the greatest movies of all time. Fact.
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I didn't see any bookshops at all while I was out there. If you're looking for travel advice though, the Brussels Midi station where the Eurostar arrives is weird. The insides of the station are pretty neat with a lot of cafe's to hang out at but the outside is nothing more than a destination for local crackheads and homeless drunk dudes to hang out. In the space of about three minutes I was approached by three guys for cigarettes, two guys for cash and one drunk guy (who was wearing a knuckle-duster) was certainly thinking about asking me for something but he was so out of it even my sister could have taken him out . Surely common sense would dictate to the authorities that when it comes to the rest of Europe landing on your door-step, the cops should clean up by the hour? It's like inviting people to your house for a meal and leaving a pack of hungry dogs out to welcome them. Interestingly, the smart homeless people had got themselves bags from somewhere and were able to hang out inside the station looking like they were going places with pretty well thought out sob stories to get by on. Survival of the fittest and all that huh...
To wrap up - not much of a video - rather an audio embed but worthy of your time all the same. The return of the mighty My Chemical Romance! Get cool stuff right here.
Judging Books By Their Covers
It's no secret that I love book cover design and this little gem has got way more work going into it than it first appears.
It was designed by Rowan Stocks-Moore to 'celebrate the launch' of the Penguin Design Award, of which he knocked up a few but this is far and away the best. Oddly though, I'm not sure it works as a real world book cover. It's a great piece of design in a masterclass 101 kind of way, but I can't imagine it jumping on - or off - the shelf. That happens sometimes... but regardless, it's really clever and beautiful all the same.
Conversely, these bookmarks are really simple but supremely freaking cool.
They were designed by Ethem Onur Bilgiç who is from Istanbul (no, I can't pronounce it either) and you can find him and his other groovy stuff right here.
Over Christmas, I might have a bit of a whirl at designing some bookmarks myself. That sounds like a neat plan to me - and maybe I'll lovingly hand-craft them and give them away with every copy of a book sold here. So maybe they had better be good! No idea what to base them on though. Best enlist the collective aid of that powerhouse known as 'the children'.
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And that wraps that up.
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A friend (Hi Tim) mailed me a story this morning about David Byrne (the Talking Heads dude) and his quest to produce a digital book of some value to people and the roadblocks that amazon et al put in the way. You can read the whole article by clicking here and always a good read, you can check into Byrne's personal blog here. Anyway, read that first and come back - there's a section at the end where Mr Byrne says;
Books, when well made and beautifully designed, are lovely to hold and behold. There is pleasure in reading a well designed book. A little bit of beauty is added to one’s life—something that can’t be measured in terms of pure information. I also have a funny feeling that, like much of our world that is disappearing onto servers and clouds, eBooks will become ephemeral. I have a sneaking feeling that like lost languages and manuscripts, most digital information will be lost to random glitches and changing formats.”
I tend to agree and that shocks me a little. I have come full circle from being a pro-digital kind of person to seeing so many of them, that they mean nothing. A quick look around myself right now will reveal a lot of business type books and books I have outgrown but couldn't let go of sitting on my various bits of tech. Big novels that I will never read twice can be found on audio because a) I can sometimes work and listen, b) I am in the car a lot and c) I actually quite like being read to when it's done properly - when you look at words all day long, sometimes it's really nice. Latest additions to this audio list are James Herbert's Ash and Rankin's Standing In Another Man's Grave. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by reading them like this.
When I look around my shelves however, I am still buying books at a heavy rate. Yesterday, I picked up Winter Ghosts from Kate Mosse, I'm on the road tomorrow. I know I'll buy another even though I'm armed with audio. I did give away a lot of books a while back - I have no idea what they were anymore but anything deemed important is still with me. Big art books, books with great covers, books I've had since I was a kid. The list goes on.
I am beginning to know myself more than I should - I mean, you hit certain times in your life and you should have it all figured out, right? Albums come and albums go. My rdio collection online grows by about six albums a day but I still bought the Soundgarden album on vinyl last week. Why? Because some animals will always be more equal than others. A beautifully designed Bukowski novel will never be archived to digital around here. It doesn't work.
Eventually, I think we'll all figure this out for ourselves. It's not going away. I don't want it to go away - it's cool and useful in some instances. I don't want bookshops to go the same way as record stores but it's already too late. We're headed down to a critical fork in the road. The only thing anybody really knows for sure right now is that it's a fucking mess. If you want books, albums and films to go the same way as the motor industry in which all cars look the same and are classified as to whether they're small, big or really big, then carry on doing the digital thing. If you got this far - you're already too late. The movie industry is already there.
Slick is very cool but nobody will look back fondly at any digital product like they do a Cortina or an Impala - they don't have a memory attached to them. Nobody will sit around and say "Hey, remember that day we stood in the kitchen and downloaded the new John Connolly book" - it doesn't have a sense of occasion attached to it. I used to have a Triumph Spitfire. It was a piece of junk but it had more character than any car I've had since. That had a sense of occasion about every freaking journey...
We're in the midst of a trauma here. Here's some questions for you to mull over if you care to:
AC/DC recently gave in and allowed iTunes downloads. This is a shame. Want an AC/DC album? Just go and buy one - it's not hard. Anybody that cares that much must have their catalogue anyway. I don't know if Led Zeppelin have released their catalogue to digital outlets but I hope not. Want a Led Zep album? Simply go and buy one. There's a certain way a few bands should be listened to because it's not about the money. It's about the songs. I rather think it's not the bands that think this is a great idea.
People like Stephen King, Rowling - all those guys at the top. We don't need ebooks from them. People may moan a lot and request them but ultimately, if you want to read those authors, go buy a fucking book. You get what you're given... if there's no audiobook available, damn right I'll read it instead of listening.
And there's the crux. We can all have so much now that even something as dumb as being able to own a dog, people think comes under a basic human right. It's going to take a publishing company with balls of steel to hang in there and say 'no, fuck you, buy a book' - and that's exactly when it will become special again. It's all pretty confusing. I wouldn't like to be the historian who looks back and tries to make sense of it.
(I'm not sure I actually said anything during that part of the post, but I feel better. Thanks for listening!)
