THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
August and Everything After
I have an appointment with a doctor this afternoon. I have been 'doctor-less' for nearly eight years now but figured I had best get my ass checked over. Well, not actually my ass - that's a figure of speech. You know what I mean.
Medical stuff aside, I thought I would leave behind some gifts while I was there - see previous post if you have no idea what's going on here.
This for one, which I picked up at Denver airport a few years back:
And this, which I picked up at Philadelphia airport a year later:
Never release a book with a white cover. They collect debris for no reason like there's no tomorrow And then there's this - which I didn't pick up at any airport - that I still haven't made my mind up over whether it was good or not:
I can think of no better place to leave behind a few books of short stories than somewhere where traffic is transient. In fact, they can have this too... which I've owned since around 1993:
What's interesting about this last book - particularly if you're a writer - is a) this publishing company no longer exists. I think it was a spin-off from Serpents Tail (or at least a joint venture), b) I would wager that everybody who reads this post has never heard of Benjamin Weissman and c) the book is excellent. Consider all the boxes for success ticked and yet...
As writers, we all hanker for such things - write a book, get it published and have as many people as possible read it but I would go so far to bet a LOT of money that none of you reading this has ever read any of these books even though the first three are by people who have done other, sometimes very big, things in the world and are pretty well known out there. I'd also throw a heap of cash into the arena with a rough guess that none of you knew Molly Ringwald had even written a book.
If your next question is "who is Molly Ringwald", it's OK. It just means you are substantially younger than me and that's OK too but you really should watch The Breakfast Club as soon as possible.
So what hope does Writer X have of fulfilling their dreams? This exercise of giving books away has given me the ability to see behind the curtain and there really is an old man sitting on a stool rattling levers backwards and forwards. Writing is a crap-shoot. You might get lucky and you might not.
So, the answer I have arrived at today is this: you can get yourself an agent and subsequently a publishing deal... and your book will be released and that will be a Big Deal - and so it should be.
But what then?
Tomorrow, somebody else will publish their book and the next day, somebody else will too. In fact, somebody will release their book on the same day as you from a different publishing house and this will be 'competition'. Over the course of the week, dozens (hundreds?) of books will be released and people will have to choose you over the other people.
(How I would hate to have a book out and have it sit on a pile of things 'to be read' - because that happens too. Can you imagine buying an album and putting it on a stack of things you might listen to later? It just doesn't happen. People who by books - and I am one of them - are a strange collective that's for sure.)
Next week, the world really will have moved on - you won't even be a popular social media post - repeatedly telling your social channels you have a book out will piss people off, you will start to look desperate and that's not a good look on anybody.
I honestly believe, here in 2017 and for the foreseeable future, that you must make yourself into your own brand. You have no other option if you want people to buy your book and listen to what you have to say. If you're a band with an album, you hit the road in support of your release - that's the mindset you need to be in to make it as a writer because writing is not enough anymore unless you're happy firing one gun and then staying at home to proudly clean it for the next 30 years.
TV is the new cinema and screenplays will continue to go that way as actors strap themselves to long-term projects... and wisely so. An hour and half on the big screen versus six months week after week on the TV. That's a no-brainer for your 'brand'.
Apparently, nobody buys albums anymore. It's all about the single... or at least individual tracks. Does anybody ever get to the last couple of tracks on an album? People have power now. Your good stuff will find itself on a personal playlist and your not-so-good stuff will be banished to the back-end of the internet.
So if you're an author and you think a book every few years is good enough for commercial success, you're wrong. I believe you need to be episodic in your writing now. Don't ask me how you can make it work because I don't know but feeding new material to the world daily, weekly or monthly, is what your average person either wants, needs or expects... or at least it is of you're new to the game.. and particularly if you don't write super-commercial airport books.
I am no marketer. I struggle with this shit more than most but I have spent the majority of this year pitching at agents and publishers to find myself sitting here empty handed regardless.
Am I bad writer? Maybe.
Am I a good writer? Maybe.
Those things are not for me to decide. That's the job of the reader and nobody else. It's also important to differentiate between being a good writer and being a writer whose work sells millions of copies. Sometimes you have to decide which one you want to be, but again, these things are not mutually exclusive.
I know dozens of good writers who can't get a break and I have (started to) read hundreds of books by people who should never have gotten through the gate.
All I have is this:
The worst thing you can do is to write because you want to be a success.
The best thing you can do is write because if you don't, you'll feel like the most important part of you will die.
That's all I've got. Still working on the rest... and by the end of August, by the time I am done with this book purge, I will have come to a decision about how I'm going to approach my future as a writer.
A very short Big Bear Rescue update but an update all the same. Stage Two of the project is underway. With the wind behind me, I'm going to have multiple shirts available in the store at any one time with overlapping end dates so there is always something available at any one time.
The biggest news is that I have some quite brilliant new artists in the wings getting ready to roll - but right now it's a secret simply because if I tell you now, I won't have much to say in the next update.
End of update... but you'll find better and faster updates on twitter, instagram and as much as it pains me, facebook across the remainder of the year.
A Very Small Stack Of Books
I'm going through a serious purge this week. It began last week and will continue until the purge is complete. Fact of the matter is, I'm purging books in a very serious fashion.
