Alex Chilton

“Children by the million / sing for Alex Chilton
When he comes ’round
They sing “I’m in love. What’s that song?
I’m in love with that song.“
('Alex Chilton' by The Replacements)

Alex Chilton sang about teenage love in ways that no other man managed before or since. He sang about a teenage boy's love. Songs like 'Thirteen', 'September Gurls', ''I'm In Love With A Girl" (all 1 minute 48 seconds of it!)

About a year ago, I posted the lyrics to Thirteen,

Won't you let me
Walk you home from school?
Won't you let me
meet you at the pool?

a song that perfectly expresses that astonishing season when you suddenly discover that girls are interesting (what do you mean? well... just... interesting) in a way that they have never been before. A season when you know nothing about girls, but you suddenly decide that you would quite to be with one of them.

(Be with? What the hell are you going on about?
What kind of wanting is that, wanting to be with someone?)

Alex Chilton died in New Orleans on Wednesday night. He was fifty-nine. Old for a teenager; young for a man. He was a year older than my dad when he died. (Nowadays I know, that is young.) And that song, Thirteen... that's the song about the year I discovered girls, which was also the year I discovered my dad was dying

Important stuff. A great many questions,
and no-one to answer them.

The Alex Chilton aong everybody seems to be turning to right now is 'September Gurls' (love that spelling.) I'll go and find the words, and post them here later today.

Choosing Life

I don't find it easy to explain this to anyone, but I'm finding it very hard to adjust to wanting to be alive. It's like waking up after a sex-change operation. Actually, no it's not, because people who opt for gender realignment have lived with the conviction that they truly belong to a gender that their body doesn't express.

This is more like being given my eyesight, a great gift, undoubtedly, but one that I have always managed to live without. I'm not sure what to do with it.

For several months, I said the words that I always say, "I hate my life", my familiar Tourettian outburst of despair, and the words rang hollow, untrue, and archaic, like saying "Gadzooks" or "Verily". And recently, I've entered into a phase of life where no part of me is pulling me towards death any longer.

This is exceedingly strange and unfamiliar. I have left it a bit late, really. I am going to have to live to hundred to make up for what I've missed out on. And I'll have to find a job I can do 'til I'm ninety, because I'll never get a pension. Somebody will have to pay for me to stay in nice hotels.

I'd better finish this PhD, hadn't I?

My Favourite Cat

I want to talk a little bit about depression and creativity.

There was a time when depression was a demon sitting on my chest, a stomach full of acid I couldn't throw up, an undertow in the water, a dark magnetism stealing life from me. Now, depression is like a favourite cat that sleeps on my bed.

There are people we love in our lives, and animals and places and moods and posessions. Some of them, we wouldn't be parted from, no matter how bitter or heavy they can be, because they remind us who we are, and our reason for being in the world.

"We are wounded again in the same place" writes Jeanette Winterson, and I know what she means. "This doesn't turn us into victims. Rather, we are people in search of a transformation of the real."

When I write, I am on that kind of a search. To say something true, and be heard by someone else. To share, and be transformed.

I learned I could write when I was six or seven years old. It was the most wonderful thing I'd ever known since I learned to read. The most empowering thing, the thing with the most integrity, and yet... it opened a door to a world of forbidden things.

In my family, there are stories you don't tell.

I am a survivor, from a family of survivors. And I never wanted to survive. To flourish, yes, but to survive, no. It makes very little difference whether I am the corpse and you are the pall bearer, or the other way around. The year I discovered I could write, I discovered death. People around me started dying. I didn't make them die; I know that. But I asked questions, and I learned what people do and don't talk about, and what grown ups are afraid of.

The year of six and seven was the year I was expelled from the Garden of Eden. I had eaten from the tree of knowledge, and life would not be the same again.

Last week, my mother showed me some writing. It was quite a shock to me. It was mine. They were poems I had written, but not in my writing; they were in my nana's handwriting. My grandmother must have taken my books and copied out my words to keep for herself.

From the moment I learned to write, I learned to censor myself, to please others. That lies heavy on me, and always has done. And I know that I censored myself to protect my family.

We are people in search of a transformation of the real. And my favourite cat sleeps on my bed, and I have bad dreams, and I hear her purring.

Fathers and Sons

After a day of remembering, (and a little re-imagining), today is Talk Like A Pirate Day.

So here's Jack Sparrow for you, talkin' the talk and walkin' the walk, with his dear old dad, a.k.a. the world's most dignified drug abuser, Keith Richards.

What I couldn't have learned, from a father like that...

Like the man says: it's not about living forever.
It's about living with yourself forever.

Heavy Metal Bands

The name of every heavy metal band can be derived from this chart. [Click to enlarge] Seriously. They're not that smart.

Three Strange Days

I discovered this tune in the bargain bin at Atomic Records some time in the winter of 1991-92, and bought it just for the title, and because it was 25p.

I never regretted it. In fact, if I'd ever had a seriously romatic relationship with myself, this might have been "our tune"....



I lent the CD to some friends of mine, who got married, then divorced, and I don't know which one of them to ask for it back. It's deleted now. I've ordered myself a second hand copy.

When I Googled the band name, I found out the singer died in 2001. Testicular cancer. Age 32. Shit. That's not nice. I've ordered a copy of his solo album, too. I suppose it'll be a disappointment, but it has a nice title: "Inarticulate Nature Boy".

