THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
WAR OF THE WORLDS - REDUX
Following up from the WAR OF THE WORLDS piece I wrote a few days back, it appears that there was recently (back in May at Heritage Auctions in Dallas) an auction to own the originals of that very art. I am not disappointed in missing it because the £350,000 minimum price tag attached was slightly above my means to say the least.
Anyway, there appears to be more to the story than I first thought. British artist Warwick Goble had provided the illustrations for the first edition of the book but Wells was so unhappy with them, he included an introduction in following issues of the book criticising the drawings, stating Goble had 'evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting machines, and it was there that his knowledge ended'. Meanwhile Corrêa had fled to Belgium with his aristocratic family when Brazil declared independence from Portugal in 1888 but was cut off from the family fortune when he married against his parents wishes.
Turning to art as a way to make ends meet and after reading the French edition of the book, he sketched his own vision of the Martian invasion. Then - in 1903 - Corrêa took his drawings to London to show Wells - and the author was so impressed he instantly hired him to illustrate the rare 500-copy limited edition I was talking about.
Stefan Gefter, an expert at the auction house, said:
'There was nothing like them before Henrique Alvim Corrêa put his vision to paper for the 1906 edition, the first special edition publication of The War of the Worlds. Pretty much everything you see in science fiction art involving death rays and aliens that followed was, one could argue, inspired by this relatively unsung hero of the genre.
'Whereas today's artists have 100 years of art and literature to draw from this fellow had nothing other than the images in his head. That makes these historical pieces above and beyond just really imaginative drawings.'
Which is a good point, the irony of which is that there is so much easily available great art out there now, it's likely that it gets copied in the subconscious, but this isn't the place for such a conversation.
•••
While I was looking into that, I found some illustrations for the book that one of my other icons of cool had put together for it. If I said it was a surprise to me that Ray Harryhausen got nowhere fast with it, that would be an understatement to say the least:
Here's some bonus test reel footage he created for a pitch to RKO in 1949:
Meanwhile - and slightly related - take a look at this from Great Martian War created by Christian Johnson and Steve Maher:
I am lost for words. You can find more on their little project right here.
Note to self: catch up with these guys and see what makes them tick.
•••
Footnote: some of Warwick Goble's work is great. When you read it in the context of this War of the Worlds story, it makes him sound like an amateur but he really wasn't. Go search.
CIRCUS OF POWER
While I was at the tattoo show in Florence, as part of the incorporated art exhibition, there was this trilogy of posters on display which you may read into what you wish but hopefully you'll read them correctly:
I couldn't find the man behind them when I was there - Bue 2530 - but I dropped him an email today and, well... let's see what happens. These must be for sale - and if they are, I'm pretty sure I can do some great things with them if you know what I'm talking about.
DREAM: 39 STEPS
I killed a man on a train with a knife, except when I look at the knife after the event, it's a pen. Then I run away. Not a sprint down the carriages but a real 39 Steps in the making.
I open the carriage door, jump out while the train is crossing a bridge, plunge into obnoxious black water, rise to the top gasping for air to find myself magically transported from a stretch of water nobody should ever find themselves in - possibly the Thames - into a clear shallow stream somewhere in the Highlands of Scotland.
I drag myself out, a heavy coat dragging behind me and sit on the bank next to a man who looks like Tom Waits but I know is supposed to be my old man.
We exchange pleasantries.
“Did you do it.”
“I did not. Did you?”
“I think I did.”
“That’s a real shame,” he says.
The next time I look, my father has turned into Tom Waits for real.
He pulls a full size piano from one pocket, a stool from the other and proceeds to play his song, New Coat Of Paint on the riverbank.
GOODNIGHT FLORENCE
I just got back from Florence which is, as you'd expect, more than a little special. It's not somewhere I immediately fell in love with like I did when I found myself in Copenhagen, but it's certainly up there in the list of good places to die. The people are wonderful. Even the junkies in the park waiting for their Daily Dope Delivery were politely helpful in giving pointers to a decent eatery. There wasn't as much time as I would have liked to get off the beaten track though but I made time to check in with one of my literary heroes, this man:
Here's a close-up of his face...
That's one stern face. Stern and focused on the task at hand. A little research tells me he had at least two children and we can probably all agree, that's not the face of a man you want to come home to when you've had a shitty day at school. Then again, he also looks like the kind of man who wouldn't notice when his kids got home from school anyway... unless perhaps they went over the top with their Playstation13C.
