THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
HAND ME DOWN DAYS
I took a little trip to The Slaughtered Lamb to see Steve Conte do his thing with his guitar last night. That's OK... I get blank looks from most people I mention his name too, even those who know their shit.
It's been a long time since I've been to a show in a tiny, sweaty room with a capacity of about 150 (and that was probably breaking fire regulations) but hand on heart, I enjoyed it 100x more than seeing Kiss earlier this year. Arena shows are great for some things I guess, but there's no substitute for rock n roll as it was meant to be... in your face, up close and personal.
I took one shitty photograph before the show just so as I could illustrate what I'm talking about here...
...and that was enough. A couple of people were insistent on snapping and shooting video but for the most part, it was fantastic to see that everybody else was AT THE SHOW... fully present mentally if you know what I mean.
At £12 for the ticket, I felt like I owed the man some money when it was over. I need to get out to more shows like this even though they are few and far between. This is where my heart lies... in some backstreet London basement with a leaking air conditioning unit, four feet away from the stage and four feet away from the door I walked in through - at the same time, where any merchandise is stacked on a small table that still had beer mats on it from earlier in the day.
Here's one of my favourite clips of Steve doing his thing from a while back:
His music isn't hard to find online at all. Get it on.
Note to self: Jesse Malin is back in the country soon. It's in the calendar.
DEEPER INTO THE FOREST
On a recent research trip, I came across The Irregular Casebook of Sherlock Holmes by Ron Weighell:
You can grab it here at Zagava. The description doesn't give a lot away but you could always check that part out on amazon. Judging books by their covers is always a great idea when the cover looks like this - otherwise, what's the point of having a beautiful cover. There's also this version which is even more knockout:
Available now as a pre-order, this version will be 'bound in finest Scottish tweed, manufactured by the company which created a special Sherlock Holmes tweed on the occasion of the Sherlock exhibition at the Museum of London' and a magnifying lens will also be embedded into the front cover.
What Zagava do with their books is fuelled by a total passion to publish quality - the way books perhaps used to be - with no eyes at all on the mass market, not a thought for selling thousands upon thousands but rather publishing them because they deserve to be released in such a way to a limited audience who will appreciate them and don't mind paying a little extra to be part of an elite group of other book lovers.
It took about an hour of loitering around over there to change the way I think about myself and what I'm doing with Bad Hare.
Sometimes, you can get exposed to something wonderful and it will get under your skin.
THINGS THAT MOVE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
I thought it was all over but after going out and looking at some cars I didn't really like, I took a rethink on the whole car thing, talked to the garage and we looked at it again. Some days later, my Saab made it back to the land of the living. Filthy from sleeping in the street during a heatwave, just ten minutes after I took it out for some juice, the heavens opened and washed it clean of sin.
In as much as losing it made me ridiculously sad a while back, I'm now equally over-emotive to have it back on the road - mostly though, I'm appreciative. It's tough trying to replace The One That Hardly Ever Let You Down but for now, I don't have to.
With that back on the rails, other things have begun to move forward too. Late August and Mid September will both see books released... that's all I've got for now otherwise there will be nothing to talk about over the next few weeks.
For one of these, a lot of envelopes, shopping receipts, notebooks, old proof copies - anything I find to write on when I needed to write - have been consumed, and now there will be fire. I like the fire part of my working life. I burn everything after writing - it's a good ritual to get it out into the world and off the damn table. Here's a sample...
People may pore over Neil Gaiman's work in future generations to come, but nobody will be lovingly turning the pages over my handwritten brain drain that's for sure.
Not anymore.
And hey... want to know something about social media? Since I deleted all of my accounts, I'm not missing it at all. Not one scratch. I was not what I'd ever have called a "heavy user" but it's more than noticeable how much time I've reclaimed by steering clear.
Want to know something even better? I'm not even interested in explaining why I left but I am a happier person for it.
DOGS, BIRDS AND FOXES
Eleanor came back from a holiday in France today and brought me this little slice of carved wood magic back. No caption needed right? I love it.
This last few weeks - and probably for a lot longer - two Jackdaws have been raising a chick on the roof of our house. This morning, taking to a shady place at the top of the garden to escape the sun, I saw there were three of them up there. The chick had gotten big and was waving its wings about, making a hell of a lot of noise as it got ready to take its first flight. It’s a long way down from the roof. I know because I’ve been up there.
Anyway, by the time we got to lunch, they were gone.
No fear. It’s just what you do when you’re a bird chick. You don't think about it because you have no choice... your food will have been depleted and if you want to survive, you need to fly.
That old rogue, Mr Aesop, painted the Jackdaw as a stupid bird in his fables who starved to death hoping the figs would ripen, prompting the fox to point out that ‘hope feeds illusions and not the stomach’.
I always liked that phrase. That fox always had smart things to say.
Except Jackdaws are not stupid at all. They are one of the only birds that communicate with their eyes and therefore are acutely aware that this is what we do too... so it's (relatively) easy to form a bond with a Jackdaw. If you put food out for them and look at the bird, then the food, they will follow your eyes to see what you're looking at and given time, this breeds trust... though if you break that trust, they will steal all your belongings. Fact.
I learned this a long time ago and over the last few years of feeding them occasionally and leaving good nest building materials around in the Spring (aka: Hector's haircut trimmings) they've left me small pebbles as ‘gifts’ that all look vaguely the same. There have been dozens and I've kept them all.