My goal for the middle of August is to have given away at least 90% of the books I have here. It's pretty drastic but I have my reasons. The first is that I never read anything twice. Never - so why hundreds and hundreds of books line many shelves is a mystery.
Actually, it's not a mystery at all. You buy the book, you keep the book and as the years pass by, they grow into something called a collection...
...and then I read something that rang an alarm bell right in the ear drum. I realised these books were all still here because I thought they said something about me I needed other people to know.
But nobody ever comes round and if they do, they have better things to do than stand around looking at my bookshelves. It's an interesting question to ask of yourself but I also realised these books were dead. They're not books if they're not being read. They're just paper sitting on a shelf. For them to be books, they needs to be out in the world being read... though what other people choose to do with them after that is up to them.
The purge is going well. It was tough to begin with but now, not so much. A few things will stay - something like twenty books that are special editions or mean something to me - but not many more. There's also a few art books that will stay but the upshot of this is that I will be left with a few books that have a soul and I will have gotten over the biggest stumbling block in my minimalist head.
The point of such a thing?
Freedom of course.
The Lost Gods
I went out last night to The Bookstore. Not for any particular reason, it was more like a calling. This happens sometimes and you don't actually know why you've ended up in the bookstore but somewhere in there, is a book you must read and your job is to find it. It can be a hard slog navigating your way through the piles of books they want you to buy, piled high and tempting you in with two for the price of one offers.
These are not the books you are looking for.
The search would never be so easy as that. Mind you, it would have been a lot easier if my ear had been to the ground for the release of this last October - how I missed it, I have no idea, but there it was: a single copy right in the corner, top shelf, spine facing inward so that nobody else would find it until I came to discover it... I only reached up to turn it around because things like that shouldn't happen in a bookstore.
I am easily pleased.
Anyway, I have even taken the rest of the week off work to give it my undivided attention because some books need such a thing. This should be one of them:
I might be gone some time.
One of the internal illustrations... of which there are quite few.
Something In The Water
I finished the first draft of The Man Who Lived Again today. I shall celebrate by throwing it in the back of a drawer and not looking at it again until the middle of next week. That's the best way to treat these things. Months is an even better way of finding out if what you wrote was any good or not but it's not super incredibly long, so a week should be enough.
Then I must figure out what to do with it but that can wait until it's finished for real.
Wrapping that has given me a jolt in the arm too. Seeing some pages mount up is always good for the soul - no matter how confident you might be to the outside world, those doubts can set in for anybody and if you let them take hold, they can really start a riot in your head.
Anyway, while I'm in the frame of mind for this kind of 10,000 word novella format, I'm going to wrap up another I have lying around. This one is running with the name Just Like Living In Paradise and is in the same rusty nail format as this one was when I picked it up, so spirits are high that if I turn up in front of the paper with a pen and bleed like a prize fighter who needs to pay the rent, I can lick it into 'drawer-shape' by the end of the month... which is apparently just a couple of weeks away.
I found myself in the news yesterday and I wasn't even there! My friend Siân (horror actress, tattoo model, all round good egg and lovely person) was on Heno - a Welsh magazine show - talking about... well, I don't actually know what she was talking about because I haven't watched it yet but messages from back home kept bouncing around in my phone saying she was on and had mentioned the Big Bear Rescue project.
Any moment now, it should go online and I'll catch up. My Welsh is awful these days. I might need the assistance of subtitles to keep up - or my mother!
...and while I'm on the subject of things in foreign languages, this hit BBC4 at the weekend and is worth a watch:
If you go hunting for it, it's called I Know Who You Are. Highly recommended.
And now, back to work. Today I am accompanied by songs from the wonderful Sade simply because I need to listen to something unquestionably beautiful as I pick at scars with long fingernails.
Balance. Balance. Balance.
Internal Injuries
I have a torn rotator cuff.
It doesn't look like much from this x-ray but it hurts like a bad motherfucker from hell - which a great song by The Datsuns. You may send flowers if you wish. The odd thing about internal injuries is that nobody believes you're hurting because there's no blood or gore to show how bad it is... not that I was looking for sympathy here. It was just an observation.
Which makes it a lot like writing. If you haven't got a book out, you're not doing anything. Doesn't matter if you're crying on the inside over your words, planning, proofing or beating yourself up for some reason - if you have no book for people to look at, then you're probably sitting around on your behind watching tennis.
And the horrible thing is, when your book comes out, at first it will be judged by the cover (regardless) and that's the part you likely had no part of - unless you're me, in which case, it's all my own fault.
Even worse - because we all like to see the world spin super-fast - if you do have a book out today, rejoice like a crazy person being showered with ash at the end of the world because tomorrow, somebody else will have a book out and you will be Yesterday's News.
Hey - we all helped to build the monster.
Jeez - who would be dumb enough to spend thousands of hours being creative when all you have is a tiny window through which to launch your product at the world! A window so small, there's also every chance you'll hit the frame and your thousands of hours will simply fall to the floor.
Me for a start and if you're reading, possibly you - and I wouldn't change a thing.
Writer's write and there's nothing you can do about it. You either are one or you're not. Writer's write, photographer's shoot etc... and one day, there will be blood.