If you haven't already, you should read Divine Comedy - preferably an illustrated edition, but only if illustrated by Gustave Dore:
There's not many laughs in it but it's nothing if not the greatest story ever told.
•••
What's not the greatest story ever told is the number of people - I'm talking hundreds upon hundreds of them - who hit the the square armed with selfie sticks and take pictures of themselves in front of these monumental sculptures without stopping to look at exactly what it is they have in the background.
"Any art will do so long as it looks vaguely like art and I can prove I've been there."
The world becomes more broken every day. Is it too much to ask that sometime soon, a James Bond styled super criminal will figure out a way to launch a global data blocker just for a couple of days of the week to keep the magic of the world alive?
Probably.
•••
I also found some time to show my face at Le Macchine di Leonardo and discovered this fine piece of advice, though I can't quite wrap my head around DaVinci ever using the word 'stuff'...
MR SMITH: LIFE COACH
"When you introduce a pistol into your story, sooner or later, it has to be fired."
Adapted from Murakami who adapted it from Chekhov because today, I'm hanging out with giants.
WAR OF THE WORLDS
I wish I could draw sometimes. Actually, I wish I could draw a lot of times but I can't. It's likely to be a good thing really because it keeps me appreciating those who can - and today, I am appreciating this work from War Of The Worlds by Henrique Alvim Correa (1906).
Henrique Alvim Corrêa was a Brazilian artist working in Belgium at the end of the 19th century, specialising in military and science fiction illustration. His best-known work is this illustrated French translation of The War of the Worlds, for which only 500 copies were produced. 500 copies! I know I have an extremely limited amount of possessions but I can't begin to tell you how badly I want a copy of this.
Before I drop in a whole bunch of magic here, if your only experience of the H.G. Wells masterpiece is the Tom Cruise movie, you need to expand your horizons and you start that journey at this page over at the British Library website at this page.
Lecture over heathens - let's get down to the good stuff:
THE DAYS RUN AWAY LIKE WILD HORSES
Thought I would share this with you in isolation here. I don't often see great tattoos of writers - maybe most writers don't have the sort of faces you would want on you permanently.
Now there's a thought. If you want to be remembered, cultivate your face.
Anyway, this is from the fair hand of my friend Veronika who works alongside Henrik Gallon - the man who has the sole rights to tattooing my arms.
You can find the pair of them right here.
THERE WILL BE FIRE
Some guys came to build a new summerhouse where the shed used to be at the weekend. Looks good too - except now there's even more wood to dispose of including a very tall and bushy holly tree that was in the way. All of which looks pretty much like a few days of getting spiked and splintered as I try to reduce it all down to nothing.
I'm looking on this as a good thing. When you have a job that means you more or less sit in the same place all day long, doing the same thing, a spot of manual labour is always welcome.
So, across the next few days, there will be fire.
Anyway, while that was going on, I cleared up some work I had lying around and moved on to some good stuff. I pulled together about 1500 words on a new idea I had, dug out something I've been meaning to dig out for a while, read it through a couple of times and added another 1000 words along the way to bring it to a place I wanted to work on it some more - and that seemed like quite a lot of work in a relatively short space of time.
But that's really nothing more than a public announcement that writing is happening around here and I'm not just sitting around watching re-runs of Lost.
I also realised that in a few days, I'll be in Florence - mostly for a show that's going on out there but there are 24 hours in a day and with sleep only needing five of those, that leaves more than enough time to work on my next instalment of Cities Of The Dead.
I can't remember if I've ever mentioned that project before but it's a long term thing - largely dependent on getting around the world as much as possible and as such, will simply be ready when it's ready. It's a fun one to work through that's for sure. There will be cab drivers, baristas, hotel clerks and plenty of dead people.
Better news posts to follow. Promise.
DESTROYER OF SPIDER-WORLD
I spent the weekend destroying stuff. A shed to be exact. It was here when we moved in and was full of useful treasure like bits of cut up hose-pipe, a rusty metal bin, a bag of 'stuff' I didn't have the nerve to look inside of, some paint tins from an unspecified year of the 1990s and 15,000 spiders. It looked like an easy ride when I first decided to take it down because anything can be deconstructed to its component parts with one big hammer, a flathead screwdriver and brute force, right? Once the spiders had scattered to the four corners of the earth and four large pieces of wood and a roof lay on the floor, I happened upon a chain of events that I hadn't even considered.
