THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
MILAN: 1
7.30am: Flying to Milan today. I've decided to try the one thing I've always wanted to do but never had the commitment to before and that's travel with no luggage at all.
I made this decision after packing a bag and then taking everything back out again. How much stuff do I really need for three days? Less than an hour in, I can tell you already, it's incredibly liberating.
A quick tour of my jacket pockets will reveal a passport, cash, phone plus associated phone leads, notebook, two pens and a packet of cigarettes. I'm guessing they will have a store somewhere in Milan that will sell me shampoo and toothpaste.
It's freezing out here this morning, so I am also multi-layered. As soon as I check in to my hotel, I shall de-layer and rotate clothes and yes... I will also find new socks and pants on the toothpaste run. I mention this because it appears to be the biggest concern amongst people I've told.
What else could a man need across three days? I don't think I've ever emptied a bag of its contents whenever I've been away so hopefully, nothing.
Once I've checked into my room, I'll take a snap of the contents of said pocket and you can see for yourself that it is indeed both possible and comfortable.
I say this now but I've only been out of the house for an hour.
NOTE:
Every single person within viewing distance has an Apple device of some description. Only the stereotypical I.T. guy sitting next to me has a non-Apple product. He also has his laptop out and is at war with the world before the day has even begun.
If Windows was a car, it wouldn't even have got out of development hell. Fact.
WHY DO YOU THINK THEY CALL IT DOPE?
I think I'm on a roll.
I've decided to create some er... how shall we put it? Broadcast-able material. Some run-throughs I've been running up so far indicate that it will take the format of a radio show. There will be some music, there'll be some chat and... well, what else could there be? I guess the chat may not only be mine but that's generally the sum total of the contents of a radio show, right?
Anyway, a working title for it right now is The Dope Show. Estimated time of completion? I have no idea but I'm working on it.
•••
Long time visitors will likely recognise this:
I wrote The Language Of Thieves & Vagabonds a fair while back and released it initially in a low-key short run and also unleashed it for the kindle, but when my stocks of the softback ran out, I killed it off. With things being different now and Bad Hare being around, I decided to make it available again. The cover's been redesigned to sit comfortably with all the others and it's available now - here - in a new softback format where you'll also find whatever else I have to say about it...
...and doing this has made me feel a lot less like a lame-ass than I did yesterday and that's always a good thing.
•••
Yesterday, I found I needed something new to read. I was supposed to be in a period of enforced non-reading in order to write, but this was not to be. An hour in the bookstore revealed nothing of any value to my trained eye, which is a crying shame. Nothing but all the books I had seen before Christmas and a whole bunch of books on dieting... a situation which obviously calls for drastic measures.
Rummaging around in the memory for books I had promised myself I would read but had subsequently forgotten about, I trawled the notebooks until I re-discovered the notes I had made on Karl Ove Knausgård until I found what I was looking for and went back out to find a copy of 'A Death in the Family', the first book in his autobiographical sequence 'My Struggle', which for obvious reasons gathered more than its fair share of attention when it was first released.
It's been kind of busy around here but I've read the first few pages and once I've moved a few things out of the way, I'm going to sink my heart and soul into this because it appears to deserve it. It's been a while since I've been excited about a book that's not mine.
An added bonus in this, is that Knausgård looks like this:
He looks like a writer who writes - not a writer that spends time worrying about things that don't matter. I believe at some point in time, he said: "I'd rather write than be happy."
I can relate to that. (My version of the same ideal went like this: "Now I've broken all my toys, words are all I have left to play with," but I think I prefer his).
Go look for yourself. I think you might like him.
•••
Lot's more to tell but I must wait for things behind the scenes to kick in before I reveal the chocolate.
Have a beautiful day pretty people...
BEAR NECESSITIES
Today, I'm going to share out some wisdom that isn't mine. Its the sort of thing I might say, would like to say, have kind of said now and then, but have never actually said so eloquently in this order.
What we have here is 24 tips for film-makers taken from the back of Paul Cronin's book Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed. If this is what they chose to throw on the back cover, count me for whatever's inside and consider a copy on its way.
Whilst they may originally be intended for film-makers, if you're trying to achieve anything that's out of the ordinary or that you want to do on your own terms (or both), they are as true for you as anybody:
- Always take the initiative.
- There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need.
- Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.
- Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
- Learn to live with your mistakes.
- Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern.
- That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it.
- There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
- Carry bolt cutters everywhere.
- Thwart institutional cowardice.
- Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
- Take your fate into your own hands.
- Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape.
- Ignite the fire within and explore unknown territory.
- Walk straight ahead, never detour.
- Maneuver and mislead, but always deliver.
- Don’t be fearful of rejection.
- Develop your own voice.
- Day one is the point of no return.
- A badge of honor is to fail a film theory class.
- Chance is the lifeblood of cinema.
- Guerrilla tactics are best.
- Take revenge if need be.
- Get used to the bear behind you.
Some things make your heart sing like a phoenix.
It also has bears in it, which makes it doubly worth a damn, obviously.
•••
Sometime in recent history, I dropped something on here about Clive Barker's Scarlet Gospels - if such news rattled your cage and started a fire in your eyes, here's a link to the Earthling Deluxe Edition. It's not cheap but don't shoot the messenger.
•••
INTERLUDE
Even though you never asked, I'll tell you this anyway - this sounds great on vinyl:
END OF INTERLUDE
•••
Talking of bears, which we kind of were, my lovely friend Michelle - better known as WolfSkullJack to the world and whose art you should be spending your money on - sent me a note yesterday and we talked (briefly... in 140 characters or less) about maybe doing something together to give the Romanian Bears a little something extra.
Thinking, thinking, thinking. This could be seriously supercool and very fun.
In case you missed it... she is wonderful and this is mine:
I believe it's based loosely on me... and if it's not, I don't care because that's what I tell everybody anyway. It's a better story than it not being based on me.
Never let the truth come between you and a good story, huh.
I should add that to the end of the list from Werner Herzog and see if anybody notices.
