THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
Walk The Line
...and another magazine leaves the desk to go and do that thing it does over the next eight days before it comes back in hundreds of boxes. Worryingly, the cover date on the one that becomes a live beast next week is cover dated November. Time is slipping through our fingers without us even having to look.
Best get on with something important then...
There's a chance that I have spoken of this once before but what the hell. I love this movie. If you find yourself with a couple of hours spare sometime, maybe you will too. Never before has a movie poster pretty much summed up an entire film.
I found this great little piece from Don DeLillo (who is up there on the mountain for me) on what books actually mean to people and never has a truer word on the subject been spoken. Here: http://lithub.com/don-delillo-on-the-life-of-a-book/.
And that's all I've got today... back to the pen.
East Of The Sun • West Of The Moon
I'm hoping I can wrap up The Man Who Lived Again today but there's a mag staring at me from the side of the stage also demanding my attention. If I can draw a line under both of things by Thursday, I'll be happy enough to drop both of them in The Win Column.
This weekend also saw some good movement on two art projects I've got on the cooker. One is inevitably Project X which will be in development limbo for a little while longer. The other - which has been on a back-burner for a long time now - forced itself back to the surface so I just got on with it. This one goes by the name of White Bear Blues - a reasonably final working title - and is a gloriously trippy folk tale about... well I won't fire all of the guns at once but it won't take a genius to figure out that it features a bear. A white bear at that.
The 'original' story can be found in this book and without dressing it up in any way at all, I've taken it out of its home, stripped it down and rebuilt it into something else. What I've done with it aside, if you like folk tales, East of the Sun and West of the Moon (Taschen) takes some beating. Here it is lying around with its pages open:
I hope I can do the story as much justice as it deserves. Now... back to writing, editing and other things that make it look like I didn't just slope off for an hour to watch a Scooby Doo movie with Kiss in it.
Burn Baby, Burn
It's a shame to let a great logo go to waste, so I dug out this little puppy and figured I would do something useful with it.
More to the point, it's even more of a shame to leave my immaculate taste in music abandoned at the roadside so I'm starting out 'reasonably' with a Burn Baby, Burn which is Spotify playlist you can find here, but who knows where things will find themselves in the future. There's much to be explored still and being as nobody else can do it the way I want it done, I'll just do it myself.
Plus, I can't work without music and today I am working. There are no losers in this scenario.
Yeah... I'm feeling like that today.
Notes On Being Social
A quick note on tech, social media and what's going on around here. A while back, I read that Joe Hill saw Warren Ellis liked to reintroduce himself on his blog every now and again and thought this was a good idea - all these years on, I've never done such a thing. I kinda thought it was pretty simple to click on the 'About' tag above and find everything you need, so that's pretty much that... or maybe there's a search engine reason going on behind the scenes, in which case:
Hello. My name is Siôn Smith and I'm a writer. I write Dirty Realism. I like rock music, wandering around the world and owning just twelve things. My short writing is collected together and published by my own company, Bad Hare. Bigger writing - or 'novels' as they are known in bookstores - are sent out into the world with a spotted handkerchief on a stick to get some milk. Maybe they will come back soon. All this writing can make a man thirsty.
I think that's enough - though I probably missed the point if search engines are supposed to read anything into that. It's not my problem if they can't do their job properly. Whatever they are searching for will be down the back of the sofa anyway - where I've hidden a note about Neil Gaiman and the cast of Game of Thrones coming round for dinner next week to discuss the work of Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver and the beat poet movement.
Is that how search engine stuff works?
Anyway, this week, I've been working on how to make a mailing list work properly with Mail Chimp - and I think I've mastered it. I was using feedburner to deliver posts here by RSS but it became old, dated and frankly, useless. So that was the first thing to bite the dust. Secondly, I was also using TinyLetter to deliver a newsletter, but it got dull very fast writing all the things I had already written here once in a different way... so that went into feedburner hole I'd already dug.
Occasionally, I like to dip and out of twitter but I don't really have a lot to tweet about - that almost went too but I kinda like the way the blog here is set up to just go tell twitter when I've posted something, so it can stay for now... and I need some kind of communication with the outside world. It's not that bad if you don't let it rule your life.