What do you do with it then?
I slept on it overnight and after unsuccessfully trying to palm it off as a valuable commodity on some neighbours who still have coal fires, I went back to the toolbox and added a handsaw to the inventory. It is now time to reduce the 'big wood' to 'much smaller wood' with a view to it being easier to transport somewhere else.
For those who might find themselves in such a predicament one day, here's how to do it:
1. Take the hammer and smash the hell out of your chosen object. Once you get started, it's quite therapeutic. Don't be disheartened by there being more wood now than there was before.
2. Using the saw, carve up anything too big to snap in half using any martial arts skills you may have accumulated over the years.
3. Make tea/coffee, stand back and admire the unholy mess you have made in the garden.
4. Repeat as necessary until you are the proud owner of something that looks like this:
Deciding what to do with your swag really opens up a multitude of choices for any free time you might have had in the coming days... three days later, I'm still chewing it over.
Chris Cornell - Higher Truth
I can hardly bring myself to write anything about many albums these days. I blame myself, I blame you, I blame the artists but most of all I blame ‘the way things are’. We have pushed the world into a place in which magic no longer exists when it comes to music. Whereas once upon a time I would buy an album and dine out on it for weeks - a real killer could last months and the absolute gold, a lifetime - now we are plugged into the mainframe directly, much like the rest of the world, an album is lucky if it gets a few days of my attention before I move on to whatever the next one is.
Oddly enough, those where the days when artists were also able to dine out - at least once in a while.
But this week brings with it a taste of the way things used to be. It brings a genuine desire inside of me to sit down and say something worthwhile about an album I am going to live with in isolation for as long as I possibly can. Purposely disconnected from said mainframe, I dropped Higher Truth onto my laptop, onto my phone (and therefore into the car) and pretty soon, it will be here on vinyl too. I can stream it to my hearts content, but buying it seemed like the decent thing to do because six days in, I have decided this album falls into the category of ‘real’.
I can’t remember the last time I was excited about the release of an album. Not a simple excitement, but genuinely looking forward to its release date and most of all, for everybody to go away and leave me to listen in peace.
So what gives? Higher Truth is far from what I expected. Truthfully here, I’m not sure what I expected. I was prepared for anything and that’s the right way to be with Cornell - I guess you need to have a good perspective on things to understand why. A solo album is hardly likely to come on like a daisy-cutter when Soundgarden are still very much alive and well. What would be the point in that? Secretly, I am always hoping for something close to Euphoria Morning (orMourning as the re-released album has just been titled). Back when that came out in 1999, I widely claimed it to be one of the greatest albums of all time and I will stand right next to that comment today. I never get tired of it, I’m always pleased to see it - maybe it got me at the right place, at the right time.
Sometimes that’s all an album has to do to embed itself inside of you. What I (we) actually get with Higher Truth is about as close as Cornell could likely get to it sixteen years later. Like many things in life, I didn’t know I wanted this until it was given to me.
Anyway, I currently stand accused of overusing the word beautiful - an accusation I’m going to gracefully accept and utilise one last time before I move on to find something else - but this truly is all that and more. When it comes to Cornell and his artistic output, there's always a lot of focus on either a) Soundgarden or b) his voice. The former is expected. The latter is valid. I think he’s the best vocalist at work in the world today but one thing that is constantly overlooked - to the disgrace of the entire world of music writers - is his ability as a lyricist. It’s a hard thing to nail to the mast but trust me on this - he is swigging wine and being fed grapes with the best of them.
I once posed some questions about lyrics and songs to my (small) circle of friends and was stung in the eye by how many of them don’t listen to lyrics as the larger part of a song. I don’t even understand how such a thing is possible, but over time I've also come to realise that some people call leafing through a magazine and looking at the pictures, ‘reading it’. A part of me wants to ask the question as to whether or not they listen when people speak or do they nod their head to fill in the irritating sound until it’s their turn to speak again. It's a question I keep to myself because I don’t think I would much like the answer. For those of you who recognise yourself in that statement, maybe you’ll be better served whipping through the next few paragraphs - in reality, if you are one of ‘those’, I doubt you got this far anyway.
Snatching phrases from the pool where the finest of songwriters like to hang out with a fishing line knotted around their big toe, there’s some real poetry to play with here. What I found on Higher Ground is some honest to God 'old school' craft - the kind that only works within the parameters of the rhyme of the song that it comes dressed up in.
