SOMETHING SIMILAR TO THE LAST POST, BUT WITH PICTURES

ICE BIRD SPIRAL @ DREAMSTATE, OR: A SERIES OF RANDOM, NON-LINEAR MOMENTS FROM A 24HR PERIOD OF MY LIFE BETWEEN 2PM LAST FRIDAY AND 2PM LAST SATURDAY

1. The girl is in her mid-twenties and almost certainly a heroin addict. She has a Londonish twang to her voice and a really bad case of nasal-drip. Every third word is punctuated with a snnrrrfff. She sighs like someone from an amateur local drama production; too weary to even disguise the lie. "This is, like, the most worstest birffday I've ever 'ad, y'know," she whines, "I'm 'avin' a really baad birffday. Lost all me money and can't go out with me mates now." She executes another badly-acted sigh and sits down on the bench next to me.

I make no attempt to disguise my groan. "Yeah," I say, which is FuckOff for "Fuck off."

Normally, I'm a lot more easy-going, but I have the flu - really have the flu, not the fall-out from some summer-long drug binge. I'm watching the lights shift on the river, trying to eat one chip at a time in an attempt to get my energy levels back up to a level where I can stand up for more than 5 minutes without an exo-skeleton. But my stomach does not want me to eat. My mojo hath departed. I'm due on stage in an hour and a quarter, and all I want is to be left alone so I can look at the lights and recentre myself. It's selfish, I know, but please go away, luv.

"This is the worse birffday, ever. Snnrrffft." She sighs again, this time louder, and even does that slumping thing with her shoulders. It's pantomine-level acting. Sub-Eastenders. My daughters do it when they don't get any pudding after tea. She lowers her voice slightly, half to herself/half in an attempt to create some sort of artificial intimacy between us. "If only...if only I had some money."

"Yeah," I say, again, which = "Fuck off." I dangle a chip down my throat like a seagull and hope it won't come back up again. I feel like shit, but I bet she feels worse. We have a couple things in common, or so it seems: feeling shit and whining.

She continues on for a while; more snrrrrfs, more sighs; more hard-luck stories, then slows down and finally stops when she realises she's not going to get any cash off me. "Look," I say, completely worn down by her patter,"I can't eat all these chips." (It's not a lie; my stomach is on strike.) "You can have the rest of them if you want them, okay?"

She says nothing and we both stare at the water for a few minutes.

I stand up and say "see ya" then lurch off down the wharf. She attacks the bag of chips like a pirhana, shovelling them in her face faster than she can swallow.

I feel like a complete cunt.


2. "That was awesome," says Rasha. "You sounded like that band in the bar in Star Wars."

"What, in the Mos Thingy cantina?"

"Yeah, yeah. The cantina. It was completely insane." She starts laughing.

"Thanks," I say, genuinely surprised and touched by the comparison. "That's such a cool thing to say." I start laughing too, felling oddly relieved in some way.



3. Mark and I watch Ronnie Size on CCTV with the security guard. The monitor is divided into a grid of tiny images. On one of them a crowd of student ravers bounce in time to a silent riddim. On top of the monitor is a portable TV showing some lame ITV comedy program.

"How can you tell if, y'know, something untoward is going on?" I ask him. He's drinking something, but I'm not sure what it is. Coke? Whisky? Whisky and coke?"

"I just know," he says. "I can tell. Experience, innit."

Mark points at a couple of kids walking down an alleyway on camera. The image is tiny; a few centimetres wide. "What about them? Those kids...?"

The guard shrugs; half-smiles. "Naww. Students, innit. You can tell...y'know, by the way they walk. You can tell if they're up to no good."

Mark: "They look shifty?"

Guard: "Summat like that, yeah. I just know. I can tell straightaway if they're bad 'uns."

I point at the telly on top of the surveillence monitor. "Do you ever get confused between events on there? And on there?"

"No," he says, not sure if I'm taking the piss. (I'm not.) "Never."



4. Someone phones me during our set. My phone is on the table in amongst the wires and mixers and junk, so I can check the time to make sure we don't over-run. I hear my ring-tone in amongst all the aural mayhem. I check the phone and accept the call, placing the phone back on the table so that the caller gets a barrage of nosie from the monitor. That'll teach them, I think.

Whoever it is lasts almost 5 minutes before they drop the connection. Then I have a Bono/Phil Collins moment and start filming the audience with the phone, squinting thru my mask and my varifocal glasses as I pan across the assorted slackers crashed-out in front of us. They're a nice audience, I decide, even tho I can barely see them. I like them.



5. I'm laying on a bed, mid-afternoon, feeling really terrible. Aching limbs, no energy. At some point I have to get across town and sound-check. Standing up is not an option right now.

I pick up a Gideons Bible and open it on a random page. I'm told the Bible can provide comfort on occasions, so I try it out.

For so it was, that the children of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, which had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods,

and walked in the statutes of the heathen, whom the LORD cast out from before the children of Israel, and of the kings of Israel, which they had made.

And the children of Israel did secretly those things that were not right against the LORD their God, and they built them high places in all their cities, from the tower of the watchmen to the fenced city.

And they set them up images and groves in every high hill, and under every green tree:

and there they burnt incense in all the high places, as did the heathen whom the LORD carried away before them; and wrought wicked things to provoke the LORD to anger:

for they served idols, whereof the LORD had said unto them, Ye shall not do this thing.

Yet the LORD testified against Israel, and against Judah, by all the prophets, and by all the seers, saying, Turn ye from your evil ways, and keep my commandments and my statutes, according to all the law which I commanded your fathers, and which I sent to you by my servants the prophets.

