Category Archives: Writing

The Frozen South

The Frozen SouthFell out into the world this morning, and as everyone and their dog will have already informed you, it snowed in London last night. And by god, have we made a big deal out of this. But let’s be sensible about this: it was a snow day. We might need used to them, because if the gulf stream gets fucked in the ear by climate change, as I understand looks reasonable likely, then Britain’s going the get the climate its latitude deserves. Still, as days go, it was kinda nice. Worked from home, found time to nip out and get a few pics, and to have lunch at the pub with Sarah to generally conspire and set the world to rights, as is our usual MO.

But photos and lunch with friends are part of my usual lifestyle. What was lovely, though, was the little slices of magic I kept stumbling over as I walked down the back streets. An Asian family, with 4 kids between the ages of about 5 and 15, spilling out of their house, playing in the snow, more or less just diving into the stuff as they horsed about. Dad leant on the gatepost with a video camera in his had, watching the kids horse about. And all of them, the youngest to the eldest had the same sort of expression on their face, of sheer bloody rapt delight. “We only moved here 18 months ago. This is the first time we’ve seen snow like this.”

I watched them play for a minute or two, and ambled on down the street, only to get clipped on the shoulder by a snowball. I turn my head, and two girls of about ten ducked their heads back inside from the upper window they were giggling at, scraping the snow of the ledge to ambush the unwary.

A bit further down the street, I stopped to help push a young woman’s car up the camber of the road when she couldn’t get traction, so she could get on her way – me and another guy trying to get out backs into it without the feet going out from under us, both of us straining and laughing at the absurdity of having to shove a car just these few feet away from the kerb.

The cemetery entrance drive, full of kids throwing snowballs and building snowmen, but never going further than the drive – the rest of the graveyard pristine and white and solemn and silent like something out of a postcard.

Just for once, the weather in this country being a thing people took a bit of time to enjoy, rather than complain about.

The Hobgoblin Of A Small Mind

In conversation with some friends tonight, it was pointed out to me that I am logically inconsistent. We started out with a conversation about BDSM over noodles, as one so often does. My position on this is that of a reasonable human being: “your kink is not my kink, but your kink is OK”. Provided of course, that your kink has one, two, or more consenting adult humans involved.

But then we got onto the issue of what it is possible to consent to (the context, of course, being that there are certain acts that law says it is not possible to consent to, and that list will get broader in a week or two). Now, as I say, if you want to let someone at your reproductive bits with any sort of implement, then that’s fine by me. All parties around the noodles were definitely agreed on that. But I do, for example, believe that it should not be possible to give your consent to being killed. (I am of course, thinking of the case of Armin Meiwes in German a few years back.)

Except that I believe in assisted suicide. My friends picked me up on this. And my response was that well, I believe in assisted suicide when someone’s quality of life is so awful as to be unbearable, and, in the opinion of a trained medical third party, is unlikely to improve. But if there’s a chance someone’s life could get back to bearable state, then they ought to keep going and that the urge of a person with a reasonable quailty of life (or a reasonable hope of same in the view of a third party) to simply end was the product of an abberant mental state that could be reasonably held in invalidate consent. (I should make it clear: this is not a judgement on people who feel like this, I simply feel that it is society’s duty to help people who feel like this to not feel like this, rather than to help them to shuffle off.)

“Why?” I was not unreasonably asked. Because, when you get down to it, I am a big communist hippy. Someone dying for no other reason than “just because they wish to right now” removes not just themselves, but all that they might ever be, from the world, and I think we owe it to our fellow man to hang about in case we can be useful later.

“Ah!” my friends then said: “So you’re pro-life?”

But I am not. I’m a good pro-choice boy, thanks. But, of course the death of a foetus deprives our fellow man of all they might be.

Bollocks. So, how do I reconcile this? Honestly, I think it has something to do with sentience. But I don’t seem to be able to nail it down very well, because, well, a foetus in sentience in potentia, isn’t it?

So, either I need to reconcile these views somehow, or I need to admit that it’s OK to help someone top themselves just because they’re having a bit of a bad day. But then, so does our justice system, so I’m hardly alone. But while I’m mulling it over, I wondered if anyone had any clever thoughts on how these positions could be made to fit together?

A Commercial Interlude

For some years now, my friend Lee “Budgie” Barnett has been running an ongoing writing challenge on his blog, and producing some truly excellent pieces of short fiction as a result. He has finally collected the results into a book format, available for £6.50, which I believe works out at around ten of your yanqui dollars, for 180 perfectly formed little bombs of fiction calculated to appeal to even the most stunted of attention spans.

