Boogled

Google Analytics is always fun. Aside from telling me I remain unloved in Greenland, a cult of one in Palestine, but surprisingly popular Patagonia, there is the warm glow which comes from knowing that I am widely read in Texas. Bill would be proud of me.

Of course, the biggest joy provided by Google Analytics is seeing which surreal searches have pushed people towards English Dreaming, English Rain. My favourites over the last few weeks include: ‘Michael Keaton sightings’, ‘celebrities and their Dobermans’ and ‘duck herding Essex’. However nothing quite tops ‘Kyle McLaughlin pursued by a bear’.

If my mind was not already boggling at though of Agent Cooper stumbling onto the darkness at hidden in the song Teddy Bears Picnic*, then it would definitely be boggled at some of the desperate searches for niche porn captured by analytic software. ‘Dirty pissing,’ ‘leather glove wank story’ and ‘Timotei advert girl fuck’ are probably all pretty standard things. Yet broadminded as I am, there is still surprise in finding people hit my blog looking for ‘Dame porn’, ‘wanking with ribbons’ or ‘badger sex pictures’.

David Icke and Anne-Marie Forker remain ever popular searches, though it is probably best not to interrogate some of the Boolean logic attached to their names by some researchers. There are cases with both of them where I think I need to move beyond the standard boggling and invent a new word, possibly boogled.

The biggest shocks and laughter came from those trying to answer really hard questions. ‘Is Stephen Grasso evil?’ ‘Is English jazz dead?’ ‘Where in the world is David Southwell? The chance of EDER ever being able to answer those imponderables remains slightly less than that of Southend United winning the UEFA Cup.

*Trust me, it is there. I can rumble the line: ‘If you go down to the woods today you are sure for a big surprise’ with such bear menace it makes children cry.

There is Magic in London Town…

It has been said there is nothing more boring than hearing other people’s dreams. Second-hand nightmares and wandering in the kingdom of Morpheus are not always meant to be shared. However, having had the following dream three times in a fortnight, I feel like recording it.

I am on stage in a nightclub. Late fifties or early sixties plush, all velvet curtains and gild. The air is thick with cigar smoke incense and the tang of rum. Dressed in the type of suit you would expect The Midnighters to wear, I am playing bass and singing. I look around me and see my band all attired in outfits matching my own like some bad boy Beatles. I recognise each member as a close friend, including Stephen Grasso playing the sweetest rhythm guitar.

We launch into a cover of Lord Creator’s Kingston Town. The lyrics are changed and I croon it like Jacques Brel possessed by Lord C. Looking into a crowd heavy with godfathers and rude boys, I find my Lady Love’s eyes and sing:

The night seems to fade, but the moonlight lingers on
There are wonders for everyone

There stars shine so bright, but they are fading at the dawn
There is magic in London Town…

The Everyday Made Sacred by Intent

A while back, Stephen Grasso commented to me that he appreciated reading the entries on my blog about cooking, how the tales of finding ingredients and preparing them were actually small love stories. Perceptive. Whether baking bread or pulling everything together for a risotto, my cooking is often one of those commonplace expressions of love that can easily be overlooked. A bit of the everyday made sacred by intent. Sometimes you want to tell those who command space in your heart and mind your love them with words, other times by plucking basil leaves from the pot in the kitchen and adding them to the tomato sauce you have been reducing down for the last hour.

Another higher function cooking serves for me is as creating a meditative space within my life. When I am being slammed hard by a storm of deadlines and worrying about trying to fit in making a speech at a literary convention, a child’s birthday party and a visit to Nanna all on the safe day, cooking grounds and centres me. The urgent tang that comes from sweating onions and garlic cuts through the roaring static of my stress. Building the flavours of a sauce becomes alchemy. Combining ingredients I transform base elements into a temporary panacea for my ills.

The moment in the day when I take down the wooden board, pour olive oil into the pan and begin chopping while Radio 4 throws out voices is always special. Cooking is not just a chore, not just a pleasure. For me it can be as essential as sleep for gathering up the cares of the day and making a feast out of life.

