The Best Magazine You've Not Heard Of Yet...

Sitting around with your mates moaning about how magazines aren’t as good they used to be – it’s almost a national sport in this country for men of a certain age. It’s all about the supposed 'heyday' of the NME and how amazing it was back when there were four weekly music magazines in the UK; about how brilliant Select was back in the day and “didn’t the Observer magazine actually used to run things that you wanted to read of a Sunday”? What a perpetual disappointment it is, logging all the wrong turns that magazines make – your magazines, those ones that you're stupidly loyal to. Several pints later the argument ends up about how much better you’d do it had you just got A) the time, B) the inclination and C) a huge conglomerate willing to put your crazed pub bore ramblings and deranged beer-mat doodlings out and onto the shelves of into WHSmiths in Swindon train station. Annoyingly, it’s just that last point that eludes me...

As a lifelong magazine junkie, I now find myself increasing drawn towards American magazines. For starters, there is a massive plus in that you are a lot less likely to be confronted by waffle about whoever you’re supposed to care about this week, be it Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong or the bloke from Bloc Party (that’s got to be a good thing). For seconds, music magazines over there are allowed to conduct themselves with a level of intelligence much closer to our broadsheet press. Rolling Stone, always a political animal, has just put Barack Obama on the cover (they did the same for John Kerry and Howard Dean in the last Presidential election, not that that really helped). Their main politics correspondent, Matt Taibbi, is a man so forthright and forceful in his opinions, he’d make the good Dr Thomson blush - someone well worth following if you’re vaguely interested in reading about the labyrinthine, murky world of American government alongside your above average Britney Spears off-the-rails cover story. Another favourite is LA based freebie, Arthur, which has long flown the freak flag for nu-folkers, doom metal heads and acid eaters the world over. The fact that Arthur is still here is a something of a miracle of bloody minded determination – when the magazine was folded a while back, head honcho Jay Babcock bought it from the publisher and forged on, creating the ultimate 21st century free press success story (the magazine and back issues are distributed online as a free PDFs).



Chicago based Stop Smiling is the best magazine out there that you’ve never heard of yet. For reasons I’ve yet to understand, you don’t see this magazine in British newsagents or even in Borders. Tagged as “the magazine for high mind lowlifes”, Stop Smiling has been a labour of love for its editors, JC Gabel and James Hughes, for over a decade now. Their editorial approach is best described as “if you don’t ask you don’t get”. Printed in colour with a textured matte finish, each issue of Stop Smiling is whip smart and uncynical, a lesson in how to keep your head when everything else around you is dumbing down. The last few years have seen them run exhaustive cover story interviews with the likes of Lee Hazlewood, Jay Z, William Eggleston, Cat Power, The RZA, Kurt Vonnegut, Ricky Gervais, Christopher Hitchens, Bruce Robinson & Lynne Ramsey (if that sounds like a lot of magazines, they print as many as 3 different covers for each issue, often covering a load of different audience bases). Their recent Stax Records 50th anniversary issue was labelled “An Ode To The South” and was just that – everyone from the Kings Of Leon to the Mayor of New Orleans came to the party. This is also a magazine that hasn’t forgotten the art of a great cover shot - it came wrapped in a picture of the Stax record store in Memphis, all fizzing neon, proudly displaying the slogan ‘Soulsville USA’. If that was the Guardian Weekend magazine you were picking up, you’d be convinced you’d died and gone to some kind of magazine heaven.

The latest issue of Stop Smiling, a Jazz special, just arrived in my letter box. The covers are alternate classic black and white photos of Ornette Coleman, Bobby Hutcherson & Eric Dolphy. It’s like being walked through the aisles of a great specialist record shop by people who know what they’re talking about. An article about Sun Ra and Moondog (“Costuming The Super Anti Hero”) brilliantly cuts to the chase by focusing mainly on their clothes. The cover strap line is a bold as brass commandment – “Start Appreciating America’s Greatest Art Form”. Can you imagine Uncut holding off from someone from the pantheon of acceptable old duffers that they rely on and doing that instead? Hopefully, one day someone will collect together back issues of this magazine and put them in a book. That day, people will look at it and wonder where it’s been all their lives. Get the jump on them early by seeking it out now, you won’t regret it.

