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The dead don’t deserve respect, hell, they don’t even want it. They don’t care, they’re dead. They don’t want pity, piousness, or pretense.

The only thing we have to offer the dead that means even half a shit is honesty. The dead can no longer protest, permiss or persuade you with their reaction only silently consent with your opinion.

I’m not going to write about growing up, under her hateful shadow, in the shadow of the bomb, or in an area that was riddled with racism, unemployment and crime like ivy through the mortar between the bricks of a crumbling wall. I’m not going to write about that partly because It’s been written better and with more of an even hand elsewhere. And partly because I make no apologise for this and frankly don’t care for any explanation you offer if you feel otherwise.

I’m grieving the death of an old woman – my grief is a celebration of the suffering of someone who caused ten times more than she received. Nailing that ghost to the wall and toasting to the coming death of the army of smug school chums still under her spell. Anyone that can’t see the vicious irony in spending 10 million in the same month we said the weakest among us were not worth the money is either a fool or a bastard of the highest order.

I’m not on my own either. If they really want to solve the economic crisis they should turn the room in the Ritz where she died into a 24 hour disco and urinal and charge £1 entry.

But its not about the dead, as I said, the dead don’t care. It’s what the living deserve, and the living deserve to grieve. And by ‘grieve’ I mean react in way that allows that person to move on.

‘There is no right way to grieve’ is a go-to maxim of councillors and head doctors all over. It just so happens that mine, and over half the country’s grief, involves grim joy, defiance, and the venting of thirty odd years of hate – whatever the narrative portrayed in the media today.

Being best man at Jon Bounds wedding has been eating a whole bunch of time recently so not a lot of time spent writing – I got something coming in May’s Area Magazine that I will plug on my twitter account. In the meantime you guys can have a look at the text for my speech. Its not a particularly great bit of writing, and to be honest I made up a bunch of stuff when I came to deliver it, but most of the bones are here, and yes, it IS cynical to put in a pause where you intend to emulate an emotion.

First of all I’d like to thank Adam, my co-best man who has covered my inadequacies from the very start. Although Both me and Adam know that the only reason we we’re asked for this job is because Poppy can’t give a speech.

For those that don’t know me my name is Danny or as I’m known on the internet ‘probablydrunk’ and to answer the inherent question in that name, ‘not yet’. But I hope you’ll all join me in sorting that out later on.

I’ve never been a best man before and naturally was honoured to be asked. – actually this isn’t true. I received a text. The text read ‘what do you know about being a best man?’ I text back ‘nothing why?’ and he texted back ‘you best buy a book then’. And didn’t call me for two weeks.

I can see Jon’s naturally nervous, you see I do have a bit of a reputation for salty language. But I’ve promised him not to f….

[changes to the next card]

…orget there may be children in the room, so errrm [throwing away cards from my speech ]I suppose that ones out, and that one, definitely those, and the whole section about the petting zoo cant stay in.

First of all a big thank you to all the bridesmaids who I think we will all agree look amazing on this {weather} day, and the ushers who Jon trusted the important job of showing people how to sit down.

[cheers]

Its traditional to relay embarrassing stories about the groom in this situation, but when I came to writing this speech I realised how savvy Jon had been picking me. You every truly embarrassing stories I have about him, I’m was there with him being equally if not more so embarrassing or I was there so drunk only he remembers.

I mean I could talk about the stag do. But the first rule of Jons stag do is…

I know Jon from the internets, and we got to know each other well on the various creative projects we’ve done. Drinking in all the independent pubs in Birmingham in a day, the magazine we published and travelling to all the working piers in England and Wales in 10 days. When you share a car and tent with someone for 10 days straight you get to know some one pretty well. Here’s the things I learnt about Jon.

He’s not very practical – the first night we stopped in the tent on the trip, it was pitch black when we arrived at the campsite, it was high on a hill near the coast so very windy, and I’d never put the tent up before. Now seeing as a tent is essentially a large sail and I was tired, a little drunk and being lit by our driver midge this wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. And how do you think Jon helped?

