How My Year Began:

(I'm on my hols so I'm posting some stuff you might have missed. Original post date July 30th 2008)Paris Hilton clearly fancied her chances but I was having none of it. “Excuse me,” I said, pushing past her in an attempt to get outside.
“Please, come in for another dance,” she insisted.
“I’m from Belfast, love, we don’t dance.”
“Tell me of this Belfast,” she said eyeing me the way alien princesses used to eye Captain Kirk.
“You couldn’t handle it dearie, now if you don’t mind I have things to do,” I said.
“But I am streetwise, I have been to prison,” she said, begging now.
“Jail. Not prison. There’s a difference,” and with that I was gone out onto that weird, dead part of the Strip in front of the Luxor Hotel.
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Our paths had never meant to cross. She’d been brought to the Luxor Hotel to host their 2008 New Year’s Eve Party. I was supposed to be staying at Circus Circus but it was full and I’d ended up at the Luxor as a last resort.
“Who were you talking to there?” a man asked me.
I was cold. No one tells you that Vegas in January is very, very cold.
“Paris Hilton,” I replied. “After me she was and I’m married.”
“What have you been drinking?” the man asked.
“Vodka tonic. Pacing myself,” I explained.
“Think you’ve had one too many, Paris has left already. Hours ago. You should go to bed, pal.”
“I’m not your pal,” I said but maybe the man had a point. Paris Hilton had in fact been a lot more articulate than I’d been expecting. Could I have hallucinated that whole episode? Certainly I was jetlagged and I’d been drinking since 6 o’clock and I’d taken a Tylenol PM and gone to bed and only gotten up because of the fireworks.
“What time is it?” I asked the man, but he was gone too.
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Hell with it, I thought. The time didn’t matter anyway. I had come to Vegas on a mission and I was going to fulfill it. I zipped my fleece, pulled on my wool hat and started walking north. Past Excalibur and TI, the Bellagio and the MGM Grand. None of them held any fascination for me, for I was heading for Circus Circus.
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The trip had been motivated by an article I’d read in Business Week (the only thing available at the Doctor’s Office – well it was that or Freshwater Fisherman and me and Freshwater Fisherman had a falling out when an article I submitted on declining stocks of baby eels was given the headline 'Eel Stocks in Decline' rather than my headline 'Elvers Have Left The Building'). Cute story huh? Only some of it is, alas, true. Now, where was I? Oh yeah, Business Week said that Circus Circus was going to get renovated and probably blown up to make way for a new improved Circus Circus. Circus Circus is famous among Vegas casinos as the first of the really big family joints. Before Circus Circus, Vegas was an adults only place, seedy, sleazy and actually pretty creepy. But the mob-, er, those marketing geniuses in charge of Circus Circus decided to have a free circus every day and every night and that way parents could dump their kids at the big top and they could go off and gamble their life savings, brilliant eh?
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Diamonds are Forever was shot in Circus Circus and a lot of other films but the reason I wanted to go there was because of Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book which changed my life. Before F&L I was a law student heading for a prosperous career in the city and now I was an unemployed writer with no prospects whatsoever.
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A pilgrimage should be hard. Did I mention it was freezing? And Circus Circus is bloody miles from the Luxor. A cab you say? You try getting a cab on New Years Eve. I’ll skip over the vomiting frat boys, half naked girls, and the dreadful covers band playing Ramones songs on the “Brooklyn Bridge”. Puke, blood, spilled beer, police horses spooked by fireworks going to the toilet everywhere - you don’t need me to draw you a picture, imagine Fellini’s Satyricon, but filled with Brits, Germans and Russian mafia and cold, bone chillingly desert cold.
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An inept pickpocket tried to rob me by putting his hand into my fleece pocket while my hand was still in there.
“Hey!” he said.
“Listen companero, I’ve just given Paris Hilton’s dead blue eyes the brush off, don’t mess with me tonight,” I didn’t reply. And by the time I did think of something he was robbing people urinating against the New York New York 9/11 memorial which was karma.
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When I got to Circus Circus itself I knew that the pickpocket had stabbed me and I had died in the ambulance and now I was in hell. In Fear & Loathing, Hunter Thompson takes a trunk full of drugs and begins seeing lizard people at the Circus Circus bar during a convention of law enforcement officers. Hunter describes Circus Circus as a cess filled insane asylum but obviously he was being kind. Don’t like clowns? Me either, now imagine a free circus in a casino with clowns and jugglers everywhere and thousands of kids running around. Clark County Law doesn’t permit them to get within two feet of a gaming table (kids that is, not clowns) so the kids are constantly being chased by hotel security while their parents put coin after coin into the slots. Circus Circus is the only casino with an RV park out the back, so it deliberately cultivates the poorest Americans. I hate the term white trash but let’s say that Circus Circus’s patrons aren’t flying out for brunch at Clooney’s pad in Como any time soon.
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It wasn't just claustrophobic, it was more like Hieronymus Bosch's painting of the Last Judgement. Kids running, wheels turning, a dense layer of cigarette smoke, no obvious exit, clowns, security, thousands of people and then a sharp stabbing pain in my chest. I wanted to have one drink, just one, at the bar where Hunter Thompson saw the lizards but that wasn’t going to happen, I was either having a panic or a heart attack and I had to get out. I asked a blackjack dealer where the exit was and as per company policy he directed me deeper into the casino.
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More smoke, more clowns, more kids.
My chest felt like there was an anvil on it.
Oh god, like Chef in Apocalypse Now I didn’t want to die in an evil place.
I had to get out. I started asking random people, where’s the exit, where is it, where, please for the love of Jesus. Finally a drunk guy who turned out to be a fire marshall showed me the way back to the Strip.
I was nauseous. My head was spinning.
I vomited pretzels and cocktail sausages and cheap vodka.
The horizon was red.
The sun was coming up.
A man in a party hat slapped me hard on the back.
I knew 2008 was going to be a bad year.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

