Articles for The Guardian

Masks!

Knives!

I have a terrible track record in the music business (Part I)

I remember in 2002-2003 when everyone was going on about The Hives and The Vines and all that, I went to see this uknown band The Star Spangles in a little venue in London* and thinking that despite their shit name they were great, mainly because growing up I had always liked Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers and also because they were so ridiculously New York, so painfully Bowery-in-1977, that it was laughable, but at least they weren't even pretending that they were doing anything contemporary, and also the fact that the singer reminded me a little bit of a young Nick Cave, and also a cobra.

Afterwards I reviewed them, then I called them in New York and interviewed them and I tipped them in some magazines and - as usual - I was wrong, no-one cared and the band got dropped by their major label.

This was not uncommon. As a music journalist I was always tip the wrong bands because I have terrible music taste. Most journalists do. (I reviewed The Strokes first ever UK show and said they would remain in obscurity for twenty years.) I don't care though. A good song is a good song, and it's even better if the artist is wearing quality footwear.

I'll probably write more about my terrible predictions for greatness and music-related failures in the future. There are many.

Anyway, The Star Spangles had at least one good song, which reminded me a bit of The Replacements, Bruce Springsteen and maybe even Hanoi Rocks (actually, they sound a bit like The Hold Steady too, come to think of it) and which I haven't heard for a few years until about four minues ago. It was called 'Which One Of The Two Of Us Is Going To Burn This House Down?', which is a good title for a song, and a good title for a short story too. Maybe I'll write a story with that title. Maybe the song will be hailed as a classic in years to come. I doubt it. It's not that good. Maybe the short story will, though I suspect I will never write it.

Here's the song.

(* Afterthought: I 'signed' the support band that night to my then-fledgling record label. I also tipped them for greatness. They sold about 150 albums. They were still great though. Footwear.).

5 Days Boiled Down To The Bare Bones

watermelon

coffee

writing

cycling

coffee

writing

eating

watching bad TV

(censored)

sleeping

watermelon

coffee

writing

listening to German prog rock

cycling

spliff

sleeping

writing

some guy kicking the shit out of some other guy

eating

sleeping

rain

reading

watermelon

coffee

writing

cycling

writing

e-mails

spliff

eating

shaving

reading

(censored)

Axl Rose

spliff

sleeping

sleeping

sleeping

checking Facebook

not checking Facebook

writing this

stiff legs.

Obligatory Sci-Fi Star of the Swinging Sixties-slash-Rasta-Punk Anthem Mash-Up Video Of The Day

Beat-Off / Watermelon

Chris Killen reviews the NY wing of the
Off-Beat Generation for 3:AM (though,
come to think of it, half of the cast is
from the north-west of England). Still:

nice.

In another news, I'm still eating watermelon
every single day. Sometimes twice a day.

(0 . 0)

I'M SO HUNGRY
I COULD EAT
A TAPEWORM.

Things That Are Good, July 2008.

A Confederecy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Andrew Stevens' interview with Cathi Unsworth on 3:AM
Tent Boxing by Wayne McLellan
Preteen Weaponry by Oneida
Carnivale Series 1
The Roundhouse, London
Gavin 'Bluesbeaten' Redshaw
'Let's Hang The Landlord' by The King Blues
Johnny Thunders: In Cold Blood by Nina Antonia
Zolar X (pictured)
watermelon for breakfast
not this shitty weather
my new bike
Axl Rose.

Situationism

Featuring my pals Heidi James, Matthew Coleman and Lee Rourke
(though Adelle isn't actually reading)....

Lucha Libre!

I went to see the Lucha Libre Mexican wrestlers
yesterday at The Roundhouse and they were amazing.

I'm thinking of running away and joining them as 'El Bongo'.

Cassandro, the famed 'exotico' (below), was my favourite.

Canongate

I'm mentioned in an article that Chris Killen has written about
literary blogs for Canongate's website. Canongate are partly
responsible for many of my favourite writers and Chris Killen
is a very good writer too so this all makes me mildly aroused.

I had to go for a swim to calm down. Then I dug out an old
copy of a rock magazine in which I reviewed that week's singles
with glove puppets Sooty & Sweep (US readers may wish to
reach for Google at this point). Definitely a career low, that.

Onwards.

'Dream No. 616 - 624'

I dream of

shaven-headed

skinhead girls.

They’re all

laughing

at me.

I’m just standing

there,

largely unphased.

Why more bands should split sooner...