Yes, by looking out to sea and reciting war poetry at us until we swore at him.

I also learnt his memory isn’t the best, he lost his towel at the first campsite, his wash kit at the second and on the Isle of Wight I found a bag,

‘Is this your bag Jon’

‘Nope, ask midge’

‘Midge is this your bag?

Midge says no but it looks like Jons

‘Jon are you sure its not your bag?’

‘Yes’

‘Really?’

‘Its not mine’

So we left it there.

It was somewhere around Bogner Regis when Jon stops dead in his tracks, turns to me and says

‘That was my bag, we cant go back can we?’

We didn’t go back.

And the third thing I learnt is that despite these superficial faults, he’s a kind, generous and incredibly smart human being. And lets face it – he must be, because Libby is a wonderful, equally smart and, I think we’ll all agree, stunning lady.

Being someone who likes to describe themselves as a ‘writer’ you wouldn’t believe how much I struggled with this speech. How do you articulate happiness, how do you put stock phrase like ‘best wishes’ and ‘long and happy future’ in stupid words? You can’t. Wittgenstein said ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.‘ so allow me a couple of seconds to not speak and try and let you both know the way I feel.

[pause, with tears in my eyes]

I’d like to thank everyone for putting up with this speech and for making it here, I know it means a lot to the couple and if you’ll all be upstanding I’d like you all to join me in a toast to the bride, the groom and the Dog.

[cheers]

Being Best Man I was entrusted with Jon and Libby’s wedding certificate, being me and because I HATE public speaking, I burnt it.

really

 

(pic not at all related)

To talk about Wolverhampton and inbreeding is a hack’s joke, a big town gag on smaller nearby towns the world over. But as I sit here there is no escaping that everybody around me looks oddly related.

It’s disconcerting, but I have taken a decent amount of painkillers and drank more than a safe level of beer on top – I was hoping to mitigate the normally brain wobbling effects by eating but I’ve come to one of the few places still left open in Wolverhampton and as an upshot, an hour after ordering, the food has yet to arrive.

Drinking on these painkillers has a curious effect, I feel pretty sloppy drunk even after only my second (third?) pint. But also a numbness blurs the edges of my peripheral vision and makes my brain lag behind my perception like playing X-box on a dial up connection, even if that game is a dull one where you have to hold down a reasonable conversation with another adult and extra points if you make it to the bar with falling over a table and keeping your trousers on.

The pain in my back is dulled to a sharp throb as I hobble up the stairs, I’m grateful for the medicinal barrier between the pain and my head.

“Oh YA BASTARD” a goblin jumps out from behind the top of a stairwell, all bugged out eyeballs and spindly fingers.

“Jesus Christ why?” I manage as I try to keep from tumbling backwards down the stairs. His arm reaches out and in Slo-Mo panic mode time I take in that he is, in fact, human and developing a look of shock on his face that I imagine, if arranged normally, would match my own.

Dancing around him for the toilet trying to shake the Muppet eyed lunatic from my memory.

“I thought you were someone else” he shouts from behind. No fucker deserves that, even if they do fuck their own sister. I think, but don’t say, because Wolverhampton is a different world and definitely not mine.

 

 

 

 

(this was a reveiw I did in november that never found a home – I dont think, correct me if you’ve seen it before)

 

Anything short of stunning and the name ‘Fucked Up’ would be a spindly teenage middle finger of pathetic unfocused rage. Fortunately the band that has that particular name bring the stunning with aplomb.

A wet Thursday night in Birmingham is a dispiriting as it sounds, and walking the far end of Digbeth in the rain had better be worth the trip.

It was almost a religious experience. Allow me too explain.

