Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it? - Shadow Of A Doubt, 1943
The Shadows project continues. I try different techniques, styles, approaches...looking for not only one but possibly two or three that will work to my satisfaction. This is personal, I told myself the other day. It's personal in that it's taken so long to come to fruition; I've lived with it for a long time.
More than that, it's personal because although it will appear in printed form and be available to purchase I know it won't have much appeal to anyone. It'll be even harder to sell than visual poetry. Why? because it will be something other than visual poetry, yet include elements of it. It will be something other than a comic, ie a narrative told in pictorial/text sequences, although it will naturally have a sequence of my own making which, perhaps, only I will partly understand.
The lack of conclusion in the 'story' will mirror its contents. There will be no neat ending. How can the mystery end? Because...
If, as is often suggested, we make art first and foremost for ourselves, Shadows represents that idea totally. If only I feel a real sense of satisfaction when it is printed, so be it. It would please me greatly though, of course, should anyone buy it and get something from it.
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...
*
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...
The title was possibly influenced by reading HP Lovecraft recently, so it became Signs From rather than The Colour Out Of...and as I said to my friend who works in the charity shop when discussing Lovecraft it's his very dryness, his sort of academic prose style that makes him so distinctive, not only that, of course, but, you know, the way he describes horror situations as if they are field reports by a scientist rather than a fictioneer bent on thrilling the reader - know what I mean?
There's a playlist of Lovecraftian metal on Spotify.
Staying metallic: this morning whilst working on a new piece I've been 'listening' to Under The Sign Of The Black Mark by Bathory who, as you know, made metal noise as good as anyone, probably better than most...but I'm no expert. Take this, Chariot Of Fire. And. What I like so much about it is the drum sound so rapid-fire as to become mechanical to the point of almost become Thrash Techno. Right?
And what could be more logical than to follow that sonic representation of horror with a master illustrator, Graham Ingels and the superb Fantagraphics book, Doctor of Horror...a 'Ghastly' treat!
Yes, people like Thelma do exist! They did exist when this comic strip panel was created (1952) and still do - so what? It doesn't matter how other people see art...unless they directly hamper any progress you should wish to meke...as in someone important that you meet looks at your art and says 'I like pictures that look like something!' and shows you the door. Why did you want to impress them anyway? They own a gallery? They act as agents for artists? Etc...
When I was a lot younger it would bother me that some people didn't 'understand' art, as in even old-fashioned abstract art. Perhaps I still felt it was a battle to 'win' and worth arguing about. Pah! What a waste of time. People have different opinions and taste. That's all. So what if the Thelmas (and male equivalents) of this world only want pictures that look like something.
Here's a print I made a few days ago:
RTomens 2026
I've been called a snob many times for just knowing what I like and some of those things being 'obscure'. My accusers only saw part of the picture, though. I love Motown records. Snobbish? Hardly. I love old reggae tunes, John Wayne films, Laurel & Hardy and Pop Art. Do any of those signify snobbery?
These days you can find people online with similar taste to you in obscure music, Art, books etc. In a way, it takes the fun out of it, although I did used to pine for like-minded souls before the internet and once found they were seen as rare treasures. It might be that friend of a friend you were introduced to in a bar. That someone in a club. A chance encounter on the tube with someone reading The Ticket That Exploded.
People who were actual flesh and bone rather than just names on a screen were akin to records, physical vinyl. They meant something other than virtual 'friends' never to be met and streaming music. You had to make an effort to get both. You could touch them, smell them, get a feeling from them via eye-to-eye contact...the record sleeve, the handshake or hug...
(Talking of records, in a charity shop the other day I overheard a young girl tell the shop assistant that she'd just spent fifteen pounds on vinyl, to which the woman (aged around 45) replied 'Do you have a vinyl player?'. A vinyl player?!!! It's a record-player! And the plural of vinyl is vinyl, not 'vinyls'! God that annoys me. Since when did records become 'vinyls'?)
I don't know if young people still go to bars and clubs and discuss music, art and books. It's easy to think that regarding culture this is a lost generation (well, their culture is different, it's largely online). But I often see lots of kids hanging around music venues in Camden so there are still are 'scenes'. I would hope their music annoys their parents but I fear that their parents are 'liberal' and tolerant in that respect. Parents take their kids to festivals nowadays, for god's sake.
