Episode One: The Trail

I.

He was the sort of man that committed three crimes before breakfast.

And, in the end, he was caught.

There are many judges in the world, and all of them can be bribed. As any crimial will know, all judges can be bribed, execpt one. And - would you belive it - our hero was brought before the only straight judge in the world.

The trail commenced, as trails do and, at the end, the judge gave the verdict.

"The facts are plain. You are guilty as hell. And this time it's death. The only thing that could save you is if someone would step in your place. But that wouldn't be even - even Steven. To make things square, we'd have to find someone who has never done anything wrong. Nothing. Not even lied to make thier girlfriend feel more secure about an old pair of trousers. You know anyone that fits that description, boy?"

Our hero couldn't think of anyone that he knew who was perfect, not even the nice old lady next door - to cut a long story short she was a bit of a racist.

"No, your honour." He said. "Lord knows I've tried, but I can't say I've ever found any one who is perfect."

A file was passed onto the judge's desk. He flicked through the pages. And looked down at our hero.

"Well," he said "You may not be able to find the perfect substitute, but looks like we've found one. The only perfect man in the world - and he is willing to take your sentence.

"Not only is this man perfect - his files show that he has never committed a single crime and our 'experts' have found no stain upon his character. Not only that, but he is definitely human - no smoke and mirrors there.

"Now let me make this clear. There is nothing that you can do to save yourself from the punishment you deserve - nothing, except to accept the help of this man, the only man on earth who could pay the penalty for your life. Do you accept?"

And, hardly believing what was happening, our hero did indeed accept.

The sentence was death. The execution was televised.

Justice was done and our hero returned home to celebrate his freedom. He told himself that he would be eternally grateful to this kind stranger and try to follow his example.

But unlike his saviour, our hero wasn't perfect so he ended up commiting only two crimes before breakfast the next day.

To be continued ...

Next time: 'Episode Two: Three Days Later'

'The End' #3

Flash Fiction #3: The End

'The End' - In which a young punk tries to survive in a post-apocalyptic Morecombe...

I went to the end of Morecombe Bay and bought fish and chips. Forgoing the Northerner’s choice of curry sauce, I plumped for the traditional salt and vinegar.

Outside, I leant on the rail as the grease permeated the paper bag and looked out to sea. I thought of the spot where the Chinese cockle pickers died. They were picking cockles and were cut off by the tide. I speared a chip with the little plastic fork and though to California. The wind blew cold specks of ocean into my face.

I was thinking about California because of a band called Rancid. They have many good songs, one is called ‘To the End of the East Bay’. It is about touring with your band, having good times, trying to get signed and the ups and downs of that whole gig. They were considered the real deal: tattoos, shaved heads, Mohicans, leather jackets and studs. I was at the seaside in Lancashire in October – I think that’s pretty punk too: my very own bay experience.

The Bleach Boys, Argy Bargy and 3CR were playing tonight. I loitered outside the old ‘Carleton’ club but I didn’t have a ticket to get in, to tread the sticky floors and sup the suspicious cider. Further down the bay, there was a bunch of underage oiks sheltering in a grafittied bus stop, wrapped in their leather jackets and rollup smoke.
One of them must have a spare ticket, particularly if there was a plastic pint of snakebite on the line, so I stepped out into the road to chance my luck.

Morecombe was like San Francisco in some ways. As Tim Armstrong says: “This ain’t no Mecca – This place is f*cked.”

In Morecombe, the shops were shut, some windows nailed down. The old women wore plastic bags on their heads to protect their curls from the spitting North rain. Bus drivers were mean and only the lonely statue of Eric seemed to smile, immortalised in his skipping dance, waiting for a chance partner and a tourist photo opportunity – perhaps even a “bring me sunshine”. The punks with their cider laughed and said that Morecombe looked like he was moshing.

Flash Fiction #2 - Also called "The End"

The boys thought Grandfather Claude was exciting: he had fought in actual wars and he had medals to prove it. He also had an air rifle that fired metal pellets and he went hunting in the woods. He even killed rabbits for his dinner.
“Did you enjoy the pie?” He asked, when Mum and Jenny, the little sister, were out of ear shot, “got the rabbit myself.”
“Have you killed many rabbits, Grandfather Claude?”
“Oh yes, hundreds, maybe.” He said with a wink.