Seagulls on the other hand... I’m not certain they’re very smart at all. Those guys had been nesting on a roof a few houses up and had two chicks. At 5am, you will know all about this because of the unholy cacophony coming in through the window.
But this morning, they could be seen with only one chick. A little detective work revealed the other one had got itself stuck behind the summerhouse (aka: studio/aka: shed) and tangled up in the bindweed that secretly grows there.
I've no idea how long it had been there but it couldn't stay. That would mean having to deal with a dead seagull in a few days. Much easier to tend to it alive - except, it didn't want to be tended to.
Not even a little bit.
It didn't want to be rescued so much that I had to enlist the assistance of my buddy Adrian down the street because he has Official Seagull Chick Rescuing Tools (aka: welders gloves and a blanket).
An hour or so later, the chick (actually, they're a little big to be called chicks - it's more likely called a fledgling but I can't be bothered to look it up) was safely out from behind the shed, delivered into the relative freedom of the path that runs at the back of our houses where we could see its parents and brother/sister sitting on a nearby roof for the coast to be clear.
What did it do? It ran - RAN - into the nearest bush 100 yards away like the unappreciative dumbass it is, but we decided to leave it alone at that point. If you had been pulled from bindweed with welders gloves, you would be scared too.
As I write this, it's about 11pm so if it hasn't gone back to its family, that fox I mentioned earlier will probably have some wise words to say to it tonight - and they won't be about figs.
Nobody could be bothered releasing a good album this week, so hunt this down and take it for a spin:
Great albums are hard to find and almost always slip under the radar. This one has been punished every day this week... never mind that it's nearly ten years old.
THE END OF AN ERA
My Saab died.
I know it's dumb to get attached to a car but I've had it for about eight, maybe nine, years and it's never let me down. Well, once it did but that was a few weeks after I got it so that's allowed.
Which means I need a new car (not that kind of new) and that we'll have to go through that whole 'trust' thing, like when you get a new partner. How far will they take you without spoiling your day? What kind of baggage are they carrying you don't know about? But at least with a car you get a sheet of paper that says how many other people they've been with and a rough idea of how they've been treated.
I was going to make some kind of cheap gag about how it would be funny if, when you start a new relationship, you asked to see their papers so you could get a glimpse into how it all might pan out and then I thought better of it. Somewhere out there in the world, there will be people who insist on knowing this kind of thing. It probably won't come up in the first week, possibly not even in the first month, but it will come up - and to those sorts of people it will be A Very Big Deal.
If you are one of those people - buyer beware! You will be lied to. The mileage may not be quite as accurate as you had hoped.
And so, the search begins. I have a few ideas but there's one thing I know for certain before I begin. Cars have become dull as hell - much like our phones. Once upon a time you could go into a phone shop and choose from a hundred designs and it made phone shopping quite a thing. Now, all you can do in a phone shop is choose a size of a sheet of glass.
Cars have gotten pretty much the same... technology has driven them to be so aerodynamic and safe that vehicle design has gone out of the window. A VW saloon looks more or less like a Peugeot saloon, looks more or less like a Toyota saloon etc... if you stripped their badges off, your average Joe would be hard pushed to get excited about any of them. Your choice in 2018 (unless you have won the lottery) is A: a very small hatchback type car B: a medium sized car - usually a three door affair C: a large saloon type car for going 100mph without noticing D: an off road 4x4 type thing E: something that looks like a van but is pretending to be a car that is only acceptable if you need to do the wheelchair thing or F: a people carrier.
A, B and C should look to the past and do something about it because ain't nobody going to look back on the new Audi A4 with the fondness they have for the 100 or the Coupe or the Quattro. It may be a technological marvel that can park itself or whatever but at heart, this too is now a slab of glass.
D: There are loads of these in our street and so far as I know, they are either used to go take kids to school and/or to transport very small dogs... a maximum of about four miles a day. Where I go to take Hector for a walk - which is very much off-road - I have never seen one of them.
E: Unless you do have a wheelchair - in which case they're just the thing - I'm not sure why anybody would buy one. They're horrible and people who need to use wheelchairs are not totally devoid of taste. Wheelchair users of the world should unite and tell whoever makes them they too would like a useful car that looks great and not like something the Pope used to drive back in 1986.
F. The people carrier. Bah. How many people do you actually need to carry that you can't get in a regular car unless you happen to be a taxi driver? Your kids should be in school and they should get there on the bus... unless you live miles away in the country, in which case you should be doing D not F. Next time you see a people carrier that's not a taxi - check it out for how many people it's actually carrying. That number will be One. Who would buy a car called Sharan anyway? More to the point... who the hell let that through in the marketing meeting?
Tsk.
This is car design:
The Citroen DS
The Triumph GT6
To own either of these now (in their original form) would be a Money Pit of the Highest Order, but surely it can't be that hard to put today's tech into yesterday's design.
Know this. One day they will... because much like the phones we're all using, there's nowhere else to go.
Maybe I'm just sore because for the first time in about twenty years, I no longer have a car. Best get busy.
A WEEK IN MUSIC
A man could get used to blogging once a week. Maybe I'll keep it up, maybe I won't but while I'm busy, it suits me fine. This week I have done NO WRITING AT ALL because I took The Mag to print (so I have written really) and for some reason, it was tricky beast, thus, my lust to string words together disappeared with the wind. This week coming is little lighter on the soul so I'll get moving.