Robin Turner, Socialism Magazine

Bitches Brew, working with Miles Davis

Teo Macero, October 30 1925 - February 19 2008

Teo Macero was undoubtedly one of the most influential producers in the history of recorded music. Although he first came to prominence as a tenor saxophone player and member of Charles Mingus' Jazz Composers' workshop, Macero is most well known for his work as a jazz producer with Columbia Records from the 1950s through the 1980s, producing some of the best work of Dave Brubeck, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, and especially Miles Davis. With Davis, Macero pushed jazz through several changes, from the cool jazz of Kind of Blue to the grand orchestral gestures of Sketches of Spain, finally ushering jazz and popular music into the electronic age with his landmark work on Davis albums like Bitches Brew, In A Silent Way and A Tribute to Jack Johnson among many others. The experimental cut-and-paste method of production which he used on these albums helped put the producer-as-artist on an equal footing with musicians in creating a piece of recorded music, and paved the way for future generations of groundbreaking producers from Herbie Hancock to Prince Paul.



thanks to Rofey

The Taking Of Pelham 123

great film, tonight, 6.10, Channel Five

Kitchen Sink Dramas

THE TREES

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greeness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin, 1967


Notes:
Oh, dear Mr Larkin, that terminally melancholic librarian who weathered residencies in Leicester, Hull and Belfast; Poet Laureate
refusenik; misanthropic bachelor; we can hardly blame you for being such a miserable sod for much of your quiet, bookish life. And yet how glad we are that on a spring morning some forty years ago you woke up feeling such uncharacteristic optimism and penned 'The Trees'. (Let's not forget that Larkin also gave us poems about empty station platforms, toads, hospitals and Prestatyn). However, spring did appear to be, if not his favourite, his strongest seasonal muse, like so many poets before him. We may be slightly premature as far as the current weather goes (snow predicted across the UK tonight), but the cherry
blossom is already out on my street. For this, for the sheer sumptious beauty of Larkin's words, and because it's Kitchen Sink Dramas'co-director Julia's favourite poem in the world, we release our
inaugural Reading Room post into the world with some verse to defy the most winter-jaded of us all. Enjoy. It also happens to be World Book Day. Riffle some pages.

Love

Jemma and Julia

P.S. Please feel free to forward this post on to any friends you think might like it. To become a member of The Reading Room and receive our monthly literary bulletins all they need to do is visit The Reading Room page on our website and enter their details. No purchase necessary!

Letters From Arcadia

click here for the latest LETTER FROM ARCADIA, a regular correspondence between angling's two most original contemporary writers...

Seth Morgan

The piece below, by Mathew Clayton, is a killer. When "Homeboy" was released, some 18, 20 years ago, it was news. The underground were all over it - Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch, Thurston Moore - something brand new and hip for the Wiseblood / Bukowski boys. I remember buying it from Compendium in Camden Town (now sadly, one of the great counter culture bookstores in the sky). It was that kind of book, though it wasn't long before word began to spread and it started to cross over. Seth Morgan was suddenly the great white hope. As Mathew explains below, that never happened. Sad thing is you don't even hear talk of Homeboy anymore. That's why this is really special. (JB)

PS I know you're supposed to tell people not to print things these days, but this one is worth reading properly...
. . . . .

Seth Morgan was the author of Homeboy a tightly plotted, beautifully written crime novel set in San Francisco's underworld that was first published in 1989. Seth had a colourful background; a former boyfriend of Janis Joplin, he had served jail time for armed robbery and like the book's hero, Joe Speaker, had been a junkie and worked as strip club barker.

Homeboy is primarily, though, a love story rather than a crime story. A doomed tragic love story, the best most captivating kind. Seth died a year after the book's publication in a motor cycle accident, and Homeboy is now largely forgotten.

