Wednesday 28 December 2016

Cancel My Subscription to the Resurrection... maybe?

Carrie Fisher is dead.

For the last twenty-six hours, or thereabouts, I have been repeating this to myself every so often just in case I forget (I won't) and to make it more real.

Other folks have written eloquently about Carrie - nobody moreso than herself - so I'm not going to even try and have a crack.

I've spent a lot of today mucking around on the internet and taking some joy in the never-ending - if occasionally horrifying - creativity of fans. Lots of memes. I mean, LOTS OF THEM.

Spoiler Warning: There are references to features of Rogue One behind the jump.

Sunday 25 December 2016

Black Dogs and Universe Glue

I wrote this post's title a while ago, as I started to try and write a post for the first time in godonlyknowsevenhowlong.

Then, I stopped. I left it lurking while I did other things - anything else, I suppose - and now i know why.

This title was waiting for today. It is entirely relevant.

It is Christmas Day for another ten minutes - might be 26/12/2016 by the time I finish - and I want to scream and shout. I want to go at this room like I'm Kylo Ren with his lightsaber.

Last night, I went with my parental units to their church, a perfectly ordinary Roman Catholic parish church in North London. Carols followed by Midnight Mass.

Church once a year, I can deal with, especially as this is not the parish of my childhood and has no particularly unpleasant associations beyond the general, overall issues I have with Holy Father Church.

There's a great line in Dogma by Serendipity about Catholics: You don't celebrate your faith, you mourn it. That seemed about right yesterday, during the carols-as-dirges and mass that dragged in a succession of stand up-sit down-keneel-stand up again-recite some words like rote.

I'll be the first to admit that the problem is almost certainly me, not the singers and the organist, who at least made an effort. The priest seemed engaged and pleasant (I've definitely encountered worse)... but it all left me feeling sad, and then hollow.

Today, with my parents, who are generally lovely if... eccentric... and my sister L and my dearest, loveliest niece.......... even then the proceedings had a shadow hanging over them, not assisted by the Golden Child's insistence on being a two and a half year old and consequently lobbing tantrums at regular intervals. Her poor, overstimulated, excited little brain that wouldn't her nap, that wouldn't be at peace even when Gene Kelly was on TV.

Turns out, Gene Kelly doesn't hold much sway over small children.

And that was the Black Dog, snuffling at my heels. Like usual. Like almost always. Like he thinks he belongs, like he's entitled. the Morecambe & Wise 1976 Christmas Special was a hilarious band aid for a while, but a Band Aid nonetheless.

This is my life. Even when I'm happy, I don't get to be all-the-way-happy, because that fucking dog is at my heel. So far, I've been able to push it away for short periods of times, even lock in a dungeon for awhile, but this is my reality, I guess.

I once thought to myself that if I could, I'd absorb everyone's pain. No sense in us all feeling this way, after all.

*

It's been a year that I'm fairly sure will have its own special module on History courses in decades and centuries to come. I don't want to be right, but moments in actual history have acquired new resonance lately: Archie Duke, who shot his ostrich; blackshirts and rise of popular fascism in the 1930s; the horrific treatment of black Americans that led to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s... I could go on, but it's too fucking awful.

not just on the worldwide or national scale, but the amount of utter awful that has befallen the people I love and friends and those folks who share even a little of their worlds with me... My pain has been inward-facing, of my own making. Theirs? Less so.

There is so much pain in the world. Ever t'was thus, I hear some of you say. Perhaps, but it's 2016 so why are we content with accepting this form of status quo? Why is this considered OK just because 'it's always been'?

Smallpox was traditional, once. High infant mortality rates were traditional, once. Gaslamps and bows-and-arrows were traditional, once... we made them obsolete (T&Cs may apply) so why don't we make other traditional hates and pains outdated too?

We live in a selfish time, and it's by design. If we're all busy looking out for ourselves, looking to acquire what we can for ourselves, then we're not helping each other and we're not making the world a better place by holding those in power to account.