The Secret History of English Jazz

There have been a couple of nights during the last fortnight where I have dreamed of a future where Stephen Grasso and I have become authors of a book entitled The Secret History of English Jazz. It was less an account of the music scene, more of a novel and exploration of an occulted culture hidden in basements. It covered the magic of music from swing to sweet rocksteady. The Café de Paris to after-hour clubs on the Charing Cross Road and a certain Powis Square shebeen. Piron’s New Orleans Orchestra to Cyril Blake’s Calypso Serenaders. Rum libations, sacred smoke and the tale of how the Loa of Bouncers became the Prince of London.

The echoes of dream tumbled into the Soho twilight when I met Mr. Grasso on a Dean Street corner. One pint of the dark stuff at a spit and sawdust then we shuffled a few doors along. Descending a staircase, we entered the Black Gardenia, a strange nightclub that can only be called a true jazz dive. It was the type of venue where it would come as no surprise to learn that Lord C. had once worked the door. I had been warned the Black Gardenia was like something out of a David Lynch movie. I had not been misled.

Tight and dark, it was furnished somewhere between a faded burlesque bar and the Sunrooms of my youth. Surreal touches of decoration were rubbed raw over the cracked bones of dead glamour. There was snakeskin wallpaper in the gents and a boxed skull skulking behind bottles. The most impossibly chic barmaid I have ever seen spent the night looking like a Parisian Maquis poster while the two rooms pulsed to a soundtrack of 1940 swing interupted by the occassional eruption of Blue Beat.

Come nine, the records stopped. A man with more than a passing resemblance to a giant Kyle McLaughlin, ravaged by a diet of booze and pills, walked over the piano beside us. He called out for bits of wood to jack up the instrument so he could put his legs under it, set up his PA and we entered what he called his ‘time tunnel’ as he began to power through 1920s and 1930s jazz standards.

Requests were made and granted. I got a time travel rendition of That Old Black Magic and we also got a beautiful Caravan. This was especially fitting. Its lyrics of starlight mysteries, crossing the desert as a metaphor for crossing the abyss and getting through difficult times together make it something of a favourite with the English Hoodoo fraternity. While my request for some Ken Snakehips Johnson could not be met, his spirit was evoked by our pianist telling the story of how he had performed on the same stage at the Café de Paris where Snakehips had died in the bomb blast.

Having made our own libations and nods to the secret history of English jazz, we climbed back into rainy streets of Soho to dodge rickshaws as they splashed through neon puddles. Down below in the Black Gardenia the time travel was still happening. A crumpled lounge singer five hours off the plane from LA was guesting on vocals as the pianist played the opening bars of Ghost of a Chance. Every note and word a living line of transmission.

A Fragment from the Dreamscape

People often ask writers: ‘Where do you get you ideas from?’ It is a fair question, yet many authors sweat when answering. You can see guilty beads of moisture tracking the lines in their foreheads.

This is because most writers are thieves. We steal ideas. File down the ISBNs and respray or break them up for parts to be shipped out to distant lands. Illicitly obtained Peugeot 505 gearboxes go to Port Harcourt, plot devices go to Arthur Machen’s Baghdad of the mind.

In defence of my profession, it should be noted that poverty plays a part in most crime. According to Denis Johnston, there are only eight basic stories. With millions of writers around, that equates to a real shortage of resource and a breeding ground for criminality.

Some writers claim not to be thieves. They style themselves ‘literary DJs’. Remixing, sampling syntax and characters, pumping up the plot. Others claim to be scavengers, salvage merchants, saviours of stories that would otherwise be scrapped. Even when this narrative is self-consumed, it remains just a distracting lie. Every writer is a thief. Every one of us.

I could try to claim cleaner hands. Point out that I deal in non-fiction. No law against taking facts during empty afternoon raids on Kew. I even pay fair coin to my stranger sources. Vodka and tonic, a curry or provable gossip for sharing buried news. Tell me what is on the missing Diana tapes and I will tell you which of Philip’s bastards is scouting for a ghost writer to dish the dirt. Libertarian memories of the man behind Guido Fawkes for on the level fact about Charles Kennedy. Information brokerage. Legitimate exchange.

