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.

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.

Still Daddy

It's that day again; that special anniversary I blogged about a year ago. For the third year in a row, I've been remembering my stepdaughter, sitting at the foot of the oak tree we planted for her, with pages from my PhD, which I still haven't finished.

And it ain't nobody's fault but mine.

Nowadays, there isn't anybody in my life who calls me 'daddy'. If I hear the name, I'm the one who's speaking. It's my own voice, my inner child, the voice of my creativity. Asking for strength, reassurance, and courage.

For me, writing is, and always has been, the voice of integrity, the voice of enthusiasm, the voice of a young, playful, powerful six year old who has seen a lot of life, but is still enthusiastic, and knows that he's going to make something of his life.

I sat down at my desk writing at 6:45 this morning. I wrote good words. But by eight o'clock, my creativity had ebbed away. Damn. I have a full day ahead of me. I need to persevere.

I am going to make something of my life.

Mad Men

Lately I've developed a real crush on Don Draper. I know. Strange, isn't it? I watched about half of series one, got hooked on series two, and bought myself series one on DVD for my birthday. Which I keep watching over and over.

The world of Mad Men is somehow contemporary, but just historical enough that I don't feel contempt for people who are superficial and glamorous. I have photographs of my parents and relatives in 1960's suits and dresses, and I can remember flicking through ancient Reader's Digest magazines full of adverts like Sterling Cooper make. (Did anybody else have a Reader's Digest childhood? There was always an article 'I Am John's Scrotum' or something.)

I'm fascinated by Don Draper's character. He reminds me of my father in my parents' wedding photographs. He's confident, and successful, and he's vulnerable. I like reading all the contradictions and nuances of the man, which I never could do with my real dad.

You can see that he has emotions, because he has brilliant ideas at work that come from the empathy he has for people. And Don likes women; he feels comfortable around women in a way that the other men don't (especially not the odious Pete Campbell).

My father used to talk about his childhood. It wasn't a happy childhood, and his stories used to scare the hell out of me. We don't hear Don Draper talking about his childhood, but we see the flashbacks.

I remember a scene from the end of Series Two when Don gets his tarot cards read, and the woman he's with (I think she might be the original Mrs Don Draper) tells him that the cards say he's connected to all the living things in the world.

"The only thing keeping you from being happy is the belief that you are alone."

That was a good statement for me. I wonder if it would have meant something to my father, as well?

Daddy

Right now I feel like a small boy that wants his daddy. That's been happening a lot lately.

You know what that means...

That means that if I go back far enough into my life, there must have been a time when I wanted him and trusted him, and loved him, and felt loved by him.

Or something.

The clouds overhead are getting darker all of a sudden, and I think it's about to start raining.

Strung out in Heavens High

This blog post is late, just like a lot of the others and a lot of stuff in my life (filing my tax return, losing my virginity, etc etc.)

On Monday morning, I read the obituary of J.G. Ballard in the newspaper. Monday evening was the series premiere of Ashes to Ashes, the Eighties time-travel police drama.

Ashes to Ashes is set in 1982, a time of my life when the black dog of depression had already moved in on me, and I was darkly cynical. I listened to Elvis Costello albums and read Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde, and I knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Ashes to ashes, punk to funky
We know Major Tom's a junkie
Strung out in heavens high
Hitting an all-time low

Punk had been and gone, and the charts were filling up with dross again. 2-Tone let different races mingle, and dance together, but it didn’t stop there being two million unemployed. The New Romantic movement meant that people like Jonathan Ross were allowed to become famous. Bowie was still good for a couple more years, but Roxy Music had deteriorated into some sort of soul band.

The show captured my feelings well. Apart from the Gene Genie and Bolly-Knickers, who are the hero and heroine and therefore have to look good at all times, everyone around them was drifting into an abject state. Not tough, not soft, not principled, not a-moral; just strung out and getting low. The sex was nasty and loveless, the prostitutes were unhappy and not nice to look at, and even the arrival of Princess Margaret and a giant pink penis failed to improve the mood.