Which is why it's by design. Carthago delenda est is now common policy, it seems. Trade unions have not helped themselves over the years (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Scargill) but the discrediting of them has worked enormously well for businesses and not at all for workers.

Most of us are workers, by the way. The lie that we can be part of the elite if we just do as they say and vote as they tell us to is one of the marketing greats of the last half century.

I wasn't even going to talk about that, but you can't talk about common pain without it, I guess. And i haven't even touched on Aleppo or the many varied concerns of the people around the world who go largely ignored by us because they don't look or sound or seem like us. Even though they are also human beings with a baseline of human dignity and respect. Even here, I'm using 'Aleppo' as lazy shorthand for 'brutal human suffering' rather than considering the real humans affected, because I'm part of the problem too.

*


Are we all so fatigued that we don't care, in our selfishness, about things now? A truck got driven into a market in Berlin. Where were the 'Ich Bin Berlin' Facebook filters (Ich bin ein Berliner has been done, of course). Did we rend our digital garments then? No.

Bowie died at the start of the year. Since then, it feels like the Grim Reaper must've had a stretch target to meet. Variations on the theme of 'Turns out Bowie was the glue holding the Universe together' have littered the internet over the year.

I've started to really dread the noise of the BBC News Alert on my phone.

I'm a pop culture person, these things matter to me. I don't expect them to matter to anyone else and I don't ask you to care, but don't expect me not to simply because I didn't know someone. I don't suggest my sadness comes even close to that of the peope who loved and knew *Insert Name Here, Let's  Be Bitterly Honest'... but allow me - and other fans - to experience our own feelings in our own way.

As I was beginning to contemplate going to bed this evening, with the black dog nipping at my heels after a day which has been both lovely and taxing, and after seeing pictures of other people experiencing much more straightforward joy (as far as I can tell)... my phone pinged.

George Michael, a fixture in the pop culture around me for my whole life, died. Another one. Another one.

A friend of mine, who is awesome, thoughtful and compassionate, wrote that the 'Fuck you 2016' stuff was getting too much. That we should not turn real people into memes and joke about the year that sucked. She's right of course. I deal with this sort of thing with dark humour (see, yanno, above) but there's also a strain of prurient gossipy nonsense that comes along with it. We almost wallow in it, wishing to be the first to break the news to our group (no, we all get the same alerts...) and wishing to be seen to be the biggest fan by being the saddest. Who can rend their garments quickest? Who can be the first with a bad taste joke about the deceased?

That last point is moot: nobody can do better (worse) than Twitter after Michael Jackson died.

We have our right to our feelings and our grief, but there's responsibility there as well.

*

I remember leaving 2015 behind thinking that 2016 would 'be my year' and while in some very important ways I've made some important progress... I'm still here, Black Dog fur running through my fingers, still not living my vocation...

But I'm writing this blog post, and that's a sort of achievement. There have been moments of great joy this year, for me, for the people I love... but they seem to be so utterly outweighed by awful things.

What could possily counteract the bile and Newspeak of the various elections and referenda this year that have kicked Western Civilisation into the long grass?

This is not a competition and it's definitely not a joke. I would say "gotta laugh else you'd cry' but if 2016 has proved anything: it's that you can do both at the same time.

CW 25/12/2016

Wednesday 21 December 2016

The Storyteller - From the Vault 2008

Another piece from the Old Blog of Long Ago... although 2008 is not all that long ago, surely?

 As ever, I've made a few tweaks here and there but nothing particularly substantial except an Ernie Wise-ism in the opening line that I couldn't resist.

Thursday 8 December 2016

The Great What If - From the Vault 2006


This is an odd little alternate history scribble found during my latest chunk of dragging through Ye Olde Blog for anything worth keeping. It's a bit daft and a lot of wishful thinking but amusing, I think.

It's also an interesting little precursor to the fictional magazine pieces I wrote for Walking in the Shadowlands - practice, perhaps?

The universe is odd: I am posting this now almost a decade since it was posted, and on Jim's 73rd birthday and Lennon's anniversary - this was not by design. Not mine, anyway.