Talking of strings - and I don't recall posting about this before, but maybe I did - David Hale (a tattooer and artist I much admire) blagged a guitar from Gretsch some weeks/months back - then set about it with his tool kit. It's finally out there up for auction and looks like this:
AND HOLY MOTHER OF ALL GODS THAT EVER EXISTED, THAT HAS MY NAME ALL OVER IT.
I'm keeping my eye on it. If I ever post a picture of it again, it will feature me holding it. I'm so in love with the damn thing, if I can't have it NOBODY WILL... umm, except for the winner of the auction I guess.
If you were going to have a guitar for life... that's what it would look like.
File under pending. In the spirit of raising money for the cause it was intended to and you fancy your chances at owning it yourself, here's the page.
Meanwhile, writing songs continues. Some are great, some are good, some are in pieces all over the floor. Some never made past the lightbulb moment. One isn't for me to do anything with other than hand it on to somebody else... don't ask me how that works. Maybe songs just need bringing to life occasionally and then your job is to find a home for them.
On which subject:
I’m not the greatest guitarist in the world. Fact. Then again, as I keep telling myself, I don’t need to be - the guitar is the lesser of my triangle of terror. I’m a lyricist above everything, my voice is not so bad and the guitar is more of an accompaniment to those first two things... but that doesn’t mean I don’t try to get a little better every day. Some days are good on that front but some days can be horrendous.
The mind is a peculiar thing. If I write a set of lyrics and later decide they are in fact, shitty, I’ll just throw them in the trash because some more will be along later. If I have a bad day with the guitar though, it’s like the end of the world. Makes me wish I had bought a piano.
Anyway, a few weeks back, I ordered a capo from Thalia. They make beautiful capos and wrong though it may be, a good looking guitar is essential. Thus, the things you choose to dress them up with should be too. I figured it would be a good investment based on what people had said about them but I didn’t expect it to be quite as fine as it is. Makes me want to give all my other ones away and restock exclusively with these - which I probably will. They’re not cheap but nothing this good should be.
It's been thought about at the engineering level, it works like a charm, it’s pretty and if there’s one better in the world I’d love to hear about it because this little baby is unbeatable.
I've spent hours today putting it through the motions and simply from being happy in my workspace, stumbled across the bones of a new song. Maybe I should cheer up more often... but being cheered up is not as conducive to writing dark songs as I would like.
Finally, this is neat: the business card of Lester Bangs.
Lester never seemed to be the kind of guy who would remember to take his cards out with him. Maybe there's a big stack somewhere with an elastic band around them. Unused and sadly, never to be used again.
On the very same day, I saw this in the latest GQ in an article about business cards:
So I threw all of mine in the bin next to some song lyrics that didn't make the grade.
Life is simple if you let it be that way.
FINALLY...
I have become a real writer in my own eyes. Not with a multi million publishing deal. Not with a glut of writer friends to eat noodles with on a Tuesday afternoon. Not with a crazy writing tour schedule in which I’m able to meet and greet people who say they love my work.
No... I have begun to drink red wine alone in the evening because... well I don’t have a good reason but it seemed like a good friend to talk about writing with and so far, so good. She’s a good muse and knows her way through the fog.
I suspect if you got to know her well enough, pretty soon you could learn not to give a fuck about anything.
Meanwhile, this afternoon, I put a bullet in the head of my twitter account. Nobody cares unless you’re Royalty Famous. I walked. What used to be a good place has become a platform of such inconsequence, even a writer of Dirty Realism can see no value in it.
This is part of a much bigger picture in which three of my friends have also closed ALL of their social media accounts along with me.
We all have our own reasons but the common denominator for all of us is how the ‘socials’ have you performing like a circus pony without you knowing you were doing it. If you’re still in that zone, take a long hard look at how much time you spend on your feeds, how they make you feel and what they have you talking about.
If you’re honest with yourself, it ain’t good. It may have been once upon a time, but it isn’t anymore.
HOME IS WHERE YOU HAPPEN TO BE
As the years do what years are supposed to, it's a good thing to remind yourself where you came from. Where you are right now is not so important because in the next second or two, you'll have moved on from that. You're about to go into your future and that's the way it is with every passing moment. The future seems to be the place in time on everybody's lips - probably because you'll have to live in it and you're the only one who can create it, but this too will eventually become the past.
Spare a thought for the past while you're busy being the one determined to die with the most toys. It's important to remember where you came from. This picture is about as early as I can remember:
No phone, no TV, no car, hardly any money, what we ate grew in the garden and for some reason, my mother (not in the pic here, this is my grandmother) chose to dress me in the same clothes that Mickey Mouse would wear. For me, this picture is 'home' even though nobody lives there anymore. How I came to be the person I am is a mystery - just the same as you. Most of life is one long chain of accidents, good vs bad decisions and chaotic liaisons.
I have no reason at all for bringing this up. Maybe it was going home for a few days that brought it on. Sometimes I wonder how I could have come so far and still have got nowhere - but I know the answer to that already.
Like a stupid person, I promised myself that I would buy no more guitars this year - that three much loved guitars was more than enough. Then the power steering on my car decided not to be power steering anymore more and I'm staring down the barrel of close on £1000 for making it right again - I've bought cars that have lasted years for less than that before now. It's currently up on a ramp for another couple of days but as I was contemplating the best part of a grand for the privilege of steering with little effort, my mind wandered to the one that got away... and how it could easily not have gotten away if steering wasn't necessary.