I'd also gotten into the habit of posting occasional stories at Medium because they promised it would be a cool place for writers to write - but as it turned out, it was a cool place for people with keyboards at their disposal to write and either a) whine about the state of the world or b) suggest life hacks - but nobody there wants to really hear b) because then they wouldn't be able to partake in a). Medium turned out to suck diesel.
Then there is instagram and for now, I kinda like it. It's not too disruptive but you don't even need to head out that way because everything I stick up there also gets posted further down this page - which also seems like a good idea for the time being.
So.... lots of things have died and been replaced. Twitter and Instagram can stay for the time being - my name at both is @mrsionsmith. You don't have to look for me anywhere else because I'm not there, but you will find me on tumblr (same name) where blog posts, tweets and instagram pics are dumped into one huge timeline. Why? Because I actually do like tumblr and everybody should have one.
Finally - the first and last word on this: if you like what's going on here, sign up to my 'Gone Out For Milk' weekly mailing below. It's just the whole week of blogging here in one tidy package.
And now, I am going to eat a croissant and let search engines unleash spiders into my digital home for no reason at all.
Dirty Little Secret
I finally found myself a copy of the Summer 1983 Dirty Realism edition of Granta magazine. The copy I picked up is old and slightly battered but I like it that way. On my search, I also saw that new copies were still available from Granta - which is surprising given that 1983 is thirty plus years ago - but if you're interested in getting yourself one, here they are.
Here's what it looks like:
Here's the back:
What's interesting on this is exactly how 'American' Dirty Realism was perceived to be at the time, but so far as I'm concerned it has also existed over here and always has - it just wasn't called that. Orwell's Down And Out In Paris And London was absolutely of the same spirit (albeit 50 years earlier), and somewhere in the not so distant past (around '58 I think) there also came Alan Sillitoe's novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning which a couple of years later became a film of the same name which is equally as brutal. If you're on the lookout for Real and Dirty with capital letters that mean something, they don't come much closer to the bone than that.
There's a lot of people out there who don't like this style of work. Maybe it's the kind of mirror nobody wants to hold up to their face because what's really happening is not what you want to hear - which is fine.
We all have different ways to get ourselves through the night.
Beautiful Creatures 1
Right on schedule, Beautiful Creatures is live and kicking over at Serpents of Bienville.
I have nothing else to say aside from what I've said over there. Hope you enjoy it...
Roll The Dice
I happened upon a fine piece of film work today. Created by Willem Martinot, this three minute Bukowski poem - Roll The Dice - really is All That. If you don't fall in love with it, your soul has gone way past the point of no return:
Voiced by Tom O'Bedlam, this is one of my favourite pieces from Bukowski and is generally filed under One Of Those Things I Wish I Had Written. If my memory serves me correctly, I think it comes from the What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire collection, in which there is much other work to fall head over heels in love with.
Days Of Thunder
Things have got really busy this last couple of weeks. Busy in a good way and I have no complaints but when things get a little hectic, there's only one thing to do.
Nothing.
Sometimes, you need to let the wind blow itself out and wait for all the things it's picked up to fall to the ground. Trying to grab hold of ideas while they're flying around the forest is a fool's game. So instead, being as the end of the summer is heading this way, I figured it would be time well spent fixing up the outside of the house before the storms arrive... because eventually, they always arrive.
So: decking has been industrially washed, decking is part-way through being painted with gritty paint so that it doesn't turn into an ice-rink and the next job is to hit the fence out front with a wire brush before it gets painted with industrial paint that can stand another ten years of punishment. Much like washing the dishes, when you're doing things like this and have switched off from writing - or at least unhooked yourself from The Machine - the insides of your head will also fix themselves.
And in those moments, I wrote something new called Carniversary that you can find right here.
The Serpents Of Bienville... and STICKS THAT HURT
A little update - over at The Serpents Of Bienville, Sean Herman has gone public that I'll be writing a monthly blog series for him, so that means I can too. Sean rather eloquently puts it like this:
Sion is also our newest contributor to the Serpents of Bienville collective, bringing us an amazing blog series entitled “Beautiful Creatures” starting at the end of this month. Make sure to check back regularly to check out his amazing stories about the artists that created monsters and creatures throughout history. We are excited and grateful to Sion for his involvement.