A word from the wings of my life... I am (maybe) a day away from competing a novella here. I may have mentioned it previously but it is now fast approaching that thing called 'reality'. It's called The Man Who Lived Again. Aside from that, I'm not going to say anything else about it... you can figure that out for yourselves.
More news as I get closer to the end-game - but it makes me happy to be putting something new out. It's been a long time.
This album comes out soon - in a limited edition of 500 copies too. These sessions are wonderful if my memory is holding up like it should and the live album comes from a show I was at when the band where at the very peak of their game. If you ever loved The Dogs D'Amour, you can pretty much file this under essential. You can pre-order it direct from Cargo Records right here. I hope it never becomes available for streaming. Some things you really should own in the real world and this is one of them.
Baby Dynamite
The iRig2 seems to be a good piece of kit. It at least does what it's supposed to in the recording stakes but you could spend a fortune inside the app adding effects. It would be easy to go down that road but that also sounds like wasting time when all I'm looking for is a way to record first drafts of songs. This week I'll be switching from their own apps to see how it fares with GarageBand - where I at least know which buttons are worth pressing.
However... I found another use for this solid little piece of kit:
Stuck in a tape deck here, because it's the safest place for it, is a tape of a tape of a tape - probably seventh generation - that has seen many better days that plays host to a Baby Dynamite four track demo from 1992. Baby Dynamite is of course, my band from what has very quickly become a 'few years back'. This is the first batch of songs we recorded. Somewhere out there is a second tape with another four tracks on it but I have hidden it so safely, I haven't a clue where that is.
Thus, out of interest and for anybody trawling the internet for proof such a thing really did happen, I'm posting them here in all their detiorated glory. These were all recorded in a bedroom home studio pushing the tech we had as far as it would go with the intention of handing record companies a demo product so good, they would hand us bags of cash safe in the knowledge we would spend it wisely and come up with something like Hysteria that would make superstars of us all... or at least make us enough money that there would be something different for dinner other than cream cheese and Space Raiders inside a bread roll.
In hindsight, we were at gentle war with each other. Pete - whose studio it was had very set ideas about how we should sound and so, that's how it sounded. He's a great producer and I think might still be somewhere out there. Nate, my drummer, blood brother and housemate had similar tastes in music, so the multi layers were fine with him too. I don't recall Lee, our bass player having much of a say in anything because Pete was a control freak and recorded all the bass parts himself - but in fairness (so far as I know) Lee is the only one of us still out there regularly playing 25 years later, so he obviously didn't take it to heart... and at the only gig this particular line-up of the band ever played, he was the only one of us that didn't mess up.
For what it's worth, my fuck up was the worst. I misjudged how high my heels were and fell off the stage into a stack of amps, blowing all of the power in the building. Funny now. Not so much on the night.
Anyway, I was just pleased to be writing these songs, getting them out of my head onto tape and didn't think much about such things. We were riding a wave of self belief - no matter how misguided. The goal was to become a slick, well oiled machine of a band that outgunned the American wave of glam rock back then... and in hindsight it wasn't a bad shot at the target.
Then Nirvana came along and that was pretty much the end of the story for a bunch of guys living just outside of Liverpool with no cash.
Let me talk you through it:
WHITE KNUCKLE RIDE
Pete had some old riffs lying around and I came up with the lyrics for this while he was out walking his dog. This was to be the 'statement' of what we were about and it even had an intro you could walk on stage to based on the WWF Legion of Doom's catchphrase "What A Rush". Sadly this one has suffered most on the tape just because it's first...
CREATURE FEATURE
I wrote this song for Alice Cooper. True fact. Maybe I should have sent it to him. If White Knuckle Ride was a showcase for Pete being a guitarist, this was my showcase for hooks and lyrics. I loved this song and still do. It simply is what it is and yes, somewhere in there is a lyric about nuclear war which I stole from Duran Duran. If it was good enough for them and all that...
HOT CHERIE
This is an odd one. Back in the mid 80s I used to trade tapes with some guys out in California and I came into possession of one by a band called Brunette and because I was running a fanzine at the time, had some correspondence with Johnny Law from the band. A later tape from the band contained this song and Brunette disappeared from the face of the earth. For the record, they were a great band and all these demos can now be found as an album on Apple Music - and more than likely Spotify as well.
Anyway, Pete wanted to cover a song to see how we stacked up against the real world. I was dead against it but submitted this to him as a great song from a band nobody would ever hear from again... and thus, people would think it was our own unless they looked really closely...
Who could have known that the very same year, the guys from Brunette would get together with some guys from Journey (yeah, that Journey) to form Hardline and release an album on which this also appeared.
Still, it was good fun to sing this... it pushed me right out of my comfort zone.
Whatever you think of this version, it's a great song and if you like such things, the Hardline version is on their album Double Eclipse... but I still think the Brunette version is the best.
The other song we recorded sucks diesel. I hated it then and I hate it even more now. You know when you get to the end of an album and you turn it off because the band had obviously run out of ideas? That's what this other song is like - it doesn't even have a good title, something I was massively insistent on then as much as I am now.
The other tape had some much better material on it - I really found a groove after this batch. It had/has a couple of songs on it I'd love to hear again. One was called Paperhouse and the other, Naked With Jezebel. If you happen to be passing and own such a demo, I'd love to hear from you.