I'm off to a place without internet for a week. No its not a federal prison, its just a house near the water south of Melbourne. So have a great holiday everyone and snarf some eggnog on me. I'll be back in the new year with a massive 50 Grand giveaway, so if you want a free copy of the new book check back in early January and there's a pretty good chance I'll send you one. The pic to the right is from Christmas 07 in front of our house in Denver (though it says 05 because I put the date in wrong). Now thats what I call snow (and bad camera programming).

End of the Year Lists

A few end of the year lists. (Observant readers will notice that some of these are from 2007, which shows you how out of touch I really am.) (I'm going to do a separate list for books.)

Album of the Year
1. Made of Bricks - Kate Nash
2. Rockferry - Duffy
3. Only By The Night - Kings of Leon
4. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
5. Dear Science - TV on the Radio

Film of the Year
1. No Country For Old Men
2. There Will Be Blood
3. Waltz With Bashir
4. Juno
5. Man On Wire

TV of the Year
1. Mad Men
2. Battlestar Galactica
3. 30 R0ck
4. South Park
5. Project Runway (dont say a bloody word)

YouTube of the Year
1. Larry54
2. Battle of the Kruger
3. Alpe D'Huez
4. Aron Ralston
5. Chris Matthews Munich

Sandwiches of the Year
1. Classic cheese on toast
2. Roast beef po boy
3. Spicy tuna with mayo
4. Roast turkey & ham with provolone
5. Classic BLT

Guest Blogger Review: Little House on the Prairie

by Arwynn McKinty (aged 6)

Two girls named Laura and Mary, their baby sister Carrie, their papa and their mama went from the Big Woods to Indian Country in the olden days. They travelled all the way from Wisconsin to Oklahoma in their wagon and their horses Pet and Patty and their dog Jack. Jack walks under the wagon and the horses pull it. When they got to the prairie pa built a house out of logs and trees. To get their food pa went hunting. At Christmas one of their neighbours brought them their presents because Santa Claus couldn't go across the river. Pa dug a well and their other neighbour Mr Scott fell down it! When they had their house finished and really beautiful with glass in the windows the government told them to move on so they went in their wagon to go somewhere else and build a new house! I really liked the book, but I felt sad when they had to move.