Wednesday 7 December 2016

The Valentino Test - From the Vault 2007

This is from mid-2007. I had discovered the deathless wonder that was Rudolph Valentino earlier that year when Blockbuster Online (cue 'remember them' gag) sent The Sheik on DVD.

I had know of Valentino forever of course, but had not understood the fuss until seeing him on film. I was entranced, enchanted and bowled over. He was a beautiful distraction during unquestionably horrendo times.

This is all still true, nearly 10 years later. I'm nothing if not consistent.

Sunday 27 November 2016

Silver


24 November 2016 passed in chaos for me. The Day Job went from 'super-busy' to 'hang on a minute, am I being trolled or something?'

A couple of times during the day, I thought 'merciful Jaysus, it's Freddie Mercury's anniversary today'.

I was too busy to say a word, let alone blog about it. The day after, despite having a half-day of leave, was much the same. I was so busy Friday that i even forgot to press 'pause' on my iPod and found it still running through shuffle mode - it went from track 7 or 8 to 120 or so, without me being anywhere near it. So much for the battery life, amirite?

Saturday dawned and I stumbled from my warm bed to the frigid November morning. It took 20 minutes to get to Finsbury Park, where I sat a Nutrition exam, completed an 'Introduction to Teaching Kettlebells' module, bashed my head on a wall at Starbucks and stared at my reworded literary agent query letter as if extra eyeball time would make it magically better.

That wasn't in strict chronological order, but you get the idea, which is likely a notion that my life consists of semi-regular head injuries, procrastination and a willingness (if not happiness) to give multinational tax dodgers a chunk of my hard-earned spondoolicks in return for soya milk and bad coffee.

Anyway, I ended up heading from Finsbury Park to Tottenham rather than home, to visit my mummy and daddy. I was hoping I'd get sympathy for being hurty. Fat chance. But I did get to check out the Amazon-delivered Crimboid presents for my niece. And yes, more multinational tax dodgers.

I don't like capitalism, but I do rather have to live within it, and my niece needs her toy doctor kit, damn you.

None of the above is remotely relevant to the subject matter at hand, but it does provide some context to the wearying grind I currently find myself within.

On the bus from one part of North London to another, my iPod ticked through some tracks which I listened to with the half-conscious attention of someone who has listened to all 5000+ tracks at least twice. I'm finding it difficult to focus at the moment (see above) so it was on Shuffle Mode to see what it threw up.

As I got off the bus, These Are The Days Of Our Lives by Queen pinged up... and I nearly burst into tears on Tottenham High Road.

You see, I listened to that song a lot in the winter of 1991. My daddy bought me the Double-A Side cassette of Bohemian Rhapsody/These Are The Days Of Our Lives because he is stone-cold awesome sometimes. I was nine years old then, and dealing with my first 'hero death' and the stresses of primary school (chiefly: crayon wars, trying to game the system to be first in line for lunch, gaming the system to produce a nice maths to story-writing ratio).

What I didn't know then was that other heroes had died, I just didn't know it yet.

Anyway, I listened to that tape a lot. I had neckache for weeks from the headbanging to the second half of Rhapsody as if I was Wayne and/or Garth.

Over the coming years, I returned to Queen on and off. I listened to These Are The Days Of Our Lives with a vague understanding of what it meant.

As I listened last Saturday, I wanted so badly to cry. For us living 25 years without the fabulousness of Freddie, of course, but also because I am increasingly part of the demographic for whom the song actually means something.

When I was 9, I understood what Freddie was singing about. Now, I find that I am living it. I have enough time behind me to be able to look back. To miss, to regret. To truly feel that I have lost things.

Now, we are all old enough that my friends are married, have children - increasingly more than one of both - and I bear witness to their many joys and sorrows and wonders. I am still much the same as I was in 1991, if sadder and more tired and with less hope.  

And yet, also in a position where there is fresh hope. I see it in the bright, shining face of my beloved niece, for whom the world is truly her oyster. In the newness of my dear friend Louise's brand new son.