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Closing with a classic is getting harder everyday. Time to take a left turn and just flaunt something I like and reboot from there:
Cool Shit For Its Own Sake
I've been following the guys at the Mondo Gallery for a while now. Along with my buddy Brian Ewing, I am smitten by the art they produce and may have to work an awful lot harder at getting more of it on the walls here. I wasn't paying attention when these Universal Studio prints went up for sale, so at a vastly inferior level, assuming they are all sold out (but I will check in a second), here I am hanging them on my blog:
First thing I'm going to do when I am in a position to actually have an office is flood the place with art like this. I find it totally inspiring and I think the reason behind that is that I can't draw to save my life. I have no desire to even try - thus, it remains something that I enjoy rather than have a desire to replicate.
On a similar note, it was Rhiannon's first parents evening earlier. I sat down with her art teacher and was blown away by what they're up to there. They're really teaching some great skills and with the wind behind us, so it will continue. I'm kinda hoping that by being honest about art, she'll rise to it and see that there is a solid future in it. It might be hard work, but hey - what isn't! She thinks she might want to be a vet, but I can see otherwise...
For those of you doing the Pinterest thing, you can drop in on my Cool Shit For Its Own Sake pin-board by clicking that very link.
Preaching The End Of The World (II)
I saw these today on tumblr, but they absolutely need reposting here - if anybody can tell me where they originally come from, I'll hook up the links.
Those are some damn fine nibs right there. The simple things in life are always the best.
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I thought I had said my piece on writing for the time being in yesterday's post but just to make sure I had my facts straight, I mailed my friend Gary Smailes at Bubblecow (go see what they can do for you if you're the sort that is likely to be admiring those nibs posted above) to check. I was pretty close to the mark, but Gary filled me in on a few things that I hadn't taken into account, once you read them, you'll see why there's more than a little life left in print publishing. I'll paste the entire email in here:
This makes perfect sense. A UK mid-list writer will be selling 5000-ish books a year. But you are missing something from the equation:
If that doesn't change the way you want to look at the industry, I don't know what will. We're all aware that there are hard times right now but maybe what it comes down to is this: If somebody took away all digital books tomorrow and told me I would never read one again, would it bother me? Not in the slightest. I don't think I would miss them one iota - and if you track back through the blog, you'll find that I have tried a couple of times to reduce my stock-piling of books into a neat digital library, but it's not happening at all. Conversely, if print books disappeared, I would indeed be very sad. Where would I hang out? What would I spend my money on? Would I still love great book cover art as much as I do now?
I don't have any answers that's for sure - but you know what's more important here? I don't think I have any more questions either.
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COMMERCIAL BREAK
...and if that isn't one of the greatest moments in television anywhere in the world, I don't know what is.
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It's nearly the end of the year people. I've decided to gather together a Top Twenty Books of the Year - I'll open comments out on it and aim to post early December. I'm also going to have fuck with the format and add a clause that says I can have five books in the list that weren't necessarily published in 2012. I've discovered far too many great books this year to be boxed off by tiny details. It's shaping up to be pretty diverse. In fact, it's a pretty serious list with something I didn't expect to be at number one nestling comfortably in that very spot. I doubt it will look anything like the bestseller lists they have in the back of the newspapers at the end of the year but it may contain books you might actually read.
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Where shall we go today for an outro tune? How about this from the days when 12" remixes ruled the world:
Preaching The End Of The World
I'm off to Belgium at the weekend for three days. That's just far enough away to see exactly lightly I can travel - regular readers will have figured out by now exactly how much I dislike carrying luggage. Here's what I'm thinking: Personal hygiene materials (including socks and pants) - buy them when I get there and throw old stuff in the trash before I come back.
Books - this one was proving tricky but for the relatively short trip that it is, Rankin's new Rebus offering - Standing In Another Man's Grave - as an audiobook seems like an excellent travelling companion.
Clothes - figured I would wear a suit, meaning I don't need only need two shirts, one of which I shall be wearing. A man can find a white shirt in any city on any world if he needs to buy another.
This more or less means I can get by with just my phone and a bottle of water (the ultimate in instantly disposable items), but I always think this. Worst case scenario? The old Scaramanga bag. I don't mind that so much at all. The hard part is the fight with yourself that says if you really have to take a bag, you might as well fill it with stuff - which is wrong.
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Blogging is a little sporadic at the moment due to - wait for it - actual words being written. The schedule says two more books by Christmas so that's what I'm aiming for and there's nothing like having a deadline hanging over your head to sharpen the pencils. I was talking to an author friend yesterday about his latest book and how it was faring internationally. The word came back that sales, although respectable, where not as good as his previous novels resulting in something of a 'pay-cut' from his publisher. I like hearing things like this because the temptation is to always look at King/Gaiman/Koontz for business models but they are the exceptions and not the rules. That's not taking anything away from them because Lord knows they deserve everything they have but even though they may be the ideal, it's always good to know the reality of any likely situation from the guys in the trenches.
I know he won't mind me quoting him here - particularly as I haven't said who he is - but this was a good reality check for me:
"Well, there is a really scary thing happening with a lot of us mid list authors right now. Publishers are not editing our books. They are not backing them with much, if any, marketing or advertising. They are fighting us over titles and cover art and pigeon-holing us. And for that privilege we allow them to take 85 cents on the dollar."
85 cents in the dollar? That leaves you with 15 cents that one would presumably have to share with ones agent. My number skills are pretty poor, but let's take a simple example. Let's say a book is ten dollars. Your share of this using this model would be one $1.50. Let's take a simple sum that I can work out and say that you have to give your agent 20% of that - which is 30 cents - you are now left with $1.30 per book sold. Let's quickly move that model to the UK and say that if a book is £10 on the shelf, your share eventually becomes £1.30. Let's take a ballpark salary of £30,000 that is probably an average wage to live off these days. You would need to shift 24,000 copies of your book to make that grade - and that's not factoring in taxes etc either.
Now, I don't know if this is typical of the industry or not but it doesn't sound great. I also assume that most authors sell remarkably less than this. If it is a reasonably typical example, it's small wonder that a self published kindle/ibooks author goes down that route, as it tips the percentages on its head in your favour. By my (probably bad maths) you would only need to sell in the region of 3,500 books to make your £30,000 salary. That even seems achievable - and even though you would probably be insane to try and sell your book digitally for £10, the numbers are at least something you think you might be able to deal with. I even forgot to add the money back on that you would give your agent.
The fly in the ointment in this is that a good publisher can get your books in front of people. People buy books that are in front of them in a book store. I am 'people', so I know. Digitally, I tend to hunt very exactly with sniper crosshairs. How do you get your book in front of people to sell that many of a digital device. You might think social networking is a great place to start but as I have always said about networking online, it's like being at party with a million people all of whom are looking out for nobody but themselves.