I like to think there are teenagers out there proudly being 'snobbish' about the culture they like; reading obscure books and listening to obscure music. With 'everything' now being available online though, I suspect that any underground scene worthy of the name would have to be either offline, or so miniscule as to avoid attention. It would certainly escape the notice of this old fart.
Mine are often (not always) about nothing. But then...
are they really poems?
No.
*
When I worked in the bookshop I'd play Thee Headcoats and other Medway bands' music regularly. It seemed to suit the place, the place being a bit ramshackle, rough, raw around the edges. I found this book in the local charity shop the other day...
That sparked a fresh wave of Medway Sound listening again.
Chatham is a Medway town. It's the only town I've ever visited that actually made me depressed.
Rochester is good.
Gillingham is great for a walk where the River Medway opens up.
Heading East from the Medway towns you come to Faversham and a fantastic boat yard.
It's the kind of place I'd like to live...in a shack...alongside the creek...
...away from all the big city crap...with men who while away the days patching up their boats...get a bulldog and learn to play the banjo...drive an old Jeep...I can dream of the alternate lifestyle...
Typewriter Jim asked me to contribute to his demonstration at the UCL event. It was the kind of college demonstration I could get behind, you know, not the political kind, but a demonstration of the spirit duplicator machine and Gestetner mimmeo printing. So I created about a dozen pieces using the required carbon paper, then he rolled them out on the day as part of pages made by others to be collated as a magazine.
Here's the machine in action...
The UCL has a large collection of underground press, some of which was laid out on a table for visitors to look through.
This is Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag.
The college also took my latest production, Mind Games, for their collection.
I made Private Lives late last year and a few weeks later found myself reading The Gas by Charles Platt. One reflects on privacy and what goes on behind closed doors, the other depicts a country (England) driven sex mad by gas leaked from a military lab. 'Why don't we do it it in the road?' indeed.
If sex circa 1970 in relation to the 60s 'revolution' was supposedly about liberation, Platt drives that idea to an horrific extreme in which no-one can control their desires and sex is not a choice but a compulsion. The results are repulsive and Platt doesn't hesitate to describe them in graphic detail. It's an extraordinary piece of fiction, a grotesque twist on disaster sci-fi...pulpy, conceptual, pornographic and possibly profound, if you like to read it that way. Not for the faint-hearted.
I've given up trying to be smarter than I already am. Perhaps, once upon a time, long ago, I tried. I may have tried in my twenties, for the very first time. What did that entail? Reading 'smart' books. Or were they just books by smart people? Smart people can't write terrible books, but they can write ones you find boring...incomprehensible, annoying etc.
It's not as if we fall into comprehensive categories, is it? That brain surgeon is hopeless at DIY and that rocket scientist can barely dress properly. Can we therefore call them smart? Really? Is there a total person, adept at practical and intellectual tasks?
You may watch lumps of flesh pounding the pavements as I often do outside a cafe and think 'Brainless idiot!' But you're being cruel. Supposing they were as brainless as they appear; it isn't their fault. They were dealt a hand at birth? Environment? Parents? Socio-economic situation? And even if it is their fault because they never once tried to learn anything except the basics such as walking and eating, it was their choice.
A few weeks ago I thought I'd challenge myself by reading Jorge Luis Borges. The Labyrinths collection had been sitting on my shelf for years but I didn't just start reading that, oh no, I bought The Complete Fictions. I was quite serious. It's chronological so, to begin with, A Universal History of Iniquity (1935). I read all the stories. Then Fictions (1945) and the 'story', Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius...dammit! I was defeated...I fell at the first real hurdle, closing the book with a sigh and, you might imagine, if I was a cartoon character, steam hissing from my ears. Pah! I've not given up on Borges and will return to him as soon as I've got over this...event.
So I turned to another recent purchase, bought because of Borges, who was a fan of G.K.Chesterton's Father Brown stories. Again, I bought the complete collection in one volume and read the first, The Blue Cross, which I enjoyed. How could you not enjoy such a refreshing approach to the crime story and a masterful display of writing? Then halfway through the second story, The Secret Garden, it dawned on me that I had lost the plot. Or to try and be more precise, lost track of the characters involved. Oh please...
