Diminishing Voodoo Mystery

hoodoo
voodoo

hodo
vodo

hd
vd

h
d.

White Van Men

I just saw seven grown men climb into the back of a

small white van.

I can only assume it is a portal to another world.

Danny Dyer deconstructed

For the uninitated - eg. people with good taste, American readers - the actor Danny Dyer is, to many, the epitome of English manhood. To others he's known for portraying some right 'orrible slags who can't abide liberty-taking muppets.

Anyways. I've written a piece for The Guardian about my strange fascination with the fella. You can read it here:

'Axl Rose, Human Guinea Pig'

Here's an extract from a poetry work-in-progress

It is about Axl Rose.

It is based on a true story.

Read it here.

March 08 Reading List

Tales Of Love & Loss by Knut Hamsun
Motel Girl by Greg Sanders
The Outsiders: The Secretive World of Ireland's Travellers by Eamon Dillon
Last Stop Salina Cruz by David Lale
Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life by Jeremy Paxman

Copey

Maybe you think you don't know Julian Cope.

Don't like Julian Cope.

Don't care about Julian Cope.

But you do.

You do.

This might be why:

blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/03/julian_cope.html

'Pale Lesbians Bent Over' (Spam Poem)

Joy puffs their work - these wives want their shine lakes sunny;
their neat habit shadows arise plucking holes done loudly.

Fact: two pale grown men sleep in silence, two groan men

in matching silk gowns, full of lamp-light wine; by the lake.
True smoke eats the land, their wives together, hand in hand.

The Missing Kidney in Dazed & Confused

Q: Does this mean I'm hip?

(A: No. No, you will never be hip. Even if you wear a hat. Especially if you wear a hat. Because even if the hat is from 1974 and belonged to your Grandpa, people will still start mentioning Pete Doherty and then you shall be doomed. And anyway no one who is hip uses the word 'hip'. What is this - the 1950s, Daddio?)

Local News Headline Of The Day

YOB MAGNET
GETS GO AHEAD.

Righting

The power of semiotics?
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/
2008/03/signs_of_the_times.html


The state of the British music press?
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/
2008/03/why_so_hard_on_music_press.html

Yeah.

It's
all
kicking
off.

British Sea Power live review for Mojo

A few weeks ago I undertook a 600 mile round-trip drive to Kendal to see British Sea Power play their town of origin. I had terrible flu, got hammered on some sort of codeine-based medication before the show and left a trail of snot-rags from London to Cumbria and back again. There are few bands I would do this for.

Anyway.

I wrote a review of the show and it's in the new issue of Mojo, on sale now. Here it is.

British Sea Power
The Brewery, Kendall

Perched at the southern gateway to the Lake District, with its nearby five hundred million year old slate intrusions and post-volcanic screes it is a different type of rock that the residents of Kendal are more familiar with.

In the week that British Sea Power’s third album ‘Do You Like Rock Music?’ went Top 10, for one night only it is a distinctly twenty-first century style of rock that permeates the town and draws a crowd of locals of all ages and persuasions. Tonight feels like a ticker tape parade for those local heroes sent off as boys into battle many years ago.

They return to the town that spawned them bloodied men but victorious nonetheless. Drummer Matthew Wood is absent with a slipped disc accrued, unbelievably, during an aggressive bout of dusting to be temporarily replaced by Tom White of Electric Soft Parade/Brakes, while some-time cornet player Phil Sumner has spent the day in hospital after knocking himself out cold the previous night following a twelve foot swan-dive from a speaker stack during their encore.

Not that it matters; BSP are resilient types who take the boy’s own resourcefulness of Lord Baden-Powell or Ernest Shackleton - not to mention their sartorial style - as inspiration. Snapped a string? They could probably fashion a new one from bark. They are Ray Mears then, had he been raised on the Bunnymen and The Pixies rather than witchetty grubs and whittling sticks.

Beginning in a burst of wailing feedback that thankfully smoothes itself out, it is on new songs No Lucifer (centred around wrestler Big Daddy’s “easy, easy” chant), Atom and the pro-immigration, Joe Meek-sounding Waving Flags, that British Sea Power suggest their cult status is deserving of worldwide membership, each song containing moments as awe-inspiring and breathtaking as the peak of celestial Helvellyn piercing the swirling cumulus nimbus on a frosty morning.

Because, ultimately, that’s what British Sea Power do best: transcend what is on paper mere indie-rock to create something grander, more elemental and just beyond words. The slow-burning Spirit Of St Louis and closer A-Rock allow for prolonged noise pieces, the latter seeing guitarist Martin Noble hoisted aloft to walk across the entire venue’s ceiling.

But it is elegiac pop where British Sea Power excel, early singles Remember Me and Carrion both widescreen and sepia-toned, and breathed new life from the vocal yin and yang interplay of singing brothers Scott and Neil Hamilton; the former impassioned behind his thousand yard stare, the latter sinewy and fragile. If Arcade Fire can sell a million albums doing such similar windswept rock on their own terms, then in a just world BSP should be equally as widely adored.


Ben Myers

Van Gogh Fields

'Van Gogh Fields' is another new story that was published on the fishing-related blogsite CaughtByTheRiver.net.

Here it is.


Van Gogh Fields

Behind me the fields of grass swayed nosily in the breeze.

Perhaps ‘swayed’ doesn’t do this vision justice. Neither, for that matter, does ‘field of grass’.