I'm genuinely excited too. I think first in the series goes live next Tuesday (23rd August) but I won't give anything away. Sean pretty much said all I have to say in his quote but when it goes live, I'll explain a little bit more about it and more importantly, where we go next. Did somebody mention podcasts?
Something to note here... Beautiful Creatures is not what is known here as Project X. That's something different altogether. 'We' hooked up about it yesterday and churned our way through some minor details and well... moved forward with it some more. It's a huge project and isn't something that will be finished soon, but there will be sneak previews along the way and if everything goes according to plan, some golden opportunities for interested parties to get their hands on some items that are quite original and unique.
Meanwhile, I have returned to this and it's fucking wonderful.
INK AND WORDS
Now and again, a man needs new tools to tackle his work, so yesterday I bought myself a new pen. There's nothing wrong with my old Waterman - I love it but if you were paying attention a month or so back, you'll remember that I dropped the back-up pen and bent the nib beyond being useful for anything. I've never used anything but a Waterman for years and years and years and I was going to get another one, but the whole point of a second pen is that it's not the end of the world if you kill it or lose it.
I tell you - it's like thinking about buying a new car. With the internet in full swing, there's a whole world of options out there but I finally settled on this Duke which is some kind of German/Chinese hybrid as far as I can make out:
It's pretty heavy for a pen (about twice as heavy as the Waterman) which I like very much but the nib moves fast - really fast. For those of you aren't writers, imagine working with a pen that won't move as fast over paper as your brain is able to - going back to the car analogy, it's like getting stuck behind a truck, deciding to overtake it and finding your car is incapable even with your foot to the floor.
And now... I shall go create something with it - or rather, I shall finish something, just to see how it fares in the real world. Another thousand words to go and I'll have wrapped up a short novel called The Man Who Lived Again. In the same vein as The Eternity Ring, this one will be going out as a digital one-shot to see what the world makes of it. Estimated time of completion? A couple of weeks... I think it's that long until the end of the month anyway. Here's a sneak:
Toys In The Attic
Sometimes it's good to let another be in charge and just pitch your work into the ring to fend for itself. Over at Litro where they publish lots of great material, I muscled up a review of that most awkward of books - 'S' by JJ Abrams. You can read the review here and if it makes no sense because you were sleeping when the press machine launched for it, here's a couple of images which might help put it in perspective:
And to finish, this from Mr Robert Crumb:
These two things are not related.
Two Towers
Who wouldn't want to go into work when it looks like this:
There are worse walls to find yourself staring at. Just the kind of place to be getting along with Project X - so that's exactly what I did. I might even have some details about that to talk about soon... maybe even a sketch. Very excited by this - as soon as it's a little bit further down the line, I'll reveal what I can.
In other news, I've been looking around for months - seriously, it has been months - for a place to contribute material online. I've considered a few literary magazine type places, some pop culture websites but they all seem to fall short just where I need them not to. When business and art clash, boy do they clash heavily. Anyway, I've done my time of reviewing music and books. In a world where reviews are populated by people that can bothered clicking on some stars if they like or dislike something in the extreme, there's not a whole lot of enthusiasm from this quarter to correct that particular human trait.
Cutting to the chase, a few years back, I did some work with Sean Herman - a tattoo artist from Alabama - and this week discovered he has launched a spin-off site to his 'day-job' called The Serpents Of Bienville. It's all kinds of things. It's a site/blog about life and death, art, horror movies, music... and who knows where he will take it next - I love it. I figured it might make a good home for some words and so, we talked, talked some more and well... I'll let you know when the delivery is made and there's something to look at. For my part, I've decided to write about things I don't normally and I'm excited about where it will take me as a writer. Sometimes we all need a little push right?
So, days are good right now. I put another issue of The Mag to bed tomorrow - even though I'm pretty sure I only put the last one to bed a week ago - and then I have, not a week off as such, but a week in which I can be creative, organise things and roar through all the things I've been to busy to roar through for a while. I've got all the things I've mentioned at least a hundred times here to finish - maybe some will get figured out and maybe it's time to retire others for the immediate future but there are also very live things flipping about. The things that are flipping about are exciting... maybe the others were nothing more than good ideas at the time. I have come to realise that there is no harm or shame to change your mind about something. That's what a mind is for. One day something can be the greatest idea in the world, the next you can come at it from a different angle and see something totally different.