However, facts are not the same as ideas. The question remains: ‘Where do you get you ideas David?’ The answer is always the same, always honest. Dreams, talks and walks. There has been a shortage of curry conversations in July, so it has all been walks that drift unknowingly into Baghdad-on-the-Thames and dreams.

I do not know how it works for other writers, but for me the dreams that provide ideas come in two broad forms. In the first, I will find myself possessing the body of an alternate me in a parallel dimension. A place where I am guilty of fiction and published by Gollancz.

I twitch inside this other David Southwell. Make him switch on his computer to see the drafts of his latest project or else force him to pull his published books from the shelves. The Scarlet Faction by Tim Dedopulos and David Southwell; Before The Blood by Matt Adams and David Southwell; The Far Lands by Stephen Grasso and David Southwell; the collected Hellblazer comics. Half a Dozen Doctor Who novels written alongside Sean Twist. The Sherlock XIII series. In these dreams, I attempt to read as much as I can; I do as all authors do and steal. I could try to spin it, but taking my ideas from an alternate me is still literary theft.

In the second type of dream I take directly from the landscape and inhabitants of what Machen’s Baghdad. Map its streets; make surreptitious word sketches of faces I see dining in its restaurants. I sit alone in its bars, pilfering overheard conversations, recording them with my shorthand scratch.

Every dreamtime experience is mine for the taking. I can steal without fear of repercussion in this ideaspace, knowing that within hours I will be beyond reach of any law operating here. Safely over the Theta state line, safely across the border of sleep. If I ever manage a decent night’s sleep again, the Baghdad security force will nab me and I will be up upon a charge of grand larceny.

There will be those who do believe my answer as to where my ideas come from. They will assume it is my Verbal Klimt improvisation to excuse and justify my crimes, who think: ‘He is a writer, therefore a proven thief and liar’. There is little I can provide to counter such thoughts. I could try calling Alan Moore as an expert witness; cite his work on Machen as a record of case law. Then again, those who do not wish to believe ideas arrive fully formed from dreams are unlikely to be swayed by the testimony of a man who worships Glycon.

In terms of hard evidence, I doubt dream journals are classed as admissible. Regardless, here is a record of last night’s journey through the territory of the Oneiroi.

‘Albion at the margins of the 1348 apocalypse. Empty fields. Abandoned. After the abnormal, constant summer rains, everyone was expecting famine as the grain rotted on the stalk. Worse came when plague robbed the landscape of enough men to work it. Blighted vegetation, mutating under the cover of mist that will not yield to a watered down sun. Skeleton thin livestock left to fend from themselves stagger across the blistered and black earth.

It is a time of crows. Breakdown of social order. All law a hollow memory. Knights Hospitalier colonies fallen to ruin. No one to protect the crossroads. All maps mock the living. England now a country of abandoned ghost villages, the only inhabitants are the unburied dead that once inhabited them. Pilgrims and outbreak refugees alone on green lanes drained of all colour except the black and grey palette of road turned to mire. High death rate for abbeys and monasteries. Two thirds of all England’s clergy dead. Mass burials. Mud pregnant with corpses.

Rumours of infection and Judgment Day as rife as the plague itself. Doomsday cults and heresies infect all belief. Antisemitc riots, the plague seen as a Jewish conspiracy. Mass penitence processions drudging on across several days. There is so much death, even the Pope is forced to abandon any pretence of established doctrine, declares all plague victims saved. Seeking ways to assuage the wrath of God has become political imperative.

Hoodoo Crow Men try to arrange contracts with the old powers to keep their patch free of contagion. Village militias murder outsiders on the roads to keep any possibility of disease from passing through. Plague Doctors tour the country, peddling false hope. They all wear the same uniform of fear: a hat to denote their status as a doctor; a mask with crystal eyes and the spice-stuffed beak to purify the air; a wooden stick to push away victims who get too close; leather gloves; a waxed gown and full-length boots.