I am genuinely intrigued as to how an author can make this work properly for them and break the traditional model once and for all - and I'm not talking the lower than low sock puppet tactics recently in the news. Did I say everything that was in my head on that? I think so... possibly some edits to come.
COMMERCIAL BREAK:
Meanwhile, I meant to post this quite some weeks back now. My friend Mr Downes came up with this and I loved it - and now you may love it too because he couldn't find anywhere online he wanted to post it.
I feel that we must finish the day with something from the music library that kicks royal ass with total agreement from all. Thus, I present to you, this:
Bang Go The Bells
Halloween has come and gone and so has Guy Fawkes night. From the passing of these two events, I can clearly deduce that kids today are lazier than they have ever been. Halloween saw a single group of five girls lurking in the street only one of whom could be bothered to dress up. At least I think she had dressed up - she could have been a hardcore goth I suppose. I drove up to the house and they were at the door across the road where they got no answer. This does not surprise me. The people across the road appear to be in their mid fifties and they have a little boy who must be around 11 years old - a wild stab in the dark would suggest 'unplanned accident' and that's how they treat him too. He doesn't have any friends that you could put your finger on and last year, he wasn't allowed out trick or treating either. I eavesdropped that conversation by taking my time getting non existent stuff out of the boot. Very occasionally, before his old man gets home from work, he can be found chatting to school chums outside the house but that's about it. I feel sorry for him, that's no way to grow up.
These girls were shit out of luck all round. I think the scariest thing in our street is me, or maybe the cat a few houses down that looks like an escaped lynx. I expected them to come knocking after they saw us get out of the car but there was no knock, no treats and very disappointingly, no trick. I wonder what constitutes as being a trick these days? We never went trick or treating when I was a kid because it didn't exist. Seriously. Out in the greenery of Wales, the nearest house worth going to was miles away anyway. I imagine eggs being thrown on your car is the pinnacle of trickery before you can get arrested for something (and you can probably be arrested for that too these days). Where's all the imagination gone? Wouldn't it be great to dress up as some real scaries and go through a very loud and elaborate occult ritual outside a non-treating house? I don't think you can get arrested for that under the 'freedom of religion act' or something similar (there has to be one of those surely).
Anyway, every single year I go through the same thing about Halloween with the kids - the real meaning behind it (and therefore, why they should be really afraid of the dark) but I don't think it ever hits the ground. What grates me more than Halloween is Guy Fawkes night - now known throughout the length and breadth of the land as Fireworks Night or Bonfire Night. At least it used to be. I don't think many call it Bonfire Night anymore due to the lack of bonfires. When I was a kid, this was a big deal. There would be bonfires twenty feet tall made of old chairs from the school or church, if you were lucky, somebody would have buried a tyre in the middle of it to ensure maximum smoke too. These were huge family events in a random field. Health and safety didn't exist much back then either. Maybe it's because it was all pretty obvious that the bonfire was hot and a firework could take your eye out. I do remember that we were allowed close enough to the fire to throw in your own potato and get it out yourself though. This year, if you can even find a bonfire, you'll be at least thirty feet away guaranteed and stung like a bear by hot dog merchants and other pirates trying to sell you nonsense.
The saddest thing of all though is the total absence of Guido Fawkes. 'Penny For The Guy' doesn't exist and I haven't seen an effigy on top of a bonfire for at least twenty years. Fireworks night, much like everything else around here is all about the people that figured out how much money you could make from it. I read somewhere that during the Thatcher era of government, that she and Regan had agreed to re-name Guy Fawkes night in an attempt to eradicate it from the history books - and you know what - I think they succeeded. My kids have no idea who he is, what happened. I'm not a big patriot - I live where I live - but the only reference to Guido Fawkes left across the length and breadth of the land is the wall mural on Charing Cross station - and people take about as much notice of that as they do the other signs the London Underground put up.
What does the future hold? A Halloween sponsored by Haribo and a Guido Fawkes night in association with Swan Vesta? Probably. I would give up saying anything at all if I didn't think it was important.
What we need around here is an intelligent renegade character to put the train back on the rails.
COMMERCIAL BREAK:
In the absence of a decent part two of this post (mostly because really good material is being ploughed into book projects), I thought I'd post the interview that recently appeared in Sounds of the Suburbs magazine from ReCharged Radio:
1. If you could look like anyone else, who would it be?
It would be great to look how I think I look when I look in the mirror, but keeping with the spirit of the question, you can’t go wrong with Johnny Depp. A man can achieve a lot with that face.
2. Favourite flavour of Pot Noodle?
The ultimate garage snack! That Bombay Bad Boy can be OK in an emergency but there used to be a Chicken Curry flavour Pot Rice that I was quite partial to as well. Jesus – I haven’t had a Pot Noodle in maybe ten years or more. I like getting older. It’s quite dignified now I look closely at it (getting older – not Pot Noodle).
3. Stoned, drunk or sober?
100% sober. I’ve done my time with the other two thanks and they suck. I never liked stoned. Stoned = Bed. Drunk is slightly preferable but only when you’re alone. If you’re looking for how I get my kicks though, there’s a big curtain hidden in the corner of the universe – get behind that and we’re talking serious business...
4. You are a puppy, what breed are you and why?
Nice question. A Briard perhaps. I got caught in the rain a couple of days back and sure as hell smelled like one by the time I got home. I saw somebody I hadn’t seen for years last week and he commented on how grey my hair was getting and said pretty soon I would look like “A Gandalf that got left out in the rain.” I can live with that.
5. Shoes, trainers or boots?
I did nothing but wear one single pair of boots for something like 20 years but they died so in the last couple of years, I’ve taken to wearing shoes and they’ve turned out to be pretty cool – I’m pleased with the decision. Trainers? People that wear trainers outside of doing something that looks like exercise should also be forced to wear a big sandwich board. It wouldn’t say anything on it – it’s just a punishment for not thinking about life properly.
6. What would you have been called if you were born a girl?
Most people think I am a girl when they look at my name – word on the street from my Ma is that she was going to call me Sian. Imaginative huh. It was the sixties and she had never been out of Wales. I guess the choice was limited. Apparently, I nearly got the name Dylan – taken from both Thomas and Bob – which I could have more than lived with.