Am I really so stupid?
I blame the internet. As part of the bridging generation, from no-internet life to internet life, I move from addiction to resistance. A common scenario, I'm sure. I check in online frequently, but rarely stay long. Long enough though, it seems, to become another victim of concentration deficit. Bah!
Unfortunately, the internet being my gallery without walls, I must tune in regularly. If not for my art, perhaps I would visit less often. Then again, as a virtual hermit, socially, I might have to go online to talk to 'friends'. I've heard people describe books as their 'friends' and thought, 'How sad that is', yet I'm in no better position, perhaps even worse since my ability to engage with even those 'friends' seems to be rapidly diminishing!
*
Yesterday as I waited for the bus...'it was cold and it rained and I felt like an actor' so I looked into a puddle and took a photo.
I've been listening to other types of rain, Black Rain and (appropriately, considering my 'art' and struggles with reading), Rain Text. Black Rain are a new discovery for me but they began in 1992. I can't say what, if anything, marks them out from all the other Dark/Techno/Ambient artists, but they have something that I find...engaging...satisfying. Perhaps it's that balance between the genres that they put together so well. That or the fact that, recently, with the onset of Autumn, their music suits the mood I frequently find myself in.
Rain Text are Giuseppe Ielasi & Giovanni Civitenga. III is their first album, just released on SAGOME. Don't rush to judgment should you decide to give it a casual liste and skip through - no, give it time - that's it - relax with a cup of tea, light a pipe, put your feet up, clamp on or insert the headphones...and you'll find a lot more going on than may first appear. How can I put it? The compositions may not be packed with complexities or heavyweight sonics, so it seems, yet there's much to be said for the way the pair juggle sounds, jiggle sounds, even, from percussive patterns to concrete pavement gritty ambience; perfect soundtracks for moody weather...even, to borrow the film title, a seance on a wet afternoon.
Whilst speaking to someone recently the subject of slimming down our book collections came up and I asked her for her Top Ten. Then I gave her mine. This is it:
The Outsider - Camus
Nova Express - Burroughs
Don Quixote - Cervantes
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
Our Man In Havana - Graham Greene
Nineteen-Eighty-Four - you-know-who
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
On The Road - Kerouac
The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
Double Indemnity - James M. Cain
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RTomens, 2024
I've not blogged for a while, mostly been typing but - .....
recently I decided to return to collage (see above) and...
since it involves architecture perhaps, subconsciously, this was dictated by the forthcoming work on our flat due to be started on Monday - the dread - I hate workman invading my space and this will be a four-day interruption of my usual existence which may not be fun-filled or action-packed but it is my routine and that involves making art, the disruption of which would normally involve homicide but cannot until the work is done, after which I shall be too relieved to want to kill them...
*
A recent post by Simon Reynolds alerted me to the existence of Andrew Rudin, for which I'm extremely grateful. As Simon says: 'love to listen to this stuff but I'm not sure I really understand it beyond "that's a bunch of cool weird noises in a pattern" ', which is a brave (?) admission but one I can relate too and, if truth be told, so can most of us humble fans of avant-garde electronic music. Yes, there will, in many cases, be an intellectual/musical explanation of the complex arrangements and technical expertise and I even have some in books on the genre but there's no way I'm going to try and decipher what's written. Meanwhile, you might enjoy these 'weird noises' and as a bonus, visuals by Rudin himself...
...walking towards the high street he dreams of the ultimate high...
...a novel that reads like a cross between Mickey Spillane, Jean Paul Sartre & Ray Bradbury...violent, philosophical speculative fiction...mmmm...ye-e-ess...
...he wants his prose hardboiled, ideas deep and the setting, that dystopian future every's always talking about...
...yes, an existential science-fiction thriller...dames, guns, aliens, mind control...James M. Cain meets Albert Camus and Brian Aldiss? He reckons there's probably blurb on some book that claims to fulfill his dream, even though he's never seen one...beware of the blurb...written by friends of the author or hacks hoping to look smart whilst selling a fix upon which their living depends...heh-heh...watch out for them...