Next time I put cash to one side, I think I'll make the call to The Man In Germany and bring this Hagstrom home where it belongs.
A man could write some great songs with that.
REALITY BITES
Last week, I downed tools for a couple of days plus the weekend and headed north to see The Mother, The Brother and his family and most importantly, my two buddies - Darryl & John - who have been my buddies forever and quite honestly, I can’t imagine them not ever being my buddies. One day, Death will drive a wedge between us somehow but that’s OK. Death likes to do that to everybody. We ain’t special... but Death.. if you’re reading, we’re in no rush.
It’s always struck me peculiar as to how the years make no difference at all to any of us.
“Hey, good to see you!”
”Damn, you too!”
Cue manly hug.
Relationship continues like we saw each other yesterday, even when “yesterday” collectively consists of 14 years since I last saw one of them, 6 children, a bunch of houses and some ‘other people who drift in and out of your life’.
That’s real friends for you. I would have shed a tear if boys were allowed to cry.
I also saw this outside a pub and realised I missed somebody way more than I thought I would. It had only been two days:
Meanwhile, back home, I’m approaching the week I’ve set aside for recording home demos of the songs I’ve been writing. While I wasn’t looking, four songs turned into eighteen, so my task this coming week is to figure out what I think is good and what’s possible. I’d like to get through as much of it as I can because I can feel more songs bubbling around but that’s a dumb approach. I'll never get through all of them in a week.
Patience with myself is not my best skill.
I don’t even know what to do with them when they’re done. I have a huge stack of demo songs here by other people - Chris Cornell, Bowie... that kind of level - and some of them are super lo-fi but mine are going to be even more lo-fi than that.
I guess I'll get that far first and figure it all out later. It is what it is - something to build a band around perhaps (or perhaps not) then find a studio to run it all out properly... or maybe I’ll base my entire repertoire around just writing and writing and writing some more and never bother recording them on an industrial scale and simply be like ye olde wandering troubadour spinning tales because they are there to spin.
That sounds good written down. I’ll do that.
To wrap up the week - because it sounds like I've done not anyting but hang about the world and eat barbecued food - when I got back, there was also a magazine to get to print. I've pulled this out of the proof I signed off yesterday simply because it's great:
Sometimes I forget how much I love my job and how much work is put into it... mostly because it can be a pain in the ass like any job, but once a month, when it all comes together, I get that glow that tells me it's all been worth it - this one goes on sale a week today if you happen to be keeping track.
TATTOOED DUDE OF THE DAY WITH A GREAT VOICE TINKERING AROUND ON HIS PIANO:
THE WEEKEND IN PICTURES
The weekend looked a little naked so I went back out into the world and found Fatherhood In Pieces by Michael Chabon - he of the Hector doppelgänger - and Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams, who I’ve never heard of but if Lydia Davis and Franzen are on the train, that’s good enough for me. GQ also arrived yesterday morning. Thus begins a weekend of reading underneath the umbrella.
Talking of the umbrella, this little guy landed on it in the afternoon:
That's shot on my phone camera - an iPhone 6S - but the detail in those wings is off the scale - good thing the sky was in the right place. In ten years, even pro-photographers will give up lugging around Canon bags and be happy with the slab of glass in their pocket.
I also decided the current capos I have for my guitars were letting the side down. A little investigation and I discovered a company called Thalia who make some seriously beautiful products, so I treated myself to one of these:
If they're as good as people say they are, it's probably the first of quite a few. I'll report back - if nothing else, the kids will have Christmas sorted out for many years to come. We've come a long way from a Toblerone and a Doctor Who comic that's for sure.
The Unholy Trinity
I also got tattooed last weekend by my friend Fiumix. Here's a small corner of what we got up to - because people like to steal things out there, this is probably all I'll ever post of it:
He also made/drew me a present. Here it is:
Funny how the smallest things can make me so happy - not that it's small, it probably took hours to draw. That just about sums up my whole life and I should probably get it tattooed - it's certainly something I'm thinking about hard but no rush... I'm still getting over the hares.
I've never looked so good in my life as I do in that picture - see:
I don't normally take pics of myself but I was messing about with an app called NOMO and took this by accident... at least it looks like me.
HOWL
The running programme came to a halt early last week when my knees decided they weren't going to be knees anymore. I strapped them up and went out anyway but they weren't very convincing about their role in the project at all. I figured I would give them a rest for a while and presto... I went out tonight and they were just fine.
I can't remember if I put up the playlist for Week Three so here it is because I've decided to go back and do that week from the beginning again. Never under-estimate the power of a great playlist to get your ass back into gear. Pretty sure I should be on something like Week Five now but I'll just keep chipping away here until I make it.
SKY NEWS called me earlier this morning. Asked me if I would be game for contributing to some live coverage on Raheem Sterling's tattoo of an M16 on his leg. Of course, the answer was yes... but I'll admit right here that until that a couple of minutes after that call, I didn't know who he was, had never heard of him and if it hadn't been for that call, that's how it would have stayed.
Having said that, the more I dug, the weirder it got. There's coverage everywhere about it online today, so I won't repeat it here, but the tattoo doesn't mean what the two newspapers (The Sun and The Daily Mail) insinuated it did (they didn't actually insinuate anything but by just pointing it out, did) and then Mothers Against Guns came out (or rather their spokesperson did) and said he should get it ..."lasered off or be dropped from the England World Cup squad".