Now, Louise is an even bigger Queen fan than I. We became friends when she moved to my primary school when we were about 7. She is a full 10 days older than me, and the only person to stick with me all this time, truly. She now lives on the other side of the world. I couldn't go to her wedding because I could afford neither time nor money, and I regret that dearly.

As I walked up Tottenham High Road, I wanted to cry. For Freddie, for the shining children we were once, with all our hopes and dreams stretching out ahead of us. And for the promise of now.

There is something we have now that we didn't have then: history. We were dear friends then, Louise and I, and the rest of the gang. Now, we are the roots of a tree. Those roots might go off in all sorts of diffeerent directions, twisting in odd ways we didn't expect, but we are still part of that tree.

Golly, that's a laboured metaphor. I do that when I'm feeling sentimental.

I wanted to cry for everyone and everything I've lost since. I wanted to cry for the self I lost and rebuilt and lost again. I wanted to cry for the friendships that have broken, for the ones that faded. For the potential I threw away with laziness and procrastination, that I never reached for through fear or lack of belief in myself.

I wanted to cry for everything I left unsaid with people I have loved, and who I will not see again. I wanted to cry for everything I said or did that I ought not to have said or done.

I wanted to cry for those shiny-shiny children we were... and I smiled for the people we have become. Louise is an even more amazing grown-up than she was a child. Smart, brilliant, beautiful. She is an outstanding human being and I'm proud she and I remain dear friends, even though I have not always put in the effort I should've.

My tears were stayed, just. I smiled for Natasha and Rachel, Ebony and Nancy and my other Louise, and Anna, and the people I have in my life now that I couldn't have dreamed of in 1991.

I smiled for my Pollyboo. When I was nine, I imagined that I could love someone as I love my niece, but I didn't know what it felt like to love someone more and more fiercely as they grow into who they are. I didn't know the steely determination to help them become their best self... I do now.

For all the dark moments I still have, for all the frustrations of not being what and who I really want o be, for all the lost potential.... for all the Awful in the world right now, I am still surrounded by outstanding human beings. My nine year old self might be irritated in some ways, but I reckon in others she'd be pretty impressed with who she became. Because that kid understood that song more than any nine year old really should...

Those really were the days of our lives, and yet, so are these.

Monday 21 November 2016

Freddie, George and the Decade that Changed Everything - From the Vault 2006

 The following piece was written ten years ago, and was concerned with a single decade, 1991-2001, five years later.

Perhaps next I should take on 2001-2011... or the entire quarter century that has now passed...

Freddie, George & The Decade That Changed Everything

I noticed a funny thing recently. Within days of each other, it will be the fifteenth anniversary of Freddie Mercury (24th Nov) and the fifth anniversary of George Harrison (29 Nov). Barely ten years separate these two events, and I find that a strange quirk of the universe. This post is less about them than it is about me.

Tuesday 6 September 2016

The Spinster

This started as something for a character in my soon-to-be-published-online novel Tbe Bright Side O' Life but I think it became something broader. I don't think it really reflects my own personal opinion of spinsterdom, although perhaps some of its fears. It is perhaps a worst-case scenario with a slice of light.

What say you?

*

Spinning, not moving

It comes on gradually until it hits you like a train. Sitting quietly at a family event, watching your loved ones grow and develop, watching them change. Yet you are the same as you always were. You are the same; you are treated as you were five years ago, or ten, or twenty.

To your parents you remain a child; to your contemporaries you are an anomaly - at least until you finally settle down.

Your single income household cannot afford mortgages or flashy foreign holidays, so you listen to the minutiae of property deals and tropical islands with a smile frozen between interest and frustration. You fall behind in ways big and small, obvious and subtle.

You are excluded from topics because you wouldn't understand. Much experience is kept from you, and you have to remind yourself that it's not the 19th Century anymore. Even if it was, you know that Mr Darcy isn't coming for you. The Mr Darcys look through you to prettier girls, to sweeter girls, to girls that know how the game is played.

You are not the romantic lead in the film, after all. An extra, perhaps. Odd, given that this was supposed to be your life. Perhaps the genre is wrong...