The first band Them Wolves, made a promising start, I mean you know you’re in for a good gig when the drummer starts limbering up with the focus intensity of a Korean Weightlifter. The guitars kicked in with squelching guitar noises and the strong back line drove the music forward and exploded into the chorus’s. The guitars would pitch and roll, building to these crescendos. The drums laying a solid foundation for the fuzz riffs that emerge out of the noise like the demon faces in TV static.

At its loudest, Them Wolves seem like unrelenting juggernaut metal done right, loud enough to cause the singer to throw his earplugs out with disdain before launching into his vocals that sound like the familiar screams of someone being tortured in the next corridor of hell. At their most reflective they can have the distorted landscape quality of Kruatrock bands like Einstellung.

At this point I went to the bar to drink over-priced rum, so I missed most of the Fair-os so it would be unfair-o to say I didn’t enjoy them. They both wore hats in a way that annoyed me and performed with a self satisfied smile to their mouths. Maybe its because they sounded like a heavier Vampire Weekend that made me dislike them. The music improved many-fold when they decided to let their balls swing a bit and play something with sack but this wasn’t often.

‘Go fuck yourselves’ they said as they walked off stage, which would have been a quite rock and roll thing to do if everyone in the place wasn’t thinking exactly the same thing of them.

The members of Fucked up took the stage and in a line started to play a building guitar refrain, but some guy wandered on stage after a minute or so, picking up a mic and winding the lead around. Of course because he had a hat on I presumed he was a member of the Fair-os being a complete tool-end and picking up his shit while the next band were playing. Little did I know this was Pink Eyes, one of the most charismatic front men I have ever seen on stage. With his hat and full beard he kinda looks like a character in the game Guess Who? except almost instantly he took his top off, which would add an interesting element to the game not least of all the chance to ask the question ‘Does your person look like a friendly but inexplicably hairy dolphin?’.

The music was fierce and loud, in some places quite poppy but better for it, and shades of The Pixies when Sandy Miranda added backing vocals to Pink eyes hardcore growl. The crowd, starting off with some light jostling, but soon degenerating into a tiny but ferocious mosh. The crowd were bringing it, so I was surprised when Pink Eye screamed ‘Bring It’ and even more surprised when the crowd embrungend it more.

The tempo of the songs increased, looking over at the drummer the sticks were strobing and Pink Eye waded into the crowd, as he passed people wanted to hug him, which he was happy to do, and some people wanted just to touch him. A tiny odd part of my brain thought about how his skin must be really well exfoliated with all the sweating and rubbing before another speed metal-esqe freakout kicked in and blasted all thoughts out of my head.

The crowd loved it, and him. He was screaming with and for the crowd for the most part, not at or despite of, which can be the case. There was a real feeling of warmth, a sense of community. If old classic metal is the Church Of Satan, theatrics, costume, a deference to the classic texts of Iron Maiden and Slayer. Then this is something new, a friendlier more relaxed but no less passionate Anglican version of the same faith albeit delivered by a man who looks like Zangief from Street-fighter 2 with five metres of microphone cord wrapped around his head while his flock slam dance in front of him.

A group of football Casuals sit in the corner of the rock pub I’m in, they’re giving off a concealed menace and bigger boy vibe that has regressed most of the customers back to their school defaults, and the rock crowd were definitely not on the top of the food chain at any school. The Casuals are subdued but everyone casts an eye over every no and again to check their mood.

It’s clear that they’re different, an aberration to the safe space. The differences are subtle but in an environment of outsider conformity they’re jarring. They buy an excess of drinks, looking back to the table and estimating roughly who wants one, doubling that figure, and getting a couple extra just in case. Their table is a small glass forest of green bottles.

They’re a mass of quilted jackets, Burberry scarves and fitted winter jackets all done up to the neck. As a left over from our ‘scruffy’ reputation or perhaps Grunge’s lasting legacy, are the layers of clothes we wear, nothing fastened, tucked or buckled.

The act of fastening all the buttons on a jacket is some sort of sartorial shibboleth.

