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| Mindswap, RTomens, 2026 |
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Shadows (excerpt)
Pale shades of evening...naïve, twitching, tottering citizens animated by the profound and the puerile...jerky shadows...the procession of twisted corpses...strange beings damned alive...all must endure in the grave city.
Tongues are heard far away in the universe...
Time and space devour the damned...cold stars flash mechanically...
From the shores of death....I am the dagger and the wound...
Abstract thoughts...turning the individual...influencing a person's behaviour.
Past forms are charged with madness, the poison flows...a sad tomorrow...perceptions of reality continue to influence a person's attitudes...victims and executioners meet memories of the past...
Feet scurried in the yard. I held my gun steady, barrel pointing up toward the sky. I could see a single star above. Suddenly a gaunt yellow face hid the star from my view. The face started to shout and I fired. The face disintegrated and I jumped straight up, put a foot on the edge of the can and vaulted over.
A chorus of shrill yells came from various parts of the yard. Flashlight beams flitted about. I stepped over the body of the Chinaman who lay alongside the garbage can and darted across the yard. From the window above, Foh Shen-Li shouted in shrill sing-song dialect, “Shoot! Shoot now! He must not escape!”
I swung my gun up and took a pot-shot at the sound of Shen-Li’s voice but missed because wood splintered the framework of the window up there.
Lead winged past me. One slug tore at my sleeve but I reached the fence unwounded.
A dark shape hurtled at me and I straight-armed that shape with the hand that held the gun. The shape yelped and collapsed.
I hoisted myself up on a garbage can alongside the fence and jumped. Shouts rose to a tumultuous crescendo behind me; a gun barked from the window above and just at that moment my foot caught on a projecting nail as I was clearing the fence. My arms went out wildly into the air and I hurtled over into the next yard. I landed heavily on concrete, the breath knocked out of me for the second. Then I got up and felt about for my gun which I had dropped when I fell, picked it up, and sped away through the yard, down an alley...
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| Spider-Man and Havoc 205, 1987 |
When I came across vibraphonist Freddie McCoy's Spider Man album from 1966 I thought it must have been to cash in on the TV series but that didn't debut until '67 so we can only assume that Freddie was simply a fan of Marvel comics and Spider Man in particular. Either way, arch publicist Stan Lee must have loved the fact that Spidey graced an album sleeve and a Jazz one at that. I wonder what the artist, Steve Ditko, thought. Not that Freddie exactly oozes Jazz chops on this album. It's a lightweight affair, aimed at who, I don't know. The tracks are all brief, having little space for anyone to do much more that briefly solo before returning to the tune. Bachelor pad music, perhaps.
I did warn you; Bobby Hutcherson, it isn't, although I could imagine it going down well in the kinds of Jazz clubs I went to in 80s Soho. This is Bobby Hutcherson...
TTFN
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