2.30 AM

It’s Saturday night, 2am, I’m sitting up listening to music and having a late night pint, there’s a mad wind blowing outside, slashing rain, rattling the windows, there’s a ghost film on TV, but I’m not watching it really, I’m just playing some music on my headphones and typing this.

This year, I shall be 60 – I feel like I’m lying saying that, but it’s true! Once upon a time, I was much younger, I just found a video of the Damned live in 1982 on YouTube, its crazy, it reminds me how we was, fucking mental, that’s the best way to describe it – well they’re back this year, doing a tour with that original line up, same as it was all those years ago – incredible, brilliant energy, they really were very very good – the aim back then was to drink and smoke as much as humanly possible, and just have the biggest night out imaginable, we had the energy for that, we had ambition, the idea was to just smash your balls to the walls, LOL I just made that up, but that’s how I remember it – first time I saw them, we queued up outside, and some bloke built like a brick shit-house told us “Sup it up outside lad” (cos you couldn’t bring your bottle of vodka or whatever in with you) Well we got in there, and it was mayhem, Anti-Nowhere league were support band, singing “Fuck you Fuck you, Don’t you tell me what to do” Then the Damned came on and drinks and beer flew through the air as everyone just exploded throwing each other all over the place to the crazy music, on the way home we got our heads kicked in by some local nutters, missed the last train home too.

Well I’m not looking to repeat that experience, but the music still sounds pretty wild, sure I’ll be going along to get my lug holes reamed, you can’t beat it!

Nowadays, I don’t think the sort of things we were doing are normal anymore, they weren’t then either to be honest, but it was fun to go crackers, back then I remember chatting to some guy, he said oh you don’t like that do you? Those punk people are scum! Well that was a part of it, there was a lot of anger around, mum and dad thought you shouldn’t be doing any of that disgraceful behaviour, but that’s what made it so fabulous, it was therapeutic, to be seen and heard, rather than seen and not heard, which was meant to be idyllic you know back then, when England was so conservative, stuffy and boring, we weren’t really trying to overthrow the order, just get absolutely hammered drunk, get onto the stage and jump off heroically into the heaving crowd, that would be a good start! LMAO

Some Blurb

I created this in zBrush, and I thought that’ll do for that one, what shall I do now? Then I thought well I’ll do her some trousers and a pair of boots! A pair of rugged jeans, complete with stitching and seams and all that! That’s gonna take quite a while, but I do enjoy the challenge, I know what trousers look like, I think she should be wearing Dr Martens boots, and I know what they look like, I don’t even need a reference, its going to be fun! Or is it? It’s a bit of a nightmare half the time, but that’s life!

I have quite a bit of 3D stuff I did over the last year or so, I shall have to collect it all together and see what I have – I know a lot of people probably don’t rate it, it seems sort of peverse, perhaps its more interesting for the person doing it than it is for most viewers – for instance, I had to do quite a bit of work to get the skin texture right, aside from it being difficult to make a smile look right, she looked a bit dry skinned, so I tried adding sheen using various methods till I got what I thought looked ok – sometimes it just goes on and on, its a lot like doing a puzzle. The thing is, when you’re doing stuff in 3D, you realise how amazingly complex the world of vision is, you got to think about colour, texture, how lighting works, everything has to be created – or rather, simulated, that is a lot, believe me!

Hey, remember when Marc Bolan of T-Rex did Ride a White Swan on Tv? That was crazy, I love that! Maybe I could do something like that in 3D, but there’d be no point, cos its already been done in real life, and its never going to get better than that –  imagine all the work it would take to re-create it! Mad!

Creativity – (roots thereof)

I’m just posting some notes here, because I don’t know what I’m talking about, I can’t be bothered to sort it all out properly, but maybe some people do? Who knows, see below!

You know how to do something, but can you go deeper than that? Apply those tools in a different way? You need to meditate on that, because just knowing how to do something, is to repeat yourself, now you need to go back to before you learned these skills without losing those abilities.

You can turn into someone else every day of the week if you like, or you can make additions to your abilities, but can you go deeper? That is the challenge which makes most sense. 

In life, or art, (as in this case) you learn some skills – right, really complicated ones, like in 3D art, its very complicated, so you learn how to use all these tools, but what if you want to apply them in a different way? I mean not to go down the same old path, photo reality, its difficult to avoid, its what 3d art is basically for – or you can add effects, (yawn) its like cinematic, mainstream cinematic, or fantasy art, what a bore! 