It doesn't really make me feel any better, so I make a cup of tea and swallow some painkillers instead. This seems to help more than the Bible.

I was almost certainly a King of Israel in a past life.



6. I sit outside chatting with Bram Devens aka Ignatz, who earlier on had played a cracking set of smoky, warped, smeary, smudge-vocal'd Space-Blues while a couple of the Qu-Junktion dudes projected celluloid 8mm kino-flicker upwards onto his face. We have a handful of friends in common, so we chat and swap stories. He'd seen us play in Brussels earlier in the year and he tells me that we'd completely freaked him out, which makes me laugh a lot. He tells me some more Henry Flynt Kraakfest anecdotes on top of the ones that Steve had told me. I tell him I'd accidentally dropped my trousers in front of Henry Flynt whilst changing into my stage gear. Bram's a lovely geezer; a total dude.



7. A drunken posh bird is having a go at the staff of the kebab-shop, claiming they'd short-changed her. She is drunk and gobby - blonde, upper-middle-class; clearly used to having her own way in life - and she won't let it go. The guys are v. polite considering how drunk and beligerent she is. The bloke are Iraqis - nice, hard-working guys; I always eat there when I'm up that end of town - sometimes when it's not too busy I talk to them about Iraqi Pop; what they think of life in the UK, etc. A bunch of poshboy hurrah-henries cheer her on. "I positively, totally, fucking know you've fucking short-changed me, mister," she hisses. She pronounces "fucking" as "Fahw-king", pouting and rummaging around in her dinky little designer bag. "See, I have less change than I really should have and this is all your fahw-ing fault." She teeters backwards on her heels.

"Tell you what," says the bloke who'd served her - clearly exasperated, but never once raising his voice, despite the fact that the place is heaving mad busy - "You're accusing me of being a thief. I am no thief. You give me £** and I give you £* change. This is basic mathematics, yes? This is all on CCTV. I go upstairs and rewind the tape, go back 10 minutes. It will clearly show what money I give you back, yes?" He opens the door to go upstairs. " I rewind the tape, watch it, then you come and see for yourself, see that I have not..." He pulls a face. "...ripped you off."

Poshbird pulls a face of her own - a shorthand, exteriorised form of inner horror that negates her own good looks - and turns to her braying friends for support. "I'm not going anywhere with you, mister."



8. Sami Sänpäkkilä reminds me that the last time I saw him play was with Tara Burke aka Fursaxa. He tells me: "Tonight will sound more, umm, Poppy. Yes, I will go Pop!" He laughs.

Sami's set as Es was beyond beautiful. Languid chiming tones circled the performance-space: accreting delicate mass like some otherworldly church-organ. Micro-loop click n whorl: early Philip Glass organ and chamber-group pulse circa "North Star" or "Music in 12 Parts" but far, far lovelier. Bach goes Pop in a frozen cathedral made from Bob Shaw Slow-Glass.

One of Sami's films was projected on three of the walls: blurred overlapping footage of bare-leafed tree-branches shivering in some imaginary Finnish autumn breeze. Absolutely friggin' gorgeous: my personal highlight of the evening.



9. Backstage about 11-ish my phone rings again. It's the same number as earlier. "Oi!" says a snarky Cockney voice. "You pranged my fucking car earlier on. And now you're dodging my calls. What you gonna do about my fucking car, eh?"

"Your car? I think you've got the wrong number."

"Yeah. My car. Don't try it on. This is the number you gave me. You fucked my car up right good and proper."

I start laughing. "I don't even drive."

"Don't try and fucking wheedle your way out of this, you wanker."

Me, more forcefully: "I don't drive a car. I don't have a car. I've been nowhere near your car. You've got the wrong number."

*mumbled swearing down the phone directed at me*

Me, impatient, bordering on angry: "Fuck. Was that you who phoned me while I was on stage earlier on? Who d'you think you're talking to."

"It's, uh, Sean...innit?"

Me, v. narky now: "No, it's not Sean. I don't drive and I've never been near your car. Get it? Now, go away and don't ever ring this number again or I will play some more of my music down the phone to you. Understand?"

Subdued voice: "Yeah. Uh, yeah...okay."

The line goes dead.



10. I'm smoking a cigarette on Stoke's Croft. The hotel owner - who I know pretty well by now - stumbles drunkenly past without even recognising me and spends 5 minutes trying to open his own front door. It is almost 2am.

I watch the cars slide past me. A lad in his late teens cycles past with his girlfriend half on the saddle, hanging tightly onto him. She grins, her face lit by love, youth and streetlights - illuminated by all the wonderful, hopeful things in this world, in this...this life of ours. She waves as they speed past me, doppelshifting off into their own future. I hope she hangs onto that moment - that feeling - as tightly as she was hanging onto him.



11. The African taxi-driver's taking me round St. Pauls in his cab. He's playing an old Kanye West LP, beats bouncing from the speakers in the bright, almost July sunshine. Black kids in ubersized baggies and 3-colour rasta-tams smoke weed next to a park. He tells me about...stuff. I've never met him before in my life, but I find myself really warming to him.

Music: it's good, innit? A Good Thing. The way that it makes us feel.



12. In the second-hand record-shop they're playing Soft Machine's "4". A couple of guys - nicely-spoken, middle-class Indie-DJ types - are taking the piss out of a friend of mine - a Bristol producer who's not present to defend himself. "Dub's boring," says one of them, drifting into generalities. "Reggae's boring. Really boring. It's all..." words escape him. "Boring," laughs the other one. He practices scratching an old 70's Dub record. Badly. "See? It's just so..." He makes an indeterminate noise meant to denote existential twenty-something DJ frustration. "Unweird. I need it weird, man. The weirder the better."