For three strange days
I had no obligations
My mind was a blur
I did not know what to do
And I think I lost myself
When I lost my motivation
Now I'm walking 'round the city
Just waiting to come to
For three strange days

For three strange days
I couldn't put a smile on my face
So they dressed me up in all of their clothes
And took me somewhere else
And Johnny Clueless was there
With his simulated wood grain
So I pulled up a chair
And started drinking by myself
For three strange...

I've got to make it through
No matter what it takes
Oh I've got to make it through
These strange days

I lay down for a while
And I woke up on the ocean
Floating on my back
And staring at the gray
It was completely still
Except the pounding of my heart
Bringing me back to life
From three strange days
Three strange...
Three strange days
Three strange days
SCHOOL OF FISH
Words and Music: Josh Clayton-Felt

John Mortimer 1923 - 2009

Writer, lawyer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, and all round English good egg, John Mortimer died in his sleep yesterday.

I found out from Stephen Fry, on Twitter.

Nothing like seeing some of your childhood TV favourites turn up in the Obituaries column to make you get serious about leading a more healthy lifestyle.

Emotional Weather Report

It's been a long time since I hated myself this much.
(Maybe five or six years.)

Physical pain from my belly button up to my temples.

I can't remember happiness. I hate it when people ask me to remember a time when I felt happy. Actually, I can remember some happiness.

I just answered the door to a meter reader and managed to be polite to him. Maybe there is hope. I'm not opposed to hope.

Can I haz stronger medications, plz?

Update: 10:00 My headache isn't so bad now, but I'm still finding it difficult to think coherently. (I am too dependent on my intellect.)

Late night and early morning
low clouds with a chance of fog
chance of showers into the afternoon
with variable high cloudiness
and gusty winds, gusty winds
at times around the corner of
Sunset and Alvorado
things are tough all over
when the thunder storms start
increasing over the southeast
and south central portions
of my apartment, I get upset
and a line of thunderstorms was
developing in the early morning
ahead of a slow moving cold front
cold blooded
with tornado watches
issued shortly before noon Sunday,
for the areas
including, the western region
of my mental health
and the northern portions of my
ability to deal rationally
with my
disconcerted precarious emotional
situation.

it's cold out there
colder than a ticket taker's smile
at the Ivar Theatre, on a Saturday night
flash flood watches covered the
southern portion of my disposition
there was no severe weather well
into the afternoon,
except for a lone gust of wind in the bedroom
in a high pressure zone, covering the eastern
portion of a small suburban community
with a 103 and millibar high pressure zone
and a weak pressure ridge extending from
my eyes down to my cheeks
cause since you left me baby
and put the vice grips on my mental health
well the extended outlook for an
indefinite period of time
until you come back to me baby
is high tonight
low tomorrow,
and precipitation is expected
TOM WAITS

Update: 10:30 Why do the song lyrics that seem to describe my current mood have to be about bad relationships? That's one dimension of my life where I've quite lucky. Unlike my misogynist heroes, evidently.

Date It, Fuck It, Kill It, Cook It, Eat It

I like my food, but have never been a 'foodie', or even much of a gourmet. Simple, tasty, nourishing dishes, in ample quantities, with beer and wine, and an extra portion of chips, is what works for me.

The only TV chef I ever liked was Keith Floyd, because he was usually drunk and charming, and would quote Bob Dylan lyrics. He once managed to fit an entire verse of Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues into a recipe.

He was also responsible for Kiwi Fruit and the Stranglers, two elements of Eighties culture without which life under Mrs. Thatcher would have been even harder to bear.



But times change, and now we have now we have to be entertained by gastric gnomes like Anthony Worral Thompson, Giles Coren (the humourless son of a humorist), and Jamie Oliver, whose tongue seems too large for his mouth and capable of vasodilation, which may explain why a) he talks in that lisping fake Cockney accent of his and b) he has managed to marry quite an attractive woman. Jamie is currently annoying the population of Rotherham.

But it gets worse.

Thirty miles up the M1 from Rotherham, the top match on Google for "seasoned and fried" is now the murder trial of Anthony Morley of Leeds, who went on a date with Damian Oldfield, after which he took him home, had sex with him, cut his throat, stabbed him repeatedly, then carved a piece of flesh from his thigh, seasoned it with fresh herbs and fried it in olive oil.

Morley then walked to his local takeaway kebab shop, wearing a bloodstained dressing gown and flip-flops, and told staff: "I have killed someone, call the police."



Isn't this just typical? One minute he's all pretentious and showing off, with his olive oil and herbs, like he thinks he's Paul bloody Newman or someone, then as soon as he's got what he wants, he's off down the kebab shop in a dirty dressing gown! Mr Morley, I'm afraid, is a cannibal bulimic and a junk food junkie, and very much in the closet about all of it.

I think Mr. Morley hasn't exactly been honest about his sexuality either, come to think of it. In 1993, he won a beauty contest as Mr. Gay UK. According to a contemporary report, to win the title he had to beat off stiff competition in front of a nightclub audience in Blackpool. (Oo-err, missus) I'm not sure I could have managed that.

Then, he was the "gay scene's best known and talked about lad" who listed as his hobbies "pleasing other people". Now he says he's never been happy being gay, and claims the other man raped him. Sad, if it's true, but still no reason to kill your date and eat them.