Java - An Island in the C++

A little code monkey humour there. Anybody geddit? No. Ok moving swiftly on. I'm back in Melbourne after my little bro and I spent a week travelling through Java. We started in Jakarta, which reminded me a lot of Mumbai or Cairo, basically a big, out of control, unmanageable third world city. Not quite Gangetic plain levels of poverty and desperation but no treat. We jumped a twenty dollar (including tax) flight to Yogyakarta which was smaller, nicer and walkeable. Yoga is an exemplar of central Javanese culture and boasts craft markets, a royal palace and dozens of mouth watering food options. I could have spent a couple of weeks in Yoga but we had to move on. From Yoga we took in the spectacular Buddhist temple complex at Borudbudur (right), which is deep in the rice paddies and jungles of central Java. It was the rainy season so we had the place pretty much to ourselves. The stupas are carved from volcanic rock and the whole area is at the mercy of two nearby still active volcanoes.

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From Borudbudur we travelled to Prambanan Temple, a Hindu shrine to Shiva which had been damaged in a 2006 earthquake but was still impressive. At Prambanan we saw the Ramayana Ballet, a night-time performance with the temple lit up behind us. I was entranced from start to finish. The dancing was graceful and beautiful and I was impressed by Lord Ram who kept firing live arrows round the stage killing only the people who he was supposed to kill and none of the paying customers. Even my cynical, hard bitten Iraq war vet brother was impressed and afterwards went to pose for pictures with the chaste Lady Sita.

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A little more journeying east and then I jumped a ridiculously cheap flight to Malaysia where I spent some time in Kuala Lumpur and the delightful island of Panang where I haggled for bangles in Little India and enjoyed a Tiger beer or two. For reading material I took the perfect book: Paul Theroux's "Ghost Train to an Eastern Star" which is an entertaining recapitulation of the trip he took in the "The Great Railway Bazaar". It's a thorough and engaging journey undertaken by a 66 year old who's lost none of his bottle or verve. (One minor niggle: for someone who's worth many millions he complains and talks too much about money.) I flew out on the red eye and after a week of cycle rickshaws, monsoon drains and the smell of morning ghee it was bewildering to be back in 21st Century Melbourne. "The GPS says you don't exist," the taxi driver said after I had given him my address in St Kilda. "Who are you gonna believe?" I replied but I could see the GPS's point of view.

Portrait of the Artist with a Spray Can

Melbourne proudly calls itself the “graffiti art capital of the world.” Well maybe not proudly but I don’t think anyone would dispute the title. Graffiti is everywhere in this town: shops, schools, businesses, trams, bridges, scaffolding, walls, garages, windows, I have even seen it on garden gnomes and parked cars.

In Saint Kilda where I live, they run a graffiti tour so that residents can learn about the motivations and techniques of the little scamps who have scrawled all over their house.

I haven’t been on the graffiti tour yet but I am looking forward to it. I imagine an earnest young man with a beard, a bit like one of The Modern Parents in Viz Comic, who will explain the semiotics behind the huge phallic letters sprayed on the doors of my local bank. Perhaps I’ll learn to love the local artists but I doubt it. As far as I’m concerned graffiti tagging is basically blogging for stupid people. Any point you want to make with a spray can you could do on the web, and you could actually make money out of it, and you won’t go to prison. In Melbourne you can get six months in jail for just carrying a spray can and if you get caught spraying it they’ll transport you to the colonies … Wait a minute, we’re in the colonies, that’s no deterrent.

Anyway let’s say you’re one of those evil, reactionary Tories, perhaps fresh from playing an Englishman in a Mel Gibson movie, who doesn’t like seeing graffiti painted on your family business; what do you do? There are two radically different schools of thought and both can be seen on my local manor: Camden Street. At one end of Camden is the Coles supermarket. Coles have decided that they don’t like graffiti, so, every week, they whitewash their walls. It costs a fortune and it’s a big hassle but it seems to work. Graffiti artists tend to avoid Coles because their tags won’t last long there. At the other end of Camden Street the kosher butcher has gone for the other school of thought: Danegeld. Here what you do is pay one of the taggers to draw a mural on your shop and usually all the other artists respect the art and leave it alone. The only problem with that approach is that most of the murals are rubbish. The one on the kosher butcher looks like it was done by a man who, like the late Syd Barrett, took too much acid and never quite returned.