DREAM POLICE
Wouldn't you know it. Just at the time I need to be thinking about those parts of work that need finishing before they drive me into a wall, not one but two new ideas - both with legs - turned up. I had a good stab at ignoring them, promising that I would come back to them later at a better time for all us, but they knocked on the door for so long, I eventually had to let them in.
I guess I could have opened the door and told them to stop hammering but that would be foolish. At least they don't knock and when you open the door, there's nobody there. That's really annoying.
•••
I'm a big fan of great photography and luckily I have no interest in attempting it for myself - and that's a good thing because the second you get involved in something you love on a level other than loving it, little parts of the magic begin to float away.
Anyway, today I discovered Kilian Schoenberger. He comes home from a day out with things that look like this:
Kilian Schoenberger and his excess of seriously incredible work, can be found right here. I'm compelled to drop him a note and see if he will speak to me about his life and passions... and if it all comes together, you'll be the first to know.
Can I have my tongue back now please?
•••
Work on the Raw Sharks project pushes ahead... slowly, but pushing ahead all the same and that's a lot better than going backwards. I had a meet with some very cool guys yesterday and I think we can make good things happen together.
In some other news on that front, repeated emails to TerraMar aren't hitting the ground. If they are, they're bouncing around like one of those crazy balls you can buy to scare the dog with.
So, I'm taking the path of least resistance and instead, we will work alongside a different global ocean awareness organisation. What's that old saying? If you can't beat them, go play a different game.
Yeah. That's the one.
More details on that soon enough - hopefully this week. I'm hungry to get started on this.
•••
And the moral of the story is?
Be Here. Now.
I (ACCIDENTALLY) BOUGHT A ZOO
Received an email yesterday about some Romanian bears that I sponsor asking me if I wanted to go out to Romania and see them. I was going to do this last year but got derailed by work - this year, I'm determined to make it happen. Aside from raising some cash to free more bears from an existence not worth living, this comes under the heading of 'an experience'.
HOW BEARS KICK ASS IN THE WILD
I would guess there's more to write about from a trip like that than I can even begin to imagine. Will I turn into a five year old who didn't get what they wanted for Christmas in the leaky eye department? Possibly, but as was very wisely pointed out to me, you can't let leaky eyes stop you from doing things.
First port of call is to raise close on £3k... let's see how that goes. I'll keep things updated here but even a garden gnome could raise that in six months surely... couldn't they?
HOW BEARS SHOULD NEVER LOOK
•••
A few days back, I ventured out into tattoo territory with Bernd Muss here - I always feel like I write about tattoo art quite enough (i.e.: a lot) in the mag but it becomes increasingly difficult not to mention it here when I'm finding work that makes my eyes widen at just how damn good it is - and you can never have enough education about the really good stuff don't you think?
Take a look at the work coming out of Decasa over in Austria:
Sisters Carola and Sabrina Deutsch run it... and hot damn, if that hasn't made my heart sing today. I love it when a picture says more than I ever could, so I'll shut the hell up now.
Fuck, that elephant is the best thing I've seen for the best part of a year.
•••
And now: I am going to write to the soundtrack of Love/Hate and love every damn moment of it.
I'll leave you with BulletBoys from the days when men were pretty, taming your hair was a crime and music made you smile while moving your hips involuntarily because that's what it's for... in case you hadn't heard.
I enjoyed that so much... here's another:
Bring It.
SOME THINGS ARE JUST WEIRD
I don't ever wonder what I'm going to be doing when I'm in my mid-sixties, that's a whole lifetime away, but if I were to kick back in a very soft beanbag one evening with a remote in my hand and daydream a few hours away, I'm not sure I could come up with something like this if somebody asked me to. I don't even know what I think of it or what it's about:
It's OK... I wasn't looking for an answer, I only went to see if Kiss has released any dates for somewhere I might be this year and this is what I found. I don't really question it anymore. You can criticise all you like, but it beats sitting around watching daytime TV when they tell you you're too old to work anymore.
Nice artwork for the cover of the single though:
I know I said I wasn't looking for answers but if anybody has a clue as to what's going on here or who these girls are, I'd be mighty interested - but apparently not so interested that I'll go and look it up myself...
•••
Had an interesting two-way with Scott (Cole) this morning... in which he flashed me over this article on HST. The important part is this:
When photography gets so technical as to intimidate people, the element of simple enjoyment is bound to suffer. Any man who can see what he wants to get on film will usually find some way to get it; and a man who thinks his equipment is going to see for him is not going to get much of anything.
The same goes for writing - and more than likely anything else you might want to fix your sights on. Everything is as complicated as you want to make it - which also means it's frighteningly simple at the other end of the scale. Everybody has access to a pencil and some paper. Grand total to invest in what you want to do? Around £1 if you're broke as hell - you could probably steal a lifetimes worth of pencils from Argos if you're really desperate. As for paper? There's always something to write on. If you're still not writing with these basics, maybe that's not what you're supposed to be doing.
Honestly, if you're struggling with any of this - don't get too caught up in having the latest tools - it's not worth it. It eats all your time, makes you feel inferior and sucks the soul out of your bones.
Tomorrow, there will be a new tool, a new lens - there's always something you can't afford that you think will make you feel more like the person you want to be.
This is what I think I need right now to make myself feel like a real writer:
But the only tools you need to know how to use properly are the ones inside your head.
THE BEARD OF HURT
I'm not the biggest fan in the world of beards and the hip 'beard movement' - not shaving for months on end is not exactly a hard-to-pick-up skill - but yesterday in The Times supplement, there was a spread of images from Mr Elbank and this one of John Hurt is a killer:
Firstly, what a great portrait, you can see the whole project at the link above or here if you can't be bothered scrolling back up. Secondly, I've never seen a beard suit anybody more. When I look at pictures of John Hurt without it, he looks like he's forgotten something really important. It's no secret that I think he would have made an impossible Doctor Who to follow. I would gladly hand over twice the licence fee to help make that happen, but the moment is gone and lost forever to time.