7. Everybody wants some … what?
Body. There really is somebody for everybody. There’s some seriously odd looking people out in the world with a special somebody on their arm. If you’re single right now, maybe you should lower your expectations.
8. Which monopoly playing piece are you and why?
The rope in the drawing room with Miss Scarlet. Wait – that’s the wrong game isn’t it.
9. Favourite word and why?
Yes. You can achieve so much by using it even if you don’t mean it.
10. Boiled sprouts, cabbage or spinach?
Is there a correct answer to this? Certainly not the first two but spinach is OK – when you cook with it, spinach pretty much disappears to nothing and gives you arms like Popeye. Sprouts and cabbage were created by Lords far darker than I – last I heard there was a bounty on their heads but better men than I have tried to find them…
11. Last time you had sunburn and where?
That means you have to go out in the day, right? Let me think. Probably when I was about 13 and it would have been across the back of the knees which is about the most inconvenient place ever.
12. You have hit random on your i-pod – what’s the first song that comes up?
For all my rock-ness, today that happens to be Play That Funky Music by Wild Cherry. For every 20 rock songs on there, there will be at least 1 funk tune lurking somewhere. Jury is still out on whether or not that’s the coolest answer ever or the saddest…
13. And what was the last track you deleted in disgust?
There are lots. My kids have ipods that are sometimes loaded from my iTunes factory. It was yesterday and is was that Whore of Babylon Nicki Minaj. No idea what the song actually was but I took it off their pods as well. Nobody should have to live through that. Life’s too short.
14. What would you like to have total control of?
Today? School dinners. My kids went back to school a couple of weeks back and all that good work that Jamie Oliver did was apparently for nothing. Either that or Doctor Who (the show, not the man). I can’t decide if it’s going in a great direction or not at the moment. By the time I find out, it will probably be too late.
15. What is at the top of your To Do List today?
Well until this interview came along, I’m only a couple of days from putting the next issue of Skin Deep to bed, so I had better concentrate on that, but I’ve also got a story to finish later. Maybe I should have made something interesting up for that answer… actually, I do need to find some tears from a howling dog, but it’s not top of my list.
16. Favourite insult?
“Nobody likes you. You’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny. Now smile you fucking douche.”
17. Perfect night in?
Saturday.
18. Perfect night out?
Tuesday?
19. Who would win a fight between deer, a goat and a boar?
It has to be the boar. The deer would run away. The goat would get hammered because it was too busy eating a shirt hanging from a washing line. Definitely the boar – a boar would win most fights with anything. Ever.
20. Describe yourself using three words...
Supermassive Black Hole.
•
To wrap up, how about some Stevie Salas? Yeah:
Fu Manchu - Setting The Record Straight
A month ago, I decided to spend the next year or so growing some good n proper Fu Manchu facial hair. In my mind, having seen the original movie and read the books - in which the famous hair apparently isn't spoken of and I never noticed - an authentic version of the style, and the finest example I can come up with, looks like this:
This is the end game - though I suspect that unless I get out the hair dye to play with, it's going to be rather grey. I'll cross that bridge when we have some length to speak of. Anyway, out of curiosity, I had a quick trawl to see if there were any other people sporting a version better than this and I'm pleased to report that this is indeed, the best I've seen but the web seems to be awash with false information.
For instance, quite often you'll see phrases like 'the style has been adopted by bikers and roadies' - but this is a lie because what they're talking about in those instances is something like this 'handlebar', as modelled by the immortal Hulk Hogan:
That's quite a difference don't you think. I'm sure there's some rules on this but they're not similar in the slightest. If the rules don't agree, then maybe they need to look a little closer. Having said that, I'm sure the rule book is actually correct if there is such a thing because the web is constantly flooded with garbage when it comes to... well, everything. Either way, it's not important. It's the Chow Yun Fat as Captain Sao Feng Fu version that I'm intending to grow on my face. I wonder how far it we'll get in a year? I read that facial hair grows about half an inch a month, so if my primary school maths is correct, that makes about six inches.
There's only one way to find out...
Have You Ever Been Let Down, Really Badly...
Have you ever been let down so badly by someone or something that it left you almost speechless? Maybe like when your kids are totally brilliant at drawing and make you a card for your birthday and it's done on a bit of paper folded in half and the picture is rubbish because they were more interested in what was on the TV.
Maybe like getting a hot date with Catherine Zeta Jones after ten years of waiting and at the end of the evening finding out she used to be a man. (Sorry Catherine, that was obviously for illustrative reasons alone).
LIke when you're really looking forward to going on holiday and you save up for months - maybe years - on end, only to find when you get there that the holiday brochure lied.
Maybe like that toy you wanted and pleaded for at Christmas, and the package is there right under the tree. You open it and it looks the same for a second, but on closer inspection, you find that it's a cheap imitation made in Korea that your folks bought in a make-shift market because they forgot.
Perhaps it's the same feeling a Christian might have after leading a devout life filled with worship and commitment only to find that all you really get at the end, is a box in the ground.
That's how I feel about the release of the new Kiss album 'Monster' that came out yesterday. After a good 32 years fighting the corner, at least £5,000 contributed towards enjoying the spectacle (not a penny of it begrudged) and all they had to share, the incredibly awesome times my friends and I had with them - like the days we all used to take off work together declaring it 'National Kiss Day' in which we would do nothing but watch back to back bootleg videos and cassette tapes to sleeping on stations, airports, ferries… Jesus, you name it, we were there living it with them and it was genuinely great whether I was 14, 24 or 34. At 44, I don't think I've outgrown the magic. I'm still here ready to join in.
Now I think about it, I don't even really mind the time I got punched in the face by a skinhead for turning up as Gene at a fancy dress disco.
But man, you guys can write better songs than this! I know you got a bit old and your voices aren't the same as they used to be but that's OK. I/we can live with that. What I can't live with is the seeming lack of effort or care. One good song does not a good album make. Hell, I would have taken the good song by itself and been happy with that if I'd known this stuff was all you had backing it up. Even the album cover is a cheap shot. It looks like somebody at the record company pulled it out of the slush pile for the cover of a greatest hits collection. Maybe that's exactly what happened.
This is not what what you promised. This is not what the fans asked for. We wanted the best and you failed to deliver. It won't change how I feel in the long term - love is love - but if this is all that's left in the arsenal, I think I would prefer it if you just hung up the guns and sold Mr Potato Head kits with your logo on them.
