This is brilliant, just absolutely bloody brilliant.

Reading Morrissey’s Autobiography. Very enjoyable. My favourite line so far: Morrissey summing up an incident in which his father crashed the family car into a front garden…

The gentle householders of old take us in to sooth our nerves, whereas today’s indignation generation would pellet writs at us from upper windows.

The ideological fiction of capitalism is dead in Europe. Capitalism is a fiction if capital that is placed at risk for a return cannot be lost.

Charles Hugh Smith writing on Dangerous Minds.

Look what the postman just handed me.

A gift, and much appreciated. Peter Cushing by the brilliant Matt Soffe.

It’s based on a publicity still from Hammer’s The Abominable Snowman. Always one of my favourite Hammer films – I taped it on VHS from a Channel 4 late-night showing, probably sometime around 1990. I think I was around 12 or 13 years old. It was a Friday night, I remember that quite clearly because I got up really early on the Saturday morning to watch it. It’s a really great film, written by Nigel Kneale (based on his earlier BBC drama The Creature, also staring Cushing), and features one of Cushing’s finest performances. I wish I had kept a count of how many times I have watched the films that obsess me.

Matt and I have been discussing the possibility of working on a comic together – a joyously monstrous horror book. A love letter, of sorts, to Hammer and Universal monster movies. If schedules allow we might start working on it towards the end of this year/start of next.

Took a shortcut through a lane I haven’t used in many years today and spotted a very nicely made iron gate that I don’t ever remember being there before.

I used to walk through that lane at least once a week but I have no recollection of the gate, and yet the gate is very old. What’s going on?

Looks like I’ll have a six page comic called “Thunder On A Summer’s Day” in an upcoming issue of Overload. Probably issue three. No word on who the artist will be yet. I’m quite happy with this one.

Lets see – I’ve got pitches for two new 66 page graphic novels out with publishers at the moment. One seems keen. The other inscrutable. Fingers crossed.

Work continues on Project Luna: 1947 and the Crowley book. Both look to be on schedule to launch early next year.

This painting is haunting me.

My favourite of Gustave Courbet’s trout paintings – the fish seems to be staring right at you. There is a something in that eye that pleads for help, or at least mercy. The late Robert Hughes said “A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.”

It reminds me of bright summer mornings. A fit trout, fresh from the water and still squirming in your hands, has a unique and not at all unpleasant odour.

Laid off from the shipyard. No work. No more boats for the time being. It will, at least, be nice not to have bloodshot eyes for a while.

HOLE IN THE GROUND

My story Get It Down (which appeared in Innsmouth Magazine #6) was included in the Honourable Mention List for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Volume 4. Link.

Nice to know that she read it, never mind liked it.

HOLE IN THE SKY

Been trawling youtube looking at Harlan Ellison videos. Lots of people really hate Harlan, but I think he’s funny as hell. In this vid he shows off his sprawling comic collection. The actual storage archive is almost as impressive as the comics themselves.

Further to Cliff Twemlow’s The Pike, here’s some archive footage detailing 1982’s sadly aborted movie version featuring Twemlow, Joan Collins, and the brilliantly awful mechanical pike.

In this documentary Twemlow informs us that “the largest pike ever caught was nineteen foot.” A statement so wrong I am going to pretend that it is true from now on.

By noted English “actor, nightclub bouncer, horror paperback writer and library music composer” Cliff Twemlow.

Sadly out of print, but available in dog-eared form from the usual places. I admit that I’ll buy most books with a pike on the cover, but this really is good. I’ll be tracking down a copy of his other novel The Beast Of Kane.

Here’s a picture of Cliff.

Random line from his wikipedia entry – “The Mechanical Pike apparently now resides as an exhibit of robotics in Japan.”

More info at http://itsahotun.com/Cliff_Twemlow.htm

“it is hard to imagine the planning of the mandrill, except by a malignant fiend”

EJ Sullivan
The Grotesque (from Form issue one, 1916. Edited by Austin Osman Spare & Frederick Carter)

As reported in Phil Baker’s Austin Osman Spare – The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist

The bloke who was sitting in front of me seems to have shot this footage.

. . . since Delia Derbyshire passed away.

3 – 9 – 7 – 1 – 5     3 – 9 – 7 – 1 – 5     3 – 9 – 7 – 1 – 5     3 – 9 – 7 – 1 – 5

Bravo. The entire four disc set of The Conet Project – Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations is now available for free download on archive.org

If you’re the kind of person who likes to relax by listening to permanent loops of the Shipping Forecast (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t?) this will be right up your street.

Excellent Radio 4 audio documentary here.

Been helping to strip the walls in the hallway of my parent’s house back to the plaster. After prising off a long length of moulding we found this intriguing piece of cardboard . . .

Been there at least thirty years, I am told. Who is this hardy looking bastard plugging up a hole where the old light switch used to be?

Will try to excavate further as the job goes on.

Arthur Machen says it best:

He and his father seemed to pass down an avenue of jeers and contempt, and contempt from such animals as these! This putrid filth, moulded into human shape, made only to fawn on the rich and beslaver them, thinking no foulness too foul if it were done in honour of those in power and authority; and no refined cruelty of contempt too cruel if it were contempt of the poor and humble and oppressed; it was to this obscene and ghastly throng that he was something to be pointed at. And these men and women spoke of sacred things, and knelt before the awful altar of God, before the altar of tremendous fire, surrounded as they professed by Angels and Archangels and all the Company of Heaven; and in their very church they had one aisle for the rich and another for the poor. And the species was not peculiar to Caermaen; the rich business men in London and the successful brother author were probably amusing themselves at the expense of the poor struggling creature they had injured and wounded; just as the “healthy” boy had burst into a great laugh when the miserable sick cat cried out in bitter agony, and trailed its limbs slowly, as it crept away to die. Lucian looked into his own life and his own will; he saw that in spite of his follies, and his want of success, he had not been consciously malignant, he had never deliberately aided in oppression, or looked on it with enjoyment and approval, and he felt that when he lay dead beneath the earth, eaten by swarming worms, he would be in a purer company than now, when he lived amongst human creatures.

The Hill of Dreams (1907)