Anyhow, shall resolve that later (hopefully) Ideas bubble up, and you think I’ll do that! But by the time you learned the necessary skills, you forgot the idea, it got demolished in a series of hard lessons in practicality and so on, soo you got to go back to the roots, something like that.

Anyhow again – so last night went and saw Echo & the Bunnymen, now there is a good band! I suspect the magic is in teamwork, singer Ian McCulloch said in an interview he was talented and cool even in the womb! LOL That’s a good way to think about your work! I mention this in regards to strategy and what I was haranguing myself about above.

I do music too, I done tons of it, it’s really simple and I think of most of it as just shit – but really it’s not, who cares what anyone thinks? I’m not a very sophisticated guy, I just like to bring on the dancing horses!

Spare us the Cutter!!!! 😮 (not my footage, but same gig!)

The Shangri-Las

I don’t know if anyone needs to hear this, or who you are, but I been listening to all this Shangri-Las stuff, then I found a very good track list on YouTube, that’s where its a list and you just play a whole load in one go, I shall share it here – I think if you click to watch on YouTube it’ll show the whole list, its Gert!

Here’s a screenshot of how it comes up on YouTube!

Screenshot

Down the Royal Rabbit hole

Every time, well not every time, but quite often, when I hear something I don’t know much about, I google it, and very often end up on Wikipedia, so, I just looked up Lady Jane Grey, because she was mentioned as the 9 days queen, she got executed cos they changed their mind and went with this other queen called Bloody Mary, so she was catholic, whereas Lady Jane was protestant, they’re all related to each other, but with different personalities and beliefs and so on, so we went back to catholicism and loads of people got executed, that’s partly why America got founded, cos everyone was so fed up with it, but these royals, it does you’re head in when you read about them, cos there’s so many of them, its just an example.

by Unknown artist,painting,1590

Anyhow, I’m reading this book set in the middle ages, its called Wonders Will Never Cease, by Robert Irwin, (his books are all brilliant) he really does his research, it makes it so interesting and imaginative, he mentioned this bloke Simon Sudbury, who was Bishop of London, got executed by a mob led by some guy, I forget his name, but I read more on wiki – they turned up at the bishops palace & the guard’s let them in cos they seemed like they were upset about something, the struggles of life & that, but this was like years before Jane Grey, she was 1554, peasants revolt was 1381.

Also in this book was Thomas Malory, who wrote Morte de Arthur, which was like a fantasy about the ruling classes, half the time they’re ass-hats, even if they might be chivalrous, or would like to be.  

There’s stuff about the War of the Roses, that interests me cos the last main battle was fought near here at Towton,

also Pontefract is near here, they had this massive castle that looks like something out of a Disney film, it’s amazing! Imagine seeing that in the landscape, not your average hovel is it? Unfortunately, it was demolished by Oliver Cromwell, hundreds of years after the thing with the roses, its also now hundreds of years since Cromwells time.

Also read a lot about this church reformer John Wycliffe & what he believed, it just makes you think, the philosophers among us, there’s always a few, but not as many as the nutters, there was one in Czechoslovakia at the time, I forgot his name, but if you spoke out in those days, you got killed by the nutters, that’s the way I see it, and even today, even with all our freedoms, there’s still more nutters than anything else. 

That’s why I love history, it takes you out of the present, even if you don’t really know what you’re reading, its actually more effective if you don’t, then when you come back, you feel like things are better, or worse, or at least different (or not)!

Conundrums

During 2023 my email blog notifications seemed to get out of hand so that I was getting about 20 + extra WP emails a day on top of the junk mail and news, that took me to about 40-60 in total daily, sometimes up to 100 a day! This was maddening, so I un-email subbed from lots of blogs as well as shopping sites and so on, getting it down to an average of about 35-45 a day, still a bit steep, considering when I first got on the net (about 25 years ago), I’d probably only receive about 5 emails a week if that!

Over xmas and new year, I didn’t get any WP notifications of new blog posts, so I thought people just weren’t posting new stuff, I was really busy so I didn’t think much of it until recently, it seemed nothing new was going on anywhere, it wasn’t until almost the middle of January before I realised something must be wrong, so I checked my settings on the WP site and found that a checkbox was marked with “Block all emails”  How did that happen? I’m sure I hadn’t done it, had someone hacked in just to do that? I don’t think so, I must have done it by mistake, or else it was a glitch. I’d been getting so many notifications I’d actually been reducing them for a while, I just don’t have enough time to do justice to all blog posters, I’m getting 40-60 emails a day now, what with everything else that comes my way – I’m glad you’re all back though I shall continue to avoid as many of you as I can!