I am so unbelievably disappointed with this and I'm not the only one. Seriously, you've got the money and the time to go back into the studio and write ten songs in a few weeks like you used to and put another album out before Christmas. Hell, if I had a few grand kicking about at my disposal, I think I could write and record a great rock n roll record and have it online before Christmas - and I don't even have a band right now.
Is this really what it comes down to?
Le Roi Est Mort. Vive Le Roi!
Rock In A Hard Place
I see that Dave Grohl has put the Foo Fighters on the back-burner. This is really smart. No breaking up the band, no indefinite, lengthy silences but an honest to god, up front commitment from all of them to go do something else for a little while. More people out there should have the balls to say exactly what it is that they're doing in the future. I think they call it managing expectation. Now, Dave is free to do some other projects, put the band in perspective and generally, get his ass creatively inspired again. When you do the same thing all the time, you can start to lose track of the reasons you started them in the first place - particularly when the money is rolling in. I take my hat off to the man for walking the walk. Also over at Rolling Stone (which is where that Grohl link heads off to), there's the results of a great fan made video of a Ziggy Stardust contest. (Why do I always get to hear about competitions when they're over?) I can't get it to embed properly here, but it's definitely worth a watch and you can see that right here.
COMMERCIAL BREAK: TRAILER FOR DEL TORO'S NEW MOVIE...
Del Toro is surely the best director in the world right now - this looks incredible.
Anyway, this morning, I decided it was time to tighten the nuts and bolts on a few things - I've been hanging out at two tumblr pages for a while now. End result? Two slightly lacking tumblr blogs. Todays project is to kill one of them off (which if you didn't know about, I shan't mention so that you don't go there) and rework the other to be a meeting place of minds. Both of those minds happen to be mine though - sorry if you were expecting something else. The plan is to rebuild it as some kind of extension to what I do here and at Skin Deep - basically, if I engineer it right, it will become like an online magazine in it's own right - only without the articles... or the staff... or anything else. Just head over there - you'll see what I mean. A little something to do in your lunch hour perhaps - or, if you're clever, something to do while you should be working, thus leaving you free to do what you like at lunchtime which is a much better idea all round.
Bit of a quiet day here, some writing was done but mostly been 'fighting' over the cover of the magazine as it goes to print (usual state of affairs) but all fixed now. Tomorrow afternoon - meeting at school about exams and then back to the dentist. I can think of no better soundtrack for both of these things than the new Papa Roach album that I handily picked up on this very day.
Here's the new promo so that you may investigate in safety:
Publishing: A Game of Thrones.
The weekend came and went without incident - more or less. I'm not sure where those days went though. Nor yesterday. Probably in a haze of copy-editing, proofing, scratching the head and hoping that pretty soon, like the schedule says, this issue of the magazine will finally go to print. Work continues to get this site figured out before the end of the year. For those that missed it, many months ago, I moved here and built the site straight out of my head, live onto the page so that I knew when things weren't right and thus would be fixed pretty damn fast out of shame. The idea was - and still is - to call myself out on the projects that are going somewhere and identify the ones that were simply a good idea at the time but didn't have enough legs to take them anywhere special. The stone is being chipped away at fast and things are starting to feel like they're a little more achievable - then again, I did give myself a list from hell.
What's intriguing about this "thing" that I'm doing, is that I'm still torn between doing everything myself or working with a publisher - or rather, starting the long task of finding one. I made contact with an author that I haven't spoken to for about five years yesterday who had a bad experience with a large publishing company and only through being smart, managed to rescue himself and his canon from oblivion. He seems happy now with a much smaller publisher - we must talk further. Insider info can be invaluable. That was closely followed by this article I found, in which a novel, despite great things being said by email from the big guns themselves, appeared to remain in development hell for over ten years. Ten years!
Nobody has ten years to spend waiting around to decide if your book is good enough to publish or not. I don't care who you are or how big - that's nothing more than being shit at your job and you should be handed your papers and told to never come back again. Apart from it being incredibly lazy and oh, the lies you must have spun over that period, that's somebody's life being played with. Which is a good a reason as any to have an agent, but there's nothing written in law to say that the agent will do any better either.
I know a published author who doesn't live so far away from me who can't even get her agent to respond to her emails. Genuinely important emails about touring, money and what the status is of the book she submitted over six months ago. With a little research, we discovered that he was probably sleeping with one of his other female authors who is selling books at a good rate. Which all goes to prove one thing regardless of where you stand in life. When you're on the up, everybody wants to know you and be associated. When you're on the way down, they scatter like crows. The solution so far as I can see, is to do everything yourself (and I mean everything) and remember not to be a dick to anybody whether you, or they, are on the up or down. Nobody will ever care about your product as much as you do. Somebody will always take a bigger cut for the privilege of working on it than you will and you will forever be wondering when the axe will fall when your new one sells a little less than the last one.
It's harsh out there.
Then again - having your book in front of millions of shoppers every day is damned priceless. Such is the need for a publishing company - actually, that's not true. "Such is the need for a distribution company" would be more like it. It will change. I know it will because I know how the distribution points work and in a digital age, the stores are struggling to make it work on a daily basis. I just don't know when.
Now, you're probably feeling like I am. Sitting there thinking that yes, "Smith is correct. I must do it all myself because nobody else cares but me" - but the idea of selling a ton of books via a real store never goes away. Maybe that's a good thing. I'm just going to keep moving forward as best as I can - that's all any of us can do.
Also noteworthy out there this week is the appearance of Rowling's new book which has replaced 50 Shades as the "item of the week to pimp to death" in all stores across the land. No idea what it's like - it's not about a boy who is a wizard so I don't really care, but if you're a published author who wants to sell millions, that's what you're up against. I haven't even seen James Herbert's Ash in that many places since it (quietly) appeared last week - and The Wrath of Angels from John Connolly in even less places. That's sad - but not as sad as being a moth eaten hare on the end of a couple of sticks:
COMMERCIAL BREAK:
Talking of making it, which we kind of were, I'll leave you with the trailer for The Runaways movie. Much under-rated, highly enjoyable and if you've not seen it already, please go and sit in the corner.
Zebra 3, Come In Please...