On the Border, Scots see the pestilence in England as a punishment of God on their enemies. They gather an army to strike while the English are defenceless. However, before they can march, plague hits their ranks. Pursued by English forces, the Scots flee north, spreading the plague deep into their homeland. First flood, then famine, plague and war. All horsemen free, Albion as a territory of hell.

An inquisitor for the local prince-bishop makes his way across the landscape. Moving towards an abbey suspected of heresy. Moving into the reach of Lord Carfax – the local embodiment of authority who is suspected of diabolism. Moving towards a church where a Doom mural is being painted. It shows people dancing with a crowned bear; a bridge of spikes; St. Michael wielding a flaming sword, leading an army of saints against a legion of living skeletons. The mural intended as both prophecy and protection from the plague.

The mural reflects the sense that the tide of life and light looks like it will be permanently out across all Europe. The sea of civilisation rolled back to reveal primal horrors; deep fears now free to surface and roam. The inquisitor is the protagonist, moving towards his role in a vampire story. All vampire fiction as a fear of plague, infection, contamination and contagion from the outside.’

This is a fragment from the dreamscape. A note scratched into the dreamtime Moleskine. I probably will never transmute it to fiction, never be published by Gollancz. However, I hope it at least helps clear up one third of the ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ question.

Midwich Cuckoos to a Northern Soul Soundtrack

According to Elvis Costello and Wendy James, ‘London’s brilliant when it’s raining…' Yesterday, it was pissing down in London. After meeting up with Dickon, I found I had four hours to kill before the evening’s action. The usual round of the bookshops on the Charing Cross Road took up two, so I decided to seek shelter in the Odeon in Shaftsbury Avenue. I feared I’d have to endure something bordering on artsy pretension in exchange for protection from the weather given which cinema it was. At best, I was hoping for a good documentary. Instead I got Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence.

I can only describe Innocence to those who have not seen it, as Blade Runner done as an animated buddy-cop movie by Ridley Scott on a magic mushroom bender, re-edited by the studio to have a happy ending and more haiku-based exposition. Seeing it on the big screen, I emerged from the bowels of the building with the decompression that always follows a potent cinema experience.

After the wonderful guilty pleasure of seeing a movie in the afternoon, it was onto Treadwells for the London launch of Generation Hex. Fittingly given the title of the book, despite it being a London occult book launch, it was a younger, less snobby crowd and the usual malicious atmospheres were absent. I’d only come up to town for it because it was Stephen Grasso’s night. Despite the distant taint of my blagger and journalist past, it takes more than a few free glasses of red get me to go to a launch, especially if it has any link to the snide, lunatic political world of the London occult scene. Stephen is one of the few people I’d ever brave that cacophony of poisonous prattle for.

However, the launch was refreshingly devoid of cocktail jazz/atonal droning, careerism and pretension Christina Oakley Harrington gave a passionate speech about the book and managed to give the whole thing a celebratory, party attitude - something also helped by Stephen’s choice of a Northern Soul soundtrack.

Good conversations with strangers on Jack Parsons and Ogun, a rum, cigar and Bounty Bar interlude and the fact that other friends apart from Stephen were there, made it a night that despite what is happening in my life, I was almost able to enjoy. Especially as I think Christina said she was smitten with my book. I might have got that wrong. I did also enjoy the free wine.

More than one person could be heard echoing my view that Stephen is the best writer on magic to emerge in the last 20 years. He read his ‘Midwich Cuckoos’ piece that, like the rest of his work, is strong on emotional truth, inspirational clarity and a nice turn of phrase without recourse to poncy language. You can be of a non-mystical persuasion and still get the same pleasure out of his prose that you can from Alan Moore or Susanna Clarke lighting up with the page with their descriptions of the magical.

Hearing that everyone’s Season went so well, the positive reaction to Stephen’s work and the general celebratory ambience gave last night a sense of a New Year party. All dues paid. Clean slates. No auld lang syne, but nods at the Crossroads. The side effect of feeling that I’d been at a New Year party was the 3am heartbreak and loss was more intense and I’m trying to cope with today on an insomnia jag. Even so, London can be brilliant when it is raining.