JG Ballard was a science fiction writer who wrote about the twentieth century, and the imagined twenty-first, as though he were dissecting a corpse trying to establish how it died. He describes a civilization that’s lost, only we are inside it, and losing ourselves with it right now. I discovered his work when I was sixteen, round about the time my father died, thanks to a friend I used to borrow records from, who lent me this paperback.

Ballard was trained in medicine and for part of his childhood, he and his parents were interned in a prison camp in Shanghai. I had a chronically ill father, and both my parents spoke endlessly about the war, so Ballard’s stories seemed like pointers to my own future, in a world where my father’s visions partially came true, and I was an adult capable of inhabiting this savage, whimsical, collapsing scientific experiment. I would become an illuminated man with “arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown”.

Today (I mean Monday) I remember one scene in particular from ‘The Terminal Beach’. The earth is much hotter, and London has become a tropical rainforest, and the narrator is trying to make himself a home on an abandoned scientific testing station, while grieving the deaths of his wife and son.

One day, he finds some large charts showing mutated chromosomes, and he takes them ‘home’ and hangs them on the walls of his bunker. They are his art, but he doesn’t like the pictures not having any titles, so he begins to make up titles for them. Then, one day, “passing the aircraft dump on one of his forays, he found the half-buried juke box, and tore the list of records from the selection panel, realizing that these were the most appropriate captions.”

“Thus embroidered, the charts took on many layers of associations.”

Am I Nearly There Yet?

I've always felt cheated out of my last six weeks in the womb, and a big theme in my life has been to figure exactly how to compensate for not having what I needed, when I needed it.

Being born is something you have to do for yourself. It's taken me a while to finish it off, but I think I'm just about there.

Hello, world.

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.

Girls at Play

One friend's daughter at play, with another, the same age:

"I know. You be Supernanny, and I'll be a pole-dancer..."

Fatherhood is going to be so interesting, if I get round to it...

Death Letter

Today is an anniversary in my life. Today was the day my step-daughter died. She used to call me 'Daddy'. It was her idea, and it worked very well for me.

Around four in the afternoon, we were allowed into the mortuary at the hospital where she died, and I remember holding her and hugging her, and talking to her, and trying to figure out how to love a dead person.

Blues music. It's what I need at moments like this.

I got a letter this morning
What d’you reckon it read?
"Hurry home because
The gal you love is dead"
Got a letter this morning
What do you reckon it read?
It said, "Hurry, hurry!
"Because that gal you love is dead"

I picked up my suitcase
Took off down the road
When I got there she was
Laying on the coolin' board
Yes, I picked up my suitcase
I took off down the road
When I got there
She was laying
'Lain on the coolin' board.

Look like ten thousand people
Standing 'round the burying ground
Didn't know how much I loved her
'Til they began to let her down
Ten thousand people
Standing 'round the burial ground
Didn't know I loved her
'Til they began to lay her down.

Ain’t it hard to love somebody
When that someone can’t love you?
And you know that she ain’t comin' back
No matter what you do?
You know it's hard to love somebody
When that someone can’t love you.
You can't find satisfaction
And you don't care what you do.

SON HOUSE

A Close Watch On The Trains

My parents' generation remembered The War. They still call it "The War" even though there have been a few more wars since. My Nana, when she was alive, said there was another war, before "The War", that she thought was even worse.

Anyway. I grew up in peacetime. I was very relieved that I wasn't going to have to join the army, unless I wanted to. I was, however, worried, that compared to my father, I was growing up soft. My father worried about this, too. (Let's be honest. I learned to worry from him. But because I was a child, I thought it was all my own idea, and, of course, all my fault. )


When I was a boy, I liked trains. Then later on, I liked girls. In my teens, I liked both together, and - things being the way they were - I especially liked the older, better looking ones that I couldn't catch. (The trains, that is. And the girls.)

Eventually, I went to university, where I fell in love with a woman who was older and madder and interesting and Eastern European and politically active. (And a self-harmer. Pity about that. ) So, I got to see lots of interesting films from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (and plenty of dull ones, too. Pity about that.)