For myself I wouldn’t do either of those schools of thought. Like Captain Kirk attempting the Kobayashi Maru manoeuvre at Star Fleet Academy I’d go for a third approach. I call it The Tom Sawyer Technique. Remember that bit where Sawyer co-opts all the local deadbeats into painting the wall for him? No? What do you mean no? You didn’t read Tom Sawyer!? And you’ve never heard of Kirk or the Kobayashi Maru manoeuvre? How old are you? Wow, that just about beats all, what are they teaching kids in schools these days? No I won’t tell you now. I’m huffing. You can just forget it then. I’m going to talk about something else.

Graffiti art is technically committing a crime and I’m a crime novelist, so it set me wondering, are there any great crime novels featuring taggers? I looked but I couldn’t find any. Why not? There are plenty of novels about pickpockets and drug abusers and vandals, why no tagging books? Well the truth is I didn’t look very hard. Maybe there are hundreds. The only thing I could come with up is a recurring character called Chopper in 2000 AD comic and it also seems that England’s tagger-in-chief Banksy, has his own fanzine.
But as I say my problem with Melbourne graffiti isn’t just its quantity, but also its quality. Local graffiti artists are staggeringly banal in their choice of subject matter. Signatures, letters, hearts, occasionally genitalia, really you can do so much better Melbourne! Who am I to judge I hear you ask. Well I’m a bit of an expert on graffiti, actually. Yes, I moved here from Denver which had almost no graffiti, but I grew up in the north Belfast suburbs which had some truly terrifying sectarian “murals”. Headless horseman of the apocalypse, skeletons with AK 47’s, ski mask assassins holding up skulls, death threats, martyrs memorials, and bold turf marking graffiti done in mental-patient white or coffin black. In my patch if someone scrawled UVF or IRA on your garden wall, you thanked them, and if for some reason you wanted it removed you had to get permission from the local hoods. Naturally permission only came after you’d handed over a six pack of McEwans Export, a carton of Woodbines and an envelope stuffed with cash.

And I also lived in Harlem for six years where graffiti really was art. In Harlem taggers would try to compete with one another in rendering compex imagery usually with a political or gang related message. I remember the Saturday night Tupac got shot, by next morning on 125th Street there were dozens of beautifully rendered memorials celebrating his life and music and a few not so beautiful ones from crips claiming they’d shot him.

So these Melbourne guys have some catching up to do. Any eejit can go out with a spray can and write their name on someone's garage. Where's the challenge in that? Where's the ambition? Ok. Confession time. I was more or less going to end this post here with a rather trite summing up but something’s been nagging at me. You see what I said above isn’t quite true. Take a look at this one below to the left:

Pretty innocuous huh? But these are from the wall around the Saint Kilda Police Station. Remember when I said carrying a spray can get you six months? I wasn’t kidding. And these taggers did that under the eyes of CC cameras on the police station wall! I’ll admit it, I was pretty impressed when I saw that. Anyone who has the heuvos to graffiti a cop shop has got a lot more bottle than I have. So, I’m not going to take back everything I just said above but I will say this to the boys and girls of the Chapel Street Crew: you who are about to spray (and as long as you don’t do it on my house) I salute you.