Back in the days when it didn’t matter what you looked like and songwriters didn’t need to be pretty to be appreciated for their talents, they used to tell stories because being able to play your chosen instrument was not a choice - it was a prerequisite. They would tell stories that mattered. Stories about touchy subjects like edging towards starting an affair with a woman by answering a classified ad that said she likes drinking Pina Colada in the rain - and later finding out it was your girlfriend all along.
I’m not for a moment saying Cornell is in this vein but he knows his heritage well enough (of course he does) to have been influenced by an album like, say, Springsteen’s Nebraska or the more commercial aspects of Nick Drake - or maybe Jeff Buckley - and wanted to bring them into his repertoire for future use. It makes good sense if the Songbook-like solo touring is to continue too... which it is.
I checked.
See, what I got with Higher Truth was more than I bargained for. I was hoping for a more or less acoustic based album with songs I could learn to love - and if I was really lucky, songs that would make me lean back in my chair and wish I had written them - which is exactly what happened.
I leaned back in my chair and said to myself ‘Man, I wish I had written these songs.’
The first time I said that was when I heard this:
“How hard can it be
To share your life with me?”
On paper, it doesn’t look like much of a lyric, but strapped to the rest of the song - Before We Disappear - it’s like a magic spell. There’s not a person on earth who hasn't thought those very words at some point in their life… and so it goes on, song after song resonating against my soul like I’ve been re-strung into the universal God-mind of punishing melancholy.
Thus far, I’ve avoided listening to him speak about the album in any form. I made a point of reading no interviews or press too. All I wanted was to hear what he had to say in its purest/intended form - pretty much like you would back in the seventies and eighties when it took something like six months before you got to hear an artist tell you it was ‘the best album we’ve ever made’. My time in the universe has served me well in its education when it comes to the arts - it’s not the artist that gets to choose how good something is.
Not that this is relevant here. So far as I know, Cornell doesn’t tend to walk that road and is not really one to sit back in his own chair while justifying his creation. He simply lets it go and moves on to whatever comes next - or at least that's how he makes it appear and that's the important part.
I digress. A lot. The whole joy of this album for me is that it’s built around the one thing I love most about music and that’s the portrayal of the songwriter as a vulnerable human being. No matter how strong you present yourself to the world, life always has more than a few branches ready to spring back in your face when you least expect it. (The absolute opposite of this is the other reason I love music and that would be to portray yourself as an infallible being who has every scrap of his own shit together on all fronts, but that’s a whole different story).
Take a listen to Harry Nilsson performing Without You - that’s the pinnacle of songwriting for me. That’s a man destroyed kicking his heart up and down the street not caring who’s watching. It’s not a pretty sight but it’s something that needs to be seen to take on board exactly how vulnerable we all are. To deny this is to deny being alive.
And that’s something Higher Truth delivers in spades. The one slight deviation may be Murder of Blue Skies in which Cornell makes a valiant attempt at reclaiming his soul from purgatory:
“I can’t wait
To never be with you again.
And I can’t wait
To lead the life that you’re not in.”
Ten days in, I think I can confidently say it’s not so much an album for those whose hearts are currently breaking - it’s more an album for those who remember what it’s like to have walked down that road. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we're all walking wounded from the shrapnel in our hearts.
It’s what makes us human and the very reason poetry works when written from that place. It’s about being naked in the presence of others and not feeling weak but strong in the process. I can’t help but read this much into Higher Truth. There’s no other way it can have been intended otherwise he may as well have moved straight along with the next Soundgarden album and given me a reason to feel something else entirely.
More than anything, Higher Truth is a battle-cry from the soul of a man hyper-aware of his own mortality. From start to finish, it’s about nothing but the limited amounts of love at work in the universe, how easy it is to lose love when you think you have it and maybe also the fact that there are no answers to be found no matter how hard you look, no matter how much you bleed and no matter how much you put yourself on the line for it in the first place.
But hell, it's good to be alive no matter how much it may hurt.
September 2015
TONY STARK | THE NOVEL
...and man, how we all wish this was a real thing we could buy with our hard earned pennies.
Le Rock Est Mort, Vive Le Rock!