They look like delinquent game keepers. I don’t know if appropriating the clothing of the upper classes is a conscious act of aspiration or a muted angry subversion of class hierarchy. I don’t want to ask either. It’s jarring that the clothing doesn’t really reflect football at all, no-ones wearing a replica kit or even a scarf – yet everyone knows they’re football fans. I suppose the closest logical connection is that the clothes look warm which is useful when attending an outdoor event in winter.

Somebody receives a call, they all leave together.

I hate the personification of the earth as a weak and delicate person being attacked by us, desperately pleading to be ‘saved’. The earth is neither weak nor delicate. If the earth is a person then weather are her moods, and its us that gets smashed on the bad days. Which boils down to the real truth that I think even the most ardent green knit your own yogurt wing ding knows – The earth doesn’t need any ‘friends’. What ever we do the earth is fine. Its US that need to be saved and, honestly, I don’t think we’re worth the effort.

Yes, we could probably squeeze out another three or four generations if we eat mud, shower once a month and power our mobiles with hand cranks. But why bother?

OR we could go out in a blaze of glorious consumption.

Lets find a way of drinking pure oil smoothies, light our cities in a dazzling display of permanent summer and make rare animal pelts the must have headgear for the season ‘ albino snow tiger is soo last season daaaarling, I only wear panda shoes now.’

Lets not only fiddle while our civilisation burns, let’s stand on the highest mountain and shred solid platinum guitars through 157,000 watts of amplification while the super volcanoes rain fire and sulphur. Mother nature may be fine after we gone, but lets kick that bitch on the womb before we go.

…I don’t think that I completely came back from the beach. Part of my soul is still sitting there, watching the sun set.

In the strange hinterland betwixt (yes, its a word) Christmas and New Year – I’m vaguely aware it might be Saturday because it was all the football coverage smattering the TV schedule like monkey flung shit that drove me out of the house.

Christmas is weird for me, it draws me together with my family, which I am grateful for, but in doing so it highlights how little I have in common with them. Even now in the pub I’m aware that the same football coverage that gave me the push to get moving would have only entrenched them further.

So I’m thinking about Christmas a lot and something I read caught my brains eye and has been harder to shift than a wet hair on a mirror. Is Die Hard a Christmas film? Various people on Twitter have been making arguments one way or the other, mostly I think out of bloody minded iconoclasm. Which I can respect. But I can’t leave it alone.

And I think I’ve come up with the definitive answer…

It depends.

See? Glad I could help.

Allow me to show my workings. ‘Is DH a Christmas film, appears, on the surface to be a genre argument. Which is tricky because genre lines are blurry, but not unsolvable.

Genre means ‘type’ or ‘kind’ and is recognised by its conventions (a sentence my A-level Media Studies teacher made us all memorise by the way, to ensure we all got at least two marks in the exams).

Conventions are things that normally occur, they can be stylistic in nature, hats and horse appearing in Westerns for example, or thematic and related to the plot. The entire film Scream was Wes Craven masterful de-constructing of these plot conventions and effectively killed the Slasher sub-genre of Horror for five or so years resulting in a vacuum filled by the gratuitous torture porn of Saw and Hostel etc.

So what are the conventions of a Christmas film? Stylisticly we expect snow, Christmas decorations, red and white suits, music with carols or at least sleigh bells. And thematically again its pretty easy to recognise (especially seeing as I’ve been put through hours of agonising Hallmark straight-to-television cable movies for the past three months.) The narrative is normally about the coming together of family (whatever iteration that takes in these future times) and redemption through this connection. The most popular Christmas story, retold in every permutation possible, is Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Which is this them in a nutshell, and one of my favourites because it isn’t religion or high ideals that redeem Scrooge, its his connection to those around him. A uniquely humanist and secular message wrapped in the template for Christmas we still follow in western world.

