Jacknife Swan

Endless, blood-soaked dreams. When I awoke, exhausted from cutting throats all night, I could feel my wings, coiled and furled in the knotted muscles of my arms, squirming towards daylight.

[redacted]

[This post, a preview of the upcoming webcomic RUN, has been removed because linking the images from the artist's website was proving a logistical nightmare for him... and without the pretty pictures, well, there's not much point, is there...? Just keep watching Opi8—it'll be up soon enough...]

Allow me a brief shining moment of auto-hype:

I’ve had an e-mail from artist Brian LaFramboise, who I know from our days with Arch-Type Studios. Brian is currently drawing my five pages from the collaborative comics story “Run,” an exquisite corpse-style project that will appear later this Spring on Opi8.

I’m dying to see this—not least because I don’t know how it ends! I wrote the third section of a five-part story, which was a marvelous challenge—I had to start resolving and fleshing out some of the stuff from the setup, while threading in new mysteries and monkey-wrenches for the writers who got it next. I wanted to leave the subsequent writers with problems to solve, but in order to play fair, I had to make them soluble problems: thus I wrote them with solutions of my own in mind, solutions which almost certainly will not make it into the final story.

The funny thing is, my fellow writers and I have never discussed the story: it was forbidden, as part of the rules of the original game—but now that the script is written and with the artist, we’ve never spoken of it. Not for lack of opportunity—we’ve all got each other’s e-mail addresses, and most of us frequent Warren Ellis’s Delphi Forum (Chad Ward, who runs Opi8, is also webmaster for warrenellis.com)—but it’s almost like the game is still going on, and won’t be done until the final story is up on the Opi8 website. I’m sure we’ll discuss it then: but for now, it’s all delicious anticipation.

Dream Dairy [sic]

Damn you, Joe Zenith—you and your infectious malaise as well! With all the discussion of nightmares and how best to combat them, how deliciously ironic to see me, bad-aleck vaquero shaman nightmare-fighter papi that I am, lying awake at an ungodly hour, cold terror seeping from me even as the details of the dream (thankfully) fade.

And when dawn comes I realize that shortly before bed I did something I usually don’t: I ate a bowl of breakfast cereal with milk. And had a fucking nightmare.

Sigh. Score one for the electrochemical model of consciousness.

Notional Becomes Notation

Once upon a time, children, our Tom Coates had a vision: a vision less-known than that which led to the founding of The Bomb, or of the Barbelith Underground, but no less prophetic for being more obscure.

Tom’s vision was to be called Slutcore: and lo, it would be a website, built around a gallery of photographs of himself and some friends poncing about in a distinct music-magazine-photograph kind of way. And lo, it would be a website for a fictional band, the eponymous Slutcore, who would be a band in all senses except that they didn’t actually write songs, play music, record, or perform.

It was too much for me to get my poor head around at first, but once I “got it” it seemed to me to be pure genius. Sadly, nothing much ever came of it.

But it seems the zeitgeist has caught up. On the one hand there’s Gorillaz—a remarkable conceptual product of meatspace musicians doing, in essence, voice-work for a "band" of literal cartoons (but Damon Albarn et al are no more Gorillaz than, say, Nancy Cartwright is Bart Simpson: Bart has a life and a cultural presence that goes far beyond the parameters of Ms. Cartwright’s sterling performance), and artists who give the band an image—and image is literally everything, for Gorillaz. Then there’s young Ben Haggar’s project, an assemblage of conceptual bands with no music and no meatspace presence, whose members and music exist only in the fevered words of press releases.

Now I hear of Chicks On Speed, a project whose parameters originally fell the closest to the Slutcore paradigm. The initial purity of the concept was daffy genius. But Chicks On Speed have now taken the additional steps of actually recording some music, and of touring to promote it. Now Chicks On Speed are just another band, one of thousands.

Fucking sell-outs.

Still, I think The Archies were on to something.

Why am I not surprised?

I have at last burst a blood vessel—this in my right eye, leaving half of my squint thickly bloodshot. I had hoped for some of the scary asymmetrical-optic cool of a Thom Yorke, or a Bowie. I’d have settled for Gomez Addams. Or even for young Brian Warner, lead singer for that popular beat combo the young people seem to like so much—the Marillion Mansions, or somesuch (keep music evil, indeed...). (vide Rollo)

But instead, when I look in my mirror, I see Stark—the cell-block boss and bull lifer from Brian Azzarello’s “Hard Time” arc in Hellblazer, a big, sagging lump execrably rendered by Richard Corben.

I am an old man, and I read too many fucking comics.

We're An American Band

The Artist Formerly Known as the Acolyte Rizla has a new project in the works (doesn’t he always?): a zine devoted entirely to fictional bands. He’s put out a general call for folks to whip up bogus NME-styled band profiles and pictures—either détourned photographs or drawings—and send ’em in.

I was intrigued. I’m horribly disillusioned about most of what I hear on the radio these days, and this gave me an excuse to think for a while about the kind of band I’d like to hear. To that end I came up with a concept and a blurb...

Soldier’s Joy: Achtung, Baby!

In the post-Pogues musical landscape, whither folk-rock? To southeastern Massachusetts, apparently, where the three men and four women who make up the songwriting collective Soldier’s Joy have been tearing up local venues with their ramshackle, ecstatic reinventions of the American and Anglo-Irish songbooks.