He had tried taking the boys out hunting with him, but they always made too much noise, squeaking and crashing through the undergrowth, pretending to be tigers.
“We’ll get something one day.” He would always say.

***

One evening, Grandfather Claude was babysitting. After dinner, the boys went up stairs to play with their G.I. Joes and Jenny chose a film to watch. They sat together, Jenny’s tiny body nestled against her grandfather, and the Walt Disney theme tune started. Jenny had chosen a new film called Bambi.
As the deer ran, throwing up clouds of snow and the music rose, he felt her, pressed against him, sensing the crescendo was fatal. She hid her face in his shoulder. Holding his breath, he braced himself against the sofa.
The gun shot thundered.
Pale flakes fell from the darkening sky and, knowing what they hadn’t seen, Claude watched the fawn look for his mother in the white silence. As the music struck a mournful chord, he felt her quiet sobs drop tears onto his shirt. He put his arm around her and watched Bambi walk away, into the blizzard.
“It’s just a story.” He said.

***

As his daughter idly chatted to him, Claude watched the boys playing soldiers in the back garden. He did not drink his tea.
“Grandfather Claude, can we go tracking rabbits in the woods with your rifle today?”
“Well boys, I actually gave that old rifle to Mrs Jones who runs the church jumble sale.”
“What?”
“The truth is, boys, your old Grandfather is getting too ancient to be playing with such dangerous things as rifles. See these hands? Too shaky. It wouldn’t be safe would it?”
The boys, almost in tears, flounced away. His daughter rolled her eyes and followed them into the garden.
With a steady hand, Claude picked up his tea cup and took a sip, thinking of the rifle lying disowned and safe in a dark space in the attic.

‘The End’ #2

Introduction
These are stories for artists and creators of work. People might stamp it as finished or beyond hope of resurrection, but the artist’s eye will always look at THE END from a different perspective.

Chapter One
Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1939. The postman called with a large package. It was received by a thin young man with a nose and a sweet disposition, a cartoonist called Antonio Prohias. Antonio politely thanked the postman and took the parcel into the kitchen. He opened it in silence. It was a collection of his drawings, targeted at a prestigious newspaper. It had been returned unopened. Antonio sat looking at this parcel for a long time.
Thirty-two years later, Antonio Prohias finally laid these drawings to rest in a cenotaph for Cartoonist Profiles. His more auspicious, recognised and celebrated creations gathered around the grave to pay their respects to their brother ‘Agapito’ – ‘The Unborn’. They looked like the demons of Bosch and Breugel and they all had inherited Antonio’s nose: El Hombre Sinestro, the Russian Communist Tovarich and Prohias’ legacy to the world, the MAD stalwarts, the Black Spy and the White Spy. No trinitrotoluene, no bullet holes, no intricate weapons of cartoon destruction. Symmetrical arms folded and heads bowed – a momentary reverent armistice.

Chapter Two
Manhattan, New York, 1972. Robert Mapplerthorpe dropped a jar containing an unborn human foetus. Forever scavenging for inspirational “found” objects to use in his art, he got it from an abandoned hospital on Staten Island (which has since been demolished). It slipped from his excited fingers and crashed to the ground. He stood there with formaldehyde splashes on his shoes. With a blank look on his face, he said to his companion, the poet Patti Smith, “You go in. I’ll clean this up.”
...

Flash Fiction: ‘The End’ #1

Chapter One --
The crowd clapped and whistled. The waiting guitar noodled. Over the humdrum a voice is heard.
“Hey, mister light man! You’ve got to turn those lights way down! I’m not kidding – you’ve got to turn those lights way down! ... C’mon!”
The man with the mic waited for the lights to go down. They didn’t. The crowd cheered. A tambourine beat, waiting, waiting.
Seconds passed and the great man said, “Ah, wadda we care.”
And he began to sing.