In the years since I first read Homeboy I often wondered what Seth was really like. He is mentioned in pretty unflattering terms in the Janis Joplin biography "Pearl" (and a couple of other places) but the truth is always more complicated. At the end of last year i decided to find out. I tracked down Seth's younger brother George (who goes by the name of Jeff) who was kind enough to answer some questions.

If you haven't read Homeboy you can buy it second hand on amazon.

I did write some follow-up questions to Jeff but for whatever reason never heard back.

Mathew



From: Mathew Clayton
To: George Morgan

Jeff - thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Underneath are some questions. I guess fundamentally they all could be simplified into one - what was your brother like? Please forgive me if any of the questions appear insensitive.

He went from Berkeley student to strip club barker. What made him drop out into a new very different life?

After Janis Joplin's death, until he went to prison, there was a five year period where I presume he was living still in San Francisco. Was his life sliding downhill and prison inevitable as he was living the life of a junkie or were his looks and charm intact and he simply lived larger than most people?

When did he start writing? And how did the discipline of writing a novel co-exist with what seems to be an very undisciplined life. I read that he wrote in prison did he come out with the intention of writing a novel?

Why the move to New Orleans?

The story about Susan Schilling visiting his house in 1990 describes some pretty depraved behavior, does this sound typical of Seth's life?

How much of his second novel was written at the time of his death? Have you read it?

I look forward to hearing your replies. Homeboy is a truly great novel, great characters, ambitious plot but above all a turn of phrase that is unequalled by anyone else writing hard boiled prose.

Mathew

From: Mathew Clayton
To: George Morgan

Hi Mathew,

Don't worry about insensitive, somehow with Seth, it's difficult to apply.
What was he like? Well, there was a lot of sensational garbage written just after his death which was distorted and inaccurate in many areas, and some of which was created by Seth himself. Let me answer your questions first, and then that will possibly open up other areas of questioning.

Seth didn't go from Berkeley to strip club barker, actually he did a few other things in between. In 1971, he opened up the Magnolia (present day Lark) Cinema in Larkspur, Marin County, CA with two partners, having built it from an old clothing store. The cinema showed classic films, but they would close it on Sundays for private parties where porn films would be shown with the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers blasting through the cinema's sound system. The audience for these shows tended to be an eclectic sampling of the counterculture, drag queens, outlaw bikers, drug dealers and prosititutes. I was sharing a house with him in Sausalito at the time and spent quite some time with him and his partners and various friends, doing the scene even though I was 4 years younger at the ripe old age of 18. It was a pretty mad summer of partying, drugs, motorcycles and illicit activities some of which foreshadowed what would later happen to him. There was always cocaine around and always plenty of people who would drop in to share it. In the evenings we would go to the Trident Bar on the Sausalito waterfront and rub elbows with porno stars and rock musicians.

There were several incidents which stuck in my mind about that time in my life, one was staying up all night with a gallon of scotch and several ounces of cocaine and the taking off for home on the back of Seth's Harley at 110 mph down the morning rush hour traffic on Route 101 in Marin County.
It was a petrifying experience and fortunately for me, Seth's coordination was intact that day. He had had a serious accident about a year earlier when he missed the corner on the main drag in Sausalito and had gone through the wall of Jack London's old residence with a girl on the back. She was seriously hurt and sued him, winning of course, but as with many things in Seth's life, the lesson was never learned. In a second incident, I saw him for the first time stoned on heroin when he picked up a hooker and drove her home in his partner's VW bug with me in the backseat. He kept trying to get it on with her while he was driving with the car swerving all over the road which wound up a mountain with a rock face on one side and a precipice on the other. Despite both her and I telling him to knock it off and drive, he persisted in this behavior talling us both to shut up. Finally luck ran out and at 40 mph he sideswiped a parked car riping the bugs fender partly off but there was no stopping as he accelerated and got us to our house just as the police cruisers went tearing up the street to investigate the hit and run.