People who love you will soon give up asking about finally settling down. Maybe they already have. Curiosity will sour into pity.

'But are you happy?' you are asked repeatedly, but the only acceptable answer is "of course not". Any variety of 'yes' is met with disbelief or suspicion. Nobody believes you can be happy alone.

You are mostly happy. Sometimes you wonder what is 'wrong' with you to have had this life thrust upon you. Can you pinpoint a single moment that sent you into the lonely direction?  Was there a missed opportunity or was fate just that capricious?

Your friends say they envy you the single life, but they are never quite sincere. They mean that their own lives are not quite 100% satisfactory, but nobody's life ever is. They would like a break from their responsibilities from time to time; often it is you who provides the opportunity for that break, and you love how those adored younglings light up at sight of their fun auntie/godmother.

People move away. It is the way of the world now: seemingly casual migration. Life gets in the way. Bonds break, as they sometimes do, and nobody is to blame. Those babies you welcomed into the world have lives of their own and Auntie is low down on the list of priorities. It is as it should be, but the world spins with you still in the middle unchanging.

All is as it should be within the order of life as commonly accepted. Milestones only touch you to make you older. One day, you are essentially invisible.

Strangers address you as 'Mrs', not considering that a woman your age would be anything else. Corrections invite pity.

Despite the effort, you are ever more alone. Everyone has their lives. You take joy from their successes and you are there with comfort in their sorrows, but you are still alone at the end of it.

You are depended on: the universal donor. You have the time, don't you?

You wake up one day and you are eighty-two years old. Your limbs don't work like they ought; your brain is slow and quick to tire. When did you become the old crone you once pitied, when you were a pretty girl with the whole wide world for the taking?

When did life unfold without you? When did you replace one set of dreams with another?

Perhaps those were never really your dreams?

Tuesday 16 August 2016

Priceless Moments in Music - From the Vault - 2006

Another piece from the DefunctoBlog... this from 2006. If nothing else, it's a pretty good display of my fixation on two particular musical groups at that time...

WARNING: THIS POST INCLUDES A RIDICULOUS NUMBER OF SPOTIFY LINKS!

Friday 12 August 2016

From the Vault - 2006: Last Night A Video Changed My Life

This was originally posted at the Old Blog That Is Old, Feb 2006. A few edits for clarity only...

As I have a habit of doing, last night I was flicking through the music channels on the telly. I rarely find anything I really really like and even rarer find something I've never seen before.

Last night, one of them, Magic, played "Barcelona" by Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballe. I have seen chunks of this, clips of this, but never the whole thing, not until today.

Sunday 17 April 2016

On Phantoms, Morrison & The Would've Been Question - From the Vault 2005


Another archive bit, this time from Jan 2005. I went to see The Phantom of the Opera in a rare family trip to the cinema. It was an excruciating outing in some respects: I don't love seeing movies with other people in general, and the rest of the party seemed determined to irritate the frak out of me throughout...

Of course, The Phantom of the Opera is not a great movie. It's not as bad as some folks would make out, and I don't think it's aged well but it's not awful.

This is another post that feels like it's from 'before'. Before the real darkness set in; before I pulled myself out of the hole; before, before... I've edited somewhat, partly to make my meaning absolutely clear, but the content remains essentially the same... and in places I've noted where my younger self was basically starry-eyed, naive and wrong. We live, we learn. What a naïf I was...

This stayed with me for a long time after I posted it, opening with a single, simple question:


Would I love Jim Morrison if he were ugly?

Saturday 2 April 2016

The London That Nobody Knows - From the Vault 2014

A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to take part in a one-off choir project called Snapshot Songs, composed by the magnificent Stuart Hancock, in collaboration with various London groups, writers and artists.

London is much on my mind today, as it so often is. Like Dracula, I take strength from the soil (concrete) of my homeland. Being Irish, Not In Ireland, I will never truly belong in the Motherland no matter how I love it, no matter how much I yearn for it... but my people have been in this pocket of London since before the Industrial Revolution, it seems... and I love my Finsbury St Lukes and Barbican, and whatever you want to label it...