I comment on the Soft Machine fuzz-organ solo playing as I go to the counter to buy some old records. "Yeah, I've sampled that," says the vendor, smugly. "For my band." He looks at me, expecting a comment, an impressed "oh, really?" I know he has a band; I've heard him playing their demos when I've been in there before. It sounds exactly like you might imagine.

"You sampled this? That's not good," I say and shake my head.

"Yeah. Why?"

"Well, it's kinda disrespectful," I say. I'm polite, matter-of-fact and unconfrontational about it, despite the fact that it's something I feel quite strongly about. I genuinely don't understand why anyone would want to sample Soft Machine, or Sun Ra, or whatever - it seems so lazy and, well, pointless, as well as disrespectful. "If you really do like stuff like this then maybe you, y'know, shouldn't sample it."

He folds his arms. "Oh, yeah? So what should I do, then?"

"Get some mates to try and play like that, even if they can't. Or find some people in a local Pub Jazz-band and tell them to try and copy something like this. It doesn't matter if they don't have the chops. In fact, it's better if they fail. Then sample that and use it on your record."

He looks at me like I'm simple. Which I am. "Yeah. But that would sound really shit."

I shrug and laugh. "Yeah, but it would be brilliant, don't you reckon? Totally mental. And it would be yours to do whatever you wanted with. It would sound like nothing else on earth."

He pulls a face. "It would be rubbish."

"Maybe, maybe not. It doesn't matter. But if it is rubbish, then you keep doing it again and again until it stops being rubbish and starts sounding amazing. Amazing and completely original."

"I'm going to keep sampling this," he says, his arms still folded.



13. I buy a gin-and-tonic and sit down further up the wharf, trying to get my shit together. I go to light up a fag, but remember that Chiz had borrowed my lighter earlier on. I approach a table with an old couple and an early-20's student-ish-looking girl, probably their daughter.

"Sorry to bother you, but could I borrow a light, please?"

The girl produces a pouch of rolling tobacco. Her hands are shaking. Her voice is shaking. "Yeah, yeah...I'll, uh, just roll one for you. I, uh..."

The penny drops. I look dishevelled, unshaven; flu-reddened eyes oozing from sockets; making indeterminate sniffling noises. I'm 50 yards from the bench where I'd been approached myself a few minutes earlier. She thinks I'm a smackhead.

I put on my bestest smile, nicest voice and laugh softly. I try not to whine and sniffle. I can act too, see? I show her my cigarette. "Oh, no, no...sorry...it was just a light that I needed. I loaned my lighter to someone earlier. I'm really sorry to trouble you."

She visibly relaxes. And we all have a quiet laugh - parents included - about the misunderstanding. It's all very BBC1 sit-com cosy and nice.

I go back to my table and watch the lights dancing on the water. It's one of my favourite things in the world to do. It's like watching a familiar, favourite old film, one that never ends or lets you down. One that's different every time you watch it.

I think about the girl on the bench eating my chips and feel like an even bigger cunt.

Socks? Check!
Pants? Check!
Ring modulator? Check!
10ft length of plastic tubing? Check!
Batteries? Check!
Jack-plug adaptors? Check!
Rocky IV video-box? Check!
Papier-mache talisman? Check!
Fake child-hair extensions to costume head-piece? Check!
Needless neuroses and middle-aged anxieties? Check!
Annoying pre-show bout of flu? Grrr. Er, I mean, check!

Time to hit the road, then.

THE ROCKY IV BOX

*cue: heavily-reverb'd film-trailer voice-over, er, voice* "What lurks within The Rocky IV Box?"



My latest 'musical' instrument. Yes, I really have added a jack-socket to a VHS video-box. Clue: it makes conceptually-linked boxing/wresting noises. I'll be test-running it tonight.

The story that's been causing me most amusement over the w/end is the one in wh/ Jack Kirby's family/estate go after Disney/Marvel for the copyrights of a whole bunch of characters that Jack co-created but never really majorly financially benefited from apart from standard work-for-hire.

The Kirby Estate lawyers have picked a beautiful moment to put the boot in as this has the potential to disrupt a number of high-profile film-making activities and their attendant revenue-streams - after they have just paid 4bil for the company. No pressure to settle then.

Particularly satisfying as Disney's lawyers have themselves been amongst some of the most litigative in the past.

Good luck to the Kirbys. This one has been a long time coming.

ICE BIRD SPIRAL @ DREAMSTATE, COLSTON HALL

Looks like I'm playing at this on friday as part of Ice Bird Spiral.



It's part of the relaunched/rebranded/reopened Colston Hall week of events. Thanks to Chiz for asking us to play. Expect much strangeness.

Cracking line-up. I see Ignatz is playing - aka Bram, who's part of the Silvester Anfang/Funeral Folk collectiv that features some of my wonderful Flemish pals. Looking forward to checking him out live and having a chat.

Also: Es, aka Sami Sänpäkkilä, the Fonal Records boss and extraordinary Finnish film-maker. I've seen Es play on a couple of occassions in recent years and it's always a treat; also seen Sami play as part of an extended Islaja line-up. As well as being v. talented Sami's also a very nice chap.