In fact, it would be stupid in the extreme to not change your mind about something if you wanted to... if you've become bored or disillusioned with them. That's what a mind is for. Thinking about stuff. I don't particularly want projects around that are going to find themselves a home at the back end of the album.
Did you buy Slippery When Wet when it came out? I bet you a substantial amount of money that Wild In The Streets is not your favourite track on it.
This week has been mostly fuelled by Steven Tyler's new album - We're All Somebody From Somewhere - and I like it a lot. I didn't fall in love with it immediately, but after a week of hanging out with it, it has grown on me like ivy. If you're looking for something to keep you company through the day, give it a whirl. I'm also liking the new Switchfoot album which is called Where The Light Shines Through. Try that too. Just because they're Christian doesn't mean they don't write good songs.
Talking of culture-type things, also on the horizon to hopefully fill a Californication sized hole are a couple of new shows heading our way. This one had better be all it should be considering where it comes from (and how long he's had to think about it):
Meanwhile, there's also this:
One of them must be worth making a song and dance about, surely. Looks like a good week for writing and rock n roll from where I'm standing.
Le Fin.
All Good Dogs Go To Heaven
My, how twenty five years can slip by in the blink of an eye. With the twenty-fifth (natch) anniversary re-release of the Temple of the Dog album in many forms, today comes this news...
That's going to sell out in the blink of an eye. Trust me. I have troops scanning the skies for such a thing heading to Europe but you're probably better off watching a different space for news on that than this one.
If you're not excited at the prospect, you're probably not old enough to even know what I'm talking about.
Assassins
If you missed yesterday's post, this won't make much sense - but now, I know more than you. Not much but enough to mean I have taken a step forward. Exciting times - I'm looking forward to seeing how this 'little' project will turn out. For the foreseeable future, it shall be called Project X.
Meanwhile, if you'd like to save yourself a couple of hours and add them back to the end of your life, last night we instigated some 'down-time' and went to see Now You See Me 2 (based on the fact that the first was actually pretty good) and I wish we hadn't.
By the end of it, I felt cheap... like the whole crew involved in the movie sat around a table, decided to make a movie that flashed and banged so they could get away with writing a wafer thin plot and weak script. To make it worse, when it came to releasing the movie they forgot to add those flashes and bangs - so the end result was just a ticking in my head that whispered how I could have been doing something useful at home while I watched an entire cast of people who should have known better waste their own time as well.
So when I did get home, I watched this - 13 Assassins - which is not a waste of time in any way at all. In fact, aside from the work done on Project X above, it was probably the best use of a couple of hours so far this weekend:
Rule Yourself
Today (well... a few days ago actually but saying 'today' makes me feel more current) a friend of mine who I admire very much as an artist (and lives on the other side of the Atlantic) suggested we work on a project together. A big sweeping project of devastation and awe. So I agreed.
We have no idea what that project might be, when it might happen... in fact, right now, you know as much about is as we do but later today - or maybe sometime over the weekend - we will know more about it than you and that will be considered a step in the right direction. It's really exciting having somebody else in the ring with huge production values in their soul. What can we achieve if we put our backs and minds to it?
Not a clue but I guess we'll all find out soon enough.
That's all I've got today and maybe for a few days - back to work. I'll leave you with this for a while:
The Wild Life
Why aren't the Elves doing their job? I've followed all of the rules about staying up and falling asleep with your head on the workbench with an unfinished pair of shoes in front of me but nothing. I guess I'll have to do it myself then. So be it.
This is one of those entries which is as much for my own sanity as anything.
Submissions are out in the world, which is a good thing. While I wait, there are other things on the table (these are the things the Elves are being lazy with) and time will judge them as it judges everything.
Sometime next week, a 'thing' that I've been working on with 'someone' for the Big Bear Rescue project should see the light of day. Everybody is really busy and it's been pushed too far onto the back-burner for my liking but this particular octopus arm appears to be coming up for air and I'm looking forward to unleashing it. Thou shalt not be disappointed... well, not if you like bears anyway.
Meanwhile, we've found a new place to take Hector. It's like walking him on a Lord Of The Rings movie set:
This week, I also found what I consider to be one of the most important sentences ever written (by James Baldwin) about writing:
The importance of a writer is continuous… His importance, I think, is that he is here to describe things which other people are too busy to describe.