In his own defence, Raheem's father was gunned down and from what I can gather, the guy is really just saying he shoots from the right foot - which is quite funny for a tattoo. I'm not sure I would have chosen it if my father had gone that way but Raheem was just two when that happened. I can relate to that in a kind of "don't miss what you never had" way. Sad - absolutely, but it's not a raw memory.
Anyway, I went ahead and figured I would back up his case on there. I was armed to the teeth with research by this point. Up against such a statement from Mothers Against Guns, I thought I might find myself in a strange war of words... but that's not what happened.
What really happened (I think) is that we met at the fence and more or less agreed with each other - the press have made a mountain out of a water fountain chat (and there's no way that tattoo is as new as they have made out) and left social media to do what it does best/worst... which is giving people with keyboards on their phones a reason to stab at them with sticky fingers.
News coverage and discussion sure does move fast these days and from my experiences over the years, if you can't say what you want to say in less time than it takes to brush your teeth, you're playing a losing game. There was a point where I was asked whether small children would see the tattoo, not read the backstory and think the message of it was something it wasn't - which is a great question. That could indeed happen. I remember seeing Paul Stanley wearing a Star of David pendant in a photo-shoot from the late seventies and adding it to my Christmas present list without a clue what it meant, but it's not quite the same thing at all.
My head began to formulate an alternate reality scenario in which I wanted to throw the ball back into the TV by saying "if you can honestly sit there and tell me small children went out and found Jesus after seeing David Beckham's tattoo, I'll agree 100% with you", but there wasn't time. I am built for long-form things rather than drive-by chat.
Mostly though, I was concentrating hard on not sneezing on air because The Old Hay Fever arrived with a vengeance yesterday. Here's me thinking about sneezing... and playing with my beard too much - which is better than playing the beat to Dr Feelgood on my teeth with that pencil I'm holding which is what I was doing while I waited...
Pic by my good buddy John McMeiken... who actually has SKY
HOW CAN MAY BE NEARLY OVER ALREADY?
The pages are starting to stack up for Scenes From The Coffee House. I feel like a real writer again... it's a very different beast from the day job even though that involves writing too. The difference is the same as showing somebody your brain and showing somebody your heart. Anyway - it's getting somewhere fast. I'll post an update here at the end of the month because I hope I won't be far away from drawing a line under it and doing that thing known as Pressing The Button.
The songwriting is surging forwards too. My ambition is perhaps exceeding my talent but I'm working on balancing it out and some kind of 'thing' is coming together for sure. I should probably remind myself more often that I'm a lyricist not a guitarist but damn, my heart is firing on all four cylinders with the guitars and I'm even enjoying it.
In a chain of events I didn't see coming, I've really grown to love the D'Angelico I picked up a while back and I write on it a lot more often than the Gretsch. Funny how things pan out.
That's all I got. I just felt like being positive and emptying my head a little. There's a busy week coming up into which I'd like to stuff as much as I can before I disappear to Alexander Palace for a long weekend of hosting our Great British Tattoo Show.
I'll leave you with this:
THE PENCIL OF TRUTH
Yesterday, I read an article on writing by one of my favourite writers - Joan Didion - and I’m going to steal chunks of it here because I think it’s important. It was for me, but maybe it will resonate with you too. Here goes:
Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am “interested,” for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it.
Sometime later, she hits The Nail really hard in the face with The Hammer:
In short my attention was always on the periphery on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
That section in bold is the one that swung it for me:
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.
When I had read this over and over because I was captivated by what it meant, I realised she was talking to me.
I figured that what people respond to most is when I write about life. Anyone - (well, maybe not anyone) - can write a 'story' but only I can see through my eyes and colour it with all the filters that already exist in my head. I see no other reason to have accumulated so much junk in there and held onto it for so long. Thus, on this fine day, I have decided not to write certain types of things anymore - ie: fiction, though I do have a few scraps around here that I'll finish just because I should.
There simply comes a time when you must decide what you're going to talk about around here - and that time is now.
It sits well. Maybe I need a photograph of myself that makes me look like the kind of writer I think I am. Here's a picture of Joan (from Vogue I think) that says more than any biography could. Once you know she's a writer, this photograph says everything else there ever was to say - in fact, you don't even have to know she's a writer for it to speak to you:
I will more than likely steal this idea very soon. I don't think Joan will mind.
There's also a Netflix documentary about her called The Center Will Not Hold. Here's the trailer:
OPERATION ANTI-BEATNIK
I got a newsletter in today from the very cool Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company. I've only been there once and it was a long time ago too so it's high time I went back. With one eye on my last post about things not being as relevant/cool/important as they once were, I'm going to steal their first paragraph here and tell myself it's OK because if you're not on their mailing list, you can fix that by going to that link and filling in the box on the top right of the page.