Why do men who are portraying heroic personalities need beards? Well, they don't need them as such but Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Game of Thrones (there are likely hundreds of others) would all be only half the sum of their parts if beards didn't come into play. Maybe it's a sign that when you're busy doing something important, you don't have time for such trivial matters. Where do you get a shave when you're out in the forest anyway? In amongst the trees, there's nobody to care if you've shaved or not, so what's the point?
Brock Elbank will be exhibiting the whole Beard project at Somerset House from 5-29 March.
•••
I'm struggling to write anything this weekend. I should have done at least something but alas, if writing is one third inspiration and two thirds perspiration, I have messed up on both counts. I could tell myself that with the new issue of the mag heading to print on Wednesday, I've been otherwise engaged - and I have - but my soul doesn't want to hear about it.
Some days a man just can't catch a break.
•••
If you're looking for something great to carry you through the week musically, I settled on John Corabi Unplugged yesterday. This passed me by a couple of years ago when it was released but that's fixed now and if you like that kinda thing (John used to front The Scream and also sung on the best album Mötley Crüe ever made - even Nikki told me that one day but also backed it up with the 'chemistry was just wrong and the hardcore fans weren't loving it', which is a shame because Vince can't sing for shit by comparison.
Here's Hooligan's Holiday from the Crüe:
And here he is knocking out Father, Mother, Son... which is pretty indicative of what you'll get on the album.
Just go buy it - here's the iTunes link.
That's all folks.
Shattered.
Have days that mean something to somebody tomorrow... whatever it is you're doing.
The King Of The Suspension Of Disbelief
Back when I was a kid in the days when they didn't teach you about sex until you were at least 14 because you honestly got all the information you were ever likely to need on that subject from watching James Bond, kids like me had heroes.
This man right here was my hero and man, did I ever want to be him:
If you are smiling, welcome to The Club because you know exactly who this is.
If you are not smiling, my heart is genuinely bleeding all over the floor for you because you missed TV gold.
This my friends, is Lee Majors in his role as Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man. Steve was an astronaut who lost control of his craft on return to earth and busted himself up pretty bad. So badly in fact, that the government had to fix him up with bionics (natch) that cost (no surprises here) $6m. There's no such thing as advanced robotics for nothing though and Steve spent the rest of his life working for the government, fixing things that nobody else could because now he had a bionic eye, a bionic arm and two bionic legs.
Here's the opening sequence:
It's a genius idea right? This is because back in the seventies, we all practiced an art called The Suspension Of Disbelief or: If a writer can infuse 'human interest and a semblance of truth' into a fantastic tale, the reader will suspend judgement concerning the implausibility of the narrative.
Which is exactly what happened but nobody seems to do this anymore, much preferring, hyper-realism to just rolling with the punches and seeing how drunk you can get on the implausible.
Anyway, Steve, along with his boss, Oscar Goldman...
...played by Richard Anderson though I really shouldn't be carrying such detail around in my head about this, spent many seasons fighting crime and other 'bad stuff. They usually did this in one hour and on a Thursday evening - which was highly convenient because that's exactly the time I wanted to watch it.
See, I was good at The Suspension Of Disbelief before it had even begun.
Like I said, I wanted to be Steve Austin really badly when I grew up, but at the time the closest I was going to get was with this action figure I got for Chrismas one year - and very pleased with it I was too.
No. It's not a fucking doll:
...and to get just that little bit closer, I also got Steve's rocket, which looked like this:
Not sure how he could operate any controls in there - it's a bit of a tight squeeze - so it's no wonder he crashed when he tried to come back home. Luckily, when you opened it out, you could fix Steve up like magic:
Times were good and life was fine, but time can play tricks on a boy...
As ratings began to fall, the team in charge began to panic. Something had changed. They were losing us and something had to be done. There were many things I'm sure they could have tried - such as writing better episodes - but what they came up rocked The King Of The Suspension Of Disbelief to the core.
They released an episode called The Secret of Bigfoot. Here's what the internet has to say about this episode:
Steve Austin and Oscar Goldman are in a remote region of the California mountains as part of a team working with high tech earthquake sensors. When two geologists - Ivan and Marlene Bekey - disappear in mysterious circumstances tracks of the legendary wild beast called Sasquatch or Bigfoot are found nearby. Ivan is soon found safe but in a state of shock. However, there is no sign of Marlene. When Bigfoot later attacks the team's base camp Steve pursues and fights with the beast unaware that he is being monitored by aliens who are living in a nearby mountain. During the fight one of Bigfoot's arms becomes detached revealing that it is not an animal but some form of robot. Bigfoot flees (complete with the removed arm!) and Steve follows it into a cave. This turns out to be inside the mountain occupied by the aliens and Steve is soon rendered unconscious, captured and analysed by them.
When he awakes, Steve learns from Shalon - a female alien - that Bigfoot was built and controlled by the aliens to protect them. The earthquake sensor team had been attacked as they had identified a volcanic vent that powered the alien colony. Meanwhile Oscar learns that a major earthquake is predicted along the main San Medrian fault line within the next few hours which jeopardises all the Californian west coast cities. Only a controlled underground nuclear explosion to trigger a smaller man made earthquake along a smaller tributary fault line will prevent the main earthquake from happening. Oscar authorises this knowing that Steve and Marlene are still missing in the area concerned and will be at serious risk from the explosion and subsequent earthquake.
What the fuck? I might have been a kid but I'm not stupid. Well, not that stupid anyway. Here's a shot of Steve and Bigfoot (as played by Andre the Giant who I met once and he could hardly walk never mind much else. I didn't even have the heart to ask him for an autograph):
The King Of The Suspension Of Disbelief was willing to run with this. It was probably even a pretty good episode because I know I kept watching. The Secret Of Bigfoot was a two parter but somebody in TV-land thought he could make some easy money by over the years, unleashing on us a grand total of five - FIVE! - Bigfoot stories.