Well, he doesn't find it - surprise, surprise...has to make do with a more common kind of fix. But he still dreams...
*
Yes, look at that on Facebook...and the numbers are still rising as I write. I show it not to boast, just in bewilderment. You never know what will 'take off'. It's not as if it's The Best Thing I've Done IMO, but then, others may disagree. Someone messages me privately, wondering why he's never seen my work before. That's the internet for you. The gallery without walls...vast...endless...and sometimes someone wanders in and notices what I do. So it goes!
'Clack-thump-clack-thump-clack-thump' (the visualpoet types whilst listening to Techno)
Music always accompanies my typing. What I listen to may even influence what I produce.
It depends what I'm in the mood for.
Abstract early Electronic. Metal. Punk. Or...
Techno perfectly mirrors the movement of my fingers and the clack of the keys - repetition - its relentless momentum spurs me on. Lately I've only listened to Techno whilst typing; specifically, a playlist called 'Berlin Techno', which contains 315 'songs'.
Here's a recent piece...
RTomens, 2024
*
'The terrifying, cataclysmic sound of over 8 billion mirrors cracking, splintering, shattering into pieces reverberates throughout ever locale on earth, a piercing, eerie sound whose decibels test the tympana. The central nervous system of most is scored; the psyche disordered; the eyes emaciated.'
So it begins. What, exactly? I cannot tell you, having only read the first three parts of Dionysos Speed by Rainer J. Hanshe, founder of Contra Mundum Press. Suffice to say that everything and everyone is changed. Every attempt to write text via iPhones or computers produces the same messages (some garbled text). All photos of the self are rendered headless. Flesh becomes outmoded, as does the concept of immortality. Hanshe depicts the hyperworld (?), a future that's one click away, in another dimension? Another few years, even. Rather than try to describe the prose style, I give a sample...
I shouldn't write a 'review' of an unfinished book but this is the most exciting thing I've read in a long time. 'Exciting'? I mean interesting. I mean fiction that looks at a future via prose which has, appropriately, jettisoned conventional storytelling. It's Speculative Fiction which, like William Burroughs in his cut-up trilogy, utilises new ways to imagine altered states and an altered world. You can sense Bill's ghost guiding Hanshe's fingers - those dead fingers talk. What they tell you about is not a world you would like to live in and yet in a sense, we already do.
It's when you can't settle into a book but keep flitting from one to another.
You never do that? Good for you. But I've been flitting for the last few weeks...fresh starts that turn stale when words fail to hold me in their grip. That's me. I experience these phases about four times a year. No, make that seven. Or ten?
LJ's reading Carly Simon's Boys In The Trees so whilst we're drinking gin in the summer sun I select You're So Vain. We drink and drink whilst I play DJ with songs we both choose, moving from Prog to Teddy Pendergrass. We drink, but not half as much as Geoffrey Firmin in Lowry's Under The Volcano, of course. The latest book to get the boot. I was determined, I was, but cracked at page 62. I told my friend in the bookshop. He said it was one of his favourite books and I should 'persevere' - pah! - I don't want to have to persevere when I read, thanks.
Whilst grappling with Lowry's convoluted prose Graham Greene sprang to mind since the Consul features in Under The Volcano so I thought of Greene's Honorary Consul and how much I preferred the Berkhamsted boy's work to that by the one from New Brighton. Lowry had one supposedly great novel in him. Greene had several. Not that the width a writer forms on your shelf necessarily means anything. Never mind the quality, feel the width! No. But GG still beats ML for me.
*
RTomens, 2024
A recent collage - made three days ago. I'm an Art Worker now, officially. I gave myself the job. I'm still typing, of course...
RTomens, 2024
Someone recently asked if I'd made any videos or written about my 'technique'. I haven't. Not that it's a bad idea, just that I'm not one to talk much about it at length. Who's that interested? Then again, if I worried about numbers, about how many people were interested, I'd probably give up. Talking of interest and response, look at this. I know how, but don't understand why. What's makes that one so special? When posting in the gallery without walls, you never can tell...
It's like a new box set of your favourite pop star featuring bonus tracks...only there's no barrel scraping equivalent of 'Born To Run' (Take 5, incomplete).