Thought of today – the more we learn, the less we know – I was thinking ah yes, when we are born, we know everything, or we think we do, we look around and take it all in, its so overwhelming and full of everything, we take it on board and begin to work out what’s going on, and that’s when the learning begins to nibble away at what we know, or come to think we knew, this goes on throughout life, by the time your getting to the end of it, it seems that you actually know almost nothing! Good grief, logically, one ought to know lots!

# Latest dream!

I dreamt we went to this old German city for a break but when we got on the plane to go home it didn’t take off and just went careering through the streets trying to fly, then finally it started going up, but it had no power and ended up back on the ground, We were back walking in the street so I was saying I don’t fancy getting another plane home, shall we get a boat or train or something? The thing was, I couldn’t actually remember getting off the plane, perhaps it had crashed and we were already dead? How would we know? 

Let’s have a silly song!

Garp!

Last night I watched the film The World According to Garp.

I seen it before, and I read the book nearly 30 years ago, my art teacher lent me it or recommended it or something, maybe he thought it would be a good one for me to read, cos of where I was at in my life at the time? Who knows, but anyhow, I really enjoyed it, both the book and the film, its by John Irving, its great art I think, cos it has a whole lot of comedy and tragedy, as well as being very clever and quite bonkers, in every way its a work of genius. He’s not a writer I would say that I love, he’s not really someone you connect with in a lyrical way, bit of a smart ass to come up with all those great ideas is what I mean, he doesn’t lack in anything for having come up with the ideas you need to produce what felt like great art. 

Great art really though, what is it? Well its any painting, or poem, or book or whatever that connects with you at a point in time in your life, its got what it takes, it leaves its mark, its substantial enough that you’re still thinking about it the next day, or maybe it might even influence you enough to change or alter your path in life. This morning I woke up still thinking about how good it was, a few songs drifted into my head as I was lazily lying there, which I shall post below, cos I think they’re great too! 

Urbanian Man

I was just bending down to collect my groceries in Tescos, of course at my current age its easy to forget how sexy I am in this position, so I was quite surprised to realise just how much female attention I was getting, I heard gasps and giggles behind me, followed by a quick sharp smack across my buttocks, someone said “Cheeky” then promptly dissolved into hysterics. Easy girls, easy – I remarked, straightening myself to my full height, take it easy there, there’s plenty for everyone! Now, in the olden days, I used to go about in PVC black trousers, for real, of course I did, and yes, I looked fantastic, but that was my modus operandi, when you really are fantastically good looking, you feel like you have to work to maintain it, I pulled it all off with ease, nowadays, were I to don a pair of strides like those, I’d look somewhat foolish, I wasn’t in a band or anything, I just happened to be stunningly good looking, and that’s the thing, its all in the mind, I’m still am quite the picture today, as today’s experience out shopping proves, back in my youth, I wasn’t truly aware of it then, but now that I am, half of its gone where the other half can barely follow!

Anyhoo, I was out shopping today at Urban Outfitters, and bought myself a rather trendy designer piece of clothing I just fell in love with, I was thinking what’s that song with the lyric “Fashion trends mean nothing to me now” I later figured it out to be this great song “Lost in a Dream” by Urban Dogs, (Its Charlie Harper from the UK Subs and Knox from the Vibrators) It also has the line “Kill yourself but before you do – I wanna get lost in a dream with you” LOL That’s fantastic! I love it! ❤ 🙂

50 MILF’s

I’m just sitting here having a drink, and I thought of the title 50 MILF’s for a blog post and thought what a great idea! Sadly, I don’t have anything to add / follow up – it’s been a dreadful week or two, with all this Israel Palestine thing has it not? To add to my personal misery, I had a hard week at work, then my bike broke down, really badly, it’s taken me all day Saturday and Sunday tinkering around and still no good news to report, I really love that bike, its so nice to glide round corners at high speed, feeling like Luke Duke Skywalker, I really hope I can get it fixed. Now they tell me Killing Joke guitarist Geordie Walker has suddenly died, he was 64, that’s so shocking, Pete Shelly, Joe Strummer, Thomas Mensi, Who next?

I been listening to this Tribute to The Cure album, its all covers, I like it, good songs, I never did like Robert Smiths voice much, so listening to cover versions is a good option for me. Whatever happened to all the good music (he says glugging into his beer glass) “I’ll show you in spring it’s a treacherous thing” Great lyrics, really great!