After these sessions, we took a break to write some more songs, do some other things and never quite got it back on track. For my part, I wandered off in a solo direction and put a project together called SPIRITWALKER which was about as far removed from this as I could get. Maybe I'll post those songs here later this week - I was a lot more careful about looking after those.
One final thing on this. Back then, it was hard getting your music heard. Nobody gave a damn and every band had a demo of some kind. So far as I can see, since then, the whole world went digital but nothing much has changed. I know lots of bands that had a record deal that went on to do nothing and I know lots of bands who never even got close that should have. There were more opportunities to play locally but there were less opportunities to connect and do something on a larger scale. Such is the music business then and now.
You get what the previous generation left you.
Which means it's a lot like writing. You do it because you love it and not because you 'might get somewhere'. You make music or write because it's what you do.
The world owes you some water and some oxygen and that's about all. End of story.
A Hard Day's Night
Jesus. It's a few days into July already. How did that happen? I put the next issue of Skin Deep to bed this afternoon but it only seems like a week since I strapped a rocket to the last one. The 300th issue will be knocking on the door before I know it. This one was #279, so in the real world, I guess we still have a couple of years before that happens, but still... it sounds pretty close from where I'm standing.
I won't be taking my eye off the ball.
Anyway, with that off the desk, I shall be turning my attention to other things for a few days, namely, songwriting.
Last weekend, I messed around with some different ideas for a logo and settled quite wholly on this. I've looked at it for a few days now and it sits well, so it can stay:
Then I bought myself an iRig2 for simple, on the spot recording. I haven't road tested it yet but that's on the cards for tonight just as soon as I've finished this post.
It had better do what it's supposed to. I have high expectations and lots of material to pull together before I go anywhere near a studio. I haven't been in a recording studio for so long, they have likely changed beyond all recognition... but that's OK. That's why I have friends who know what they're doing - but that's way down the line.
I am not averse however to loading up demo material here when it's ready. If I tell you up front that what you'll get on that front will be more like Marc Bolan messing around at home in 1973 than Def Leppard making Hysteria with $100m at their disposal, you won't be too disappointed.
Or maybe you will.
Mostly though, it feels good. You know that thing you do when time disappears because you're so preoccupied it loses all meaning? That's how this feels. Not sure what took me so long to come back to it but I'm here and pressing on regardless.
On my quest to waste nobody's time but my own watching great crime shows in the darkest hours of the night, I've stumbled upon a fantastic beast. It's called The Night Of and if you're in the UK, it's skulking around somewhere on SKY/NOWTV. A brief synopsis would go something like: 'Imagine you borrowed your old man's car for a few hours in the middle of the night... and then everything that could ever go wrong, did'.
That pretty much sums it up. I'm hooked. It's a slow boiler though, so if you like you're drama edited like an MTV video from 1990, you'll be out of luck here, but if you have the attention span for shows like The Killing, it's might be right up your street...
The Great Outdoors
As something of an appendix to the last post about dropping material on Medium, my buddy Mr Wayne Simmons has also taken up residence there and made his first post about his workspace. I'm reasonably sure I've dropped some things on here before about where I like to work but no harm in rolling through it again.
Some of the time, I work at the kitchen/dining room table which is nothing special. Just a flat piece of wood with four legs. Unlike Mr Simmons, I have no man cave, no posters, no action figures, no paraphernalia at all and with good reason. I get distracted easily. Thus, in front of me sits a blank wall. I even moved all of the pictures that were on it to the wall behind me so I couldn't see them.
Which all sounds a bit dull... unless you've mastered the dark art of using the wall like a screen on which you project the film running in your head - which I do. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's all you're getting on that front.
However, the rest of the time, I write using a pen and notebook and I like to work here:
...or somewhere close by. There are many places to sit, write and watch your dog run free. There are also buzzards, hares, ravens and occasionally (sadly) other people with dogs but you can't have everything.
Believe it or not, I can get a lot of work done here. Words flow and that's what counts. It's a good feeling too because it never feels like work but neither am I averse to writing on trains, in the car... I guess the point I'm trying to make is I don't mind where I write, so it may as well be pretty. How disabling to have be in a certain place before you can get any work done. Thus, I have learned to be ready because it comes when it comes.
So there you have it. That's my day. If you're looking for pictures of sexy desks and workspaces - much like this one occupied by Bruce Springsteen - you're shit out of luck...
But this below - featuring Al Gore - is my idea of absolute hell. How can you focus and get anything done somewhere like this:
Where's the blank canvas to be filled? From the look of all this stuff, it looks to me like it's already been completed by other people, which is pretty much the story of Al Gore - apart from An Inconvenient Truth which is excellent and obviously made before he collected all this crap.
Seeds Of Decades
A whole week with no posts = busy.
The first thing to happen was that I recognised one of the holes in my life was that I missed writing about music so I figured I would do something about that. Not being of a mindset to launch anything as complex as a magazine right now - one is quite enough to look after thanks - I had a look around The Place (aka: the internet) to find a good place to do such a thing and made a call. You can't say jack on twitter, even less on instagram, I could post them all here but that wasn't really the point, tumblr has less attention span than both of my kids and the dog put together (which is a shame), which just left Medium to try out.