Chapter Two –
The second part of the story is told by rock journalist Dave Philips. He looks majestic in a Hawaiian shirt and board shorts, like Kaputnik from MAD magazine; horn-rimmed glasses, a corn-cob pipe gripped in his teeth. He clears his throat and lists names into the recorder.

“Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Elvis Presley, Keith Moon, Sid Vicious, Bon Scott, Ian Curtis, John Bonham, John Lennon, Bob Marley, Phil Lynott, Peter Tosh, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Per Yngve “Dead” Ohlin, Johnny Thunders, Freddy Mercury, Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth, Frank Zappa, Kurt Cobain, Brad Nowell, Jeff Buckley, Screaming Lord Such, Ian Dury, Kirsty MacColl, Joey Ramone, Joe Strummer, Johnny Cash, Dimebag Darrell, Ike Turner, Michael Jackson, Les Paul, Malcolm McLaren, Ronnie James Dio, Paul Gray, Peter Quaife, and counting ...

“Dramatic, gripping, ripping, bloated, tragic, glorious, death has always ridden the coattails of rock music.

“Plane crashes, drug overdoses, murders, heart attacks, electrocution (by guitar), cancer, drowning, skiing accidents, being mown in half by a speeding powerboat.

“Some are more mysterious. Skatalite and trombone legend Don Drummond allegedly committed suicide while institutionalized in Belle Vue Asylum, Kingston in 1969. Jim Morrison’s fatal heart failure in 1971 is disputed to this day –“
I cut him off there by pressing the STOP button.

Chapter Three --
Thieves first robbed the grave in 1973. In 1981, to mark the tenth anniversary of his death, a bust was erected on the site. This was subject to all kinds of atrocities before being stolen seven years later. Finally, his father placed a flat stone on the grave
that reads ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ - "according to his own daemon".
It has yet to be stolen and it is stuck tight.
Though the hallowed site knows many stories, my favourite is the one when Patty Smith visited in the autumn of 1973. She wrote it so beautifully: Rimbaud on her heart and hyacinths in her hand, following the strings of French graffiti like Theseus to an unmarked grave, reading C’est la fin, mon merveilleux ami in the rain.

Shuffle #1

I won't see you tonight,
falling away from me,
sitting 'round at home.

The short end of the stick,
marching on a dead road,
ever and a day.

Bad Town, shifting Sands;
Hello Again.

SM

On Parade

She stands outside smoking, red
hair cropped like a Futurist painting,

poised like Gavaroche,
Peter Pan, the Artful Dodger,
mistaken for a boy on the bus.

She is always on her guard,
as if I would bite her tongue.

I extend a word forward,
she takes to steps back

into a nicotine attic
and I try to follow her

a bull dancing for a flashing flag.

SM

B Shape

When you sit
your body concertinas.
The soft creases
of your iliac crest,
the bulges of your
latissimus dorsi
(love handles)
flow as if they were painted
by Degas.
I can see Fernado Botero
- Even Lucien Freud -
in your soft abdomen,
The Venus of Willendorf
in your red ochre skin.

SM

Interuptions

After the first offernings of wine
her fingers read my palm.

The curved backs of praying
cutlery reflect the candle light.

Outside our aura we are orbited
by astrobelts of adolescent attendents;
the heavens are waiting
to take our order.

Later, we linger back in the sphere of the star's eye,
rechargin in the centre of the circle.

Suddenly, plates of chicken wings
and fried spaghetti come crashing through the atmosphere
like meteors scattering debris and napkins.

Our environment breaks around us.

Tectonic plates generate an internal stress field,
which ends our foreplay abruptly.

SM

She

She has fed the Finno-Ugric tribes
before the introduction of potatoes.

She has been found in the Nahal Hemel
cave, Israel,
in the tomb of Tutankhamun,
ritually stuffed into the nostils
of Ramesses II,
the eyes of Ramasses IV:

Traces of her have been found in Egyptian urns dating from around 3000BC.

She has travelled the world.

She has been found in Pepys' Diaries
and added to coffee.

The Prophet Mohammed called her a "blessed seasoning".

She is the essence of Cocoa Cola.

Doctors have been known to prescribe her to facilitate
bowel movements and erection, to relieve headaches,
cough, snakebites and hair loss.