DH is set at Christmas but contains very little stylisticly of what we would expect from the Christmas genre. It’s set in LA so no snow, although the fluttering debris at the end is a nice substantive touch. The film takes place in an office building with only some scenes at a Christmas party which isn’t overly decorated. The Christmas touches seem to counterpoint the very serious action, used as relief, much in the same way the protagonist’s witty and human dialogue underlines the violence. For example the note ‘Now I have a machine gun too Ho Ho Ho’ or the holly packing tape that the protagonist uses to tape a gun to his back with.

So despite these lyrical Christmas touches and it actually being set around Christmas time it contains very little stylisticly that we recognise as seasonal visually.

I’ve seen it argued that DH is just the story of a man that wants to be with his family at Christmas, which is cute, and certainly fits thematically with the genre of Christmas film but has the disadvantage of conveniently IGNORING THE ENTIRE PLOT.

And, when you drill down, wrong. The only two relationships through the film that are given any real room to develop are between the ‘hero’ John McClain and the ‘villain’ Hans Gruber, and the one that actually carries the real emotional weight of the film is between JMcC and the black(the use of race in DH is another blog post entirely) police officer that first responds to the police call, Sgt. Al Powell (yep, I googled it). The relationship with his wife does give him the motivation to stay and fight the villains but isn’t really the emotional core of the film, I would argue its thematic equivalent of the stylistic Christmas touches.

Now don’t get me wrong, Die Hard is a brilliant action film. Brilliant because it changed the action genre for good, it was one of the first where the male protagonist showed how fallible he was. Throughout the film he is hurt, scared, unsure and most importantly, vulnerable. Which really hadn’t been done before. This is partly down to the script, but you have to credit Bruce Willis with the performance that managed to make the character likeable throughout.

So if this IS a genre argument the answer has to be ‘NO’ Die Hard is in no way a Christmas film.

So why doesn’t that feel like a satisfying answer?

I suppose there is a third way of recognising a Christmas film, and that is context. We recognise a Christmas film because its a film we watch around Christmas time.

Before culture was atomised into bit size nuggets flying around us in a cloud and available at the swipe of a finger there was a limited palette of films that got pulled into our Christmas habits. These were repeated every year and became part of our routine. The Great Escape is undoubtedly a film people associate with Christmas but couldn’t be read as part of the Christmas film genre by any stretch of the mind. Recently in a podcast (Marc Maron’s WTF) the director Jon Favou said he was most proud of Elf because it become part of the rotation of films that played around Christmas. Showing an understanding that its the repeated rituals that makes these cultural items special.

This explains why there is such a unchristmassy (yep, definitely a word, don’t check) film can be labelled as part of that genre, and why there is an argument about it.

Ultimately a Christmas film is a film that makes you feel Christmassy (again, don’t bother checking, defiantly a word). Its just now we are no longer bound by the five channels to dictate which bells will make us drool. We get to choose what’s important to us, what we share, and repeat sharing until it becomes entwined into our own seasonal traditions.

Unless it’s football, because that just shit.

(nb I don’t know if this is my browser adding them or what but this post contains things that look like links but are in fact spam. My links are single underlined only, the rest? fuck knows what)

Hey I did a book, a whole book right into the world out of my brain. I know I keep banging on about it but as a tentative step into the wild west frontier of self publishing I’m pretty proud of it.

Does the internet really need another step by step guide on how to self publish? No, no it does not – there are far more informed blog post’s out there. This is more an answer to the incredulous question ‘How did YOU publish a book?’ Rather than a comprehensive answer to the question ‘How do you publish a book?’

Step One – Find The Material

I decided to do a ‘best of’ a collection of the best things I had written so far. The book version of a sitcoms clip show. I thought it would be a nice way of clearing the decks before Pier Review and I stole the idea of Jon Bounds.

Luckily and to my pleasant surprise I don’t throw anything away so a large portion of this step was spent Indiana Jones style digging through my hard drive. Even then I was missing a few, but I found that if I checked my ‘sent’ folder of a couple of my email accounts I could sort out the ones with attachments so all the stuff I had sent to various editors and websites could be salvaged. Of course they would be my shoddily proofed and pre-edited versions so quite a lot of them were quite raw.