Well I got the first album of Cure Covers, I listened to them while walking on hols in the Lake District – fab memories, now vol 2 is out, I like the riff on this song,

Here’s Lovecats, from Vol 1, it’s far superior to the original! 😀 😀

Room 13

Content Warning: I was reading a bit of dodgy (Pervy) literature and decided to have a crack at the genre myself! Hence, this is considerably hotter than what I was reading! Yes, I’m a genius! 😀 (this is unedited and in places deliberately grammatically awful) Self publishing here I come! 😀 ❤

Sam, the hotel manager rolled his eyes, the couple at room 13 were struggling to get inside in more ways than one, she was pressed backwards against the door facing the man with the key who was fighting to get past her to get the key into the hole, he smirked to himself, in this low rent joint, all anyone wants to do is get inside, in every way imaginable. Good evening sir he stammered, the man glowered back at him ghoulishly then stared after him as he scampered away down the corridor. 

Finally Frank got the door open and the couple burst into the room, Angie staggering backwards on her high heels, he lifted her off her feet and threw her unceremoniously onto the bed, she squealed with manic laughter, in the hope that her quiescence might quell his ardour, but she was way off, “Strip” he demanded, tugging at her black blouse, a fancy affair with frills around a v necked opening from which her head extruded, Alright, alright big boy, I can do it myself, she cried, Then what am I here for? He retorted, grinning, happy with what he thought was a considerably brilliant remark. 

He began pulling his shirt from his trousers while roughly yanking at his tie, oblivious that the more he pulled, the more the knot tightened, argh, this fucking thing, I hate it he yelled, Come here baby boy, I can do your tie like your mummy did, she paused for a moment of thought, then added, “This morning”, and promptly descended into fits of giggles, Bitch he screamed, ripping his trousers open, like the Incredible Hulk, (uncensored version), to reveal his mammoth bulging privates, I’m gonna shove this thing in your cavernous hole, oh good she said, giggling, hitching up her skirt and taking down her nickers, I said cavernous, not gigantic, I meant your mouth honey! Oh, Frankie boy, you’re so rude, but baby, I like where you’re going, she said, grabbing a hold of his trunk. 

Finally he managed to pull his tie free and tore his shirt away, snapping the buttons on his cuffs as he struggled free of his constraints, Angie stared at his body, lost in some kind of awe, she dreamily asked, your scars, what are all these scars? He grunted, I’ve been to hell baby, that’s where I got em, he stank of booze, and fags, but Angie liked her guys rough, maybe too rough, as he gripped her face in his hands she could see his fingernails were filthy, as well as cheap whisky and smokes, he smelled like shit, Frankie, she said, why do you smell like shit? Im bisexual baby, what do you want from me? What do you mean? I’m saying it’s not my shit, it’s the other guys! Frank,  you’re not gay, you’re a freak, but you’re not gay, so fucking what, a man’s gotta live his life don’t he? Frank, can I ask when did you last have a bath? What? I don’t have baths or showers, I don’t need em, I was hosed down and de-loused at the county jail last summer, what more do you want? And with that, he shoved his hampton into her mouth, that’ll shut you up, he said, as he began pumping her throat, glug glug glug she went, then he pulled out of her and said now let’s get to it.

At last she said, come and get it, spreading herself wide, he plunged into her, without a second thought, hmm, urgh, argh he blubbed, now this is going to be the ploughing of your life, give it, she screamed, give it all up to me!

He had been pumping in and out, but now he found he was being sucked in and out, hey this is funky he said, how you do that, then the action got more violent, hey, stop that he cried, as he was slammed back and forth, she mockingly said, I thought you’d like it honey? No, stop, stop it, stop it now! But there was nothing he could do, as he was bounced back and forth like an out of control jack hammer she screamed in delight beneath him, that was when he noticed her fingers now scratching deeper than ever, more like talons, and her arms, what the fuck? These are not normal, she’s got bat wings, and I’m being enclosed into her deathly embrace, fuck this, I’m being murdered! 

Well around this time he lost consciousness, it was obviously just a drink fuelled dream, but when he woke up in the morning, he found he was cocooned and shrunk to the size of a fly – help me, help me, he squealed, but it wasn’t even audible to the human ear, he saw Angie dress and leave the room as a gigantic spider began eating his toes, upwards!

Meanwhile Angie arrives at the check out desk, Only one to check out today? Asked Sam, the hotel manager – yes only me today she replied, that other guy just disappeared! We all have our secrets, said Sam, tell me about it she replied, dumping her chewing gum into his tips bowl, as she walked out, her hips swaying provocatively, Sam went running after her, he called out, Hey, I have secrets! She turned and said, oh, you do?