Nobody (aside from you) will know how much I needed to hear that this week. It struck right at the heart of a whole bunch of things I've been wrestling with recently... and oh, how I wrestle. If you're a writer - or any kind of creative - and you have these wrestling days, you are not alone.
(George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it" - which is a completely different thing altogether but still important. Trust me on that. I grew up with pigs around the place.)
Running back through my photos here, I see I didn't post my close encounter with a lemur. Not so much an encounter perhaps as an 'adoption' - by her not me. There I was just hanging out at the zoo checking to see how Brutus and Clarence (the two rescued circus lions) were doing - and she came bounding over to me and... well...
That was about the best I could do with one hand - my left hand at that - but I got rescued and we also came up with this... there's a baby lemur somewhere under there too
In my never ending quest to find, umm... not so much 'better' ways of doing things but absolutely more minimal and sexier ways of doing things, I found this watch built by a company called Slow. It has just the one hand, makes you think about time differently and is, frankly, as cool as the breeze. I kinda like this one:
It's about as far removed from a smart watch as I can imagine - aside from not actually having a watch. I might gift myself one as a present one of these days. I mean, how late can you actually be for anything?
Finally, on the subject of The Wild Life, I had to cancel my proposed trip to NYC this coming weekend - but all is not lost - there's a substitution in the wings somewhere in the mountains of Massachusetts... and that could prove to be a real kick in the pants.
Footnote:
I forgot to mention, I have begun work on this:
Cover art (the drawing is by Thomas Serginson) is pending a review and agreement of terms (and other boring stuff) but you get the drift...
Insert smiley face emoticon if you wish. I would.
How To Do Business. Lesson 1.
Don't you wish you had big brass balls like Mr Kubrick sometimes?
Creem Magazine - Rock n Roll Over
Creem - my favourite magazine of all time, without exception (except for maybe my own) is making something of a comeback. I can't quite figure out what the website is up to out there but in associated news, Scott Crawford is making a documentary about the iconic mag - I don't use the word lightly - and has a kickstarter fund set up here to help out with those annoying things like legal fees and production costs.
Here's the trailer:
If you know what I'm talking about, consider throwing a fistful of coin into the arena - if you don't know what I'm talking about but are a Music Lover With Taste, throw in a fistful anyway. Without Creem, the landscape would not be the one we look back at with love and affection.
One of the great things about Creem was they did whatever took their fancy, any time they chose:
And looking back, that's exactly how you build a legacy that people talk about decades after your luck has well and truly run out. Just for the sake of nostalgia, here's a shot of my hero Lester Bangs with some youngster who looks like Bruce Springsteen:
Even loading up these images makes me smile and my heart sing...
And that's pretty much all you need to know. Get it on.
The Ukiyo-e Project
It's not often I have a great spillover from the day-job to the soul-job, but today I strike gold. Ukiyo-e is something really special and over at ukiyoeproject.com you'll find a solid bunch of people desperately trying to keep the art alive. If you have no idea what it is, Ukiyo-e is a traditional Japanese art - a multi-colored wood-block print. It was first appeared and became popular during samurai era, between mid 1600 and 1700. “Ukiyo” means current events and “e” means painting. Thus Ukiyo-e means paintings of current events. People during the time obtained news of the society as well as the fashion and travel trend from Ukiyoe. Many Ukiyo-e depict then popular beautiful women, land scape, sumo wrestlers, and Kabuki actors. You may have already known and seen famous Ukiyo-es by Hokusai, Sharaku and Utamaro.
But as with all art forms from another world ago, it's struggling. To pass the adequate skills of Ukiyo-e, artists need serious and long-term commitment for training and the number of successors is decreasing. The main problem is there are not enough jobs to keep them going. Therefore, the masters can’t afford young apprentices who are willing to learn. Today, there are only about thirty printers and only nine wood carvers. If the current situation stays the same, the 350-year-old Ukiyo-e techniques will be lost within 20 years.
Ukiyo-e is now facing the crisis of extinction.
Which brings us to the present day and the Ukiyo-e Project where they're working on making the art form relevant to the present day - and what better way to do such a thing than by mashing up the past with a little bit of rock n roll... like this:
They have a store right here - you know what to do.