I have a love/hate thing with Medium but it seemed like a good a place as any online and so far so good. If you take a look here, you'll see that I branded it with my dearly beloved Burn logo - hey, it wasn't doing much else aside from lying around in a folder - and is populated with the album reviews I pulled together this week. As more weeks pass by, my plan is to press on with three or four a week... and that is the total extent of my plan with it for now.
Let's see what happens. If you're in for the long haul with me, there's a BURN link up top in the navigation bar.
For the record, this first week features Cheap Trick, Nickelback, Uncle Sam and Mark Lanegan.
I finished my Father's Day present this afternoon. It looked like this and I loved it very much. As they say in places like Paris and Rome, it was "fucking excellent". The only reason I didn't finish it sooner was because I had too much work to do...
If music is the rock you stand on and you were born between 1960-ish and you can remember Live Aid first hand, you'll relate somewhere along the line, I promise.
I sat in Mark Ellen's office once with my proto-mag, Rock n Roll Babylon, when I was trying to bravado my way into EMAP on a wing and a prayer. He was very nice and encouraging about the whole thing and after reading this, I can see why.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants at some time.
Anyway, I've now moved onto this...
...which has had some good write ups around The Place and so far, is living up to the quotes on the cover. I have lot's of work still on the desk this week but I plan on tearing through it pretty swiftly all the same.
Meanwhile, work continues on various projects and my feet are getting itchy for another road trip. Must do something to rectify that.
Fast.
The Line Of Duty
This morning I began to pull together an interview with one of my favourite tattoo artists in the world: Noon. You can find his blog here but for the sake of getting this post off to a good looking start, here's one of his recent pieces:
It always surprises me that almost 100 issues on (just 15 more to go) from when I started, I can still find great things to talk about. Or at least I can when my co-conspirator is still passionate when it comes to their end of the bargain. Noon is one of those guys. I'm hoping it will be every bit as good as I want it to be when I'm done.
File under pending... for a couple of weeks.
Aside from magazine things, this week I've been pounding the keys on a script that I believe has legs. Another couple of days and I'll be done with the second draft... writing such a thing (one day I'd like to be able to point you back to this post with hindsight as my friend) has left me with a lot of off-cuts. There's so much on the cutting-room floor, if I'm still feeling uber-positive about the whole thing after the weekend (because these things have a tendency to back you into a corner) I might carry on into next week and see where those bits might take me because what I really need right now is another project to stare at me and ask when I'm going to pay it some more attention... honest it is.
Earlier this evening, my mother sent me a text. One of those mysterious ones out of the blue that suggests the whole thing would become much clearer if you had been in the room with her while she wrote it. This has happened a lot more than it used to since she got an iPhone.
The content of the message went like this:
"You will look like Billy Connolly when you get old"
My best guess is that he happened to be on TV at the time. I did see something a couple of days ago about some paintings of him that had turned up in Glasgow (I think) so I'll assume that was the trigger... but I haven't seen a pic of Billy for a long time - so I went to find one.
So first, Robert Plant (as detailed here) and now Billy Connolly. I'm starting to see a pattern of hair + beard emerging.
Billy is 74. I could live with that look. It's coming down the line regardless. My mother knows me well.
Items Of Interest From Other People Whose Work I Dig:
I saw today that Jonathan Carroll has a new book out in August - this has jettisoned itself to the top of the wish list with ease. If you're not familiar with his work, he posts regularly on Medium and it's always worth the trip.
But... you don't have to wait if you're intrigued. The man has a huge backlist and never disappoints. If you're looking for something new to help pass the evenings under the quilt with a torch, this is a good place to be.
On the music front, I tried to be adventurous at the start of the week and listened to the new Katy Perry album for some reason and wished I hadn't then diverted myself back to more familiar territory. There's a new Goo Goo Dolls EP on the racks but when I had finished with it (twice), I couldn't remember a thing about it. Putting music out because you can and not because you have something to say is wrong in every way you can think of.
Then a bird came into the kitchen, knocked a box of dog snacks off the shelf and I remembered Cheap Trick have an album out... it's not all out yet, but there are some advance tracks strutting their stuff. It looks like this:
But while I was hunting down that album cover, I saw there was also an album out last year which had totally passed me by in every way you can think of... and it's all there. Cheap Trick have lost nothing over the years. Nothing at all. That one looks like this:
Life is good when Cheap Trick are around.
A Flying Dog
To begin: a flying dog. I have a flying dog and he rocks...
Got up stupidly early this morning and wiped out a stack of day-job work that was hanging around which left me with a free morning (kinda)... so I wrote a short story. It had been bubbling under for a while and this morning it fell out of my hand almost fully formed. Typed up, I'll let it swim in its own juice for a while and see how it looks at the end of the week. Then (and only then) will I look for a home for it but mostly, it's good to have wrapped something up again.
Then, I got a bee in my head about a song that had been unfinished for far too long, so I wrapped up the lyrics for that too and tonight I am Home Alone which is a good opportunity to piece it all together. It's called Cry Baby Ridge - and I did not rhyme 'ridge' with 'fridge'. That Alicia Keys song is pretty good until it gets to that part. Somebody should have pointed that out in the studio but it's out there now and you can't take it back.
I guess pretty soon I'll have to record something and post it for public consumption.