Sunday 27 March 2016

Philip Lynott at Ni-ni-nineteen - From the Vaults 2005

I wrote this in 2005, on the nineteenth anniversary of Philip Lynott's death. At the time, I was hugely, almost entirely consumed by the music of his band, Thin Lizzy, and of the work he had given us. This is what I felt and thought then.

Re-reading now, I miss the apparent simplicity of my feelings then. I've edited a little for clarity and length, but otherwise, this is as it appeared on my LJ (aw, bless) in January 2005.

We have now been thirty years without our Philo, but that's a post for another day.

~wavy timey-wimey lines~

Saturday 26 March 2016

No more. More.

I used to blog nearly every day. Nothing particularly good or interesting... that was the old days of Livejournal, after all. Lots of Harry Potter or whining, as I recall.

I haven't said much new for a while, except trying to fold the truth of Bowie's death into my reality. I keep thinking of things to blog about, but they don't seem to stick.

I think I stopped believing my thoughts have any particular use to the world. Not when our civilisation seems hell bent on destroying itself. My thoughts are as nothing to the world, not compared to some of the truly tremendous bloggers out there, the brave and smart women and men who are shining bright lights into the manifold ways in which society works to keep so many people oppressed in one way or another, and often more than one.

I, I, I... maybe I got sick of the absolute self-absorption that characterises the way I blog.

Nah, that can't be it.

Maybe I ran out of things to say. I can only declare and express my love for various dead musicians in so many ways, after all. I can only wallow in the stagnant puddle of self-pity a little while without people abandoning me entirely.

*

Fear keeps my voice still, too. Fear what our government is doing and what it means for me and the people I love. Fear that I really won't amount to much or get my dreams to come true. Fear that I will become the worst of myself after all. Fear that I will try and try and nothing will come of it.

Fear that everything that matters to me will be taken away. Fear that every nice, good, fun, happy moment must be followed by six more of unhappiness, pain, miz-uh-ree and whatever else it is that keeps me in the dark cage of my own devising.

I tried, after all. I did everything I was supposed to do. I finished my novel - and it's good - and I sent it out into the world. I got healthy at last, I rewired my brain, I did my very best.

I tried and... nothing. I did all the things I thought I was supposed to do and... nothing. More of the same. More waiting for my life to start, more moments of hollow, howling despair.

That's the petulant brat in my head who thinks she's entitled to everything just because she asked nicely and isn't a horrible human being.

That's the brain weasels talking, of course. That's the writer's block talking.

No more of that. Maybe there's still more to say about those dead musicians, maybe there's more for me to observe about the world as it crumbles... nobody else sees the world as I do, after all.

Monday 18 January 2016

Not Ready To Shut The Book - From The Vault - 2010

I found this while trawling through old work and... well, it felt pretty relevant. It was actually written as 'homework' for a creative writing class I did some years ago. The idea was to get out of one's usual writing comfort zone (specific branches of Costa Coffee, in my case) and see how it went.

Writing Somewhere New



I am doomed to failure.

I probably know it from the moment I slouch into Barbican Library. I love libraries but I don't spend much time in them because I get too easily distracted from any purpose I might have had on entering. I am doomed, utterly doomed, to failure from the moment I walk aimlessly through the stacks and find myself in the Irish History section.

I spend an hour with a book about political cartoons of the Irish Question/Troubles/War and then resolve to find somewhere to sit with my computer so as to actually write. I avoid the London Collection for the same reason I should never have gone near Irish History, and have a narrow escape in the Arts Library when I skirt dangerously close to books about Flynn, Errol. Down the stairs to the Music Library in search of a table, I realise I am doomed, utterly doomed, to failure when behind the table I have staked out, I see a shelf of old rock music encyclopaedias.

Caught in the Death Star Tractor Beam, I check all the books for references to the usual suspects: Gallagher, William Rory. Lynott, Philip Parris. Morrison, James Douglas. The laptop resting in a bag slung over my shoulder is forgotten: it is not heavy enough. With viciously grotesque, simianised Irish faces still dancing in my short term memory, after an hour flicking through three hundred years of hatred towards me and my people, I am looking for love.