I haven't dropped anything on here for too long. 'Things to do' surround me like a halo of flies - the most pleasing of which however, is the addition of a second blog here called Ear Candy. If you're 'in my house' right now, you'll see it above - if you're an RSS dude here (or any other form of digital magic), you can push that link to go there. It won't be populated super frequently because there are rules. The rules are:
"Say it from the heart or don't say anything at all."
I've been looking at the current crop of music mags for months and I can't find a damn soul writing about music because they love it as opposed to it being their job - at which point, a little bit of politics always creeps in to muddy the water anyway.
I'm not saying every music mag writer sucks and I'm not saying the magazines suck either. Am I?
I'm trying to say nobody is speaking to me about it as a musically educated grown-up - and if that's how I feel, then I'm probably not alone and maybe somebody else will get a kick out of it here too. But, damn - you would think with an unlimited amount of resources available online somebody would have figured out a way to pay attention and deliver The Goods properly.
Anyway, that's that taken care of. I'll figure out a way of raising a flag whenever anything new goes up.
More tomorrow...
LIFE ON EARTH
This...
...will very quickly become a thing in more ways than you will soon be able to count. I'm throwing myself in with Number 14 because it feels right and the bears already have my vote on dry land.
Think about getting on board somehow because along the way, you probably had a hand in breaking it too.
CC: MY BROKEN HEART. TWICE.
This is so damn good, I might cry now.
Higher Truth is released September 18. Bring it.
•••
Alternatively, if you miss the days when the world was full of 'proper' video clips, you could always watch this instead, but I much prefer the 'lyric' version. Less distracting to the song, but here it is anyway.
FISHING TRIP
I spent yesterday with my wonderful friend Rakhee and between us we put this together - or to be more exact about the whole thing, I lay around all day while she rustled up some magic because that's what she does best. Every day.
It was originally planned out to be part of my Big Bear Rescue project - and still is - but I have to say, I'm struggling to gain traction with the project. What I need is a better thought out campaign - and some help! I've already moved my trip to Romania from this year to next because of a clash with a work trip but that's OK - I'm pretty sure World Animal Protection can cope without me, besides, this is going to be a lifelong labour of love, not a flash in the pan.
So, this weekend, I'm going to take some time to figure out what happens next - and how this bear features in the plan. I also need to figure out how to make some decent money for it but as part of that, there were also some cool art projects I let slide that need putting back on the stove and heating up.
Being as I've written a couple of things for some projects already this morning, let's do that right now.
CULTURE SHOCK
Today's post is a head dump, so you can either roll with me or scan through it for nuggets I guess.
First up, I re-started an instagram account. I did have one but I must have done something bad at some point because they took my @mrsionsmith username off me thus forcing me to think of another. You can find me @badharedays but if you scroll right down to the bottom of the page here, you'll find a link called Cool Shit that will take you there. My reason for going back to it, is that I was looking for a way to let readers here know of cool shit (natch) that I had come across on my travels - namely, music, books and movies.
I'll still post about really cool shit here but that seemed to be as good a way as any of feeding the site with things I think are neat and that you may enjoy also. Plus I can feed it from my phone which is another bonus - and that's quite enough extra accounts for one lifetime.
•••
I also just found out that The Dead Daises will be playing around the country in December. This is good news - check them out. John Corabi is a real class act and the other guys in the band are no slouches either. You can find their dates here. Is that something I should have dumped on the instagram thing? It probably is, but what's the point in having rules if you can't mess with them every now and again.
•••
One of the blogs I like checking in on more than 'quite often' is Last Night's Reading (check it out to see why) and today, this great illustration did it for me:
...and it works because I've never heard it put so eloquently. Trying to make the two things different from the sake of it, is simply pointless. At it's heart, there's no difference between the guy across the street getting high on Vivaldi and me getting my kicks from Van Halen. That's what we're all here for right? To love what we love because it resonated and not for critics to point our minds in one direction or the other.
Just to rock the boat because I can, I'm going to post this here. I still think it's one of the greatest music performances I've ever seen.
Maybe tomorrow I will whizz across the road and see what the man thinks of this:
There you go. Supposedly high and supposedly low culture appearing together in perfect harmony. I don't think anybody can have an argument with that.
•••
Yesterday afternoon, I had the craziest idea to poke around in the concept of recording a spoken word album. When I mentioned this out loud to somebody, the response came:
"Will it be like Poe meets Kiss"
To which I made a grand denial, but now some time has passed I think I'd like to know what that might be like, but one idea at a time.