I saw some of his films shown at the Cube about a year of so ago and was so impressed that I immediately bought a DVD from the merch stall. It's awesome stuff and I cannot recommend it highly enough. You can still get the DVD from Boomcat, or even better buy something directly from the Fonal Records shop. I see they're stocking an album from Ernesto, aka Bear Bones, Lay Low another member of the FF collectiv so what're you waiting for?

SUBWAY SECT: "AMBITION"

Yeah!

HEY COLOSSUS / TRACTOR / PART CHIMP @ THE CROFT

A few Kid Shirt old timers might remember that I'm kinda partial to the band Hey Colossus whose album "Happy Birthday" LP on RiotSeason tickled my verrucas last year. So when Spike suggested we go and see them play in Bristol I jumped at the chance.

But - fuck me gentle with an egg-timer - I turn up at The Croft and bump into an old friend Tim Farthing (ex-Gutless, PJ Harvey Band, amongst others), only to find he's now a member of HC (along with a guy called Joe who lives in Street - another Somerset refugee). I can't remember the last time I saw Tim - it must've been some time this decade, I guess; even tho he only lives about 10 miles from me our paths don't ever cross. He was in a band with my old much-missed pal Dave Goldsworthy for a while, tho their name escapes me. Small world/weird coincidence.

Anyway - with or without Tim - Hey Colossus were every bit great as I hoped they'd be: a six-piece - two gtrs, bass, drums, a pedal-meddlin' howler/shrieker and a Kaoss-Pad manipulator. They were blinkin' loud and intense as fuck. Frequency shards were dancing like fuck-dust in the air above the stage. But I ain't complainin'.

Started with a barrage of pedal-noise that morphed into a stacatto stop-start up/down jerky dirty Motorik-Boogie marathon that sounded like a Tourette-afflicted version of Status Quo. Mucho Heavy Doom-Noise shape-throwing ensued w/ front-guy seeming to lick or, erm, snort his own pedals for some reason, his face flat against a table like he was hoovering up bathroom-brewed Boss Pedal Noise-Crank. There was also a bunch of bananas present for some unknown reason; possibly in case band-members got low on potassium or something, which looked scarily feasible at points.



Yeah, well, so I was def. hearing a Boogie influence at points - tho a form of Deconstructed Boogie, a Boogie Mangle of Malignant Ill-Repute. This was Boogie Gone Bad. V. Evil Boogie put thru a mincemeat machine, dissected and reassembled into some new patchwork Post-Boogie form - Not-Quite Metal, Not-Quite Noise - there was some vague, skewed ancestral Rock n Roll soundform still present in amongst the Doom Drops and the skull-splitting pedalwankery: a skeleton faintly visible underneath all the shredded meat. A one point something that sounded like some distended, stretched-out mockery of a T. Rex riff put in an appearance before it was revv'd up n warped out of recognition. Also some great moments where the music seemed to lift itself on top of itself - accreting layers and creating a sense that it was moving upwards towards something - like some of Circle's best work, but a lot more distorted. They sounded like they'd been influenced by UFO circa 1971 rather than Black Sabbaff.



I was completely deaf afterwards, but didn't care. They were great and I recommend you catch 'em live soon as you're able. There's a new album on Riot Season due to drop any second.

Bristol band Tractor were next up and I spent a few minutes trying to wrap my head around them: they were kinda, ummm... Post Punk-ish; y'know - springy bass, tight/minimalistic machine-like rhythms, shouty vocal interjections. Good drummer, I reckon. I kept trying to think who they reminded me of...but my reference points were all typical Old Bloke Stuff: I kept thinking of the rhythm-sections of, Oh I dunno, Basement 5, Killing Joke, Section 25...but, no, no, no: none of those...they were faster, different...filtered through a late 80s/early 90s sensibility. No, I can't quite put my finger on it. I asked Spike and he said they sounded like Tractor. Oh, alright then.



Slightly, errm, 'Punky' in places - very tight n repetitive. S'funny, this sort of music isn't usually my bag (I lived thru all this the first time round) tho lately I've found myself warming to some o'this stuff, tho I'm not sure why. I also started warming to Tractor a bit after a few minutes, but tbh Hey Colossus had pretty much spoiled me for the evening, so unless you were gonna roll out Shit and Shine to follow 'em or something....

Part Chimp were okayish, I thought - on the plus side: very tight - I liked the Doom Metal moves, but the vocals really didn't work for me. The vocalist's voice was much better suited for the higher tempo, more 'punkier'-sounding material, wh/ I, uh, didn't really much like. The slothful Doom Drops n instrumental passages were okay, but mostly it wasn't ruff enuff for me, tho the audience seemed to be shaking down to it. It was a bit too clean. Too mannered. I found myself drifting off and losing interest whenever the vocals came back in. In the end I went for an extended cigarette break and then forgot to come back.

THRIFTY VINYL

A couple of friends whose own blogs have, um, wound down have been blogging over here on the sly.

But, of course, you already knew that.

JEX THOTH: "THE BANISHMENT"

Jessica and the boys don their ceremonial robes n jewels n twin-necked geetars and go all gothicpsych glittergloom.

I fucking love this.



An old interview I did with Jex and Clay Ruby (complete with HTML errors, by the look of it - or maybe it's just my shite browser).

MORE QUANTUM VIRUS AND SUPERPOSITIONING STUFF

Following on from a post below: more stuff about superpositioning viruses, so that they exist in two different energy-states simultaneously...also extrapolating the idea out into larger things; possibly even living-creatures such as tardigrades - animacules that can survive in the vacuum necessary to carry out the experiment.