Although Seth wanted me to stay in California and live with him, I returned east that fall and although we stayed in touch by phone, I didn't see him again except for brief visits, until late summer in 1974 when I moved to Sonoma County with a girlfriend. Seth and his wife(?) came up to visit and it was apparent to both me and my girlfriend that they were heavily into the drug scene. I had met this woman previously with Seth at the Trident Bar in 1971 and he had told me she was a hooker. Whether they were ever really married or not is debateable as he also told me that they had come east and Laura had changed her name simply to con some money out of my grandmother which they succeeded in doing. I believe it was at this time that he started working as a barker.
Shortly afterward I broke up with my girlfriend and moved to Austin, Texas to get involved in the music scene there and lost
track of Seth until a letter arrived one day with the return address of the State Penitentiary at Vaccaville, CA. He told me that he had gone to jail for armed robbery and that "it was better there than on the slab at the undertakers." With good behavior he expected to be released early and hoped I was well.

Seth started writing seriously in prison, winning an essay contest there and having the ability to concentrate with a minimum of distractions. The disciplined life you speak of that all writers must undergo, was in my brothers case intermittent with his other activities. He described it to me once as imposing upon himself a facsist regime of workouts, sobriety and solitude when he needed to write. When the pressure was off, or if one of his regimens went off kilter, that was it and he was off to the races. It took Seth about five years or so to write the novel Homeboy, and several copies were lost in transit between the east and west coast during drunken sprees.

I think Seth wanted to finish the novel before he reunited with my Dad in New York. He ended up in New Orleans after being busted in Georgia for drunk driving and there he pulled his act together and got a final manuscript ready for publishing. He used to joke about how long it had taken him and how the several first manuscripts that he lost were probably worth some money. In 1985 he called me drunk from New Orleans intears about his life which he was beginning to realize was slipping way beyond his control. He flew up to Newark Airport and I went to pick him up. In his drunken condition he couldn't remember which terminal he was in and which airline he had flown, and when I didn't find him and there was no response to pages over the terminal intercom, I drove the 2 hours back home thinking he had missed the flight. When I arrived, my wife at the time told me he had called again and given a different terminal from the one I had been in, so we both got into the car and drove to Newark again. This time we were successful in retrieving him and he was a sight. Drunk and disheveled, with a burst blood
vessel in one eye as the result of a brawl he had been in several days before. He was in a deep depression, crying and telling me how much he loved me. For my part, I told him he needed to get straight and O took him straight to a local hospital near my home where they kept him for the required three days. He then rented a room at a local inn and started going to AA meetings with me and was able to get about a month of continuous sobriety together before he went out and started drinking again. Another trip to the hospital, and a new apartment and we had about another month or so of him being straight during which time we were able to share some fun times together. Then one day I got a phone call that he and a hooker friend from San Francisco named Michelle had busted up a local bar that friends of ours owned. While Seth was about as close as family to these two friends, they still called and told me he was never to set foot in the place again and they described how he had assaulted several people and it ha dtaken seven police to put a stop to it. The next call I got was from his landlord asking who was going to pay for the damage to the apartment, several thousand dollars worth. Upon asking where my brother was, I was told that he and his friend Michelle had left in a cab. They later surfaced in New Orleans and she claimed to have had his child following his death.

I'm not sure about what Susan Schilling's story was or indeed how much she was involved in his final plunge. I know that he loved her deeply as letters that he wrote to her were still on his computer at the time of his death, he had purchased a new automobile for her. I met her in New Orleans when I went down following his death, and she told me some pretty sick stories about his behavior, I don't think them to be out of the realm of reality and while there was certainly this element to his life, I wouldn't say that it was a foregone conclusion that this was his "lifestyle." Certainly he had a dark side, a very dark side, but he also had a good ideal of the person he wanted to be, and that side of him was almost completely forgotten in the chaos
surrounding his death.