There's a news story on BBC today about Patty Jenkins (the director of Wonder Woman) being a woman and breaking box office records for being a woman and doing so. While this is great - and I really loved the movie for all the right reasons - surely such stories aren't helpful in levelling the playing field of gender when it comes to... well, anything. There is never specifically 'man' news about box office records, so why point out this one?
The world has gone nuts. A director is a director is a director and you either did a good job or you didn't. She did a great job. Wiped the floor with the other DC super-hero movies too but equality means you did what you did and then you move on to doing something else, doing what you do some more.
Gender roles should only be pointed out when it either involves childbirth or being able to piss standing up. Normally I would say it must be a slow news day, but in today's climate, that would be an outright lie.
A Bear Rescue update: I can take a few knocks. The black Bear Rescue tee-shirts that were meant to top up the bear fund fell hard on their face and died a death from not meeting the minimum print number requirement... set-up costs and all that. The white variant by Hannah Willison is still up and doing great though. Funny because when they were white, people wanted black but the black didn't sell and the white one is rolling just fine.
Go figure.
It's been an easier ride to point people at the Just Giving page and equally as profitable.
Finally, in the hand for reading this week, is this new collection of shorts - Men Without Women - from Murakami. I would say how good it was, but I don't need to. It's the law.
The Bear Necessities
This was taken a few short days ago and I post it here because... I don't remember it being taken at all. For a pretty close-up shot, how could I not know this was happening? Unless the guy was using a paparazi lens from 100 feet away, surely I should have been aware of such a thing - the man is right in front of my face.
Pic Credit: Marc Wainwright
Today is the last day you can pick up any of the three designs in the Big Bear Rescue store. I think it wraps itself up about 10pm tonight, so if you're in, get it on because I'm archiving these forever and ever after tonight... never ever to be seen again on a shirt. Forever ever.
Thanks for all your support with this if you bought one along the way, it's been very much appreciated... and the other shirt in the store, the white one from Hannah, that will be around for a good few weeks yet.
Do what thou wilt. Swiftly.
I was beginning to despair in the extreme that there was nothing new to listen to this week that would keep my attention beyond a few minutes and just as I was about to hang up my ears on the world, I saw this had sneaked under my radar - and holy mother, is it ever good. It plays like a Real Album from the mid seventies. For maximum enjoyment, it really needs that volume tweaking some.
...and then this evening, I have part three of the monks laying waste to the planet in Doctor Who followed by a late night showing of Wonder Woman - which finally looks like a DC movie worth going out of the house to see.
Right now though, I'm going to play that guitar until its frets bleed all over my fingers. Practice, practice , practice... that's the way forward.
Welcome To The Party
I hear there's a general election around the corner. They always confuse the hell out of me because all parties promise something 'better', but they never mean 'better for everybody', no matter what side of the fence you may be standing on.
What baffles me most is just how many people there are in the ball pool and what they all hope to gain from it. One would suspect money, kudos and power for the most part.
I'd like to propose a little something. I have no idea if it would work or not but I'll float it anyway.
What if, there were just three people in 'power'. For the sake of argument, let's say Mrs May, Mr Corbyn and er... another one (you choose - their names escape me). Surely three intelligent people - and we must assume they all are intelligent no matter what your fingers tell you to type on social media - could fix things quickly and easily?
Three people around a table.
"We have a problem with the NHS..."
Cue whiteboard. Somebody is handed a whiteboard marker and stands next to it.
"What are these problems?"
Between the three, they list all of these items on the whiteboard... and between the three, they come up with the answer that some of the solution is more money, some of the solution is to change things and some of the solution is to let the public know that fixing this is going to cost money.
And between the three, they decide where that money will come from, what those changes will be and in a very short amount of time, together they come up with a plan to fix things and put it into operation.
All of those donations to party politics, all that driving around of buses, all of that time spent on TV (or not)... that's all time those few people could spend doing things instead of telling people what they're going to do and inevitably not end up doing because they didn't 'win'. Maybe all of the other people milling about could be useful in collating figures and making charts of where attention is most needed. I don't know... there's most likely lots of work to do behind the scenes.
I know it's not the same thing at all, but if I spent as much (comparative) time editing the mag as they do on all those things, I would produce a single issue a year if I was lucky.
Is this such a dumb idea? I've seen Conservative governments and Labour governments in my lifetime and all that ever happens is this: those in power at the time make things happen and the other people say they're wrong - regardless of which side you're on, that's exactly what happens year in, year out. Later, when the roles are reversed, they just blame each other for the mistakes.
But all of these people can't be wrong all the time.
If they are, why are they running the country?
The NHS is good example because everybody can relate to it. How come every single person in the country can't afford an extra £1 a month/a week when we can all afford Netflix, phone contracts and coffee at £4 a go? An extra £1 a month/£12 a year from the entire adult population would be er..... £753,114,000 which is a lot of cash from such a small amount. This is based on a loose population search which is currently 62,759,500 - I think my maths are solid.
If you went for it and called in an extra £1 a week (the price of a fat-boy Snickers bar at the moment) you could crank that up to umm... 32,634,94000 ... I can't get my commas in the right place for this one, but I think it's around £32 billion... or is it £3 billion? You could fix a lot of things in that year regardless of which answer is correct... and that's on top of whatever is going on now.
It could just be 'fixing money'.