No, this initial idea was to work up something along the lines of Jim Morrison's An American Prayer which I love now as much as I did the first time I heard it. Current plan is to look around and see if I can find a band to do it with, but we'll see how that goes - I've had experience of bands before.
Can I have that as 'understatement of the year'?
It will be called The Dirt Will Find You, and that's good enough for me right now.
•••
Back to work slackers.
RASPUTIN. DESTROYER OF WORLDS.
I was watching an episode of Top Of The Pops from 1978 at the weekend - I just happened to pass it by while I was waiting for things to finish cooking and hung around because 10cc were doing Dreadlock Holiday and surely we're all in agreement that this alone, is a curio worth loitering around for.
When that was over, a seriously guilty pleasure happened along - Rose Royce knocking out Love Don’t Live Here Anymore - I watched that too because Rose Royce were a great band back in the day. With only a few minutes left of the show, I figured I'd stick around and watch the end because you know what - 1978 was a good year for music and me. It treated me well as far as I remember.
The final song was Boney M doing a ‘live’ performance of Rasputin. I watched that all the way through too and you know what, it was pretty entertaining. It’s certainly not something I would have gone out and bought but I don't recall leaving the room whenever it was on and potentially, for the millions of us who used to sit in front of TOTP every week regardless of what was on - don’t forget you actually had to sit through it to find out - we likely learned something important about Russian history.
None of this is anything I would have admitted to in 1978.
I picked up my phone and dropped into twitter:
"Why aren't there bands around like Boney M any more?"
I meant it. I didn't like Boney M - I was a heavy metal kid dammit - but plenty of people did, they sold millions of records and so far as I know, they made a great living out of it. Every musician of a certain age I ever interviewed told me Bobby Farrell was the craziest motherfucker they had ever met. This would be people like Nikki Sixx, so there's your benchmark.
Put under pressure, I could maybe even name more than six of their songs which is more than I can say for anything that came after the last great pop band (Duran Duran) stopped functioning properly.
Anyway, my point is, as we sit here in 2015, why is there nothing pushing at the boundaries of the Music Box? You can’t blame X-Factor because it does what it does for a reason. Maybe nobody wants to look different and maybe nobody is brave enough to stand apart from the crowd. Maybe everybody is quite happy with the status quo.
- I don’t know the answer - all I know is, the music world is becoming stagnant. There’s talent out there and there’s great musicians who can sing and play properly - but they’re all singing and playing in the same way about the same freaking thiKng.
Why is nobody raging against the machine?
Is it because there's no machine to rage against anymore?
Just putting it out there.
A short time later, this came along and saved me from oblivion:
In the spirit of education, Bobby Farrell died in St Petersburg on the same date and in the exact same town as Rasputin. If you're gonna go, do it like that.
DEATH AND THE HIGH COST OF LIVING.
"What happens when you die?"
"Lots of stuff. You just won't be a part of it."
PEDAL TO THE METAL
I saw an advert this morning for a speed reading course - the world keeps on getting faster every time I raise my head. I wonder if you were to learn to speed read, could you ever go back to reading like a normal person or would it be that every time you pick up a novel, you find yourself haring through it In less time than it takes the rest of us to decide where to sit?
Is there any joy in speed reading? I can see how it might be beneficial if you're a spy or need to learn how you land an aircraft in less than two minutes, but that's all I got. Come to think about it, I can only come up with a few instances In which doing anything incredibly fast is useful:
1. Some kind of Olympic competitive event in which you will be hung, drawn and quartered if you return home without a medal
2. Robbing a bank. We go in. We get what we want. We come out.
(© Tarantino/Avary: Killing Zoe)
3. Shopping with your mother or kids... or even worse, both
And now I'm out of examples. What's the obsession with hammering your way through life at a million miles an hour? That 'live fast, die young' thing is a bullshit myth - always was and always will be because I guarantee you this, nobody who ever lived fast and bit the bullet ever left a good looking corpse behind. Fact. That's not to say I'm not a big fan of death... I'm very much a fan, but in its own sweet time thanks. In the big scheme of things, we're all here for nothing but a fraction of a heartbeat anyway - what's the rush?
On which note, I'm about to engineer a lazy Sunday with a pen but if you feel the need to move particularly fast today, do it to this:
(It's always good to start the rest of your life to a tune that has lyrics worth listening to.)