FILM POSTERS FROM GHANA

Via @JamesUrbaniak and @davidbmetcalfe some truly brain-melting movie-posters from Ghana:



Apparently, these were painted and used by mobile VHS-tape 'cinemas' that travelled from village to village. Each 'cinema' had their own unique and colourful brand-name, like a Jamaican sound-system. Man, I love shit like this.

Three or four years ago I heard about a market-stall somewhere in London - I forget where - that used to flog imported VHS-tapes of Ghanaian-made 'witchcraft' and 'ghost' movies to the local African community. I tried to track some tapes down, but no luck. Also talked to the guys at Le Dernier Cri 'cos I'd heard they had a line on the damn things. But no dice.

If anyone knows where I can get some VHS or DVD-r copies, please get in contact. You will have my undead gratitude. Trade or cash.

RIP PATRICK SWAYZE

Swayze was The Man.

He and his wife had been together since they were teens: a First Love kinda deal. I think that's extremely cool and speaks volumes in itself.

TRAWLING / SHOPPING FOR JUNK

Following on from yesterday's post...

This morning I passed a local junk-shop where I found a couple of 1960's record-players stacked on a table. I immediately, errm, wanted them, but they were a bit overpriced, I thought.

Anyway, I thought I'd dump down a few recent pictures taken while browsing, digging, trawling or whatever we're calling it lol. Nothing particularly exciting, but just a few random items that've caught my eye in the last few days (feel free to post some of yr own and leave URLs in the comments box):

A POST ABOUT AN ISSUE OF INTERZONE THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT ISSUE OF INTERZONE. SORT OF.

Found this in a junk-shop for a quid a few days ago.

Nice Ian Miller cover.




It's made me ask all sorts of inner questions about why I should be more excited about finding this for a quid less than it cost when it came out, than buying a brand new issue. I mean, Rudy Rucker was in a recent ish. So why didn't I buy that one?

*sound of neurones shorting out*

I don't think it's entirely a nostalgia thing as I wasn't really that fussed about buying IZ in the 80s - apart from the odd issue here and there. And I'm not exactly a fan of Kim Newman's, erm, oeuvre.

I think that maybe the idea of finding things - stumbling on things unexpectedly - comes into play sometimes, tho I'm not entirely satisfied by that answer. There are almost certainly some other factors that I haven't quite figured out.

Lately, I've found that I enjoy finding certain objects more than the objects themselves. Possibly a minor endorphin or serotonin rush here - like some people get when they shoplift or go on a credit-card spree. Perhaps this is why I find buying things on the internet such a hollow experience lol. Sometimes I'll wait years to 'find' a copy of a certain LP rather than just click on a tab on a screen and get it two days later. I'm a fucking saddo, I know, but it seems a bit...I dunno...

The hunting, the browsing and the crate-digging are part of the fun, I suppose. The wandering around in zombie-browse-mode interspersed with sudden bursts of "oh, what's that?" I could spend all day doing it, to be honest; tho I have to be in exactly the right mood. I like losing myself. The Drift. That's another part of it too, maybe.

I'm possibly 'replaying' something here - but not quite sure what.

NOTES FROM OUNDERGROUND

GHANA SPECIAL

Meanwhile, keep an eye out for this fabulous 5-LP box-set (5 vinyl albums!) of vintage Ghanaian Highlife and Blues from the likes of The Uhuru Dance Band, Honny and the Bees, Sweet Talks, Oscar Sulley, Hedzolleh Soundz, etc. This is about to drop in the next month or so from Soundway Records.

GHANAIAN HIPLIFE

Highlife + Hip-Hop = Hiplife.

Reggie Rockstone, Tic Tac, MzBel, Asem, etc. Live n direct from Accra, Ghana.

IS (NOT IS)

Woah: This is fascinating. Bonkers, but fascinating.

And, no, viruses aren't living things.

They're actually complex, self-assembling macro-molecular aggregates.

In most cases a host-cell's DNA or RNA-replication systems are commandeered to do the 'reproductive' stuff. So they don't reproduce in the classical sense, or respire or excrete or do any of the, uh, normal stuff that you associate with living things. They have no 'Will to Move' - no auto-powered mobility systems - and no sensory apparatus or responsive 'behavioural' tics or tropes. They respond purely on the molecular n atomic levels: bouncing off things, sticking to other molecules (cell walls n stuff), free-floating brownian-like in fluid droplets, being propelled hither n thither. Some of them have protein 'shells' or sheaths peppered with peptide-chains that resemble convoluted TV-arials that act like keys, executing stereochemical twists, rotations and unfolds on the proteins of unsuspecting cell-walls that they collide with, causing them to undergo a sort of three-dimensional reconfiguration, so that they soften, or become soluble, opening up - like a door, if you like - to allow the viral particle to pass through into the host.

It's a reasonable metaphor, I 'spose, tho linguistically poor as it doesn't give you a sense of the Kirby-like grandeur of what's occuring here on such a tiny scale.

Viruses are sooo amazingly functionally elegant, but then they've prob. had a couple billion years to reach this state of molecular grace. Just think of them as clusters of molecules that can do stuff, rather than being 'alive'. And part of that 'doing stuff' has all sorts of ramifications on other, more complex biological systems. As well as fucking with our health, they've probably acted as a subtle evolutionary accelerator in the higher animal and plant kingdoms.

Viruses are the smallest article of clothing in the DNA-wardrobe.

(Tho some viruses use RNA as their minimal genetic template.)

It would be wrong to call them SmartMolecules - that term implies certain things that probably don't apply here - actually, I don't think there is a term for them; they just are. They also sit apart from our as-yet primitive notions of nano-engineering too - they were here before us and they're also an intimate part of us too - but as we start to build biostuff ourselves - as we almost certainly will - some new descriptive terminology will almost certainly arise for this class of not-quite-alive 'things' that are also an inherent part of virtually every biological system.