It goes like this:
For almost three years in the late 1960s, Shakespeare and Company was barred from selling books. This was due to a bureaucratic imbroglio attributed variously to CIA influence, to the Paris Préfecture’s “Operation Anti-Beatnik,” and to simple bad luck in business. Undeterred, George Whitman kept the space open as the “Free University of Paris,” hosting discussions, concerts and readings, including one with poets Langston Hughes and Ted Joans. In May ’68, when the quartier famously erupted in clashes between students and riot police, the bookshop was perfectly situated to become a refuge, intellectual as well as physical. As Molotov cocktails flew across rue Saint-Jacques, the shop sheltered people fleeing riot police, and stayed open all night to host political debates. In our history book, the poet Christopher Cook Gilmore describes hiding out in the bookshop one night, watching from the upstairs window as students unfurled a huge red flag from the top of Notre-Dame. Standing next to him, George said: “Isn’t this the greatest moment of your entire life?”
Which says a lot about the bookstore, its owner, beatniks and the French. This is why Shakespeare is still open, still highly regarded and still on my radar when hundreds of others are a distant memory of averageness. If I ever get around to making a video series like Old Weird America (see same previous post as mentioned before) this is where I'll begin... because a man needs an excuse to go to Paris like he needs an excuse to buy another Gretsch.
Books huh.
Meanwhile, the running continues and my knees are screaming at me to stop. They're not in a good way but they're going to have to suck it up for another six weeks because we're finishing this little challenge one way or another.
I came back from my run last night (the playlist for week three is here) and crash landed in front of Lost In Space on Netflix. The first few episodes were pretty good so I stuck with it as something that passed before my eyes while I recovered and then... episode five we hit a jackpot.
Not only were we rewarded with giant lizard/dinosaur type things but also a fist fight between them and The Robot - and that my friends, is sometimes as good as life gets. A large mug of tea and a cage fight between a lizard and a robot. Ain't nothing wrong with that.
NOTES ON BEING YOURSELF
This last few days I’ve been digging into GarageBand to get some songs down. The positive part of me wanted to get three songs into at least a workable state but you know how it is... you get started, overthink it more than you need to, battle some inner demons and come out the other side wondering why you’re not better at the things you love to do, but that’s pretty normal around here.
Then again, the one song I did lay down is one song more than I had on Friday morning before I started so that gets filed under ‘a step in the right direction’. Also in the win column is now that I’ve messed with a million settings, I shouldn’t have to mess with them any more and can just plug in and get more of them down.
I did wonder for a while if anything worthwhile would come from such a DIY endeavour. The world is set up to make you think anything is possible if you throw enough tech at it and maybe it is, but I’m also a writer who endorses the fountain pen, a fistful of Blackwing pencils and to many notebooks. If you take a look around the web, there’s always somebody who’s been able to piece something solid together with tech but not so many people wielding acoustic guitars that I actually liked, or so I thought...
I came across an album by a guy called Dan Tedesco. He recorded his last album using 'not very much at all' on his iPad. You can read about his big plan here (if you can handle the nineties design of the news site it's on) and the link to his album on iTunes is here.
Inspired by this, I see no reason I can’t play that game. I’ll more than likely use even less than Dan simply because I don’t understand half of what’s going on. Right now, my job is to get skeletons down and I’ll dress them in nice clothes later.
Dan also made a movie about what it's like to do everything yourself out there and he makes it look easy. It's called Chasing The Lightning. I could post it here but Dan would probably appreciate it more if you watched it on his site so here's the link.
Meanwhile, I also came across a guy called Otis Gibbs. He runs his Own Damn Show and lives life on his own terms - or at least that's the message that comes across. He also makes fine records and has started a new video project called Old Weird America. You can find everything you need somewhere on his site, but here's his latest instalment of the OWA series... I adore this and wish the world was still like this way:
The days of wandering into a bookstore and finding a homemade pamphlet of Beautiful Words are long gone. I guess it got replaced by the internet but it's not the same because to make your own pamphlet requires Effort and Commitment rather than spewing up some words because somebody thought it would be nice if we all had keyboards on our phones.
We need more people like Dan and Otis in the world. With the possibilities becoming ever more endless - and perhaps, meaningless - as human beings there’s way too much to consume out there. It’s almost impossible to absorb yourself into something in the way we used to. What’s going to count in the future is people going out on their own limb to create material that belongs to them and them alone. We’re awash with cookie cutter ideas and algorithms that tell you what you want to see next.
If you have any desire at all to be an individual in a world that’s trying to make us all the same (for no other reason than to take your money from you), you’re going to have to do pretty much the same as these guys and have a little faith in that thing called Yourself.
You need to be the person that people in the future will talk about... or at least try.
WANTED. DEAD OR ALIVE.
This running thing. It's tough. My knees are objecting a little but I must persist as it's part of a bigger plan... and if I can't run 5km without having my lungs hang out of my eye-sockets, I may as well abandon all hope before I start.
Earlier this week, the running track was full of people at rugby training which threw a brick through the window of my plan but across the road, there is a park. A kids park, general park - you know the kind of thing - just a big patch of grass really and there was nobody in there. I parked up, went through the gate and ran. It wasn't too dark when I went in but as the songs passed by on the playlist, it was kind of getting that way, but no big deal.
I had finished the scheduled run, went back to the gate and found it locked. No problem - there was another gate a little further along. Also locked. Down at the other side of the field there are some tennis courts but those gates were locked too.
Hmm. Not even nine o'clock and I find myself locked in a field. I'm not particularly inconspicuous and I wasn't running in the shadows but whoever it is that's in charge of the security of the field didn't give a damn either way and strapped those babies up good n tight with their industrial padlocks.
What's a man to do?
