The Day Lou Reed Died

Sunday was just a downright bad day.

It began with me opening my morning paper to the results of the Observer/Jonathan Cape graphic short story contest. My story about an old man deciding to do something different in the face of the world’s mediocrity had been overlooked in favour of a thing about a woman having a colonic. I then discovered that Lou Reed had died. The day ended with me getting locked out of the house due to a broken lock on the back gate and my having to climb over a six foot wall. Perhaps I was thinking about the old man in my short story. Perhaps I’ve just been playing too many computer games lately. I thought it would be easy. The climbing part was. The jumping off just had a few unforeseen results such as a jarred knee, slightly sprained wrist, and my feeling like a blithering idiot. What was I thinking?

I guess I wasn’t thinking. My mind was probably on other things such as why the lock would choose to break on such a spectacularly crap day.

In addition to everything, my eyes have given out and I need to rest them. They’re suffering from the sheer exhaustion of looking at screens, both tablet and desktop. It’s been weeks of non-stop work building websites, editing video, doing Photoshop work, and then, in my downtime, doing my own work: these hasty bits of blogging and drawing strips and gag cartoons. I know the signs. I’ve been here before. I’m shot, knackered, depressed, fed up, but mainly just exhausted. My eyes need some time to recover.

Yet it’s strange how these things happen together and feel causally linked. Yesterday the papers warned that the storm of the century would land. It felt like the pathetic fallacy: when you believe the world reflects your emotions.

I had spent my day wondering about the colonic winner, wondering what I could have done differently and realising that nothing I could do would have improved my chances. I don’t mind losing to something where I can see the gap, a sense of something beyond my skills to create. It’s frustrating to lose to something which makes you feel underwhelmed. I guess it’s about shared mindsets. The world of people having colonics is so far from the world I see every day where austerity bites and alcohol give people the only reprieve from living. The things that preoccupy my mind aren’t the things that might preoccupy somebody who would care to write a story about a colonic or, I guess, anybody who would pick the colonic story as their winner. Is that really the most important thing we can talk about in the graphic form? I hate to point the finger and say ‘class’ but I wonder if these things aren’t just a middle-class bias coming out. If that’s the case, then working-class me stood no chance. It was never in my destiny to be photographed looking attractive sitting on the floor before open patio windows, looking out on a sunny garden with a handsome pedigree dog lying beside me. Whiskered and miserable in front of a Manchester canal might be closer to the truth and who the hell wants to see that?

It was amid such gloomy thoughts that I heard that Lou Reed had died.

It wasn’t unexpected but it hit me hard. With the exception of hearing the news that Eric Morecambe had died, I never weep for celebrities. This was different. I tend to be loyal in my choice of music. There are few musicians who work I dearly love and whose work I listen to constantly. Reed was one of the few. I’ve always adored the albums he made with the Velvet Underground through to his Transformer and Berlin albums of the 70s, and then New York in the 1980s. Admittedly, in recent years I’ve struggled to maintain that love. Of course, I’d heard stories about his being difficult with journalists but that seemed like a good thing to be. Being difficult with journalists is synonymous to being difficult with stupidity and who wants to give stupidity an easy ride? Stories of his being rude to fans disturbed me more because I’d always wanted to meet him. Yet I had struggled to enjoy his recent albums which seemed to be delightfully sneering towards his audience. I’d so desperately wanted his last album, ‘Lulu’, to be good. I’ve written in the past that I hoped if it was going to be a failure (as some had predicted) then it would be one of those spectacular failure that are better than most of the dross out there. I could never say that it was. Now I feel like I need to give it another listen. I don’t want to think it was his last album.

Reed never influenced me as a musician. I’m not musical. I can Travis pick a guitar badly, slightly less than badly when I put the hours in and remember to let my nails grow on my right hand. Yet he was one of those rare figures who inspired me to be creative and to write. He was part of a New York scene that fascinated me from far away. Reading the comments on the Rolling Stone article that broke the news, I noticed some Americans were suggesting that the Velvet Underground weren’t worthy of licking The Beatles’ shoes. From the perspective of somebody living just outside Liverpool, I thought it the other way around. Perhaps it’s just an attraction to the unknown. As much as I liked Lennon, I never really liked The Beatles, even at their experimental best. It’s the raw sound of the Velvets that excited me. I loved the dark gothic complexity of Reed’s lyrics, the bacchanalian riot of the world he experienced. His music gave me a window on the freaks and the weirdoes, the addicts and sexual misfits. In many ways, it a vision of humanity at its worst where the banality of civil order had broken down and people were left twisted into carnival shapes. It was full of difficulty and contradictions. It was bleak but truthful and vital because of that.

My most abiding memory of Lou Reed was an interview he gave to BBC2 around the time of his releasing New York. In it he talked about writing. ‘All good writing is rewriting,’ he said and that stuck with me. I repeat it as a mantra and still offer it to anybody who ever asks me for writing advice. From that moment, I have always written blisteringly quickly but I rewrite slowly. I also learned to appreciate his uncompromising attitude towards culture. Reed could be scathing and sometimes brutal but that was his appeal. His ad libs in this live version of ‘Sweet Jane’ are among my very favourite things:



‘Here’s fucking Barbara Streisand… Fuck her and the little people.’