It's been stated by many that he had a death wish, but I know that to be false. From his earliest years, Seth had a most chilling inability to assess risk either to himself or others. It wasn't that he didn't care, he hadn't a clue either sober or drunk that he was doing things in his life that put himself and others into great danger. When Seth was a small child, he went on a vacation with my father and the three other older children. Driving to the the southwestern states in an old DeSoto, they went to Indian
Reservations, the Grand Canyon and many of the popular tourist sites. One morning when every one else was asleep, Seth, who was five or six years old at the time, stole money out of my Dad's wallet, snuck out of the motel where they were staying and proceed to walk about three or four miles up the road to a diner where he started buying ice cream sodas. When my father and the police finally found him four hours later, he had spent the better part of ten dollars and was on his seventh ice cream soda.

As for his second novel, there were only two chapters written and not even enough on the characters to build a skeletal outline for how the plot may have run. It was well written, invoking voodoo and crime, but there wasn't enough. I've read it. Seth's literary agent is the Firm of Watkins and Loomis in New York, the movie rights on Homeboy are out on option, and have been owned by various different entities since the book's publication.

Let me know what else you might need, we've only scratched the surface.

Jeff

Imaginary Bodies of Water

Soon enough, at a time not recorded in any diary, I began to see bodies of water that weren’t even there. Everywhere I went: flat surfaces like ponds and pools. Imaginary bodies of water.

They began to appear in the most unexpected places at times completely unconnected to fishing trips. Remember: I had a life outside of fishing. Remember: fishing only occupied 1% of my time but was beginning to occupy approximately 83 – 97% of my thoughts. In fact the further I was away from a fishing trip, the more I began to see these imaginary bodies of water. I was being haunted by twenty-first century water, but in a good way.

Maybe I’d be taking an overground train into the centre of London and down below amongst the tower blocks and the cluttered high streets something would catch my eye. An empty concrete yard tucked behind a scrap metal yard like a company imaginary body of water. But of course I wouldn’t see the scrap yard or the barking dogs guarding it – all I would see was the flat grey pool of solidified concrete like an unknown pond in the midst of the city, its surface only broken by a cluster of weeds poking through the cracks like reeds that disguise a school of perch below. And I would catch myself wondering whether that barren concrete yard in an area populated by one person ever square mere was fish-able.

I’d speculate as to what lay beneath that placid surface, by which train the grey surface that looked golden and shimmering to my fish-drunk eyes would be out of sight and every time I went past it again on the train it would have returned to its original form: a concrete tucked by a scrap yard guarded by barking dogs that would take your arm off at the shoulder as much as sniff your rapidly retracting balls.

Or maybe I’d be driving on the motorway and squinting through the blinding flash of the sunlight in my eyes I’d see a vast and empty industrial estate of metal corrugated buildings nestled up close to series of flat tarmac ponds where no-man would be foolish enough to set up his rod. At 70 mph with the wind in my hair and the radio tuned to songs conducive to the open road I’d see secret network of roads and forecourts and loading bays laid by Irish labourer hands in the 1970s now reinvented as secret water ways available to only the most imaginative of fishermen. And there I would temporarily drift into the outside lane of the motorway, my mind lost in this illusion of secret fishing spots.

Or maybe I’d be walking along a busy shopping street – any busy shopping street – and I would find myself stopping at road works to lean over the plastic barriers and peer into a hole in the road dug by workers laying cables to siphon television into the homes of the paying masses to see if there were fish circulating silently in that there hole.

I even considered carrying a hook-laden line with sinker in my back pocket in case I came across other such spots in amongst the urban sprawl which, to my eyes, was punctuated by prime spots that other people just couldn’t see. They couldn’t see them because they didn’t fish and therefore didn’t have the ability to see beyond the everyday façade of concrete, tarmac, glass and steel of the modern world.

It was as if fishing had given me the key to the fourth dimension and once laid upon my hand that key silently spoke the following words to me: go forth and find a hole. Sink and a line there and you will find peace and happiness and tranquillity. You may not find fish but you will find something equally as gratifying – maybe even more so.

To which I replied: Thank you, I might just do that, and went about my daily business with an added spring in my step, satisfied that good fishing existed in the mind as much as it did on the banks of a river crowded with bank holiday anglers

Taken from a work-in-progress by Ben Myers. Ben’s second novel The Missing Kidney is published Spring 2008 by Social Disease