She scents garments with the smell of Lebanon,
a scent, legend has it, that could bring breath back to the dead ...

SM

The Clash Playing The Roxy Club

I.
Police helments politics
Rain cloud markets
Neal Street skids
safety-pins kids
leather liberty spikes spit:
Club Roxy Covent Garden
1976

II.
Rich dub Roxy Club
Bass pogos the rib cage
On the small stage
Ethiopia rope rocks
Don Letts and the goths
shaven heads dreader
than dread

SM

Break time

The staff room is a dug out.
Only the strong survive
in this hard-working madness.

Newbies sit shaking in a corner,
eating lunch at the computer
getting crumbs in the keyboard.

Working too hard.

Seasoned professionals drink coffee
before the sound of the bell:
the big push.

I look into the eyes of my collegues
and see my hollow self reflected there.
It can't be hate? Can it?

The waiting is the worst part.

Misssisyphus: "musings, poetry and whatever ..."

Suprising what stalking your friends on FB can uncover! Quite simplely, I am in awe of Misssisyphus, the Manx nihilist. I dare not comment too much on anything about her for fear she will beat me up. I am very much Walter the Softie to her Dennis the Menace, but I think that everything she does is great. Think Thomas Hardy, punk, Russian authors, metal, the Beats, Henry Rollins, Amanda Palmer, Hunter S Thompson, Oscar Wilde ... Intense intensity.

Anyway, I'm glad I've found this cache of her writing - I've always been curious to read her work, ever since she told me about the stuff that she sumitted for creative writing seminars... It seemed only fair to share the wealth with the wider blogging community. If you like bleakness and rants, check it out! Although the layout does make the text a bit hard to read ... if you persist it's worth it!

No doubt if Misssisyphus gets wind of this, she will be reaching for the catapult and the rotten tomatoes.


'Siberia'

Cast out, we stagger alone through
the wilderness.
A vast Siberia of lost hopes and
new fears.
We encounter no-one, for this hell
is our own.


Read more here:
http://misssisyphus.wordpress.com/

God bless,

Walter

Introduction

Hey gang,

It's nine o'clock on Sunday morning.

So, I'm thinking about getting (back) into writing. There are a number of factors that are stimulating me at this particular moment:

1.) I am reading and my reading is veering towards autobiographies of writers. Murakami, Kafka ... anyone in the literary section of The Telegraph weekend magazine - my parents' subscription, because I would 'obviously' be a Guardian reader ... Oh, and the Beats. Awesome people. Anyway, what is amazing about these stories is that they just went ahead and did it. Murakami was a bar-tender, then, if my memory serves me correctly, one day he just started writing. I suppose that is the thing to do: start.

2.) Starting writing moves on to the next point: the blog. It is surely the way forward. It is accessible - holding Hamford as my inspiration here. I must keep it going. If I keep writing something must happen someday.

I will also add a 'writing' label to my previous compositions.

3.) Job. Teaching: can I keep it up? I keep asking myself that question. For the moment things are going ok; after a week of absolute horror you might get a week of passable success. I've even had a *gasp* 'good day' recently - don't think I've even had one of those before. If I keep writing, writing on the blog, who knows? Maybe one day soemthing will come of it.

I mean to keep in the teaching game for a while at least. Maybe move out over the summer. Next year will be the real test, once NQT is over and I am 'qualified'. Eep. But it point is to keep writing because it will give me hope. Not the God-given hope that I rely on to get through each day, morning and evening and every other concievable time, but the hope that one day I will be able to create something tangeble and say "I did that."

Like that time at uni when I made a 'zine for the Christian Union mission week. It was, I have to say, pretty cool; an anthology of different work from Christian artists, poets and writers. El did some poems for it, poems that you can actually find on her website: ( http://elgruer.com/poems.php ). I made a sort of soap-box section for rants and I put in a short piece voicing my annoyance at people who took down the posters we put up for our Christian events. The good thing about this was that was it did hit home with people. Hearing people saying "Man, I do that!" and thinking that this was aimed souly at them. Not sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing, but it had an impact and it felt amazing to actually do that!