I also dug into this blog for the nuggets of corn amidst the piles of shite. Other websites I had written for handily tagged my posts with my name so that wasn’t to difficult.

Step Two – Polish

the temptation to go through the old work with a wrecking ball and completely rebuild some of the articles was massive, but not practical seeing the amount of material I had, and also, somehow, dishonest.

I know I sometimes come off as arrogant but its because I’ve worked harder to become a writer than anything I’ve ever done. So if that means four or five really good ideas get lost in a blizzard of poorly framed arguments and dodgy syntax, its worth it to show the progress I’ve made.

Of course it has to make sense though, so I did have to go back and move a whole bunch of commas around. But it was a process of filling the cracks rather than completely re-plastering.

All of which took place in a programme (when did the word ‘app’ finally kill off the word ‘programme’ it just seems so antiquated now) called Scrivener, simply the best, and densely feature packed, programme on the market for large writing projects. Although its not perfect, the way it builds the Table Of Contents for your project is related to the nesting and order of your folders which isn’t the most instinctive way of doing things and the internal spell check isn’t the easiest to use as it doesn’t allow you to see the context of the word its correcting. But on the whole there is no way a few things I have written would have been finished without it.

Also the aforementioned Jon Bounds uses it, so he was able to proof it without the hassle of importing and exporting the text into different formats. We even share a Dropbox where we back up most of our projects so I didn’t even have to send it to him.

Step Three – Format

It was proofed (twice). Scrivener allows you to export straight into ebook format – and while this is all right, tweaking it involves opening the project again, re-exporting it and checking the changes. So I used Sigil with its very simple WYSIWYG interface to go in and nail the formatting.

It needed a cover. I designed one myself but the size was wrong and the title shoddily placed. In a fit of stupid I saved the whole thing instead of ‘save-as’ing it and lost the original photograph, yes it was my only digital copy, no, I don’t know how that can even happen. I had to paint my face and re-shoot it in the early hours one beer frazzled school night. Again Jon saved the day when I sent him the whole mess and he knocked up a much better version in less than an hour.

Step Four – Publish

At the moment the book is only available on Amazon through the KDP thing I signed up for. To be honest I’ve yet to see the advantages – I think its something to do with getting more royalties in India or something. The scheme does ask for the book to be exclusive to the Kindle for ninety days though so I do not investigating more to see if I could have opted out of that.

The whole process is relatively painless, finding your international banking numbers is a hassle (they’re on your bank statement normally but don’t ask at your branch – they know less than nothing). As someone who hates and dreads forms it didn’t bend my head too badly at all.

I set the price at $4.99 which works out at about the price of a pint in sterling which seemed apt and pretty good value for nearly 50,000 words.

And that was that, all there was left was to bother as many people I could about it.

I happened to get into a twitter conversation with Sci-Fi author Jeff Noon about e-readers. My first instinct about them was a negative one – not entirely surprising to anyone who’s seen my book collection, I clearly fetishise the objects as well as value the contents. His point was that e-readers are not just for replacing books but are a new way of consuming information, one of the advantages being that they are for all the things that fall between the cracks of internet and print – Essays, story fragments, extended blog posts now have a home, a place in our information diet. And more importantly the beginnings of a way to distribute and monetise the creation of these things.

The way we consume words is changing, personally I’m still not entirely convinced that e-readers are not the mini-disks of information distribution. The next step is probably inhaling articles through smoke generated by a new wave of electronic cigarettes or straight into our skulls with gelatinous book bullets.

Or maybe I’m missing the point entirely. With our species progression we’re realising that what we perceive as neuro-typical is a very slim middle slice of the population and as our awareness grows of ourselves and others we will be much better at managing our data flow in a way that suits us personally. They’ll be no dominant format because hopefully) there will be no dominant brain type.