The Illustrated New Musical Express Encyclopaedia of ROCK proves to be the specific tool of my downfall. It is from 1977. Opening the pages is the closest I can get to a dream I once had. In its pages, Rory and Philip live. More than that, they are at the height of their powers. Calling Card and Jailbreak are new, contemporary, popular.

A reference to Rory being the butt of cynicism and jokes surprises me. Much too much time and understanding has passed since then for this to be at all true now, and anyway, who speaks ill of the dead? Three entries later, Marvin Gaye hasn't been yet shot by his dad. On the next page, Gary Glitter has already staged the first of countless comebacks, but he's not the country's most notorious paedophile, not yet...
Jerry Garcia on page 96, most loved George Harrison on page 103, moustachioed Steve Marriott on page 112... they live. They are gorgeously alive. Then, my heart stops.

Oh dear God: page 139, where John Lennon lives. He lives. I will not write here, I know it. Not in a place where I am distracted into a world when Lennon lives.

Still, I know of a man...

I flick back to page 68... Morrison is already dead in the column inches for the Doors. He is in his first renaissance, and has only been gone for six years. It feels like nothing compared to thirty-nine. I am seduced right back into the dangerous daydream, but I have at least turned my computer on.

Pages 54-55 give Clapton far more attention than he deserves, the soulless old *cough*. He is with Patti Boyd by now. I know what pain there is in store for him, and I am sorry for it. Yet I know what a hypocritical bastard he is, and for a moment I am overcome by the 20-20 vision that being from the future provides.

On page 231, my Philo lives, but once I close the book he will be dead almost twenty-five years. Richard and Linda Thompson have already divorced, but on p 234, Ike and Tina are still going. I know what he does to her behind the velvet curtain, and I despise him.

Between the covers of The Illustrated New Musical Express Encyclopaedia of ROCK, my heroes live. I will not write here. I am too lost in a dangerous daydream of the impossible, and I am not ready to shut the book… not just yet...

CW 2010.

Thursday 14 January 2016

A Grief of One's Own




I wasn't going to post again about Bowie for a while, but something I saw via Facebook caught my eye. A comment piece on the Daily (who else?) Mail Online, where the headline was basically “I find this hysteria a little over the top!” Of course this was on the Mail, because surely only the Mail would put together a special subsection of their website devoted to all things Dead Bowie, including (but not limited to): pictures of his teenage child, speculation about fertility treatment, the nature of his death, and even a slavering piece about a luxury house in the Caribbean, complete with luxurious photographs and vomitorious copy… and then have a columnist slating the reactions as over the top.

You could play Classic Bigotry Hypocrisy House Price Mail Bingo with this stuff… while the self-serving nonsense coming from the likes of Tony Blair and David Cameron deserves to be called out for what it is, it’s in an uncomfortably similar vein to some of the stuff said of the popular responses and the usual stuff that comes out every time someone famous dies about how fans “should” respond. How we “should” feel. How we’re allowed to feel.

‘Well it’s not like you knew him.’

‘Oh, well you’ve still got the music, so it’s fine.’

‘Why are you so upset about a celebrity?’

(I’m paraphrasing real people and keeping them anonymous, rather than sockpuppeting to make a point, I promise).

Some people speak from a genuine desire to provide some small shred of comfort. Others speak to pass judgement.

I teetered on the brink of it on Monday: in my anger at the media covering this like some fabulous special event, I sniped to my friend Rachel about the mass of fans gathered in Brixton, and the flowers in Heddon Street.

Then, gently prodded back to more level-headed thinking by Rachel, I remembered something which is true no matter who died or what they meant to you: nobody gets to tell anyone else how to grieve.

Let me be clear: fans don't trump family and friends and I can’t think of a time when they should. My last post specifically excluded any comment about the people who lost someone beyond the public figure. I can't imagine what it’s like for them, because every person is different and each individual grief is different, and I won’t insult them by trying.