It's sort of the feeling that I get when I 'publish' my posts - although I don't get that gratification of comment (unless of course someone DOES leave a comment - and THAT is exciting). It is still thrills me and THAT is why I must keep going.

That'll do for now.

Peace out and God bless,

SM

Palmeresque

Trivial Pursuit and Other Stories

1. The Birth of British Punk (for Some)

Terrence Roquefort is wearing a maroon Fred Perry polo shirt, Cool Hand Luke Jeans, black and white Creepers and a crew cut. His is built like the proverbial brick latrine and covered in crude tattoos.

On June 4, 1976, the Sex Pistols played --------------- in Manchester. Legend has it that everyone who saw that gig went home and started a band the next day. I mean, there were famous ones: The Buzzcocks, Joy Division, The Fall and The Smiths – but think of all the other no-talent kids that rushed out to buy guitars, headed to the garage to play a couple of choruses of ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ (by The Ramones). Where are they now? Lost in the feedback of obscurity, the discord of history as the poet says...

2. The Rise and Fall of The Suicidal Stockbrokers

Lewis Nymaus is wearing a charity shop pinstriped suit. His tie has pictures of teddy bears and hunny pots on it. The ensemble is stained with generous daubings of fake blood.

We started the band after going to a punk rock festival called ‘Rebellion’ in Blackpool. We had been a couple of times before: I think we started going in 2005 when it was still called ‘Wasted’. But it was 2009 when we started Suicidal Stockbrokers. It was a credit-crunch themed punk rock band – at the time the country, and the world, was in financial turmoil. A bit of a laugh really: something that Sam [Raimouth, vocals] and Cribbins [Bernard, guitar] had talked about for a while, usually in the pub after a few pints of the local varnish.
So one day in the summer holidays I got a text from Cribbins asking if I wanted to play drums for their band. Never seriously played before but we all want to be rock stars, don’t we? His brother had a kit which we could use, so I text back ‘sure’.
We had a couple of songs, but our best one was ‘Into the Red’: a slide from the financially safe ‘black’ into demented anguish, B-movie inspired monetary troubles of ‘the red’. I think we pretty much ‘wrote’ the song in five minutes. Sam and Cribbins had lyrics – I remember we used to write these terrible songs in our tents in response to seeing good bands at festivals, so the lyrics came from that. Cribbins makes up a three-chord riff on the spot. I remember a standard drumbeat that I learnt at a house party once and played it at double speed and twice as badly. Then we fit the music around the movement of the lyrics and Sam’s vocals. It was terrible but it was brilliant. We were like: “Next!”
A big part of our ‘thing’ as a band was image and theatrics. We were the Suicidal Stockbrokers, so we had to look the part. The first step was buying cheap suits – we spent ages walking around Brighton on a hot August day looking for bargains until we found suits for the three of us. Then we poured fake blood all over ourselves. We got the recipe from Bruce Campbell’s autobiography. That was brilliant fun. The bloodstained suit is a memento of those happy days.

3. Exits and Entrances

English teacher Clarabelle Butler is wearing a Vivien of Holloway Tea Dress (‘Country Garden Green’) and Mary Jane canvass shoes. Accessories from unknown sources.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts ...
It’s funny how quotations are ripped from their context and bandied about; could anyone guess where this quotation comes from? It’s from As You Like It, actually. We all dutifully perform our entrances and exits. Some stick in the mind more persistently than others. The bard speaks further on the subject ... and we all have our favourite entrances and exits. My favourite example from Shakespeare can be found in the stage directions for Antigonus (The Winter’s Tale): ‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’

4. Death Jam

Rock music historian Dave Phillips is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and board shorts with horn-rimmed glasses and corn-cob pipe accessories. A captain of the Fail Boat.