All the good stuff is there—frantic acoustic strumming, swirling Hammond organ, impassioned boy-girl harmonies (all the band members sing), squalling guitar/violin duels, fat basslines, clattering multiethnic beats—all put together in constantly surprising combinations, with weird splashes of instrumental color enlivening both heady originals like “Kate On A Hot Tin Roof” (with its epic guitar coda), “Purple Jesus,” and “We Who Love The Sun,” and reworked traditional songs like “The Buffalo Skinners” (done up as a rattling spaghetti-western death march) and the eerie, chiming “Searching For Lambs,” as well as the occasional wild card (a storming krautrock-informed cover of Nick Drake’s “Know”).

Certain touchstones are apparent—the street-gang camaraderie of Les Negresses Vertes, the brooding power of the Bad Seeds, the angular guitar heroics of Richard Thompson or Television—along with a taste for quote-unquote “world music” and a widescreen sensibility: but Soldier’s Joy (named for a traditional dance tune) undercuts the earnest worthiness of po-faced crusaders like the Levellers with healthy doses of sleazy glamour and sexual heat, the former supplied by guitarists Ricky Hero and Kaz Haxsaw, the latter enhanced by the deep, warm grooves from bassist Jay Vincent and twin percussionists Tara K and Snigda Chatterjee. The band’s enormous musical reach is expanded by multi-instrumentalists Lydia Christian (keyboards, fiddles, and Celtic harp) and Drew Magyar (banjo, whistles, bouzouki, mandolin, reeds, and god knows what else).

With their debut disc Key on a Kite String (on their own Plaid Pyjama label) picked up for UK distribution and a summer tour to follow, look for the Joy to spread far and wide.

Now, that should’ve been the end of it. But goddammit, the more I thought about it the more desperately I wanted this band to really exist. The songs are real: if only the band were, too...

Last week, along with the “band pics” (an amusing hour’s worth of PhotoShop wankery on a scanned sketch from my notebooks), I sent Riz the following e-mail:

I’ll tell you, Ben, this is addictive stuff: Soldier’s Joy is the band I always wanted to be in, and the people are becoming increasingly real to me. Their whole career is laying itself out in a series of articles and interviews slowly coalescing in my head, and all written in that slightly-obnoxious NME voice—from the review of the first date of their UK tour, playing a community hall in Swansea (“To have won the Welsh over any more effectively, they’d have had to wear leeks in their fucking hats...”), to individual interviews and album reviews.

Plus it’s great fun coming up with those poncy music-journalist names (“Nigel Dykes-Grunton” is a current favorite) and lame photo-caption puns using the words “soldier” and “joy.” Fertile ground indeed.

It’s projection, to an extent. The band is peopled with a mix of figures: composites of real people, individuals who embody aspects of my personality and interests, and characters from my various fictions: Ricky and Lydia, for instance, are the leads in a comics series I’ve been developing for some time—she under the same name, he under another. Their music is only tangential to that story, a part of the "deep background”—but here it is the story. Which fascinates me. Another layer to the metafiction.

More than any of that, though, it’s wish-fulfillment, pure and simple. Soldier’s Joy is the great lost opportunity, the girl you should have married when you had the chance, the band that might have been had the people involved not been such neurotic, thoughtless ego-junkies.

Myself most definitely included.

MJQ RIP

John Lewis, whose classically-trained piano and composition ushered in the Birth of the Cool, is dead at 80.

Revisiting Old Topics, I

Signs of Spring: a woolly bear on the back step. We ooh and ahh and put her back onto the wet grass: we have learned our lesson—Don’t fuck with Nature—and Nature has sent us this Sally Caterpillar like a blessing, like a kiss of forgiveness.

Revisiting Old Topics, II

I have at last seen Dancer In The Dark, and can at last formulate an intelligent opinion. So, Zen, this one's for you.

An extremely polarizing film, from what I’ve heard—one that inspires either rapturous praise or scoffing dismissal. I find myself, then, in the curious position of having no strong feelings about it. It was emotionally moving, yes, but as I watched my mind kept wandering, riffing, associating—because the one thing nobody has mentioned about Dancer is how derivative it is.

I can see where Dancer would seem unprecedented and off-putting if one were not already familiar with Von Trier’s earlier films (Breaking the Waves anticipates a lot of the elements of Dancer, from the hand-held cameras and whip-pans to the bleak colors, from the central theme of a saintly woman being sacrificed on the altar of circumstance to the presence of übercreep Udo Kier in a supporting role), the recorded output of Björk, the films of director Krzysztof Kieslowski (in many ways Dancer seemed like an outtake from The Decalogue), cinema verité, postwar Italian neo-realism and, most obviously, the teleplays of writer Dennis Potter, especially Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective.

But I am familiar with all that stuff—which confirms my status as an overeducated film snob, I suppose—and so Dancer, though it had much merit, held very few surprises for me.

Poetry Clinic: The Angel Of The Web

Checking into the Poetry Clinic this month: an experiment in poetic form, a villanelle—a meditation on synchronicity called

The Angel of the Web

I sing the Angel of the Web
who holds us in her fatal lines,
and celebrate her golden thread.

Whom men call Fate, this Angel braids
her cord, our disparate lives to bind.
I sing the Angel of the Web.

Let all the quick and all the dead
praise she whose spindle all entwines
and celebrate her golden thread.

Her hand at word when tears are shed,
when lovers meet, when two words rhyme;
I sing the Angel of the Web

who wove the paths of wed and bred
in chance and red, in spunk and spine,
and celebrate her golden thread.

I see no tree of branches spread,
but warp and woof in needle fine;
I sing the Angel of the Web
and celebrate her golden thread.

Comments? Criticism? You know whut ta do, dawg.