No, I know Bruce Springsteen isn't your favourite pop star but you get my point.
Ballard never wrote about music, as far as I know. Perhaps it wasn't as important to him as Surrealist art or William Burroughs. Still, if forced to imagine him listening to anything I would suggest Classical music playing quietly in the background whilst he conjures up beach scenes in dream landscapes (Debussy?) or Trad Jazz (quietly) as old-time nostalgia for an age he never knew.
Really, ideally, placing him at the birth of the Independent Group as a new sci-fi short story writer in the mid-50s the soundtrack should be Modern Jazz but he wasn't that hip. Like William Burroughs, he always looked like a businessman, a square from the suburbs, a conformist. That's the best disguise for a radical writer, ensuring nobody in the street will suspect and start asking questions. Shh...
Although he didn't write about music bands such as Joy Division, The Normal and Cabaret Voltaire were undoubtedly influenced by him. Others too, no doubt, but not Gary Numan just because he wrote a song called Cars. Surely. But I don't know. Perhaps Gary new Ballard inside out.
Without having read all of this book I can say a highlight is his review of How To Achieve Sexual Ecstasy from 1969. He recommends the book, despite describing it as '...a nostalgic hymn to a kind of sexual garden of Eden' which fails to chime with looser attitudes of the day.
One thing's for sure, no matter how times and attitudes change, Ballard's writing will never feel outdated.
I've spent the last few days in the Space Age - nothing new in that, except to say that recently I've been focused on both interplanetary and inner space, travelling back in time to the golden (space) age optimism of the 50s, hence the collage above - and towards a future (The Future?) where my bank balance is considerably smaller thanks to Stephen E. Andrews' YouTube channel. That's a recent discovery. In a reasoned, well-informed manner, Stephen explains why books he chooses should be read.
I won't spoil your enjoyment by naming the books he chooses for his Top 25 in two videos, suffice to say I agree with some of the choices and haven't read a lot of them. I have an on/off love affair with sci-fi; thinking it's the greatest genre one minute, then the most stupid. It's the first genre I read as a mid-teenager, naturally choosing the big names such as Asimov, Clarke and Herbert.
Its appeal probably stems from the fact that I was always accused of just 'staring into space' as a kid - it's true, I was, but not Outer Space, no, inner space more like or, actually, that weird zone between what I could see out of the classroom window and what was between, without focus...a mental drift into another dimension, my eyes not seeing anything clearly...my mind altered to suit another dimension.
Fast forward through many decades' reading and I've always dipped into science-fiction but spent more time with writers such as Graham Green and the hard-boiled school (Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, for instance). Yet there is a connection. J.G.Ballard is on record as a big fan of Greene. In the latest collection of Ballard's writing there's an essay on G.G. It's a great book and I'll be reviewing it soon.
William Burroughs is another writer I've been into for years. The connection between hard-boiled American writers and WSB is also there in Bill's perversion of pulp fiction and the private eye (or 'private asshole'). His use of street slang ('Wising up the marks') and the exploits of the Nova Police.
It was good to see Burroughs in Andrews' Top 25. He's too radical for most sci-fi fans, I would guess. Whilst the early ideas of space travel and alien menace seems 'radical' on paper, it became a hackneyed cliche, a space trap into which all sci-fi writers seemed to fall, the end results being no more than Boys Own adventures in space. Well, as Ballard once said when explaining the appeal of sci-fi to him as a young man, at least no-one lived in Hampstead. Burroughs, meanwhile, was rewriting the book, exploiting space-age cliches to radically alter literature and our perception of time through extensive use of cut-up texts which sampled Graham Green, Conrad and a host of others. It felt to me upon discovering his universe that this was 'true' science-fiction; speculative texts for the multi-media overload age.
Stephens' Top 25 got me thinking. I'm in no position as an expert to name that many but here are 10 that would be in my chart. In no particular order:
Nova Express - William Burroughs
Hard To Be A God - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The Man Who Fell To Earth - Walter Tevis
The Atrocity Exhibition - J.G Ballard
The Death of Grass - John Christopher
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philp K. Dick
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
I'm bound to have forgotten some!
Here's Stephen's first 25. His channel is highly recommended.