In my humble opinion, as they say...

Spam Lit: the silver lining of junk mail?

Andrew Gallix of 3:AM (and the Sorbonne) has written a great piece about the rise of spam poetry for The Guardian in which he very generously mentions me. Here it is.


Spam Lit: the silver lining of junk mail?

Spammers embed chunks of literary classics to dodge email filters. Weird/wonderful nuggets are found in inboxes. 'Spoetry' is born

Ever since the dawn of the world wide web, to give it its old-fashioned moniker, our communications have been beset by spam. We ignore it almost as much as we receive it, but around the turn of the century Mammon's pursuit of our attention led to an extraordinary coupling with the Muse.

Here's what happened. In order to bypass increasingly efficient filters, spammers began embedding blocks of text - often pilfered from great literary works via Project Gutenberg - in their junk mail. Techniques like the Dissociated Press algorithm were employed to randomly generate new, essentially meaningless texts or text collages ("word salads") so that each message would seem unique. Lee Ranaldo has compared the outcome to a "dictionary exploded". Another early aficionado, Ben Myers, observed that "it was as if the text had somehow been remixed and shat out down the wires of modernity". "Spam Lit", as Jesse Glass dubbed it in 2002, uncannily mirrored bona fide literary experiments that were taking place simultaneously: Jeff Noon's exploration - through textual sampling and remixing - of "metamorphiction" in Cobralingus; Jeff Harrison's aleatoric poems based on Markov chains; or even Kenji Siratori's baffling cyber-gibberish.

Equally intriguing was the trend Wired magazine identified in 2006 as "empty spam": Spam Lit messages that were, paradoxically, all lit and no spam. The consensus among geeks is that they were probably "misfires" due to faulty server connections. To their recipients, however, these instances of found poetry - often containing nuggets of unwitting but unalloyed beauty - seemed, in Myers' words, like "scriptures from the future" or "postcards from another planet". Discovering them in your inbox made you feel like Cocteau's Orpheus picking up cryptic poetic messages from the underworld on his car radio.

No wonder, then, that Spam Lit should have inspired the only new literary genre of the early 21st century (if we exclude crimping). The earliest examples of spoetry on record date back to 1999. A pioneering annual competition was even established by Satire Wire the following year. By 2003, when the BBC picked up on the phenomenon, it was already quite clear that writers were approaching spoetry in very different ways - an observation confirmed by Morton Hurley's Anthology of Spam Poetry (2007). Some, like Kristin Thomas only used the subject lines of spam messages; others were content to cut, paste and add their names à la Duchamp. Myers, who has just published a collection entitled Spam (Email Inspired Poetry) believes, for his part, that the secret lies in the editing: "A spam poet is as much an editor as a bard". Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Ranaldo, who has also just released an anthology (Hello From the American Desert), uses spam emails as a source of inspiration for his own work rather than as a raw material. Mark Amerika, meanwhile, describes the composition of his 29 Inches as a "spam collage" and a "narrative remix".

Although published last year, Amerika's work was written in 2004, which also happens to be the year when Myers and Ranaldo penned their first spoems. None of them were aware that others were doing similar things at the same time. There must have been something in the air. If my inbox is anything to go by, however, Spam Lit is now on the wane, so the time may have come to assess the merits of spoetry, its literary by-product. Beyond the genre's obvious affinities with automatic writing, cut-ups, constrained writing (of the Oulipian variety) and found poetry, is it any cop?

(Originally published here: www.blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/07/spam_poetry.html)

Killer Right Hook

I grabbed my camera and walked to the park to capture

the pink winter sunset but two school girls were kicking

holy fuck out of one another in the midst of a baying

throng of about fifteen boys and girls in loosened Friday

evening uniforms so in a sudden and misguided flash of

community-spirited, adult-minded duty I waded in and

tried to tear them apart but they were pulling each other’s

hair and swinging fists, eventually they came apart when

another girl bit one of their hands and as they broke away,

one of them, a chubby black girl with bloodied teeth and

wild eyes, let out a killer right jab to my mouth and I had

to hand it to her, it was a good precise punch, and the throng

took a collective intake of breath but the fight was over,

the girls were all out of puff and after a while they all kind

of drifted apart and went their separate ways until there

was just me left standing there in the mud, rubbing my

swollen jaw and wondering what had just happened.

The pink sun had set. It was dark. It was December. My thirtieth year.

It Has Been Brought To My Attention

that
i am
not
here.