I am no politician - as is probably obvious to anybody reading this who does have a clue - but a small country such as ours shouldn't be hard to run in the civilised world. A few people - of varying sex, age and ethnicity - can make things work. Of this I'm convinced. Put your ego away, look at the facts, agree on them and stop fucking fighting just to prove you have a place at the table. People would love you... and you would have all the kudos, money and power you ever wanted.
...or is that the script from the last couple of weeks of Doctor Who?
Maybe it's not a fix for everything and some things, like the Trident question would be difficult, I don't get why it costs whatever it costs - do we rent it? It would however get most things done quickly, smartly and sounds like a 'step in the right direction'.
Let's face it though, most people don't care about the reality of the world. Just their own little corner of it. If you never take a train, you could care less about train politics. If you don't have kids, you don't care about childcare problems. The list is endless.
Hmmm. The more I write, the more I see how little I know and when I don't know anything about something I tend to shut my mouth. Maybe I should just move to Copenhagen or somewhere in Switzerland....
Back to Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers.
Time. Always Waiting In The Wings.
I went to see Kiss last night. I've been a Kiss fan since 1979 but I think that was mostly because things used to take a long time to filter down the line back then - I could have jumped on slightly earlier with better media at my disposal and maybe a bit of extra cash. Still, it's a fair old whack of time and I have never once regretted my allegiance and still don't. It was good to see them again. Most telling however: I took Rhiannon with me to see what she would make of it and if I say she used up all her phone storage before she killed her battery by taking photos and videos, that's probably a good indication of how that side of it went.
There's a lot of detractors around - as there always has been - to which I say: what will you be doing when you're looking down the barrel of 70?
I also got mistaken for Robert Plant. Twice. I'm sure Mr Plant spends a lot of time hanging out by the doors of large indoor venues. Go figure. Then again, there are very few other people I would like to be mistaken for.
Meantime, this morning I was looking at doing some reviews for a couple of sites I like and saw a request for a review of a movie called A Ghost Story (when it's finally released which I believe is sometime in August) and having watched the trailer (which you can find here) I like the look of this in a big way.
It looks super-smart, elegant, classy and so far up my street, it's in my house.
Yeah... it better be as good as it looks.
My beloved Big Bear Rescue project is slowly grinding to a halt and I don't know how to deal with it. I guess there a million good causes out there and bears don't feature very highly on the list of people who live where there are no bears. When you have a social media campaign that has a reasonable support behind it but it fails to translate into sales of the shirts - which are fantastic no matter how successful the campaign is - well... I'm struggling to see a way to make it work in both the long term and the short.
As I was thinking about pulling the plug after the current run, this landed in my inbox:
Chowti is completely blind. But that didn’t stop her owner forcing her to fight for money. Time and again this small black bear was tied to a stake, and mauled by trained attack dogs. People paid to make bets on whether Chowti, already blinded by abuse and neglect, could be dragged to the ground.
Like most baited bears, Chowti’s teeth were pulled out without anaesthetic. She had little defence against the snapping jaws trained to tear into her sensitive muzzle, causing agonising injuries. But the fight was always stopped before the wounds became fatal – a dead bear doesn’t make much profit, and Chowti would be needed to fight again.
In fact, she was forced to endure this torture almost every week – not even long enough for her wounds to heal properly before she was thrown into the baiting ring to fight for her life once again.
Sadly, the many injuries and sheer trauma of their repeated ordeals mean that baited bears often die tragically young...
Which leaves me somewhere between a rock and hard place. I don't want to walk away from something I started with the good - even great - intentions but I don't mind announcing right here that working this is fucking frustrating in the extreme.
Time to rethink the rethink. I dare say I need a profile of Gaiman-like proportions to catch the attention of the public and make it work. I just never wanted to be one of those people pointing at the fire watching shit burn to the ground while I was quite capable of carrying a bucket of water. Perhaps mothballs are called for.
World Animal Protection has a page here where you can donate some cash to the root of this story if you feel so inclined.
Now... back to work.
The Long Good Friday, Saturday, Sunday...
From yesterday.. which is about Sunday... which I forgot to post:
Well that was a long hard weekend of 2 x 18 hour days amongst a few thousand people. I met up with Fiumix who tattooed me back in November in Florence, got interviewed by some nice people for Alexandra Palace TV which I'll try and find later in the week when it goes live and post a link, talked myself into writing a pilot for a TV comedy idea (long story), made arrangements for half a dozen good interviews including one with Noon which makes me more than happy, met a whole bunch of friends I haven't seen since Christmas, lost my Uber virginity and somehow, made it through the whole of today without one scrap of food passing my lips.
I am, officially, starving and right now, am heading home. When I get there, after I have scruffed the dog and been a normal person for ten minutes, I shall stuff biscuits into my face in front of Doctor Who in the scruffiest clothes I can find.
I also found this from Plazma Lab which I love. Whenever I think of Tel Aviv - which is where they're based - I don't think of work like this coming out of there, but here it is:
There's stacks of great original work for sale there - go see.
(Fade to grey...)
(Back in the present:)
And while I was gone, Denis Johnson died. The New York Times pegged him like this:
Denis Johnson, a National Book Award winner whose novels and short stories about the fallen — junkies, down-and-out travelers, drifters and violent men in the United States and abroad — emerged in ecstatic, hallucinatory and sometimes minimalist prose, died on Wednesday at his home in Gualala, Calif. He was 67.
