Jim Carroll has died, died…

Actually, he died on September 11, ensuring that those who recall his work will never forget his day of passing. And yes, I know everyone’s using that “People Who Died” joke, but it seems appropriate; the song was about the staggering number of his friends who had suffered early and violent deaths, and now… hopefully he is with his friends. If we could be certain this was to be our fate, Death would hold no terrors.

You’ll find his NY Times Obit here. I never thought of his music as “punk” – I always thought punk’s blank nihilism devalued it too much, and The Jim Carroll Band was anything but blank. Here was a man whose output was so exciting and provocative that Andy Warhol and Keith Richard sought him out. I played those records a lot back then, never could part with them.

I must admit I’m not closely acquainted with his written output; I guess I’ll find my copy of Basketball Diaries when I unpack the twenty or so boxes of books still languishing in the garage after our last move. But I spent a bit of time today checking out some of his poetry and writings on the ‘net, and it was a good way to pass some time. He was hailed as a great by no less than Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Patti Smith, which makes him an artist’s artist – they are the ones you need to read, so go Google-cruising if you don’t know his work and you may be pleasantly surprised.

And put his music on while you do…

Shot Glass Stories and other Monday stuff.

Sophie Playle, a fellow denizen of Critters Bar, recently got it into her head that it would be a good idea to publish a selection of 200 word stories culled from the weekly challenge that we have been holding on our little workshop site for a couple of years now. As it turns out, she was right (well, we think so anyway) and the result is Shot Glass Stories, a compendium of short stories told in (or within) two hundred words.



You can get it as a free download here on Lulu, or if you like the old-fashioned feel of a book in your hands and print in front of your eyes, you can buy a copy for a very modest price.

If you’d like to spend a few minutes reading a fine piece of writing that will stay with you, read this wonderful story , by Quin Browne, a capital writer who rarely uses them, and who makes Six Sentences a place I should really get back to more often. That old thing about Time speeding up as your life unspools…? It’s true.

And now, because I’ve had this song stuck in my head for days…

The Scariest Graph You'll Ever See...

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called "alarmist" for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote "in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media" -- controlling almost all of America's newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies.

This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world's largest media corporation.

In 2004, Bagdikian's revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth.

--Media Reform Information Center, Links and Resources on Media Reform

(Borrowed from an article on The Existentialist Cowboy's site.)

Writers and Restraints (or, Badinage and Discipline.)

I often worry a bit that we writers who frequent those odd dens of insecurity called workshops sometimes demand too much adherence to “rules” – fair enough, to learn and know them is important, and to be aware of what certain editors demand is wise, but quite honestly I think we’re making a rod for our own backs (cliché, sorry) if we run every single phrase through the mill of correctness.

No other expressive art form (music, sculpture, visual arts) demands such rigid subservience to a set of rules that are sometimes arbitrary, often archaic and frequently ill-defined.

A fellow writer, who I know from several workshop sites, and whose work I like and respect, has become almost fanatical in his loathing of adjectives and adverbs, ruthlessly hunting them down and strongly suggesting their removal. He is in some writing workshop where, apparently, all members are being taught to write “properly” and “expressively” and where, I imagine, they will all end up sounding alike.

Obviously, some adherence to the rules of grammar is advisable in order to avoid confusion and to convey ideas with clarity, and I wouldn’t respect anyone who claims to be a master of their craft while maintaining an almost total ignorance of the tools of their trade, but life is messy and often that’s the most truthful way to write about it. My advice is – write clearly, write honestly and write humanely; everything else is dress rules for the madhouse.

Monday Morning "Look What I Found On YouTube" Segment…

Okay, so John Scalzi and other people found them, after other people found them, but they helped steel me for the week ahead.

Supernatural Presents Jensen Ackles

(Actually this isn't off YT - they didn't allow embedding)

Meme To Me – The Picture Thing

As the few wanderers who stray into this blog know, I’m not great at regular blogging, but there’s a meme going around that caught my eye. Literally. Probably because I like using pictures as story prompts.

Catherine Gardner, over at the Poisoned Pen, got it from KV Taylor, who got from… never mind, you can track it if you like.

Here’s the deal:

1) Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive.

2) NO CAPTIONS!!! It must be like we’re speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words.

3) They must ALREADY be on your hard drive - no googling or flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you’ve saved there because it resonated with you for some reason.

4) You do NOT have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don’t want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.

The hardest part was finding just 10 among 1.5 Gigs of images. I'm posting them all in one hit because I'll just forget otherwise. I can explain most of them...

Sarah Palin for President!?

I know there are many, many souls in the world who actually think this a good idea. The frightening thing is that, if she learns the tricks of the trade, she might just pull it off.

Given the speech she made the other day, she still has a lot to learn about remembering what you were saying at the beginning of the sentence…

I leave the last word to Voltaire (1694 - 1778):

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.


She might just make it...

A Death Less Obvious

“Sky has passed over and Ya Ho Wha is waiting for him at the gate. He will soon be home with his Father.”

In amongst the recent departures shocking and stellar (Michael Jackson), prefigured and less stellar (Farrah Fawcett) and purely fictional (Jeff Goldblum) was that of a man who, arguably, had a greater influence on popular culture than all of them but who remained a figure beloved only by the cognoscenti and those who do actually remember the 60s.

I first noticed that Sky Saxon had died while reading Mick Farren’s blog the other day.

From Bruce Weber’s Obit, NYT, June 26, here

“Sky Saxon, the mop-haired bass player and front man for the psychedelic protopunk band the Seeds, whose 1965 song “Pushin’ Too Hard” put a Los Angeles garage-band spin on the bad-boy rocker image personified by the Rolling Stones, died Thursday in Austin, Tex. He was thought to be 71.”

The truly impressive thing is that he played his last gig on Saturday night and was admitted to hospital on Monday. That, surely, is a rock ‘n’ roll death.

I remember hearing The Seeds not long after puberty and the discovery of real rock music coincided in the early 60s. Finding anything that wasn’t commercially-oriented was tricky in those days, especially here in Australia. I disagree with Mr. Weber in that I thought the Seeds, musically, had a more "dangerous" edge than the Stones, but they certainly prefigured punk, and they remain one of the bands that musicians have been name-checking ever since as a major influence. Just wish I’d managed to keep all my records from those days.

Three Years in Prison…

"Three Years in Prison will be served by Lee Monroe Crider, 40, who pleaded guilty to grand theft when he appeared in a Sacramento court charged with stealing a bike belonging to the Tour de France tour de forcer, Lance Armstrong."

Meanwhile, closer to home…

“A WOMAN who admitted to shooting her husband and chopping up his body might be out of jail by the end of 2011 after pleading guilty to manslaughter.

Joyce Chant, 57, was originally charged with murder, but after a jury was unable to reach a verdict earlier this year she admitted to killing her husband after he produced a gun during an argument in their violent marriage.

Justice Roderick Howie sentenced Chant to a minimum of three years and five months' jail for manslaughter and 10 months for interfering with human remains.”

I know that Justice is ultimately just an artificial construct designed to maintain social order and provide a means of punishing wrongdoers, but if Architects used the same standards of “judgment” there wouldn’t be a building standing.

Goodbye, Grasshopper...

December 8, 1936 – June 3, 2009

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