But worse was to come. Shortly after this first Bigfoot story, they made Steve grow a moustache so that he looked like Burt Reynolds:
But there is only one Lee Majors and there is certainly only one Burt Reynolds. They made him shave it off again pretty soon after this. My nights with Steve were wonderful and endless. Ladies loved him, men wanted to be him (or at least I did, so that's good enough), Oscar was loyal to him and he could run really fast, smash and crush shit with his arm and if something was very far away or somebody was escaping, he could simply see where they were by kicking in his bionic eye.
Here's a clip showing Steve doing what he does best against um... a dupe bionic/robotic Oscar Goldman though I can't decide if this episode is from The Golden Days or The Gold Plated Days
There is no point to this piece other than I hadn't posted anything for a while, however, there are three things we can learn from it.
1. When the chips are down, don't try and fix things by piling on extra junk and hoping nobody will notice because they do. Apparently when the writing crew came in with the idea of a bionic dog and a bionic boy to enhance ratings, Lee Majors told them they could put it in Lindsay Wagner's show (The Bionic Woman - natch) but it wasn't going in his or he was out of here. Sometimes heroes work behind the scenes to make everything as best they can.
2. Unless you really are Burt Reynolds, a moustache fixes nothing at all.
3. Under the right circumstances, it's OK to wear double denim.
So, Mr Majors... thanks for making me the man I am today.
Parts of me anyway.
A WEDGE IN THE DOOR
I mailed out my last four copies of The Day The Sky Fell Down today. I had the (unusual) foresight to order some more yesterday, so with the wind behind them - and man, is it ever windy out there tonight - they will be here before next Friday which is of course, mailing day. The hole on the shelf looks odd but in a satisfying kind of way that I can live with.
Today has also been a day of head down, getting some day-job writing out of the way, so there hasn't been a lot of opportunity to interact with the world. Not unless you're a particular dog, in which case you took it even when it wasn't on the menu.
Having said that, a loose plan was drafted up to hit NYC sometime around September. The exact details of what on earth for remain a mystery but that's never stopped a good plan from gaining some momentum before...
...and towards the end of the day, I had a lovely meeting via the miracle of Skype to fathom out some of the finer points of Secret Project B. Yes, there's a secret project A too but that one is slightly less secret. This weekend will move both forward with a big leap if all goes to plan. Come Monday/Tuesday, I'll lay them both out here in all their glory regardless of what comes over the weekend because neither of them are not going to happen. Fact.
That's all I got today, but you know what? That's OK. It's more than I had written 15 minutes ago.
Scary Monsters And Super Creeps
An idea came fully formed to me this afternoon. An idea that took over what was actually left of the afternoon. It nearly got away from me a few times but stayed with me long enough for me to make an identikit picture of its face and make a few notes.
It's now 22.42 (not being anal - that's what it says in the corner of the screen) and it won't leave me alone. I'm going to see if I can nail it down as a skeleton over the next 24 hours or so - if I can wrap it up fast, it will be a peach. If it takes longer than five or six days, I fear it will be lost. You don't 'work' on a catchy song - they come to you fully formed and simply need a polish.
This, look and feels as though it may be one of those things. It may involve a man with a box and a boy who finds something important in a river
•••
Talking of monsters - which I was in my head but not out loud (sorry about that) - today I discovered the work of Michael Sowa and fell more than a little in love. Take a look:
He doesn't appear to have a site of his own - probably because he is too busy actually working - but a search will take you down some very profitable roads.
That wasn't the only the only love I fell in today. I've never done this before here and I guess I should have many times over but I'm always reluctant to reveal anything that I might be working on for the magazine. Today though, I don't much care because this needs to be shared. This man is called Bernd Muss and here he is:
And this - wait a second, let me take my hat off as a mark of respect and sit down - is some of his work...
...which quite honestly, is some of the best work I have seen in years and certainly amongst my all time personal favourites. I think I would very much like this man to work on me and so, I shall see if I can make it happen. To say it was 'fucking outstanding' is an understatement. You can see more of his work here.
•••
That's all I got today - it's been a long one full of Actual Real Life Work That Needed To Be Done but while I remember - if you're looking for something to listen to, check out Richie Kotzen's new album, Cannibals. Presumably available all over the world at everywhere you like to shop but it doesn't appear to be up at iTunes yet. Here's a link to the album page on CD Baby where you can preview the songs and buy stuff.
ANALOGUE DUDES
Things are on creative FIRE today for analogue dudes. Analogue is the new digital and what better way to give digital a good ironic kicking than by using the horse it's been riding in on to tell everybody how cool analogue is.
I'll stop now - all you need to do is press play and revel in some Scandinavian Genius.
Damn. I wish I had thought of that - and so do you.
•••
If you're a creative type, there's a fantastic article here written by Talib Kweli that might just be the greatest article ever written about trying to fathom out how to make things work now that the everything is broken. If you've never heard of Talib, you're not alone because I haven't either, but the article stands regardless. It's smart, well written and if I liked hip-hop even one tiny scrap, I would buy all of his albums immediately.
Maybe I'll buy one anyway and give it away.
Maybe I should buy one and give it a spin! Broaden my horizons a little.
Now I've gone too far. Just read it and take what you need...
•••
All of which was a lovely wet fish reminder to the face that if you're going it alone, you could really use some kind of marketing plan behind you to get things moving. Right up at the top of my 'business model' for Bad Hare was to do things so damn well, that there was nothing I couldn't do myself, leaving me free to write and publish whatever I liked without being questioned over where I was going with something - not everything in life comes with a convenient label - sometimes things span out over the years and only make sense later. The down side of that is there's always something you're going to be weak at - and marketing has become a pebble in my shoe.
Or rather, my reluctance to get involved with social networking on a grand scale is certainly posing a dilemma. I am even more reluctant to change my mind about that stance than I am over joining it. Maybe I should hire somebody to do it for me - but I don't have anything to say that's not being said here. How many newspapers do you need to buy read the same news?