Jiri Menzel's Ostre sledované vlaky was one of my favourites. It was made in Czechoslovakia during the mid-sixties period they called the Prague Spring, when people were confident and artistic, and reflective and critical about society and the possibilities for the world, in a positive way, until the Russian tanks arrived, and they all had to wait another twenty years before Václav Havel became President and met Lou Reed and Frank Zappa.

It's a film about trains and The War - I don't know what my father would have made of it - and a young man trying to lose his virginity.


Milos, the teenage protagonist, is an apprentice at a small railway station in provincial Bohemia, and the trains he is supposed to watch often contain Nazi troops and equipment being sent to the Eastern Front. The Nazis are, of course, the enemy, an occupying army, and in the film we follow young Milos as he learns, in different ways, what he has to do to be a man: how to survive under Nazi occupation, how he can resist it, how to be courageous and heroic, how men behave around women, and how to get the girl he wants.


Milos watches an older colleague as he flirts with and seduces a girl, and thinks he knows what sex is all about. But his dirty weekend with a beautiful train conductor doesn't go to plan, and in despair, Milos tries to kill himself. I can never forget the scene in the hospital, where Milos shows his bandaged slashed wrist to a visitor and says, with a straight face :

"The doctors say it's called premature ejaculation."

A Close Watch On The Trains is a comedy about being a man, being a hero, and being good enough. Milos' sexual awakening goes hand in hand with his political development.

Appropriately enough for a film set in Bohemia, orgasms are an act of freedom and defiance. Orgasms will defeat fascism, if we have enough of them.

We can imagine that Menzel's tale of resistance to the Nazis was also meant to encourage 1960's Czechs and Slovaks not to stand for any crap from Moscow. Certainly, the Russians banned the film after they invaded provided fraternal assistance in 1968.



My father was right about me being soft, compared to him. But his mother died when he was five, and he was raised by an alcoholic father for a few years, before he died, and left his sons to be raised by someone even more brutal. So my dad didn't have a lot of opportunities for softness in his life.

He made the most of the opportunities he had with me when I was little, but the older I grew, the more talkative and curious and energetic I became, the less he knew what to do. I guess my dad's life forced him to toughen up a lot sooner than he would have liked, and we both lost something on account of that.

Slaughterhouse Five

This is a really good novel about men and war and happiness and freedom.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was an American soldier in World War II, and he was a prisoner of war in Dresden when the RAF firebombed the city. Many years later, he wanted to write a novel about war which portrayed soldiers as like frightened children. Slaughterhouse Five was that novel.

My father was also a prisoner of war, somewhere in east Germany. At the time of the bombing of Dresden, my dad would have been either in a Nazi POW camp, or a fugitive, walking across mountains and fields, trying to reach the American army before the Nazis recaptured him.



I don't think my dad would have liked Slaughterhouse Five. It wouldn't have been heroic enough for him. He wouldn't have liked the way Vonnegut mixed science fiction with historical facts. But I knew my dad was frightened. Even in the seventies, he still had nightmares about the war. He used to wake up in a panic, and my mother would try to comfort him.

The science fiction part of Slaughterhouse Five involves time travel to a planet called Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians don't believe in free will, and they mock
humans because we do. They can see the future and the past, and because they believe they can't change them, choose to focus on the moments in their lives that they value most.



So it goes.

Daddy's Girlfriend

When I was very little my mother used to point at the television whenever this actress came on and go "Look! Look! Daddy's girlfriend!"

I had only a vague idea of what girlfriends were, but I decided that my mum was saying that before he met her, my dad had been going out with Eva Gabor. This made me think my dad must have been extremely cool.

I wondered why they weren't still together. In those days, I didn't understand how relationships ended (or even, I suppose, that they could...) I was only five at the time, and my dad was really, really old. I didn't understand about mistresses, either, but I thought it was better not to ask my mum too many questions.

The existential implications of having a different mother didn't even cross my mind.