What is important is that we continue to have platforms to share our thoughts, dreams, and stories. And if I manage to earn enough to get around in, all the better.

The amazon link is here if you want to buy or even just look at it in its natural setting, Or if you want to know more about it this very website has a landing page for it here.

I missed The great British Bake off as a thing, Had no idea that it was so important to everyone and would never have guessed that the population of England would be so obsessed with what is, essentially, a cake competition. So when the final was on the other day, my parents, and it seemed the rest of the country, were glued.

I felt genuine alienation. It just seemed a bit silly. It was a cake competition, like what you have at a jumble sale, yet people were taking it with the gravitas as the choosing of the next pope. The judges were basically cake experts but because I wasn’t invested in the whole situation a cake expert has no more significance than a pigeon doctor or chief cloud namer. I swear at one point in the final ‘cake-off’ or whatever the judge took a bite out of a cake and declared it ‘too cakey’. My mind exploded, I looked around, my parents were nodding sagely at this wise Solomon like judgement.

‘ITS A CAKE COMPETITION’ I screamed ‘HOW THE FUCK CAN SOME THING BE TOO CAKEY?! WHAT DOES SHE WANT IT TO BE LIKE? ENGINE PARTS? FISH?’. My parents looked at me like it was my fault, like I’d missed some essential part of the cake making process where you dial back on the quintessential essence of the object you’re baking.

I hate missing the point, not being part of the joke, not knowing. Which explains why I have a feed reader that regularly tops out at 1000+ unread items, and more specifically why I’m in Subside but can’t take my eyes off the large girl from some soap or other on a dancing reality show like it was the fucking moon landings or something. I force my eyes off the TV and start people watching.

When people watching the first and normally easiest thing to identify are the power relationships – Who is the Alpha male, who is everybody looking for approval from. Its the easiest to spot because people will be turned to face them, or at least their feet will be pointing towards them, or even, more basically they will be standing in the middle, or be the tallest person in the group. But in a Alt pub its different. Looking around NO ONE is the Alpha.

Its a whole scene of Omega males, people not losing the race, just not participating in it in the first place. All signs of dominance and aggression are focused on the music or so campy and exaggerated its almost a parody. Fights in Alt clubs are rare, its seems aggressive but we’re all in on the gag.

Trouble is, so is everyone else. While at the bar some kids come in, no older than ten, wearing masks asking people for trick or treat. (its the 20th). They’re not nervous or afraid. The rules are breaking down, back at that age to me all pubs were sacred adult spaces which I could no more enter than I could pilot a hovercraft or grow a beard.

Plus ‘Rock’ is losing its mystique, the more established and mainstream we become the closer we are to the cold light of day truth. We’re just the unpopular kids in fancy dress. We need a good serial murderer or a decent Satan worshipping scare – fake shock controversy like Marilyn Manson and exploded myths like back masking have pierced the veil.

The problem is money, the more a subculture is sold back to itself, the more capitalism will knock the edges off, the extremes smoothed over and the legends Disneyfied. The teeth grinding vandals in sharp suits become scooter fanatics that love the seaside. Spit covered heroin anarchists become leather clad peacocks that pose for tourists. And outlaw nihilists become bikers with a heart of gold. Don’t believe the hype – anyone driven to the fringes soon develops a pathological disregard to ‘Normal’ conventions and towards the far ends – delight in the wrongness.

Yes the Alt scene is full of nice guys opting out of the usual football and snidey grope culture of broad street. But not all are, the rabbit hole is deep and status starts to be defined by the extreme. Some people pushed to the fringes have access to the status they’re denied in the mainstream by gambling their sanity, life and at very least the greasy marks on the soul from where the dark things stain.

if you like this sort of pointless musings or are just a me fan – you can get a collection of all my best writings so far. Go HERE to buy Guttermouth: Novelty Trinkets from the Edge and Beyond.