I do have a plan. It might be a plan that looks like a bucket with a hole in it but it's a plan all the same and buckets can always be patched up when you figure out where they're leaking. It's an old school analogue kind of plan but the beauty of an analogue plan is all the things you had to say don't disappear at the click of a button. Let's see how it pans out. It's a year long plan designed to keep me satisfied enough not to cave in with frustration anyway.
I don't want to be eating my own words when 2016 rears its head.
•••
Don't forget - if you're sick of coming back here to see if I've written anything new, you can subscribe to all future posts right here and have it delivered straight to your inbox. Digital won't be around forever, so use it or lose it. I heard on the grapevine that any videos posted here don't actually show up in the subscribed email, so today, I've embedded the clip instead and we'll see how that fares.
THE DAY THE SUN STAYED IN THE SKY
What better way to start the day than seeing a copy of your book 'on holiday' - in this case, The Day The Sky Fell Down chilling out on the rocks in Lanzarote. Major league thanks to Roy Cole (for it is he) for shipping this in.
You don't get that with a wedge of plastic whether it has an anti-glare screen and e-ink or not. I love seeing the things that fall out of my head onto paper actually being read and running free in the wild where they belong. Trying to stop a story once it's out there will only give you rope burns.
•••
Today also brings the day brightening news that Clive Barker is finally set to release The Scarlet Gospels - for some of us, this has been a close on twenty year wait and to be honest, I'd banished all thought of it ever actually appearing to the back of the cupboard. On Barker's site, the release date is given as 19th May which is good enough for me with a limited edition variant also available through Earthling - though if you happen to drift off to that page, the book hasn't got a page redirect yet. It will come.
I haven't been this excited by a book from somebody else for years. It looks like this:
•••
Talking of things that other people are up to, Foxcatcher and Birdman (two separate films if you haven't been paying attention to the world revolving - it's not a weird superhero movie, though I would pay to see it if it was) both look like they're more than worth getting out for.
Here's the trailer for Foxcatcher:
and here's Birdman:
As for me... work continues to finish up Raised On Radio, work has begun on Almost Human - which is the next collection of Dirty Realism, I have four more chapters to go before The Family Of Noise is complete (you'd think four chapters would be easy to kill off wouldn't you), and aside from some scrappy bits and pieces lying around vying for my attention, as I was pushing Turn The Lamp Down Low into a shape it wanted to be in, a story that wants to be called Dragonfly turned up in my head. Great. Just when you thought you had a handle on things, something else turns up with legs attached.
Dear Mr Barker: I see now how quickly a good idea for a book can turn into twenty years of trying to figure out where something would like to go.
Dear Readers: I will try my very best not to take that long over it. What you should do while you're waiting is read this neat little feature on Lee Child as some guy from The Independent shadows him as he starts work on his next Jack Reacher novel. It will only take a couple of minutes so maybe you could find something else to do as well, like start a secret project that will help save the world in its own little way...
Le Fin.
REPLUGGED
I came by a jawbone for my birthday. It's a classy piece of tech that's for sure. It sits quietly on your wrist like a bracelet (because that's what it is) and does the job of both of those pesky angels/demons that live on your shoulder telling you what's good and what's not. Luckily, it only deals with physical things like exercise, sleeping and eating otherwise we'd be in some serious quicksand.
I wasn't sure about it at first. I am the worst person in the world for being told what to do but it turns out we get along just fine. And I think we get along because somewhere inside, I know I need to take better care of myself. I'm too old to die young and too young to die, so it makes some kind of sense that I get my head around it. Here's how it works: you tell it how active you want to be in a day, how much sleep you want to get and if you're in the mood for losing weight, you can plot that in too and it will help you figure out some better choices than you have been making.
I looked at what the rest of the world was clocking in at with their number of steps over a typical day and added 2000 because the rest of the world is normally inherently lazy. The average (and recommended) number of steps for being an 'active person' per day is 10,000, so I figured 12,000 wouldn't require much extra effort. I'd never stopped to think about it before. Back in the day when I used to sit at a desk all day long, I probably did about 400 - and half of those would have been to the car. 12,000 is pretty hard when you haven't got a secret weapon called Hector but walking him three times a day, I'm clocking up about seven miles on a normal day simply from taking care of him.
Sleep-wise, I also looked at what the rest of the world did and then reduced it by two hours. So, the average person seems to like eight hours but I can get by quite well on six - and if I stay in bed any longer than that, I tend to drop off the edge and sleep forever. I haven't quite mastered the food part of the log yet. I can do breakfast and lunch really well with fruit, water, soup... all good things that put me in a good place - I can even make it through dinner with something as cool as an omelette with mushroom and peppers.
As soon as the night falls though, the rock kicks in the roll and the chocolate demon comes out to play... and the chocolate demon is very much in charge. If I can catch the bastard, I might stand some kind of chance of losing this last eight pounds that are hanging around. For the record, since Hector has been around - which is just over a year - I've lost a 16 pounds doing nothing other than taking him out.
If you need some help getting your shit together, aside from a jawbone, get a dog. Not only do they like going out regardless of the weather, they're also good to share your food with, so you eat slightly less by osmosis. Make sure you get a dog that takes no crap about the weather outside too. There are enough fat dogs out there already. A good working breed is hard work but worth it, and don't forget - a dog is for life and not just for carrying around in your bag like a fashion statement.
If I can figure out a way of getting my knees working like real knees again without having to resort to surgery or pills, I'd also like to get back to a new martial art but I'm not holding my breath over it.
Still, at least I have all my hair.
•••
I meant to do a lot writing during the Big Digital Switch-Off, but I didn't. In fact, I wrote not one single word. I had good reasons. One of those reasons was to reduce the number of books around the house. Somewhere in the annals of this blog, there will be a long post from years ago about how I have figured out that if you have more then ten possessions, you have too much stuff.