You need to go and buy this book. At once, if not sooner.

Restart

RestartIt’s the end of a hungover dog of a Friday, there’s a major project going live at work on Tuesday, for which I have bben hurridly coding most of the day, I’m slowly getting the hang of this Twitter business, and I’m going to spend my weekend with a small horde of people infesting my house. Again.

Spent last night out with a collection of very clever bastards getting very savagely drunk. Possibility of getting involved on the tech side of a fairly interesting project came up, and digits are duly crossed that something comes of it. The plan for tonight is a bit of shopping, in order to be able to feed the hordes when they arrive tomorrow, a bit of tidying up, some fixing of my recalcitrant printer, so I can finally make good on some prints I promised people, and decorate my new office properly (about which, almost certainly more later, as I am quite ridiculously enthused about it), and a last going over of some notes to get them into useable state before tomorrow.

Which is all by way of saying: back to blogging at http://www.black-ink.org again. No plan for any theme, other than the general random crap that occurs to me, but not going to limit the range of topics. Most of them won’t be what-I-had-for-breakfast shit like this, but I thought I’d start with a general state of my life on an otherwise ordinary day, just to set the scene.

2008 – The Year Of Living Boringly

I was going to do one of those year in review things, but then I realised I could do it in two sentences:

It’s been a shit couple of months at the end of a boring year. I have not enjoyed 2008, and that’s really no-one’s fault but my own.

So, 2009 is going to a be a year where I take the universe by the throat again. Honest. And in that spirit, here are a few of my plans for the year:

Bungee Jump. I’ve never thrown myself off a tall object. This is obviously a moral failing, and must be rectified.

Hallucinogens. I’ve never taken any. Always wanted to, just never found the opportunity. I would like to do something about that.

Travel. I make a semi-joke out of the fact that I don’t leave London, but it’s been 5 years now since I was out of London for longer than a week. So, Toronto. Some time in the spring, probably. Because the number of friends I have in that city is getting truly stupid, for a place I’ve never been. May attempt to tack a New York swing onto that, may save New York for either the autumn, or more likely, 2010.

More Exercise. About the only thing I impressed myself with this year was the progress I made on the exercise front. I’ve let that slip over the last three weeks, just because I’ve been busy stuffing my greedy fat face, but it’s time to get back on the horse. On the 2nd, obviously.

Fiction. In my case, this translates to running RPGs or various stripes, because I’m a big geek. But I approach RPGs in much the same manner I approach any creative endeavour, with the same hideous perfectionism and insecurity, and on that basis I will fight anyone who suggest that running or playing in a really good game is not a legitimate field of art. I’m already involved in the running of two regular LARPs, and one tabletop, so that’s probably about my limit for ongoing running, but I have decided I need some more short form practice – one offs, mostly, but also, limited runs of 3-6 sessions.

Photography. This makes the list every year, in a must-do-more and must-attempt-to-make-money sense. These things remain true, but I am more or less at peace with the fact that while I don’t produce a lot, and it’s of fuck all commercial value, I am very happy with what I produce. Still: must produce more things I am happy with. Am considering some kind of 365 days thing, just for the discipline, but will have to work out how to do in a manner that pleases me.

New Lens. Yeah I know it’s materialistic. But I find that if I have my really big purchase for a year planned in advance, I am less tempted by the random smaller shiny things. I know the beast I would like, and will have to see how I can juggle things to afford it after my birthday, I think, because it’s a massive beast.

New Ink. This remains a strong maybe, rather than a commitment. It’s something I would like, but it’s also something I’m not going to do until I’m sure of exactly what I want. Got a couple of strong contenders for phrases, but no real sense of the design or placement of either that excites, so will have to wait.

Right, better go and get some stuff set up. I hope your New Year goes well, and that your 2009 is better than your 2008. May your hand always be stretched out in friendship and never in want.

The Pleasure/Space Ratio

I am currently conducting a sizeable purge of my life.

I am dividing everything I own into three piles.

1) This item is useful, or contains useful information.
2) This item is not useful, but simply owning it brings me pleasure on at least a monthly basis, and the item is not larger than quite a small breadbox.
3) This item is not useful and is not small, and should be binned.

(Definition of “useful” is not limited to the strictly practical, and includes entertainment value – books, CDs and DVDs and similar are automatically “useful” as long they’re good.)

