In which, as the year comes to it’s end, our friends and collaborators , look back and share their moments;
Hey Jeff,
Son, what have you done?
Well, the year began with hauling silver bars of bass out of the South Atlantic off Villa Geschell then chasing immense brownies across the ten thousand lakes of Patagonia feeling a billion miles away from the grinds of Babylondon… a very long way around the sea via Gotham and back to tha endz. Here are just a few other moments I felt struck by the holy shakes, on the precipice of epiphanies, feeling the vertigo of wonderment… for what it’s worth…
Mr. Elliot Smith (RIP) singing ‘St Ides Heaven’ “When I walk between parked cars, with my head full of stars”; Fraisthorpe Beach, Bridlington in Febuary watching Taz the Huntaway eat up my leftover bait at an arctic five in the morning; talking carp with Russian hoods in a mob bar in the cold and slightly scary Chisinau, Moldova; seeing that the trees that I remember so vividly outside my primary school have grown taller and taller as I’ve grown older and older over the thirty years since I last saw them; riding the Echo Park night shift with Officers Flotsam and Jetsam in Wambaugh’s Hollywood Station; sitting with my grandfather in his house as he finally slid away and then photographing him; revisiting McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ “Infatuate and half fond they rode towards the red demise of that day, across the bloodlands of the West and into the distant pandemonium of the sun…”; realising that I actually find the sound of police helicopters above SW9 comforting – almost like the lapping of an ebbing tide – and deciding there and then never to leave this city again; happily noticing that the RZA continues to be perpendicualr to the square; the elegance of the Leica Digilux 2 and the beauty of the 1989 SAAB 900; being saddened to hear that no one sleeps on the beach any more at Coney Island; the endless bottles of Sagres with my best unbeaten brother at Cafe Sintra, 130 Stockwell Road; spending Good Friday watching Watership Down while feeling edgy and junk sick (“the Joy Divison album of animated rabbit films” as Mr. Stuart Braithwaite once brilliantly put it); the utterly Shakespearian and tragic The Shield season 5 – especially that moment with Lem staring over the Mexican border knowing his life is utterly destroyed as The Smashing Pumpkins wail ‘Disarm’ in the background; Interpol for becoming totally HOLLYWOOD one night at the Soho Hotel – art often passes by but ‘There Will Be No Miracles Here’ by Nathan Coley froze me to the gallery floor; hearing Jason Spaceman sing ‘Sitting On Fire’ in a church in Islington the other night; finding a copy of Steinbeck’s ‘Cannery Row’ on the Victoria line… from the prologue…
“Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”
The same can be said of everyone I know and love.
Then of course theres The Wire, The Wire, The Wire. Always The Wire. As Bubbles himself once said, “‘Tis a thin line between heaven and here”
which pretty much sums everything up at the moment.
More to the point when we fishing next?
love
Neil