Anyway, I have been avoiding the book purge for far too long. I'm caught between a rock and hard place with it. I love books and I love having them around me, but there are too many. I look at them sitting there on the shelf a lot and I guess I must find some kind of comfort in that. Maybe it takes me back to being a kid... maybe it's something else, but I will never read any of them twice so in the real world, they're nothing more than decoration no matter how much I love them. More importantly though, they have some kind of mysterious hold over me and I want to be free of it. Some of the spines, I like to listen to. Some of them have every right to say "you will never be as good as me" and that's good because there has to be high bar to aim for - but others, as much as I enjoyed them at the time, should not be saying the same thing, or more to the point, I should not be listening to them.
I had to figure out something, so I've been on a mission to divide them up into two worlds. Those that are staying - first editions, books by authors that inspire me and big art/coffee table books that have some value. In the other world, there are those that are going - fiction paperbacks mostly, but there are a lot of other things too that I've been hanging onto forever.
The fate of those leaving the house is unclear but the idea is to give them away, one at a time. Leave one on a train, hand one to somebody in the street - those kind of things so they have a life after me. It seems to be the right thing to do because I've finally figured out that books are for reading, not sitting on shelves. It's entirely possible that a book that's been sitting on a shelf too long is not even a book at all, but simply a bunch of paper bound in card.
Look, I can't even explain it properly because I don't understand it myself - just roll with it. Don't be surprised if you get a book pressed into your hand though if we bump into each other.
•••
With that under control, the painting of the lounge almost finished and a bunch of other surface mess under control, I should write. So let's get it on - there's a lot of words been backed up over the last few weeks. We've got Tattoo Freeze on the boil next weekend and then I'm in Milan early February - somewhere in between the two of those, I promised myself I would finish something.
Talking of travel - I need to go here:
What's going on here? This:
When the roof of St George’s Church in the Czech Republic collapsed during a funeral service in 1968, local residents viewed the event as a bad omen and quickly abandoned the building. The church fell into a disused, abandoned state but this summer artist Jakub Hadrava was assigned the task of reviving the 14th century site. His piece contains hooded ghostly figures which line the church pews.
Jakub said: ‘I wanted to make the church more attractive for visitors and try to raise some money for renovation work. ‘The figures represent the ghosts of Sudeten Germans who lived in Lukova before World War Two and who came to pray at this church every Sunday. I hope to show the world that this place had a past and it was a normal part of everyday life, but that fate has a huge influence on our lives.’
The ghosts are made out of plaster and fill the pews and the aisle of the church, which was built in 1352.
...and now, you need to go too, right?
FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
With two more days until I switch off for a digital break and go analogue until early January, I figured I had best post some words. Here we go:
It was my birthday this past weekend, here's what the party looked like:
Then we went to see The Hobbit (Hector stayed at home, he's not so keen) and it's as wonderful as all the others. There aren't too many films I refuse to hear anything whiney about but Peter Jackson has kicked ass with all six of these for me. I've loved every minute and there were a lot of those.
This afternoon, I got a visit from the attendance guy who is in charge of making sure the small person is where she should be during school hours. Apparently, she hadn't been in school at all and now it's half past one.
Except, that's not her style at all. My brain switched into WTF mode and presented me with three options.
1. She really hadn't gone to school.
2. He had made a mistake.
3. She had been abducted.
Number 1 was pretty much off the cards because it's totally not her style and possibly the worst thing she can imagine in the world is my hellfire and brimstone raining from the sky.
Number 2 was possible, so I made him check - and when he did, he discovered she had been in school since 1pm but had definitely not been in school this morning. That was something.
Number 3 was beyond me - but right at that moment, I actually ran through what the hell you would do. You would get in the car and what? Drive around aimlessly? Where would you even begin? Mostly though, I wondered why it had taken this long to let me know - how far could a kid who had been taken get in four hours?
Really far.
Having established she was now in school, he went away leaving me with a lump the size of a ham in my throat. I called the school to see what had happened and they told me that she had been there all day - and after many phone calls, the guy called me back and apologised for looking at the wrong name on the computer screen.
Luckily, when he called, he got my voicemail because I think I would have ruined his Christmas.
Makes you think, huh. What would you do if the worst happened? I haven't got a clue...
•••
The last magazine of the year got shipped to print a few hours ago - that means I'm now left to my own devices until early January. To defuse, I watched the extended version of Fellowship of the Ring this afternoon. Tonight, Two Towers.
As for tomorrow, time to start wrapping up The Family Of Noise closely followed by The Return Of The King.
Sounds like a plan to me.
FOR THE LOVE OF READING
In Vanity Fair this month, there's a great interview with the author James Patterson - or maybe I should say a great feature because as quite often happens in an article like this, if you stripped everything away, Patterson's actual contribution amounts to something like four sentences.
No matter - there's gold in these hills. I got hooked on JP something like 12 years ago and read a lot of his books one after the other. They're real airport fodder but very enjoyable all the same if that's your frame of mind. Pre-(mass)-internet, you never heard a whisper about him being a bad writer, a media whore or any of the other things that have been levelled at him since the silent majority found a voice for themselves online. You picked up a book, you read it, you liked it/didn't like it - the cycle continues. A good book, you'd give or recommend to a friend, a bad book would be given a word of mouth review and we all got on with our reading lives.
After a while, I got bored of JP, moved on and never looked back. I don't think I've read one of his books since 2005 and my life is no better or worse for it either way. The neat thing about the story is more in how the world sees him and how he sees himself. We consider him to be an author because a publishing house puts out books with his name on the front - but he sees himself as a mass-media entertainer whose medium of delivery just so happens to be those very same books. He rightly points out that the guys that (for instance) write a long running TV series get handed awards for doing such a thing. JP however, just gets handed crap all the time.
It's a good point. Everybody is so busy talking about books, either wanting to be the reviewer that the world listens to or the critic that is all seeing, that the previously silent majority appears to have forgotten what it means to read a story for its own sake.
I found myself liking JP a lot more than I thought I would after reading. He knows what he does, he does it a lot and he sells. Rather bringing home the point that surely, the whole essence of reading is nothing more than to enjoy a good story. He puts himself over well. It pretty much boils down to him saying this:
"Respect? Fuck respect."