...which sounds about right to me. I fell in love with his work when I picked up Train Dreams at an airport one day. A slim looking novel on the surface - something you would probably call a novella if you were in marketing - Train Dreams confirmed to me what I had always believed but had never actually seen. A novel is as long as it needs to be. If you jettison all of the words you don't need, a slim book can work just as hard as a thick one, sometimes more so.
Thick books for the sake of being thick are more about commerce than the story. I like a book you can batter an intruder to death with as much as the next person but the times all of those words are necessary are few and far between.
Denis Johnson was a class act. He will be missed here if not amongst anybody else I know who reads a lot... then again, everybody loves you when you're dead, right?
Meanwhile, back at my own desk - day job aside - tonight is earmarked for sifting through a mighty batch of short stories I've accumulated and a list of literary mags they're going to be pitched at over the next week or so. There's some fine specimens out there and the great ones are always in print rather than online which pleases me no end.
Talking of which, my buddy Wayne Simmons has a story in the latest edition of Interzone (270) which you can find right here.
A Halo Of Flies
Summer evenings usually means hanging out in the garden with a book and a dog at my feet - to be frank though, sitting out there in the day can go swing. The sun ain't no place to put a boy from Wales. With an eye on the previous post, it's no wonder there are books everywhere. Still, I've been looking at what might come next and aside from this:
...which is pretty thin but looks great, I saw this was available:
I mustn't have been paying attention that week because it's the first I've heard of it and it's been out a couple of years already. That should wrap up the rest of the month quite nicely thank you.
Also been looking at upgrading the guitars this week. Whimsical perhaps but the more I write, the more I want better machines - and I happened upon this Hagstrom and I think it's fucking beautiful.
Sadly, the 12 string they have is just as sexy... as is most of the rest of their range. Time for a rethink and an overhaul... or at least a run at one or two of them in a store.
Thats the lot for the time being. Time to get out The Pen and The Paper.
The Petting Zoo
Last year, the year before and most likely every year before that for the last five or six years, I have promised myself I would buy less books. I thought the same this year too. The only reason for this is because I have so many of them and need to cut back around the house but how is a man supposed to read the things he wants to if he doesn't buy them?
Yeah, yeah... it's fine shifting to a kindle or iBooks full time but that only works if you have a penchant for what the world wants to sell you and today, I want to read this:
The digital device does not appreciate a work such as this, though if I look in at the world from on high, I'm convinced that this was the remit of the digital reader before everybody figured out they could make money from it and the algorithm took over.
Anyway... I bought a copy of The Petting Zoo. If you like what somebody like Patti Smith does poetically and autobiographical musings, Jim is just the man to fire up the poetical cylinders. Here's a clip of him performing People Who Died. If all performance poetry was like this, I would be out every night of the week.
Watching this has given me some ideas about where to take Deadbirds. That's all I have to say on that for the time being.
Life In Reverse
I picked this up today. Mr Hepworth has a way with words I like a lot so I'm looking forward to chewing this up across the next few days.
Having spent the last few days doing some serious 'admin' work on myself and the far flung future, I'm also very much looking forward to this coming weekend where we (collectively) play host to the Great British Tattoo Show at Alexandra Palace. Always a good show, always good to catch up with friends not seen for weeks, months and sometimes years... and always good to spend each morning drinking coffee and eating croissants on the street before the madness ensues.
In the tiny space between these two things, yesterday I pulled together a new t-shirt design for the Big Bear Rescue project from my lovely friend Hannah Willison which I'm really stoked about. It's very different from the previous shirts and I hope people love it as much as I do.
Which means I'm now out of collateral and will be hunting down new designs for the summer sometime next week... and I have some great ideas lurking. I hope I can pull them off.
Le Fin. For now...
Dog Tales
Out with Hector this morning, we walked past a bush where it sounded like somebody was mowing grass but it turned out to be a swarm of hornets.
That's the end of the story. We didn't hang around.
Meanwhile, it's been an odd week. GCSE exams are upon 'us', so much so that I am more concerned about Rhiannon doing hers than I was about doing my own. Which seems to be the way it filters down the line because she doesn't seem too concerned at all. Her only worries are about whether the prom dress that's been ordered is a) going to arrive on time and b) fit.
Maybe that's how things should be when you're 16. All I was concerned about back then was getting to see Kiss but I have no such concerns anymore. Tickets are in the bag and it's two weeks today... and she is coming with me. I hope it doesn't spoil the rest of her concert going life but more than that, I hope she doesn't think it sucks. That would be the worst thing ever.
Yesterday surprised me as to how much I was touched by Chris Cornell. I thought I was untouchable by such things but apparently not. I couldn't get it out of my head for most of the day until the only way to get it out of my system was to write - the end result being a song called The Mourning After. Work continues on that front. Lyrics finished, chords being played with across today and who knows what I might do when it's finished.
I might post it here for public consumption, which sounds far preferable to performing it live via Skype to a select audience in LA as a friend who lives there suggested last night - though there is something rather tempting about such a thing.
File under pending.
The Black Hole Sun
I feel like I lost a friend. I know he wasn't, but that's how it feels anyway.