A while ago, I published a conversation that I had with my now friend/acquaintance Christopher Ransom. The general gist of it was that I considered blogging an essential part of not just writing, but my everyday life. I like weaving random thoughts together but then, that's kind of how I started all of this with The Language of Thieves & Vagabonds, so it's partly a second nature. Mr Ransom on the other hand considered that any time that he may spend blogging was actually better spent actually writing. As I sit here struggling to make the ends of time meet everyday when it comes to finishing "that book", I agree that he has a point but then, he also has a publisher breathing down his neck for another book. The pros and cons of having a deal on the table huh? I don't know how Mr Ransom has addressed the situation since we last spoke at any length but I hope I am getting better. I now have a plan. Yep - a plan.
I have always resisted plans in the past. It all seems to be a little bit well, 'planned' and therefore, clinical. I write when I write - period. But for somebody who professes to be smart, I can be pretty dumb sometimes too. Not having any schedule at all means that I've not got as much done as I wanted to. The plan is pretty simple - a long list of projects, when things have to be done by, in what format etc and accompanying this is a list that's just as long of other things that need doing. I have my cohort Mr Downes to thank for this. He's a good planner. He can't get anything done himself mind, but regardless, he is excellent at seeing things from the outside and pointing out the obvious.
Everybody should have a friend they trust that points out the obvious. Most invaluable.
Anyway, all this planning has resulted in me having to instigate something else to. Nothing at all. Everybody should also have day when they do nothing at all. I know myself well enough to know that I do my best work when I'm not doing anything. This preferably involves being outside. Sea is good. Woods are good. The downside of this is other ideas. If that list gets any longer, it will become very worrying to look at, but hey, that's the thing I've chosen to do. No doubt the next thing around the corner will be learning how to say no to myself, but I'll deal with that later.
COMMERCIAL BREAK:
(Best TV theme ever, best detective partners ever. best TV show of all time. Game over.)
Today has now turned into 'cut the blog short Friday'. I am going to write stuff. I don't know what, but let's see what's asking to be finished around here...
The Wrath of Angels
I did an interview yesterday morning with my "long time no see" friend, Lynne (Minki) Malkin for Recharged Radio where she does a show - and when she's not Recharging, she is the uber-creator of 50ft Woman who I like very much. You should check then out if you get a chance. Once she's figured out what the hell she's going to do with it, I'll link it up here. It's pretty odd being on the other side of the interview table. Not that it was anything heavy (as you'll see) but the second you know that it's not a random conversation and that it will be published somewhere for the world to read, re-post and comment on (or worse still, none of those things), you have to seriously think about that first impression. In this instance, most of her listeners will never have heard of me. This is me walking into their party and trying to be at least cool enough not to find myself in the kitchen at subsequent parties. If I can get some copies of Black Dye White Noise in front of some rock fans and they like it, that will be enough for me - especially if they talk about it - and that's really all you can do whether you're me or Stephen King. You can't force people to buy stuff based on clever trigger words or spinning off a book that tells others how to make a million from publishing because people aren't that stupid. The only game in town is to create to the best of your ability - the product will far outlast any cash in the bank if it's good enough. If you've done it right, that's how you get to be a success.
I need to get off this high horse about people who write spinny-web copy, but to be honest, it's really making the internet a crappy place to check things out these days. I know people are just paying the bills but where did all the good guys go?
COMMERCIAL BREAK:
Insanely busy yesterday and today, so aside from going to the dentist - and it not being a fraction as bad as I thought it would be - I've just been flat-out working on the next issue of the mag. Thus, not much has happened in my world. Tomorrow should see it all wrapped up though and then... the weekend. Time for adventures of some description or other. I have a 'business meeting' on Saturday night which will be cool and fruitful but aside from that, let's see what the universe has to throw at me.
While I wrap stuff up though, here's some food for thought that struck a chord with me today: I always kind of assumed that people would thirst for knowledge and understanding. But they don't. They thirst to know things that support what they already believe.
Fact. Anyway, seriously looking forward to Doctor Who at the weekend too:
To Catch A Thief
Eleanor flew out to Monaco this morning for a business trip. I guess I can hardly be jealous having only come back from Colorado last week - but there's something about Monaco that appeals to me in the extreme. I think it's because in my head, it looks exactly like all those great scenes in To Catch A Thief.
That's me right there in my - I think - Sunbeam Alpine. Word on the street is that it's raining out there right now, but that can't be right. The sun always shines out there otherwise, what's the point of it looking like that? (Edit - just got a phone call saying that it's a nifty 28° out there, so the word on the street is a lie - my dreams are intact and far from shattered).
Meanwhile, back in the real world - and being as I find myself with more or less an entire week to myself - it's time to get constructive. This means late nights, extra large post-it notes stuck to cupboards, walls and doors - a real dumping out of the contents of the head. Normally, I try and keep it all in there because it makes a mess but never look a gift horse with an open mouth and all that.
So today, I have a few articles to write for the mag, a metric tonne of email to catch up on but come this evening, I really need to finish a proposal I started on a little while back for an agent out in Manhattan that I think will work well for me if I can get it right. They do cool things with cool people, it would be a blast to a part of it, but that horse with the gifts... let's not do that thing that has something to do with the stable door and a bolt - or is it the cart and the horse saying I was looking for?
Whatever.
COMMERCIAL BREAK:
What else have I got for you today? Well, doing what I do here, I sift my way through a fair few blogs in an average day. Some are good, most are bad. Very, very few are great - despite awards being handed out seemingly for no reason to some of them and worse still, really fucked up statistics being flaunted around like party bags. All you can do is identify this meaningless stuff and move along the bus, never to return or get off at that stop again. But it keeps coming back - there are even courses out there that will teach you how to 'write for the web'. What that really means is for a handsome stack of cash, you can learn all the secrets the world has to offer about hammering out one word sitting next to another to gain that holiest of trophies: the google ranking.
That's not writing. It's mathematics using words instead of numbers.
Which is kind of like thinking that naming your company something beginning with the letter A - even though it had no bearing on what you do for a living - was a great idea back when the Yellow Pages meant something. Everybody wants to be on page one of the 'google page ranking system' even if it means nothing when you get there. Using these rules, it's all about the money, it's all about the posture, all about the name-dropping and 'prestige' but it has nothing whatsoever to do with being great at what you do.
Being great at what you do means that when somebody wants to find you, they know where you are. Online or otherwise. It doesn't mean filling every inch of copy with meaningless keywords because you know what - regardless of what you think will happen and the increasing notches on the counter, we walk away if there's nothing to see. It's really hard to find great independent blogs out there that are readable for their content - and by blogs, I'm also including any newspaper and magazine columns at places like Salon and Rolling Stone - places that built their entire reputation on fine writing.