You would be amazed at the amount of stuff I have acquired that this does not cover. In future, I shall refer to this simple series of questions when evaluating whether or not I need to own something:

“Is it useful? Is it funny? Does it cause Is it larger than a breadbox?”

It’s Back

Oh, that’s much better. I can type looking straight ahead again. The screen’s a proper size. On the one hand, it’s kind of sad that I really did miss this computer, and on the other, well, it’s my main workstation for a reason.

There’s a bit in Accelerando (which you should all read, available free at the link if you’re too cheap to pay for it) where one of the leads is cut off from the various electronic devices that are perpetually about his person, connecting him the internet cloud, and suffers for it, because so much of his intellect is distributed outside the two and a half pounds of grey matter in his skull.

Obviously, not yet being an electric posthuman (there’s a joke for a certain type and vintage of comic reader) my intellect remains locked inside my head, but still: there was a point the morning that this beast died, and my laptop was running on only battery charge, where I was very keenly aware that without them, and particularly without this machine, I am missing a vital set of tools that I use to run my life – data files, organisers, indexes and a weirdly cross-referenced archive of notes, research and random crap I’ve accumulated over the last decade. There was a genuine sense of mild panic at the prospect being cut off from it, or at least, reduced to accessing it in a less-than-optimal manner. I sort of feel like I’m doing the electronic equivalent of getting by after a trip, looking around the room, and sighing in contentment because it’s good to be home.

Mind you, I’m also bloody territorial about my computers. This one, particularly. I don’t mind someone using my laptop for periods, to look something up quickly, or even just because they can’t get on-line for some reason. I prefer to be in the room while they do. Not y’know, looking over their shoulder, or anything, but just present. And my laptop is the “public” machine. It doesn’t have my proper archive on it, or half the passwords and tools that this does.

But this one, frankly, I could be having the most appallingly intimate relationship with someone, in a knows-where-the-bodies-are-buried-and-exactly-what-buttons-to-push way, and I’d still be leery of letting them use this machine. In some ways, it really does feel like an extension of my brain.

It also occurs to me that this is the longest piece of writing I’ve done in weeks. Hmmm.

Does anyone else get like this about their computers? Or am I the freak again?

Ghosts That Sell Memories

There aren’t many artists that get a standing ovation before they’ve started playing. When Tom Waits walked on stage last night, the crowd were on their feet at once. I’m trying to find something more meaningful to say than that, something that’ll explain what this gig was, what it was like, why on earth I would fork out over two hundred quid (including travel expenses etc) to go see him, so bear with me if this is a little incoherent.

I’m very, very fortunate – I’m the only person I know who has seen him live not once, but twice. Firstly in London, for the Real Gone tour in 2004, and then yesterday in Edinburgh as part of his current Glitter and Doom tour.

Real Gone was an album tour, and was focused on that album – he played other stuff, too, but it was very much about that album. Glitter and Doom felt like a career retrospective – his personal favourites of his work, perhaps – at one point, when the crowd were shouting between songs, asking for their particular favourites, he paused and growled “Well, those are all requests – but they’re *your* requests” before getting on with whatever he damn well wanted to play.

And what he wanted to play was damn fine. I particularly enjoyed the way that so many of the songs were reinterpretations of his earlier work – not so heavily different that they felt spoiled, but enough that they felt excitingly fresh and new – not like heaving them for the first time, but enough that if felt like a privilege to be there, to hear these distinct versions of his songs.

Highlights of the night for me were Hoist That Rag, hearing the thumping percussion and listening him to him rasp “The cracked bell rings and the ghost bird sings/The gods go begging here”, the collection of down-and-outs “handcuffed to the bishop and the barbershop liar” in Bottom Of The World, and him inviting the audience to join him on the chorus of “Innocent When You Dream” which has probably taken the lead as the single most touchingly magical gig moment of my life, one that genuinely brought a tear to my eye, and then, during the encore, a track I really didn’t expect him to do, “9th and Hennepin”, because it’s not really a song – it’s a monologue set to some minimal percussion, but it’s that track that probably provides the best explanation of why I would pay 200 quid and trek the length of the country to see him.

You see Waits isn’t just my favourite recording artist, he’s one of my favourite writers, period. He’s got a knack for imagery that very, very few people can match. You can’t read a review of Waits without the writer going on about the world he’s created for his songs to inhabit – this slice of twisted carnival Americana, of three-time losers and late night blues bars, and the reason they all do is because the quality of his writing is so very strong, and doubly so when coupled with his perfectly pitched delivery, and it the imagery he evokes in every song so memorable and lasting.