Let us start this vision again in order to gain a better sense of clarity. After all, there are many depictions of fields within literature which I am competing against.

So.

The field was an emerald tin foil ocean shimmering beneath a strobe light sun.

Incandescent with light and life the field was a symphony of whispers in my ear; each blade of grass, each stalk of green corn was a violin string and the dormant breeze was their conductor jerkily orchestrating them into one complete work that held the secrets of the landscape. Each sound was an instrument, the pond and environs an opulent concert hall for the imagination.

The birds, for example, provided the melodies, each species harmonising with the next. Each sparrow then was a trumpet, four passing crows became saxophones and a wide variety of tits, gulls, widgeons and the like spanned the remaining orchestral gamut from woodwind to brass to string. Violins, violas, double basses, French horns, tubas, oboes, bassoons, contrabassoons – the entire ensemble represented.

A distant woodpecker provided intermittent percussion, as did the occasional satisfying sound of a fishing reel being quickly and mechanically operating, clicking like a man-made mating call.

Planes overhead, the throat-clearing cough of an angler on the distant bank, the splash of a trout leaping and pirouetting, the click of branch on branch, the quiet sigh of a cloud basking in the afternoon warmth; each became an instrument, a small piece of the aural tapestry.

The symphony grew with the breeze until the droll baritone clang of a flat-bed truck a mile or so away across the fields became the timpani’s finite knell as the conductor concluded with a frenzy of gestures so violent that a lock of hair loosened itself from his well-gelled comb-over and the fields of grass swayed in the breeze as noisy as an unsold Van Gogh painting in the ear of its tormented lovesick creator, as violent and vibrant as the visions that gingerly flooded his eyes with unfulfilled promises.

Imaginary Bodies Of Water

I have a new story entitled 'Imaginary Bodies Of Water' published on the fine weblog CaughtByTheRiver.net. It is an extract from a bigger project. You can read it there or here it is below.


Imaginary Bodies of Water

Soon enough, at a time not recorded in any diary, I began to see bodies of water that weren’t even there. Everywhere I went: flat surfaces like ponds and pools. Imaginary bodies of water.

They began to appear in the most unexpected places at times completely unconnected to fishing trips. Remember: I had a life outside of fishing. Remember: fishing only occupied 1% of my time but was beginning to occupy approximately 83 – 97% of my thoughts. In fact the further I was away from a fishing trip, the more I began to see these imaginary bodies of water. I was being haunted by twenty-first century water, but in a good way.

Maybe I’d be taking an overground train into the centre of London and down below amongst the tower blocks and the cluttered high streets something would catch my eye. An empty concrete yard tucked behind a scrap metal yard like a company imaginary body of water. But of course I wouldn’t see the scrap yard or the barking dogs guarding it – all I would see was the flat grey pool of solidified concrete like an unknown pond in the midst of the city, its surface only broken by a cluster of weeds poking through the cracks like reeds that disguise a school of perch below. And I would catch myself wondering whether that barren concrete yard in an area populated by one person ever square mere was fish-able.

I’d speculate as to what lay beneath that placid surface, by which train the grey surface that looked golden and shimmering to my fish-drunk eyes would be out of sight and every time I went past it again on the train it would have returned to its original form: a concrete tucked by a scrap yard guarded by barking dogs that would take your arm off at the shoulder as much as sniff your rapidly retracting balls.

Or maybe I’d be driving on the motorway and squinting through the blinding flash of the sunlight in my eyes I’d see a vast and empty industrial estate of metal corrugated buildings nestled up close to series of flat tarmac ponds where no-man would be foolish enough to set up his rod. At 70 mph with the wind in my hair and the radio tuned to songs conducive to the open road I’d see secret network of roads and forecourts and loading bays laid by Irish labourer hands in the 1970s now reinvented as secret water ways available to only the most imaginative of fishermen. And there I would temporarily drift into the outside lane of the motorway, my mind lost in this illusion of secret fishing spots.

Or maybe I’d be walking along a busy shopping street – any busy shopping street – and I would find myself stopping at road works to lean over the plastic barriers and peer into a hole in the road dug by workers laying cables to siphon television into the homes of the paying masses to see if there were fish circulating silently in that there hole.

I even considered carrying a hook-laden line with sinker in my back pocket in case I came across other such spots in amongst the urban sprawl which, to my eyes, was punctuated by prime spots that other people just couldn’t see. They couldn’t see them because they didn’t fish and therefore didn’t have the ability to see beyond the everyday façade of concrete, tarmac, glass and steel of the modern world.

It was as if fishing had given me the key to the fourth dimension and once laid upon my hand that key silently spoke the following words to me: go forth and find a hole. Sink and a line there and you will find peace and happiness and tranquillity. You may not find fish but you will find something equally as gratifying – maybe even more so.

To which I replied: Thank you, I might just do that, and went about my daily business with an added spring in my step, satisfied that good fishing existed in the mind as much as it did on the banks of a river crowded with bank holiday anglers


Taken from a work-in-progress by Ben Myers. Ben’s second novel The Missing Kidney is published Spring 2008 by Social Disease

February 2008 Reading List

Waterlogged by Roger Deakin
On The Cobbles: The Life Of A Bare-Knuckle Gypsy Warrior by Jimmy Stockin
Kill Your Friends by John Niven
Listen To The Warm by Rod McKuen
Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend by Michael Dregni

(In spring time I always end up reading books about gypsies. I don't know why)