Why is this bothering me? Because sometimes, people ask and as the days go by and the internet gets bigger and smarter, there are actually less and less great places to go. There are no niches anymore. Nothing is special. It's not hard to find anything out - and a hundred other reasons too. The world has become flooded with knowledge that nobody really knows anything about.
Do you think we'd miss it if the people behind the power switch turned it off just for a week or so?
To wrap: here's The Tea Party at their mellow best:
And if you really want to get with the programme, here's an acoustic version I hadn't seen before and love very much:
The Birds
The rain came yesterday. I can't remember when it last rained around here - not that it's like the Sahara or anything but it's been dry for weeks now. So when it came, it was largely unexpected - and unexpected means unprepared and now I smell like wet dog. That's OK. It's mostly quite a homely smell that I've gotten used to over the years - but you didn't tune in to hear about that. Last week, some weird shit happened.
I've been planning out my next tattoo session for a while now but being out in the U.S. and among the mighty, I found myself making a small adjustment to the plan. It kind of went like this: I had a few quiet moments to myself so I went outside and took a seat in the corner to gather my thoughts with a coffee. Those thoughts turned to the ravens that already live on me and where I was going to go next with it. I looked up to find the biggest damn raven I have ever seen sitting on a fence post not three feet away from me. Slipping out my camera, I hoped to rattle off a few shots at a reasonably close range before he got tired of me and either a) flew away or b) tried to steal it from me to see if it was edible. Truth be told, it didn't seem to bother him at all. It's a pretty cool moment. I like things like that.
Satisfied with my photographic swag, I head back in to catch up with Noon - which I do, only to find he's started work on his next client but he finds the time to point to the booth next to him and tells me to check out his friends portfolio. I flip the cover and what do I find but the most beautiful tattoos of birds. Big birds. Gene comes back to his booth (for it is he) and we get to talking and before you know it, the deal is struck, the design in motion and the time loosely nailed down for a weekend when we are both free.
You don't have to believe in any Gods or be spiritual in any way, shape or form to see that sometimes, magic just happens because you make space for it to happen. I really believe that. Stop for just a few moments to let the world turn. You'd be surprised what can come out of it.
Here's the beast himself being as we were talking about him:
There's a whole bank of close-ups of this big guy. This particular one I hit with the grunge effect on some new app I'd downloaded, but there's some great source material and I'm really looking forward to getting it on. I can wait though. Let's do this thing right.
That said, some things have waited long enough. Raised on Radio comes under that heading - so, as I have a good deal of time off in November, it's time to start collating and editing (and in some cases, just plain start) what will become the next book. In fact, if I can get my head together enough and plan and work far enough in advance with the day job, I might also to be able to make a good start on Almost Human. Maybe even enough to get a first draft run out to see what it looks like. That would really be something - the three books planned for 2012 actually making it out as planned.
I watched some video clip of Dean Koontz being interviewed on a news show yesterday. He sure has a strange way of writing. From what I can gather here, he writes a page a day and then rewrites that page 20 - 30 times and then the next day, starts all over again. While that might seem to be a long winded way of doing things (and my first reaction was 'how lazy can you get') it sure gets the job done. The man has written a ton of books and when I dug a little deeper, I see that he even outsells Stephen King. That's no mean feat - we're talking something like 450 million books. The last Koontz book I read was Odd Thomas which was pretty good - I might check back in and continue with the series. I'm almost inspired to try and write like that myself - you could certainly have more than one book on the desk at any one time. Maybe I'll give it a trial run for a week or so and see how it pans out.
And talking of Stephen King - he has a new book out in the spring of next year. A little different from normal perhaps as it's a contribution to the Hard Case Crime series. I've always really loved those old pulp style covers (which is one good thing about everything from the past coming back to haunt us) and this one is a peach:
There's some more info about the book here. Count me in. I know King doesn't write in the same way as Koontz but even he suggests the same kind of routine. Maybe I should embrace it - simply some kind of routine in which you chip away at the very large stone. I think I'm going to try out a few different things between now and Christmas and log them here. If you give a damn about such things, the tab will be Mr Smith On Writing. I'll try and make them posts that don't mention anything else so that the trail of clues will eventually lead to something worthwhile...
And to wrap up today? You can check out this movie short from the hands of Mathieu Ratthe called Lovefield.
Bare Necessities (Part Two)
Where was I? Oh yeah, thousands of miles away from home. The show itself was top shelf as expected. Good to catch up with some people I've not seen for a while. Always a pleasure to hang out with Jesse Smith that's for sure but made some new friends too - notably Frank La Natra and Gene Coffey. If you want to know more about the show, you're gonna have to pick up a magazine. Not this one - maybe the next, there's still a lot of material to come in. Anyway, America. We took a weird route to get there and stopped at Philadelphia on the way. Through the window of the plane, it looks like a interesting, sprawling place to visit. We did go outside for ten minutes to see what it was like and - as in any city - if you want to know what's going, a cab driver is a good place to start. Can you believe that he didn't know where the Rocky statue was. The next two said the same thing as well. It was only though persistence that we found somebody who did know it was about twenty minutes from the airport. How do people live places where they don't know what's going on?
But it shouldn't have been a surprise. Going through customs and security I was repeatedly asked where I was staying and got the "liar" look for my trouble when I told them Keystone in Colorado. "I don't know where that is" she says to me. Well lady, you'll probably find that's the case with 99% of all place names if you don't look any further than the car park and the cake shop. Is it a standard response to see how you react? A trick question? Security in the U.S. is still very paranoid - which is fair enough I guess but it doesn't make for the most pleasant of arrivals in the Holy Land. All it takes is one man to try and bury a bomb in his shoe and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet have to take their shoes off for the rest of their lives. When I hit New York for the first time back in '94, the guy didn't even look up from the comic he was reading when he stamped me in.
I think somewhere in the middle might be a good idea.
Talking of airports, once you've gone through all of the official nonsense, they're actually a pretty good place to pick up stuff you don't get to see very often. On the way home, I found this:
Sounded good, nice cover... never heard of it before and it's totally excellent. You can find Mike's site here but just go read the book because it's a firecracker. Talking of which, people don't usually give me good book recommendations that I pay attention to but yesterday, my writer buddy Barbara shoved this in front of my face:
I don't think that's the official cover that they ran with when it came out but it's the one I like the best (natch) - you can grab it at amazon here - I shall be starting in on it this very evening - just as soon as I'm done with Up Jumps The Devil. I'll let you know. There's also a pretty cool website to go along with it here.