Dramatic, gripping, ripping, bloated, tragic, glorious, death has always ridden the coattails of rock music. We see that in the histories:
Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Elvis Presley, Keith Moon, Sid Vicious, Bon Scott, Ian Curtis, John Bonham, John Lennon, Bob Marley, Phil Lynott, Peter Tosh, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Per Yngve “Dead” Ohlin, Johnny Thunders, Freddy Mercury, Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth, Frank Zappa, Kurt Cobain, Brad Nowell, Jeff Buckley, Screaming Lord Such, Ian Dury, Kirsty MacColl, Joey Ramone, Joe Strummer, Johnny Cash, Dimebag Darrell, Ike Turner, Michael Jackson, Les Paul, Malcolm McLaren, Ronnie James Dio, Paul Gray, Peter Quaife, and counting ...
Rock death covers a wide spectrum of fatalities:
Plane crashes, drug overdoses, murders, heart attacks, electrocution (by guitar), cancer, drowning, skiing accidents, being mown in two by a speeding powerboat.
And like most spectrums, there are some elements of rock death that are hidden from us: we can never know. Jim Morrison’s fatal heart failure in 1971 is disputed to this day, Skatalite and trombone legend Don Drummond allegedly committed suicide while institutionalized in Belle Vue Asylum, Kingston in 1969. And of course, there is the modern phenomenon of Amanda Palmer...

Dave Phillips would like to thank Wikipedia for its generous contribution to his research.

5. Observation Anthology

Tinkerbell Thunderclap Peaches Moonunit Bowie is dressed quite normally considering the circumstances.

I first saw her at the Koko club in Camden. Jason Webley was supporting and had finished his set and I was tired, happy and dizzy from all the spinning around (spinning happens a lot when Jason is playing).
It was that point of breathless waiting for the main event. The crowd was bristling with expectation. I was sort of in the middle of it all. (I wish I had been nearer the front!) I remember looking up into the face of a tall, burly man dressed in Victorian steam-punk garb. He had a bald head and a neat little Hercule Poirot moustache which was literally bristling with expectation! And then the lights went low and we all surged forward to try and catch a glimpse of her. And there she was!
They lifted her up, their hands under her spread-eagle arms. This way her body was carried onto the stage for everyone to see. As she was raised from beneath the stage, the freaks at the front, those who had been waiting in the London rain to see her for hours in their make-up and top hats, howled their animal ecstasy, accompanying the funerary violins. Finally! And we all saw her and joined in the noise.
At that moment she didn’t have to play a single note. What was important was that she was there with us and we could say ‘Thank you’
or whatever we had to say
or not say
or laugh
or cry
get a little overwhelmed
or go to the bar
or put your arms around a stranger
or take a video on your phone to put on YouTube later
or dance
or fall over
or try to remember it all.
It could be done in that moment. It was just being there. With her...

6. Trivial Pursuit

“People are strange. Particularly people on the internet.” (Stephen Frycook, via Twitter)

7. A New Hope / The Good, The Bad and The ‘Palmeresque’ / Keyboard Bebop

Tapioca Rice is wearing a white vest and Amanda Palmer Brand Briefs (for men). Throughout the interview she pauses to take photos for her MySpace page.

It is kind of amazing. It can be the best thing, the worst thing. It’s definitely punk.

So The Icon produces art, writes on their blog, their MySpace, their Twitter, etc. etc. When people consume that whatever, it can affect them in a lot of ways depending where they are at. I have always admired the DIY spirit of art, the grassroots do-it-yourself kinda vibe. The authenticity makes sense to me. The music (and everything else) seems to matter more. And the internet is a big part of that happening today: I don’t need to spell this out to you. But anyway – The Icon permeates people’s lives in different ways.
Then The Icon dies and we’re all like “Oh man!” ... but now people can directly respond via social networking ‘sites (or whatever) for everyone to see (all secretly hope that The Icon will see their effort some day).
Some fly their black flags of mourning from their Facebook page or fire a twenty-one gun salute via Twitter. It could be a poem, a little story, a diary entry, a stream of consciousness, a massive joke, the most obvious cliché in the world, posted onto a blog in Sussex with trembling fingers (only five people will read it). It doesn’t have to make sense and the grammar and spelling can be awful (which is actually hugely liberating when you think about it). Whether it is good or makes your toes curl isn’t important: it is the act of responding itself which is the important part! So I’m down with it. I may not like what they are saying, but it is cool that they have the passion to write such audacity. That’s keyboard bebop, baby!
... Can I finish on that please? Kthanxbai