Someone should pay me to write about this shit. I dig it majorly.

Still, this has got me buzzing about the possibilty of 'Shadow-Viruses'...Quantum viruses that exist in hypothetical Either-Or/Maybe states. One of my recent Big Writing Projects - itself still in a state of flux - is a meditation on Quantum Life n life-forms, Q-Realities, etc. I'm calling this genre, um, Quantum Fantasy.

Quant.Fant.

Qui-Fi.

THIS IS HOW I ROLL #2

A brief skirmish on the Dorset border.

THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS

Crikey. A whole week nearly gone by already. Where did all that time go, eh?

No, really, I mean that literally: where did it all go?

Does it fold back in on itself somehow? Get recycled - reused as future moments? (Does Time have a zero-chronal imprint?) Or did it dissipate/evaporate? Go Pffft into the aether?

Does it stay where it is, watching us move further and further way or do we somehow remain stationary while it drifts away from our own point of view? Are we stuck in U2's accursed Eternal Moment (jeez: what a fucking nightmare thought: endless optimism; how depressing's that?) - a never-ending Now - while the Past feels away from us, curling off into a spiral, like the skin of an apple that's being peeled.

Or are we rotating on some unimaginable n-dimensional 'shape' in which Time is just one possible vector? Personally, I like to think that everything - every moment that ever was/will be is happening simultaneously (when viewed from outside - whatever "outside" means) tho that's just a personal preference. Something that gives me some vague sense of comfort.

People considerably cleverer than me have thought about this far deeper and longer than I'm prepared to without coming to any real conclusion, so I'm happy to just make up something that works for me and stick to it until I change my mind or have it changed for me.

But is last week still out there somewhere? Does it persist in some other Context, stacked up against all those other weeks that somehow floated past me?

"Helloooo, laaaast week - are you there!?"

Or have you really gone forever?

CONCEPT MINING #1

Okay, this kinda follows on in a semi-stream from below - some thoughts that drifted in unbidden when I was trying to get to sleep last night, probably prompted by questions my 8 y.o. daughter's been asking me about comic characters and also by the Disney take-over of Marvel. So, some vague stream-of-consciousness free-to-air quasi-concept stuff, mostly Marvel-orientated:

1) The Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction/Unknown Worlds.

Marvel ought to reclaim one or both of these titles - as they do for other book-titles/characters in order to keep copyright of names or whatever. The original 70's conceit was to 'do' mainstream comic-book adaptations of classic SF stories or concepts - like Bob Shaw's 'Slow-Glass' idea, wh/ they once used as a framing device. Occasionally, they'd cover something by Harlan Ellison, or - even better! - Roy Thomas would actually get the old fucker to write a one-off issue of a Marvel mag.

"What If" The Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction was rebirthed to showcase/anthologise new Visionary SF by writers from the Cyberpunk Era onwards. Cutting-edge, 'edgy' stuff. So you'd get 6-10 pagers by the likes of Ellis and Morrison next to, oh, I dunno, Rudy Rucker, Richard Kadrey, China Miéville, etc, etc and, well, wouldn't it be amazing if you could drag Sterling and Gibson down off Ol' Visionary Mountain to play too - either with new stuff or a one-off licensed old short.story (tho prob too expensive!) illustrated by the likes of Paul Pope, yeah? Cutting-edge, but accessible. (Fill in your own favourites here. My own tastes are erring on the conservative/old school a bit, I know, but I'd like to see, hmmm: Kyle Baker (who I think has got an absolutely superb plastic pallette; the guy always amazes me with his flexibility o'style), Walt Simonson (the logical inheritor of Wide-Concept-Mass Kirby/Druillet-ism), um, Giraud/Ladronn...). I'd like to see something written by Jodorowsky too. You'd have to invite Ellison, of course - it would be rude not to - and he'd almost certainly tell you to bugger off; but he'd have to be on the invite list. Samuel Delaney too.

Yeah, so cutting-edge-ish, but accessible. That's the mantra here. It would certainly be Marvel Editorial's answer to all them fan-boy critics fretting that Marvel are gonna get speyed by The Big D.

Magazine-sized, good page-count, adverts for SF films/games/phone apps . I think with modern digital printing there's not much in the way of savings if you go to Black n White.

All I've done is probably invented a pretty good, fairly contemporary version of Interzone - a paper Science Fiction mag in an era when the sales of paper Science Fiction mags are plummeting faster than a Victorian prossie's drawers. But this is an illustrated strip mag, an antho deliberately market-spun for these PoMo post-ironic times - it's got pictures fer gawdsake. I'm hampered here by my ignorance of marketing/sales/distribution, but: imagine something that could be sold in comic-shops (and my wide choice of creators from 80s thru 'til now was semi-deliberate to maximise the buyers-age demographic, from edgy-slightly-Retro thru to Post-Now), but also fit confortably on the shelves of Borders, W H Smiths, etc. In fact, imagine something ineffably cool that would become a compulsive must-purchase for browsers picking up their copy of Wired or Wired UK. Three/four issues becomes a collected trade-type thing that fits snugly in Waterstones in both the SF section and in amongst the Manga/Trade collections. Coffee-Table A-Go-Go!

Maybe some articles/interviews, like the old 70's Marvel mags.