‘I give good clerk…’

‘Are you political Lou? […] Give me an issue I’ll give you a tissue. Wipe my ass with it.’

‘Fuck Radio Ethiopia, man. I’m Radio Brooklyn.’

‘If you write as good as you talk, nobody reads you.’

It’s well to remember the misanthropy of his art, especially now. New York is full of angry songs, which is perhaps why I like it. Anger is a good emotion if channelled correctly. I feel like I need to channel it now. I learned about his death via The Guardian but immediately found that Rolling Stone were among the first to report it. That’s where I read a comment that somebody posted to say that Lou Reed hadn’t died and that it was all a hoax.

Of course, I was relieved but cursing the sick bastards who would make a joke out of something like that. Then I discovered that the hoax was actually the claim that it was a hoax.

Isn’t that grim? To know that people write hoax stories about an artist’s death? I’ve written fake stories in the past but I like to think they had a purpose and never would I write anything so callous or cruel. Satirists generally do what they do because they want a better world. These hoaxers make the world more alarming and bleak. They also have form. The website, en.mediamass.net (I won't do them the service of giving them an actual link to boost the Google rank), seems to be some deliberately constructed algorithm to harvest readers. It’s hoax but it’s not satire. It’s blackhat operations; webdesign by bad guys. The story ‘Kenneth Branagh goes “Gangnam Style”’ is the same as the story ‘Chris Elliot goes “Gangnam Style” and even ‘Lou Reed goes “Gangham Style”’.

At the height of the news breaking, it was easy to miss such detail.

This morning, I wish I could sum all this up but I’m still aching from jumping off a six foot wall onto concrete. I’m lucky I didn’t split my shins. My spirit is really shot after the disappointment of the graphic short story contest and I now have to bike through these torrential rains to post some cartoons to another contest and to buy a new lock for the gate. I feel a little bit lost knowing that my already small world has just grown a little smaller. It feels like Lou Reed was there when I set out trying to be some kind of artist. His death came on a day when I thought it about time I stopped trying to climb these perilously high walls.

Journal from the Plague Year 2013

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

My mood is foul tonight. Perhaps too foul but I’ve not blogged in two days… It’s well past midnight and I’m of a mind to hurl stones even though I know I’m not completely without sin. Vanity is my foremost wickedness; vanity in believing I might actually find the words to complete this nasty piece of propaganda I’ve sat down here to write.

My aim was to talk about my town, my people, perhaps even my country, but I don’t know if existing in a place is the same as belonging. Perhaps I’m still affected by the ‘ghostly aspens’ of Colorado, a place I’ve always wanted to see. I want mountains in my life. I’m tired of living in flatlands.

The true measure of my vanity is my frustration that things aren’t generally better. Vanity is writing a blog you hoped more people would read and enjoy. Vanity is in believing you are part of a larger conversation. It is waking every morning and going to sleep every night hoping for fresh emails from interesting people with intelligent things to tell you and opportunities you might grasp… Vanity is the wish for human contact. It is the need for affirmation.

The reality is that it’s only the blue moon that brings mail, usually from a confused mayor who thinks I’m a celebrity. The reality is that people want porn, tattoo designs, and naked celebrities and I don’t want to give them any of those things. The reality is that my work gets borrowed, lifted, stolen, quoted, used, occasionally abused, but never once considered valuable or worthy of payment.

So forgive me if I insist that stronger men than me would be drunk tonight, hog tied in a midget bordello with the shutters down until dawn. My weakness is allowing myself to feel so abysmally dejected but if the choice is prose or poison, words or whisky, I hope I’ll always choose to write. And if you can endure to read what follows, then please excuse it for the ramblings of a man whose moral compass is stuck pointing hard north, towards a notion of how things used to be before the sickness came.

I saw that sickness this morning. I’d paused outside a second-hand furniture shop in town in order to watch a round shouldered man standing as his dog, a piss yellow strangle-haired mongrel, enthusiastically shit between his feet. I watched the pair of them, feeling abject at the sight. At first I thought that the man was oblivious to his dog as he gazed through the dusted windows at stained mattresses and chipped refrigerators. Then I realised that his focussed gaze was merely a way of covering for the dog’s business. When the man stepped away, he was careful not to walk in the wet caramel already spreading across the pavement.

The plague probably began with these small acts of indifference, no worse than my own unwillingness to say something. I like to believe there was a time when selfishness such as this wouldn’t have happened but perhaps that time exists only in my imagination. The streets of my childhood were thick with excrement and litter. Perhaps my moral compass is merely stuck pointing in the direction of my own expectations, formed from even older notions of manners, politeness, and responsibility that were themselves no less of an abstraction.