Which is a good thought to have running around your head if your mission is to sell as many stories as you possibly can. I could get behind that at some level, but I'm too busy trying to unravel the story ball that's rolling around in my own head to figure it out.
Anyway, it's a good piece - and reminded me how I still want to write something for that mag - so if reading is your bag, go pick up Vanity Fair. It's worth a damn - Bradley Cooper is on the cover.
Siôn Smith: Unplugged
The artist Godmachine - who I interviewed in this book right here - posted this on Twitter a few nights ago and I wish I had said it. It goes:
@godmachineuk: the best thing about the original star wars is that we didn't have the internet.
There's an awful lot of truth in that short sentence, but I'm not going to elaborate on it. Instead I'm going to roll down a parallel track and suggest that a lot of things were a whole lot better when we didn't have the internet.
I don't know if I really mean this. Being one of those who spends too much time on it, I'd like to test the theory by removing myself from it for one whole calendar month. This might prove awkward with the day job but I have some time off soon - almost the whole month that I need and even though I'm going to have to work some of it just to keep things moving, if I plan carefully, I might just be able to carve out a fortnight without switching on the machine.
With the assistance of an old Sony slider phone, the iPhone can go in a drawer too. It will be a great experiment because although I'm sure I used to have a much different life to the one now spent in front of a keyboard, the one thing I had and valued was a huge range of 'stuff' that was not necessarily fed to me based on something I once looked at and now an algorithm thinks I may want to spend money on.
As much as I love technology, I need to commit to this - I need to get back to a place in which I'm not hyper aware of what everybody is doing. A place in which I more regularly slip some vinyl from its sleeve, sit down with a book and chew some things over in my own little world. These things happen now for sure but the first sign of a buzz from this slab of glass in my hand and I'm gone. That's not the way I want to live, but it's become the way I do and that's not right.
How will I blog? I guess I won't but I'll sure as hell stack up a lot of material to kick off the new year.
I invite you to join me... but not just yet. Best get Christmas shopping and some work out of the way first.
Then we can party like it's 1976.
•••
In other news, Hector is booked in for a very 'manly' operation a week today. That's going to be fun (fun: hard work) keeping him calm for a few days. It would keep me calm but him, I'm not so sure. I don't think I stand much chance of keeping a cone on him that's for sure...
This Boy's Life
The following is from one of my favourite books of all time, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff:
"Then I got in the car. Dwight came up to the window, and said, 'Well, good luck.' He put out his hand. Helpless to stop myself, I shook it and wished him good luck too. But I didn't mean it any more than he did.
We hated each other. We hated each other so much that other feelings didn't get enough light. It disfigured me. When I think of Chinook, I have to search for the faces of my friends, their voices, the rooms where I was made welcome. But I can always see Dwight's face and hear his voice. I hear his voice in my own when I speak to my children in anger. They hear it too, and look at me in surprise. My youngest once said, 'Don't you love me anymore?'"
...and those are two of the best paragraphs ever written about anything.
UNION OF THE SNAKE
My buddy John recently mailed me a photograph of a group of us when we were at school. We must be 14, maybe 15 at the most, but we are wearing our own clothes which also suggests it’s not a regular school day. I recognised him in it first, mostly because he is wearing double denim, then I recognised myself standing just behind him. The other twenty people in the shot? I could maybe have a guess at who they are - first names only - but we have never stayed in touch and I don’t think I would know any of them if they bumped into me in the street. Some of them I don’t think I ever said more than ten words to when we forced to co-exist with each other.
Anyway, John pointed out how cool he looked in double denim (granted, it was 1983 so we’ll allow him this small victory) and then pointed out that I was possibly the most uncool kid in school. I thought that was little harsh but thinking back, he may be right. My mother bought me odd clothes, I liked Kiss, my hair did its own thing and I was always the last to be picked for any sports team. These are the sins that sit at the front of my mind, but I have no doubt there are many others.
This is more disturbing than it appears because my small group of friends were a bunch of misfits anyway. We were the outsiders. The heavy metal kids that hung out in corners where nobody would disturb us. So to be The Outsider of The Outsiders was quite something.
A few months back, I heard of a ‘school reunion’ that I couldn’t get to - simple bad timing - and I forgot that it had even happened until this picture appeared and John told me that an old girlfriend (hello Gillian if you happen to be passing - there's a contact me link up at the top) had turned up. In my defence, I don’t actually remember being boyfriend/girlfriend but apparently we were because I got dumped for being boring. During their conversation about me, the words she apparently used were: “he wasn’t dynamic enough for me.”
Ouch. That hurts. Seriously? How dynamic can you be at 15? How much of a snowballs chance in hell do you stand when the girlfriend you didn't even know you really had is in love with Simon LeBon?
Siôn Smith with a paper-round vs Simon LeBon and a yacht? It's not much of a fight is it.
We were in school together since we were little kids of seven and now she's a teacher. It would be cool to grab a coffee and say hi - not least because I heard that somebody in said photo died this year. That kind of put a different slant on it.
Here's the photo:
It's funny for sure, but it suddenly became a lot less funny when I found that out. Here we are, nothing but a bunch of invincible kids poised to take on the world - not unlike the multiple generations that came before - and after - us who didn't have much idea of how the world had no intention of meeting us halfway with anything at all.
Who let their dreams seep like water through the cracks of their fingers? Who had hands strong enough to stop that from happening? Who could care less? Who stayed where they were and who left? Who found out was love is? Who found Jesus burnt into their toast? How many questions can you throw at a single photograph?
The most frightening thing of all is how un-unique this photograph is. It's any photo in any place with any body in it. You have photographs like this. If not, you will exist in a photograph that somebody else owns. Nothing but a ghost to the people you used to call friends.
It would be quite something to gather everybody together and take this photograph again, with all of us in the same place - but we can't.
There are holes in the world where people used to be.