“Such a crumbling beauty, ah
There’s nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won’t fix
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse
With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific going by
And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
til you’re full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen…”

And all too soon, off he went, to another standing ovation, his third of the night. I’m honestly not sure what my upper limit for seeing him perform again would be, but it’s certainly higher for him than for any other artist. 200 quid, and worth every penny. Hope he’s back soon.

Have You Ever Had A Religious Experience?

As in: the absolute certainty that an external entity whose nature you cannot define has just reached inside you, and switched something around such that your comprehension of the world and your place in it can never, ever, be the same again?

I have, once, about five years back. It’s not something you’ll ever get me to talk about. I have my suspicions as to what it really was was, but nonetheless, the easiest definition of it is a religious experience. I firmly believe that no-one who hasn’t had that Damascene moment has any business claiming to have “faith” in a damn thing, because what they’re doing is believing in a Sky Daddy because someone told them to, not because they genuinely feel it. (Actually, I think that even people who have had a moment like that are believing in a Sky Daddy, but I digress – tonight’s topic is not the nature of faith.)

The reason I bring it up is that I am back from a My Bloody Valentine gig. It was not a religious experience. But it was as close to an artificially induced one as I have ever come.

I have been to an awful lot of gigs, by many different kinds of band. I have been to extreme metal nights. I have been to quiet folk nights. I have been chemically off my tits at dance nights. I have left gigs and clubs going “that was awesome!” and “wow!” and “fucking brilliant!” I have never, ever before left a gig shaking slightly, and needing to take a few minutes on autopilot while I got my brain back up to full cognition because the sound had obliterated all concious thought for the ten minutes before.

I know and love the vibration of heavy bass. This was not that. This was, sound as full body immersion, sound as a physical thing, as a taste. It has almost certainly changed my relationship with music in the same way that eating Heston Blumenthal’s cooking changed my relationship with food.

Yes, it’s all explicable as “sensory overload”. That’s exactly what it was. Sound, and sound alone having the same effect as drugs. Here, then, is my question: why have I not seen a band outside of MBV doing this? Why can I not go to a gig like that more than once in 15 years?

You Know I Could Stay Here All Night

Friday. End of a week off (which is why I haven’t been about/replying to email much). Spent it doing the spring cleaning I’ve been putting off for a month or so now.

Spring cleaning was soundtracked by Billy Bragg, The Dropkicks and the Levellers, so naturally, what I feel I should be doing now is smashing the state in some way. I may compensate by reading another chapter or two of Demand The Impossible, a book on the history of anarchism that I never got around to finishing, largely because it had migrated to somewhere under the bed.

Speaking of books – I seem to have acquired a copy of “The Watcher’s Guide” volume 2 of a series of Buffy annotations books, the sort of thing that I’d never have willingly paid cash for, and I don’t recall ever reading it. Can anyone explain why I have it? Did I borrow it off someone (and can you remember why)? Did someone leave it at behind at our place, and has it just migrated in here? Have I been anywhere that they would have been giving them away? And, assuming that no-one sticks their hand up here in the next fortnight to claim it as theirs, would anyone like it? It’s just taking up shelf space, and I don’t have enough of it to waste.

(In a similar vein: anyone want copies of Cerulean Sins or Incubus Dreams, the Laurel K Hamilton books? I bought them in a fit of desperation for anything to read at an airport, and read them both, and now never need to do so again, ever, please don’t make me, so could so with the shelf space back. If they’re not taken in a fortnight, they’re going in the recycling.)

Fun weekend coming up – Saturday afternoon: board games in a pub. Saturday evening I: Flogging Molly gig. Saturday evening II: clubbing – last weekend was written off to that cold, one the basis I’d rather have written the night off than most of the week.

Sunday will probably be recovery, and not much else. Catching up on my reading after spending most of the last six months in a state of having run out of new stuff to read, I now have a respectable pile to read, and really ought to get on with it.

Monday, it’s back to work, where the insanity will almost certainly have begun – I had to cancel a day of my holiday, and go in to work on Wednsday, for what turned out to be a six-hour meeting in Luton. I can recommend against both of those things.

Right, time to tidy this desk. The rest of the place is tidy, so having a desk like a bombsite rather spoils the effect. Also, I’ve lost my My Bloody Valentine tickets, so they’d better be on here somewhere. Plus, there may be paperwork that needs sorting out on here.