If Disney/Marvel do get too uncomfortable with, er, edginess, then why not resurrect the old Curtis magazine imprint that Marvel used back in the 70s, just to distance yrself from any awkward, unpleasant stuff? If you wanna soften it slightly then re-mine Star-Hawk, Star-Lord type material and respin for the 2010s. Another go-round for Howard Chaykin on American Flagg or Monark Starstalker. I'm blunting the concept somewhat now, but you get my drift. Maybe Unknown Worlds is the regular-sized, slightly softer full-colour SF sister comics-antho book.

Science Fiction comics don't sell, you say. What about DC's Helix imprint, or their Moorcock stuff - they didn't exactly fly, did they? Good point. But this is Now. This is where a great editor, an awesome art-designer/layout guy and a supersmart marketing guy really get to earn their steak sandwhiches. There's a niche for a paper product like this, I'm sure, if you got the balance right. Oh, and maybe a super-neat back-up website with tasters, Flash animation, etc for you Hypermodernists who don' like The Physical World no more.

The full title's v. clunky-sounding in an era of shorthand one-word blipvert mag titles, but - guess what? - it's exactly what it says on the label. Science Fiction. Duhr.

2) Chamber of Darkness/Vault of Evil/Vampire Tales/etc

Well, you can see where I'm going with this. Of course there's a market for a bleeding-edge quality Horror/Dark Fantasy antho magazine or comic with quality contributors. How can there not be? You only have to look at the bulging shelves in Waterstones and W H Smiths. Shouldn't there be more illustrated stuff in amongst them? Comics don't sell? Well, perhaps you're not doing them properly.

Contributors: well, some of the above, of course...Neil Gaiman, Josh Whedon, Steve Niles, blahblahblah.

A respin of Vampire Tales for the burgeoning Goth/YA market. Oh, come on, Marvel, make it happen. Give those kids in black boots and overcoats an antho to read during those awful hot brightly-lit summer days. Endless crossover/marketing potential with various gloom.bands. An illustrated magazine w/ a free CD of miserabilistic Metal/Goth/Emo/Industrial. Monstrously big market for those brave enuff to poke around til they find the right entry-points. Probably needs to be called something like Black or Red or Death, but that's not the point. Please give my stroppy, insanely intelligent 5 y.o. youngest daughter something to read when she's older and even more stroppy. "What happens when you die, Dad?"

Teenage Angst and acknowledgement of mortality - The Inescapable Inevitability of Death - will never go out of fashion.

Next!


3) Weird Wonder Tales.

Heh. Exactly what it says. But a hypermodernist take on the original 70's run wh/ was itself reprints of even older stuff.

'Nuff said, you freakos. Come on, you know you wanna fucking read it. Especially if, um, certain people were to write and draw it. Leave a list in me comments box.

The word 'wonder' is full of potentially-dated old school connotations. But take it out and you've got...well, you know. It's a gift and you know it. Reclaim the word "wonder". Reclaim it now.


4) Gerberisation.

Rather than mining characters, why don't we also mine process?

Gerber.

For me, Gerber sums up a certain kind blend of insider-outsiderism - a snippy, snipe-y type of satirical potshot at the norm combined with surreal-absurdism and some genuine o_school literary prowess. Steve was a Hipster Moralist. At his worst - back in the day - too wordy, along w/ Don McGregor a proto-Alan Moore...but at his best; ah, well... and his more recent-ish stuff - Nevada, the final run on Howard - was a fucking master-class in something-or-other. A tragic loss.

I liked the way SG's brain worked; how he pulled things out of the ol' Brain Smoke. Pulled archetypes out of the mist and looked at them from different angles n then wrote about it until it looked like it was something new. Which it was. This was Pre-Smart Thinking. Pre-Morrison. He wrote during the first wave of Post-Modernism, but it never read or felt like Post-Modernism. I call his Process (cue spooky fanfare): Gerberisation.

My favourite Gerberisation is his creation of The Headmen - Defender's villains whose origins were (randomly?) sourced from stories/characters in Weird Wonder Tales #7, a 70's reprint mag of older Atlas (?) mystery type tales. This is a predecessor to Concept Mining - taking non-characters and amplifying their non-attributes until you create 'new' characters, or a sense of character - quite different, I think, to the now-common, usually Wikipedia/Marvel Archives-fuelled activities carried out by folks deliberately employed to, uh, do such things.

In an ideal world we should create New things from New Cloth; but unfortunately the world (ie commerce) don't necessarily swing to that particular beat...new stuff is often, uh, difficult; it creates problems. Best stay with the Old Stuff; change it a bit, adapt it to new markets, see how it plays out and if it works replay to revenue-exhaustion, then change it a bit more. Things change slowly by evolution - even comics are subject to Darwinism - they respond to the times they live in, to the Natural Selection of market forces.

So, rather than remine characters, why don't we remine process? Apply the same sort of brain-memes as, say, Gerber and apply those thought-processes or approaches to Darwinian Comic Drift? I don't mean write like the guy; copy his style (ugh! you bad person!) - do the writerly equivalent of artistic 'swipes' - but apply concept-mining methodologies that x or y might have used. After all, they're just palettes - tools - another layer of brain-muscles that can be brought to bear on a problem. And NPL tells us that any tool-kit used by someone else can be adopted/utilised by another person if they take the time to grok what the common elements are and how to apply them. Think like Steve Gerber might have done for two hours, but then write like yourself. One or two people are already doing this and I think you can guess who they might be.

The downside of all this is what I call Gerber Abuse. Writers who 'do' whacky/zany. Gah.

You are not The Children of Gerber. Go away. Grrr.