Close to the tennis courts, there's a house where I thought this security person may live. It's the only house within the field so it made sense. I looked around some and then shouted up at the only window with a light on:
"Hey motherfucker! How about letting me out!"
Action behind the curtains and I see a man looking down on my wearing blue pyjamas. You know what he did? He closed the curtains against me and did nothing at all.
Maybe I went in too hard a little too early.
The field, all the way around, is circled by one of those fences you find protecting schools. Metal rods about ten foot high with arrow-head spikes to stop people climbing over. The kind that, when you're in school, there's always some story about a kid who impaled his testicles on them when he went to get his ball. That was the first thing that crosses my mind while I was standing there looking at them.
To hell with it. What does a man need testicles for anyway in an already over-populated planet.
Using the chain and padlock around the gate as leverage, I hauled myself up onto the top, teetered around between the spikes for a few seconds and jumped.
Not so bad. The landing was not so good and my knees complained a little but I was out. If nothing else it might make a humorous story...
The following day, I took the dog out. To make a change in the mini-heatwave, I figured I'd take him to the park with the river running through it - there's not much he likes better than jumping in during the summer and getting cool.
We parked up, crossed the road with some other people who were hanging around and found that over the winter, somebody had moved the gate and replaced it with a fence, though there was a sign saying to use the other gate maybe fifty metres along the road. Simple.
"Somebody moved the gate," I said to one of the guys who had crossed with us and was looking confused. This guy looked mid-thirties, maybe forty at the top end - certainly a fair whack of years younger than me anyway - which is important because then, he looks up and down the road and says:
"You're young enough to just jump over the fence."
And I stood there for a moment wondering if a) I suddenly looked a lot younger now I had been running for one whole week and/or b) pictures of me escaping from the playground had made it onto the internet without me knowing.
Or maybe the old guy in the house had put hundreds of those blurry CCTV posters up around the place of me like when a cat goes missing.
The universe sure does have a weird sense of humour.
SIGN O' THE TIMES
I'd never heard the story of what the song was about before (you can read that here at The Guardian) but right at the end of the piece, there's a quote from his sound engineer, Susan Rogers, who says this about him:
"He realised he had to socially handicap himself to be the artist he wanted to be, and that to do that without being an asshole he had to be a complete enigma"
While I don't have the inclination to be anything like a total enigma, this rang with me. Any creative field at its core has to be about doing whatever you want to do (or not as the case may be) and at the extreme end of that is accepting responsibility for failure as well as success... but you can only do that inside your own head. The only way to be authentically creative is to ignore both praise and criticism and keep working. Your only role in the grand stage-play that is your life is to produce the work regardless.
And if there comes a day when The Angels are too busy looking after some other shit to fill your being with inspiration, so be that too.
I guess the hard part of being fiercely independent is making the money part work for you... then again, as Prince said of the whole affair regarding the dirty stuff:
"Money?! It’s not about money!"
Because when it does start to become about money, you're screwed. You're better off working in a petrol station and writing/recording/drawing whatever the hell you like than you are being at the beck and call of a 'company' whose very existence relies on whether you're commercially viable or not.
You can learn a lot from Prince - particularly about how to write good songs.
STAND BY FOR PAIN
Where my head has been for the last six months I have no idea. Maybe I burnt out a little. Hell, maybe I burnt out a lot. I put on some weight, went back to my legendary smoking crutch and wandered about the place like a lost soul. Pathetic.
I blame getting my hair cut back at the end of November - for the record, it was just broken and I needed to start again. Six months on it seems have come out of the shock, woken up from its coma and with Spring in the air, it's doing what it's supposed to. To help it along, earlier this week I started training for a 5k run. 5k is not far, but the last time I ever ran 5k was ummm.. 1991 perhaps. My breasts don't quite swing in the wind from a lack of activity but when you're a man, it's best to arrest these things before they get out of control. If you're on Apple Music, you can share my running playlist here. If you're on Spotify, you'll have to make your own. These are the two camps we have been forced into. It ain't about politics, race or gender. You will now be categorised by which music streaming service you use and given those other alternatives, that's a good thing.
A few weeks back, I discovered something called Live From Daryl's House. The main site is linked up there but you can find most of it over on YouTube - natch. Every episode is wonderful and makes me think this is the way forwards for many, many things. It breathes life into everybody. There are no losers in scenarios such as this. You don't even have to be a particular fan of Daryl Hall to enjoy it but if you weren't before, you will be after. Inspiring is what it is. Imagine a similar show from Alice Cooper's house... Nancy Wilson... Brian May... visited by other musicians who 'got it'. Sheeran... Randy Crawford... Bernie Taupin... Trent Reznor.
It would only be a matter of time before fools decided they would like a slice of the pie but it would be great while it lasted. Anyway, if you have time for a taster, here's the entire episode in which Cheap Trick turn up at the door:
LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD
Once upon a time, if you wanted to be a writer (though I guess you could substitute that with whatever discipline you're in), you had two choices if you wanted to move forwards:
A) Write a book, find an agent to represent you, get published - or not, as the case may be I guess or
B) Write a book, go through the stages of A) and upon entering 'or not, as the case may be', finance the printing of the book yourself, print hundreds or thousands of copies and sell them yourself.
(There may also be a C) which is 'give up', but that spoils the flow of what's coming).