COMMERCIAL BREAK:
(A note on the above clip - was that for real? I guess it was. The dark ages were not so far away huh?)
My tickets for Alice Cooper turned up this morning. I'd actually forgotten that I'd bought them - those guys at TicketMaster, ClearChannel and Live Nation sure know how to take the fun out of everything. Buy the tickets months in advance and forget, then send them out far enough in advance for you to forget about it again. And you know what else - back when I was a kid, concert tickets used to be worth keeping - not much, but enough. I still have my Alice Cooper ticket from the Constrictor tour somewhere.
Here's the graphic they designed for the tour:
and here's the tickets for the event:
Would it have be so hard to make something that looked like an effort? It will get me in - as it should because I paid for it but is that it? Is that really good enough for you? You know what - I think it is. Give it a couple of years and you'll probably be able to collect ClubCard or Nectar points when you make a vague attempt at going to a rock n roll show. Then you'll be able to drop by the supermarket on the way home and pick up that "Dad Rock" CD they put out every year at a slightly discounted price for your trouble.
I can hear Jim rolling in his grave from here. Sigh...
Bare Necessities (Part One)
I have returned. Where have you been, I hear you ask - and that's a very good question. One has been across the big sea to the land of opportunity and carbohydrates. The holy land known in some quarters as The U.S. of A, but around here, known simply as America. Colorado to be exact. Wait. You can’t call 104,000 square miles exact, so let me tighten that up a little for you: I have been in Keystone, Colorado (population 825 and I think I met all of them) which is - and I know this because somebody with more apps on their phone than me worked it out - 12,408 feet up a mountain. The upshot of this is that at that sort of altitude there happens to be very little oxygen around and it’s like living with another person sitting on your chest and sharing your life force. There were also rumours that every beer you drank counted as three but I felt like such a bag of spanners after the flight that I didn’t attempt to drink for the best part of the week that we were there. Purpose of journey? The Paradise Gathering - probably the greatest stitching together of artists on the face of the planet. Tattoo artists, yes - but also artists in their own right and I’ll come to that in part two or three because there’s a lot to get through.
From the minute I stepped into Heathrow to millions of minutes later when I stepped off a different plane in Denver, governmental forces appear to have taken control of the distribution of fruit and vegetables. From one side of the world to the other, it appears that carbohydrates are your only option. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now I like carbs as much as the next guy (maybe more) but after a couple of days of watching my lips turn into a couple of slugs wearing salt jackets, I was beginning to get pretty desperate for something that got picked off a tree. So much so that I would even have picked a pawpaw or prickly pear by using the claw (not the paw) but I didn't see either of those things up there. Only Aspen's. Everywhere. All of this was offset by my possibly over zealous excitement of seeing a tin sign above some bins telling us that bears were active in the area.
Like, how neat is that. My first bear sign! Anyway, when we got to our hotel, we found we were the only people staying there. Seriously - when we got up in the morning, the old Polish guy behind the counter was as surprised as we were. In hindsight, I wondered who the hell had left the keys on the counter for us, but some things in life you just have to let go of. We came up the mountain in the middle of the night so it was black as er... night when we got there. I wasn't really sure what to expect come the morning - I certainly wasn't prepared for this:
and this:
Why I chose to make somewhere so beautiful look like the movie set from a seventies porno film with some serious iPhone trickery I don't know but you get the picture. I'm not a super religious man, but shit like this makes you wonder. iPhones have no place in a joint like this but after much debate with myself over what to take to get some work done - MacBook, iPad or iPhone - the phone won based on size and portability and - put through its paces, it far exceeded expectation. Also performing above and beyond was the wi-fi they have everywhere. Why somewhere with less than a thousand people should have better high speed wi-fi - for free - than I have in my own house is a mystery to me, but that's America for you. Maybe they were forced to choose between fruit and wi-fi, in which case, I think they chose very wisely indeed.
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The kids are now firmly back at school. As expected, shit happened while I was away, which was just about the worst thing that could happen. It wasn't uber-serious but the school bus being late in the morning is always a pain in the ass. To ice that cake properly, the driver seems either a) incapable of controlling anything or b) never gave a damn in the first place because I got reports of the kids at the back smoking weed and setting fire to aerosol cans. Yep - that's just the education I had planned for my kids.
Our bus journey to school was pretty dull - or at least it was until this new kid arrived called Baines. I think that was his name. He was Irish and in our very small town mentality, being Irish meant one thing. Bombs. That was about all anybody knew about Ireland at the back end of the seventies in our school - it wasn't until U2 turned up a few years later that there became two things to talk about on that subject. A bunch of kids poked him with the proverbial stick for weeks on end to make a bomb and set it off in the car park of the pub next-door. He eventually came up with the goods and we all crowded around after school to watch him set it off - which if I recall correctly, consisted of a newspaper package that looked like a fish supper - back then you were still allowed to do that sort of thing and by that I mean wrap chips in newspapers, not make bombs. I think that's always been illegal. Anyway, the fish supper bomb was set alight and well... it was like burning a lot of rolled up newspaper in a pub car park. Disappointing but perhaps just as well given how close we all gathered round to see it go up. I wonder whatever happened to him. Maybe it's better not to know.
I've heard no more about it since then so either it's stopped or it happens every day and has become normal - I'm talking about the bus ride now, not bombs. Keep up.
Finally for today, while I was 'over there', I woke up in the middle of the night with a Eureka moment sitting on the tip of my tongue. I was in America! I could buy the Sixx A.M. album "7" from iTunes that's not available here in the UK. I looked, I found, I coughed up some cash and it made me very happy. Which is as good a place as any to end part one:
Hooligan's Holiday - A Blast From The Past
Sometimes, I like to post things here because they're simply too damn great not to be associated with. Corabi changed the face of this band from a bunch of wannabes to a real band with real songs and showed that 'other guy' how it should be done properly. I feel the same about Sixx A.M. who are the best rock band out there at the moment. Anyway - relive the past with me here - just for a couple of minutes.
The Plague Doctor
I don't normally cross over the day job with the night job, but I adore this tattoo. Its creator is Ben Harris at Art Machine Productions in Philly, I'm thinking I might have to pass by sometime soon... nice work.