I do, however, like what I've seen of Dan Slott's Great Lake Avengers and She-Hulk. He gets it.


5) Rocket Raccoon.

Speaking of which: Rocket Raccoon.

Gerbilisation lol. Rocket Raccoon: come on then, Disney, what are you waiting for?


6) AR

Marvel should pay someone - a couple of programmers and a whatsit-guy - to build an AR iPhone app that points you towards comics-shops, retailers, etc in major cities who sell Marvel n Disneyware. It would cost 'em peanuts. If they were magnanimous about it and included other comics companies, SF n Fantasy stuff, theme-parks, blahblahblah they would frigging own the phoneworld comic-universe - a still-small portal that will soon open up into something ridiculously big and scary. It would cost them chump-change.

Also: AR apps that overlay onto physical world via iPhone camera lens with direction/compass-responsive data so that Wolverine or Deadpool or Hulk or Disney.munter.avatars react to yr phone-movements and/or smart-mouth you: "No, this way, bub! Directions ain't what you do best."

AR character downloads fo' your phone. In a few years, the characters would/will interact with the camera visuals, moving around inside the 'real'-world visuals streaming in thru the lens, etc. Big potential market here if you're not scared of change.

7) Man-Thing Fail.

Gerber rewind: why was it that only he could write Man-Thing - that most frustrating/passive/illusive of characters, one who's undergone zillions of completely unsuccessful reboots? Writing Man-Thing is like writing The Watcher, yet SG did it extremely well and with a variety of artists, not just Ploog. I've always thought that cracking Man-Thing is a gateway to something quite incredible; the character is a portal to entire universes of otherness - horror, humour, strangeness, grotesqueness, comedy, parody, fun - but no one else has ever even come close. A great run on Man-Thing is The Holy Grail. The Anti-Alan Moore Swamp Thing Run.

Why Man-Thing Fail? Think about it.




I want to go and listen to some music now.

More on all this later.

WORLDS UNKNOWN

I only ever owned #1 of this comic; again, no idea if I kept it or not. I hope so; I think it might've had a Ralph Reese strip in it.

I may have to get this one - #5 - if only for the fantastic Gil Kane cover.

THE UNKNOWN WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION

Sadly, I think I disposed of all my copies of this mag some years back. I'll have to check. Damn. I might have to buy them all back again.

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE UNKNOWN SCIENCE FICTION WRITER

A couple nights ago I dreamt I interviewed The Unknown Science Fiction Writer. Face fully bandaged up like a Fritz Bogott mummy. He was American, 'of course'.

He was telling me about the shit you needed to do to get on in this world. Heinous PR bollocks and such. I was curious about Method, 'of course'. He said: "Man, I didn't even start getting half-decent 'til, uhhhrm, the third book." This all in a timestretched Mid-Western drawl. "There's no Method; you jus' gotta do, is all..."

I was curiously bemused by this pearl o'wisdom; well, slightly irritated, actually. "You jus' gotta do, is all" sounded, I dunno, kinda facile, like some vague n vacuous Jedi homily: "Do, or do not. There is no try."

I remember dream-thinking: "What? Is that it? Is that all there is? Fuck, even I knew that..."

It seemed so hollow, so bleeding blinking obvious. I mean, 'everyone' knows there's more to it than that. But, no, when The Unknown Science Fiction Writer saw the disappointed expression on my face he just did a dreamtime *shrug* which was shorthand for well, there it is; just take it or leave it, pal.

And, 'of course', that isn't quite the end of it: if all that was required was effort then any fucker on the planet who could hold a pen or bash the keys of a typewriter would/could be a prize-winning author. It's also about distilling a certain form type of magic - and that magic varies from person to person - but the act of creation is a form of magic and of that I have no doubt, but it requires the use of certain arcane muscles in your head and for those muscles to do their stuff properly you have to put in some hours at the gym.

Did I say hours?

Sorry, I meant decades.

Digression: my favourite bestest ever piece of advice to a budding writer comes from Warren Ellis - who wheels this routine/skit out in various, ever-mutating forms whenever he's had a whiskey or two, usually when he's asked a question about writer's block or what do professional writers do when they don't feel like writing; tho sometimes he just says it for the sheer fun of saying it - just like Alan Moore likes to occasionally scare kiddies with the tale of having plotted Big Numbers in a grid of minute panels on a single sheet of A2 sized paper (or A1 or A0 - depending on where you read the story).

Basically Warren will sip his whiskey or draw on his cig and suggest that if you don't feel like writing, then you're not a writer, that you're something else: a plumber, a milkman, a fucking pub landlord. Whatever.

But you're not a writer.

Because what writers do is they fucking write.

Back in dreamtime I said to The Unknown Science Fiction Writer - and there was a weird kinda semi-sob in my voice as I said it: "Lately I've finally started to learn some useful stuff, but - but for each single thing I learn I suddenly realise there's another ten things - a hundred - that I don't know about."

He nodded slowly, his bandages creasing slightly where his mouth should've been, as if to say: ah, now you're getting it, kid...

I was feeling pretty emotional by now, so I took a deep breath. I was about to say to him: have you read anything by Tom Bradley...? but he slowly crumbled into Fritz Bogott mummy-dust - grey powder that blew around the room and the scene dissolved into black-and-white and I found myself on the Faux-Noir monochrome streets of some hemi-familar mindtown that was a composite of half-a-dozen places I've visited or films I've seen, because that's the deal, man, when your short-term memory-buffers flush themselves out into archival storage.

The interview was over.

"The Essential Massive Attack" - isn't that an oxymoron?