Not much has changed in this scenario apart from B) in which you no longer have to print thousands of books and have them sitting in your garage until your heart finally breaks and slowly but surely, you whittle down the pile of books nobody wants by dropping them into those magazine recycling banks you find littering bus lay-bys and supermarket car parks all around the country. Now, you can simply host it as a digital product that's not harming anybody... but the fact remains, you still have to sell them yourself.
And you know what? Nobody cares. Nobody cares about your damn book - after a while, even you will cease to care about your damn book. When you've made £17 from the kindle store in six months, what will you think then? Was the book that bad?
Not necessarily but what's happening out there in writing land is people who want to be writers are dodging the gatekeepers (agents) and simply saying I Am A Writer. I looked long and hard yesterday and it's like a Digital Calais out there. There are thousands of people all hoping to make it to the promised land... only there is no promised land because the sheer weight of people trying to make it has diluted the pool beyond recognition for anybody to make sense of it.
I'm just making observations here but the same is true of being in a band or making an indie movie. Nobody cares about your damn stuff because there's some more damn stuff around the corner that might be better or cheaper... or free even. On the surface, this all seems great for the consumer (presumably the kind of consumer that thinks bacon from a supermarket that's £1 a pack is as good as bacon that costs £6) but the worst part of the not caring, is that not even the authors of these items care about the damage being done to each of their industries.
And maybe that's fine. Maybe those people are happy to write a book and have it for sale on the kindle and for their parents and neighbours to be proud of them, but it doesn't help a serious author who is going about writing as a long term career.
I'm very quickly coming around to seeing that the majority of great writers, those with a career in front of them rather than behind them are still running with plan A). A lot of shit is fired at the big publishers but that's only because they're an easy target. In a world in which your entire industry is based on taking chances that your investment in a writer will pay off and book shops are disappearing far too quickly, that can't be easy.
But let's spare a thought for the smaller publisher here? The underdog of the publishing world is out there fighting the same battle... but as I discovered from a friend yesterday, they can be a little lax with coming up with the actual cash promised. Maybe you didn't sell enough books for them to pay you... was that made clear at the start? In this real world scenario, my friend is owed £2000 from a small publisher and has been waiting two years for it. It's hardly a lot of money in the big scheme of things but when it's your job and you're waiting on it to eat, keep your house and all of those other things that you could easily pay off if you were (for instance) working in a cafe, it makes it into not a very funny joke.
He is not alone. I know big name authors who have come across the same thing too - but then again, I also know of people with deals who have not delivered on their deadline. This too breaks the workings of The Big Machine.
So basically, being a writer is hard work. Selling books is even harder. Being a publisher is hard. Being an agent is hard.
I'm going to stop looking at The Machines now and simply write the best material I can but for all my independence of trying to look after myself, I can't help but feel I'd like to be under the wing of somebody like Penguin or Harper Collins... even if it was only for a little while.
The Beginning Of The End
I have been blogging for almost ten years and (even if I do say so myself) I have become pretty good at talking about nothing at all several times a week in such a way that people tune in to read.
This last couple of months, I've been feeling like I need to blog when I don't want to blog and that's not a good thing. The internet has become a very different place since I started. Back then I was running a Nokia 8210, Rhiannon was six, I had a semi-regular job and owning the best dog in the world was a distant dream...
Since then, everybody (and I mean everybody) has been convinced that posting something (anything) - online is 'producing content' and therefore, everybody is now blogging whether they like it or not. Their breakfast, their cat - you get the picture - you post it, people like it, sometimes they like it a lot and that's called a 'readership'. Fuck - people who post pictures of their cats regularly have a bigger 'readership' than me. Nice work cat people.
A few weeks ago, I saw an instagram poet with a following in the high tens of thousands... like 323,000 and counting. My soul gave a small shudder. As a self marketing guru with the ability to convince all of instagram he was a great poet, this guy rocked the house down to its foundations.
As a poet, he sucks diesel through a straw but 323,000+ people bought into it all the same!
My blogging hero, Neil Gaiman, has all but stopped blogging over at his site. The gaps between posts are so long now, it would perhaps be better if he called it a day and left it there for all to see as an archive of 'the past'. At least I wouldn't go there very often only to be disappointed that he hadn't written anything.
Talking of heroes, Michael Chabon has abandoned everything bar instagram and left the heavy lifting to his publisher - who cannot be bothered to lift anything by the looks of things. Nikki Sixx (and many other rock people) has even abandoned his domain name, choosing to fire most of his life out via instagram and Facebook - the latter probably via an auto-posting mechanism. The reasoning behind that is most likely that their entire fanbases are on those platforms and care only about seeing tour dates, new albums or a bit of nostalgia... otherwise they are too busy posting their own pictures of cats, breakfast etc...
Anyway. I need to change. I have to change because I'm not getting left behind. I love blogging but I don't love it so much that I want to carry on when everybody else is too busy to come here and read. It's like hearing that you missed the Berlin wall coming down because you were baking a cake.
So, over the next few weeks and heading to the end of the year, I'll be shoving some things around here, getting into shape for 2018 and whatever comes after. My books will be coming out through a different publisher in the new year and with that taken care of, I'm going to reconfigure my own house and perhaps turn it into a different kind of machine.
The important thing is I've figured out I need to be better at this. I'm not saying blogging is dead - far from it, but take a look around. The world ain't what it used to be and neither am I.
If all else fails, I could always increase the number of pictures of Hector I post everyday and churn out the kind of poetry I used to when I was fifteen.