Be cool to each other.
THE UNWRITTEN
This week, I started reading a graphic novel called The Unwritten. Its landscape is huge and its ideas are even larger. It's not a super new series but it may be the second greatest comic book sequence I've come across. Daytripper being the best if you're interested - which is, frankly, flawless.
Anyway, in the last instalment I read, our hero - Tommy - happens to have found himself in the company of Josef Goebbels and things are looking rough to say the least, but there's a point at which Tommy says to him "Do you believe that shit or do you just peddle it?", to which Goebbels answers (nicely scripted and not in real life one would assume): "I believe that others should believe it. Beliefs are collars to which leashes can be attached."
I really had to chew that over. I don't think I've ever read something quite so true in my life. There are millions of examples of this being how people react to the world. Religion and politics are the two obvious examples, but it drifts right down to everything you do, everything you own and everything you believe to be valuable to you - be that material or immaterial. It strikes me that the only road to being your true self is not to 'believe' in anything aside from your own heart (and even that will have a good attempt at betraying you before you learn to trust it).
The more I thought about it, the more it became so incredibly easy to see that nothing more than the way the world is has us shackled to a post. I'm not suggesting each and every one of us go all V for Vendetta on the world's ass because that's also a collar, but there's always somebody wanting something from you.
Some guy rang the house this morning peddling some junk or other but I hung up on him before he got too far into his script. It might be rude but nobody forced him into getting a soul destroying, waste of time job and try to sell people things they don't want or need. Those are my minutes you're chewing up there mister. What you do with your own time is your own collar.
Freedom is a complicated beast. Sometimes it makes you want to sit in a corner and do nothing more than read a comic book, but apparently there's no escape in that anymore either.
MY HEART GOES OUT TO BUFFALO
Some time ago - back in 1994 - I took a road trip to upstate New York with my buddy JJ. To us it was a big American adventure. To everybody else in upstate New York, it was winter. Let me tell you something we have both discovered from this bitter experience.
There is winter and then, there is Winter.
We took an overnight Amtrak out of Penn Station and before too long, things began to look like this:
Which was a little worrying as we were thousands of miles from home with a grand total of £60 between us. In hindsight, we probably could have thought it out better. That money doesn't translate to a whole lot more these days either. Still, it was pretty exciting to be on a warm train travelling north into the darkness of the night - rather oblivious to what was really going on outside.
When we reached the end of the line, it was 4am. The station was in darkness, there were no people but us and a very lonely (yet kind of sexy in the dim light) looking machine that would feed us M&Ms by the handful in exchange for a quarter. So we did what any battle-scarred rock-types would do, shrugged our shoulders at the predicament and tried to go to sleep until the day arrived.
The laws of physics clearly state we should have died that night as we later discovered the temperature had dropped as low as -32 (that's a minus sign, not a dash). Many people did die that winter. I don't know how we escaped it. Likely because we were immortal and our engines were full of adrenaline coated coal. Having established that it was Extremely Cold, when we woke, we went outside to find it looked something like this:
The snow was easily eight feet deep and it was still snowing.
It's kind of hard to find where you're supposed to be going when everything is buried under a pile of snow. That was the first time that I had ever seen first hand how places like Moscow and other traditionally winter-like places keep functioning when it gets bad.
Anyway, to cut a long, cold story a lot shorter than it is. We were picked up in a car by a friend and we drove even further upstate - and I promptly fell in love. Over the next few days, I fell in love with how you could walk into a warm radio station and get your music played simply because you were British. I fell in love with the frozen lake and the idea of opening a rock club on its edge and I fell in love with the dream that such a stupid idea might even work. Talking of clubs, I also fell in love with a barmaid at a club called The Lost Horizon but that might have been the all you can drink for $5 thing they had going on at the door.
There was one night - in which we were safely inside a house in which there was a TV and a fridge - we got totally snowed in. We sat up all night in front of a fire, repeatedly watching The Bronx Warriors and collectively decided we had been slackers and dusky dreamers for long enough.
If we couldn't hatch a dream in a snowbound America, then where the hell could we?
Many hours later, JJ had it figured that he would come back to the UK and work on becoming a DJ in a club. For my sins, with my band falling apart at the seams, I figured I had best have a back up plan too. I would launch a magazine. What the hell did I know about running a magazine other than I could see how some did it (that sucked) and how others did it (in ways that really didn't suck).
When we eventually made it home - after spending our very last shared dollar on a lottery ticket at the airport (because that's The American Dream) and despite it looking like we might have needed that dollar for some food due to something like this:
... we got home and got to work.
Twenty years later, progress has been good to say the least. We both probably take for granted and have long forgotten how we dug ourselves out of our snowed in mindsets of the time. JJ has DJ'd (by my rough estimation) over 3000 nights at his decks in The Krazyhouse in Liverpool (amongst others) and I have published/edited in some form or other, over 200 magazines and easily written over a million words in the process.
For both of us, the work continues.
It doesn't really matter what any of us think of those loose statistics - they mean nothing to anybody aside from J and myself (and even that's debatable) - but what brought me to write this was that yesterday, an old friend got in touch, I heard news of an old friend that died, news that some other old friends had been asking about me and I got to wondering what it was all about.
Then, really late last night, I came across a piece of paper 'hidden' in the pages of a book I surely can't have even opened since back in 1994. On that sheet of paper is a song I had clearly intended to write called 'Dream Under The Snow' - which is an awful song title every single day of the week. That's all it says though. There are some sketchy pencil notes beneath but it remains unfinished - nothing bar a working title with a line under it which I guess makes it unstarted, not unfinished - written by a 20 years younger version of myself.
A message from a previous version of me to an older model? Who knows.
All you need to know is, in the worst winter I have ever lived through, I fell in love with America and found enough of myself beneath the snow to save myself from oblivion.
Winter Is Coming. Shovels at the ready please.
•••••
The pics used throughout this post are of the snow that arrived yesterday in Buffalo. People of upstate New York: for those about to dig, we salute you.