On the corner, a woman was standing with her five children, a family fun pack of sizes but all sharing the same brutish dirt scowls. She was wearing a short denim skirt and a heavy pregnancy, a cigarette flaring between her livid pink lips. Her ugly breasts crowned her tight vest top, their bad skin freckled and pimpled, and across her shoulder ran an angry tattoo that read ‘Only God Can Judge Me’. Isn’t that the truth? I’m not qualified to argue theology with a tattooist. My life is full of qualifications that nobody wants and, as if to emphasise the point, my back was against the grey shutters of the Job Centre. Backed into a corner, you might say, yet it was also the perfect place to watch and see that the anger in the woman’s face was real. Her razor cut husband or boyfriend looked at her five year old boy and then he raised a finger and spat ‘this is all your fucking fault’ before he turned and walked away. She laughed defiantly and I moved on when she glared at me for watching.

The children around here are already marked by the plague. A small girl on the arm of a grandparent wore flaking false tattoos from elbow to wrist. Given a few years, the ink will be real and stand proud like an embossed cliché. Yet it’s not the tattoos I hate but the conformity to blandness, the lack of individuality that pervades everything. Growing up, I admired outsiders and they all had tattoos. I’m now marked as an outsider simply because I have none.

And conformity is the plague in its truest form. The plague is a disease of the surface, of skin not bone. It is characterised by an obsession with image, self, and possession. We now live on the other side of celebrity culture where we are all stars. Our sickness is our perceived specialness which is fed back to us from everywhere we look. Yesterday, I took a train out of Manchester and the conductor wore her hair and make-up like Elizabeth Tailor, an insane contrast to her otherwise manly uniform. She was a fading beauty in a no hope job yet also in a perpetual state of being only moments from fame.

Friends tell me that I’ve outgrown the town but then so have thousands of people like me across the country. Towns now reflect Britain’s investment in surface at the expense of depth. The false facia business is big. Cheap plastic covers the beautiful brickwork of every shop front, hiding centuries of life behind thin sheets of pristine banality. It’s erected by companies with vibrant logos on white vans and men with electric screwdrivers and tight schedules. And everything is run to a tight schedule. Gardens are cut by professional gardeners who strim the lot in fifteen minutes and are gone. Windows are washed by professional teams with expensive vans and tools and a refusal to climb ladders. From the end of a long pole they rinse the centre of the window once, take your money, and then they’re gone for another fortnight. We’ve become a nation of dirty windows, uneven hedges, and identical high streets.

Meanwhile I’m stuck watching the post office queue stream sickly to the door. It’s a wheezing creature with many legs but a single wet hawking voice. At its head stands a man who went to school with me. A lifetime and a few stone now separate us. We’re long past the point where we feel the need to acknowledge each other and, as he walks past, I gaze at his profile. The fat on the back of his head is folded onto his thick neck, forming a bulge like the hood of a raincoat tucked into his collar. He’s counting so much money that I feel ashamed for looking. I wonder what he does for a living, this man made from the dim-witted child I’d known at school.

Outside, he climbs into a long white truck, the length of two reasonable cars and worth a hundred times the value of my bike. It’s an Isuzu, a 2x2 cabin at the front and a huge enclosed space behind. A year ago I’d never seen one of these monstrosities and now the town is full of them.

‘Only God Can Judge Me.’

The words of the tattoo now seem well chosen. How can anybody judge these successful men? If it were London, Manchester or Liverpool, we’d think them footballers or benefactors of some high financial ruin. Here amid the plague victims, their wealth is just more of a mystery, though a mystery that everybody has quietly solved. We mutter about the guy just out of prison driving the luxury 4x4 whilst claiming unemployment. We tut about the Ferrari that sits outside a cheap terraced house. Down the road a guy was done for badger baiting, spent six months inside, and came home to expensive fireworks and a new car. Every street has a family like that: ugly people with seemingly endless means, who greet strangers late at night and hold unusual conferences in their parked cars with the lights turned off.

‘Only God Can Judge Me.’

It’s nonsense, of course. There is no judgement, just homes and cars and families and holidays and memories that fade and are eventually forgotten. And my judgement on this grim night is that I’m really tired of being me, of choosing hard paths and depth, and of being on the outside, and of struggling as though the struggle were indeed a noble thing. I now want the tribal tattoos and I want muscles on my arms which are too thin because all I do is write and draw and read. I no longer want my legs strong from cycling. I want them strong from doing deep squats in the gym and I want huge cars with high emissions and friends who know friends who can arrange things. I want drugs to sell and cars to steal and I want to be involved in armed robberies because all the things I have been taught have brought me only a sadness so much worse than the threat of arrest or punishment or even the eternal damnation of my soul. Time in prison might make me a better man. I might learn a trade there, how to deal, how to lie and cheat, how to be callous and cruel, break women’s hearts and not feel ashamed about it afterwards because they were just Playboy models with large breasts and dense smiles and hate in their eyes and deep sorrows in their lives…

Except, of course, I don’t want those things. All I know is that I’m tired and I’d like my sleep. Tomorrow I’ll start my work again and hope everything will be different.