But fans occupy an uncertain space in this. We're not the media, who have their own agenda, nor are we directly connected to the deceased (Bowie is just the most recent). But that doesn't stop us feeling as we do.

Some fans clearly wanted a communal experience and wanted to share in a space relevant (sort of) to Bowie. I couldn't imagine anything I'd like less, but as a Thin Lizzy and Doors fan, I've done community grief and didn't find any comfort. Mass celebration, on the other hand, can be magnificent. That’s my way, you have yours.
We fans have the right to our sorrow and our grief, and no contemptuous bystanders can take it away.

Look, some folks can use music as background colour. That's cool. Some folks can really like the music without any interest in or connection to the man himself. Some of us love him for providing music because it was not merely background. Bowie has been part of the fabric of our cultural landscape for more than 45 years (longer if you were in the London scene) and – more than most – practically formed the centre of an entire subculture. If you found a place of belonging in the world, found pals and lovers, all because of Bowie’s work, would you not feel something towards the man himself?

For some people, he has been a more constant and longstanding presence than wives, husbands, children, friends et cetera.
Bowie was there for us when we were scared children and lonely misfits; when we were falling in love and out of it; when we danced, when we laughed; when we cried; when we first felt stirrings of attraction and lust, because just look at that beautiful, terrible creature and listen to his voice…

We aspired to be like him; we crushed on him; we wondered what the fuck he was thinking sometimes (ask a Bowie fan about “Tonight”). Those who grew up at the same time are likely questioning their own mortality this week. Those teenagers now discovering him as part of their own ‘who am I and what the hell is this world?’ experience have had the man himself snatched away just as he started to mean something to them.

I can't personally say “Bowie saved my life!” as I can for other musicians did with their work. Yet, there have been days when I could face the world because his music buoyed me up just enough. When I could smile, because Bowie. When I found common ground with others, because Bowie. When I sat in a hairdresser getting the Thin White Duke haircut and feeling that I looked a little more like myself than I did before I went in.

Just watch Bowie interviews, especially 2001-onwards and I defy you not to be charmed, to not like him at least a little. Whether it's an act or not, maybe that doesn't matter so much. I say this while truly acknowledging the underage groupies and fascism stuff lurking in the background.

There are people jumping on the bandwagon, who simply must be seen to be rending their garments because they want to be seen to be sad, as if it confers some measure of cool… and there have been times over the last few days where I’ve almost felt like I should be taking a test to prove my credentials because of those folks…

They’re not helping matters, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the rest of us are entitled to feel like there's something missing, like a world is dimmer, sadder, whatever it is any of us feel… because this means something to us.

Being a fan gets short shrift at the best of times, especially when you’re female and it all gets seen through the mockery of fangirls and crushes and all that stuff which might be true and might not. We feel as we feel, for whatever reasons, and there is truth to that, whether reciprocated or not, whether healthy, or not.

Fandom is not simple hero worship (ask Bowie fans about Tin Machine) and it’s not the "break into their house" obsession. It's also a more two-way experience than you might think: the people on stage take a lot from us. It isn’t just some transactional thing: our response to them feeds their own needs and wants (sometimes too literally), but also to take inspiration, to meet, defy and exceed our expectations. And yeah, often they make huge amounts of money.

Without fans they would be incomplete, and the opposite is also true. Symbiosis, my friends. Maybe you don’t get it, and maybe you think we’re idiots, but there’s probably stuff you do that we think is odd or stupid… and if one more football fan ignores their tendency to go over the top while they mock our pain? Let’s return to the Hypocrisy Bingo card, kids!

We are entitled to our pain and loss and sorrow. Some of us will be okay tomorrow. Some of us won’t be. Speak to Michael Jackson fans and ask what their experience was; or Tupac/Kurt/Lennon fans, or… look, music has a really high mortality rate so there’s plenty to choose from. Try listening to us instead of mocking us for our reactions.

Try not to judge us. I don’t know if you’ve heard: David Bowie died, and our world is changed from the world we knew on Sunday.