Denver's Moment of Glory

(I'm on holiday so I'm reposting some of the stuff you may have missed: original post date August 21 2008) This week the eyes of the world will gaze at Denver, Colorado, where the Democratic Convention is being held. Sure it’s all going to be about speeches, balloons, and scoring coke and hookers on Colfax Avenue, but what if you want to get deeper than that? What if you want to find out about the real Denver? I lived in the Mile High City from 2000 - 2008 so I know a bit about it. Fiction is my metier but modesty forbids me from mentioning my own Denver novels HIDDEN RIVER and FIFTY GRAND. Oh wait, I just did. Sorry.
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I first learned about Denver through the fiction of Jack Kerouac. Kerouac indeed is Denver’s big name author. Kerouac came to town in pursuit of America, the open road and his man-crush, native Denverite, Neal Cassady. It was in Denver that Kerouac bought his first house, had his first serious tequila bender and began planning ON THE ROAD. Sniffing after Kerouac came William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who spent many a fertile hour in the Colburn Hotel cooking mescaline, injecting bug spray and writing the occasional poem.
...Thomas Pynchon followed a little later, Denver cropping up in several places in his work, but most importantly in AGAINST THE DAY, in which we are transported back to the bawdy turn-of-the-century city where you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a gin joint, a prostitute or another lunatic swinging a cat. AGAINST THE DAY contains my favourite line in all of literature, a graffiti written on a Denver wall: “Roses is red/shit is brown/nothing but assholes/live in this town.”
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But surely the highlight of Denver’s literary legacy has to be its prominence in L. Ron Hubbard’s BATTLEFIELD EARTH. The first time I tried to read BATTLEFIELD EARTH it got thrown out of a train window, when I was 14, by me. Years later I read it again, because a girl asked me to do it for an article she was writing. The girl is now a rich and fairly well known TV historian and I’m a substitute teacher living in Melbourne, Australia. Let me summarize the book for you, so you don’t make my mistake. In 3000 AD, Earth is ruled by the Psychlos, nine-foot-tall sociopathic aliens. Humans are slaves called “man animals” who toil bare chested in open cast mines. The hero of the book is Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (yes, really) an escapee from Psychlo clutches who makes his way to the ruins of the Denver Public Library where he finds a copy of the US Constitution in a display case. Inspired perhaps by the commerce clause of this austere legal document Jonnie decides to lead a revolt against the alien overlords. After a few setbacks the revolt gathers momentum and then we only have about 900 pages to go. Interestingly, the Denver Public Library has no display cases containing the US Constitution and all five of its copies of BATTLEFIELD EARTH have been stolen. A Psychlo conspiracy perhaps? I haven’t seen the film version of BATTLEFIELD EARTH but by all accounts it’s up there with Swept Away, Gigli and other modern classics.
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If you’re an L. Ron Hubbard fan then allow me to suggest a field trip while you’re in town. Jump on I-70, drive west for a few hours and you’ll come to Tom Cruise’s house in Telluride, Colorado. Mr. Cruise and Mrs Cruise (right) welcome visitors, especially if you’re carrying a copy of his and (potential McCain VP) Mitt Romney’s favourite novel. Seriously, just park right outside the big metal gates and start yelling “Tomcat! Tooomcaaat!” You’ll have lots of fun. Tom’s sister is in charge of security at the Cruise Lair and is famous for her sense of humour.
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Strangely, Denver is also home to those nemeses of Scientology - Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of South Park. The Denver suburb of South Park is near Evergreen where Parker went to high school but South Park itself is probably modelled on either Boulder, Co. where the boys attended college or Colorado Springs about forty minutes south which is the HQ of Focus on the Family and is reputedly the “most right-wing town in America.” Trey Parker’s childhood home can be found easily but leaving little brown gifts dressed as Santa on the front porch is a joke well past its sell by date.
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If the idea of making a Christmas Turd or being pepper-sprayed by Tom Cruise’s security guards doesn’t excite you, then head back to Denver and out on the I-76 to Fort Morgan, where Philip K. Dick rests forever opposite a sugar cane refinery in the grim Fort Morgan Municipal Cemetery. There are always a lot of interesting characters at Dick’s grave, many from Japan, Finland and that comic-book shop you always walk by but never go in. Get them talking about the nature of reality and whether Dick could be alive in a parallel universe and you’ll happily watch the morning pass by
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Finally, let me mention David Icke’s book THE BIGGEST SECRET, in which the former BBC reporter and Green Party co-chair claims that “lizard aliens from Mars, through their allies, the Freemasons,” have been running the planet Earth from a secret bunker at the Denver International Airport. Once I lost my bag at DIA and had to go to a basement storage area to retrieve it. I see now that I was lucky to get out alive.
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To sum up: If you’ve never been to Denver before, don’t worry about it, for most people it’s that place they groggily drive through on the way to Vail. But take my advice and go. Even if the Democrats have left town you can still get legless at Coors Field, eat a Famous Fish Fajita at Illegal Pete's and put an offer on my house on Pennsylvania Street. Now that property prices have collapsed I’ll take anything: crayons, a box of old keys, interesting (or not) house plants. I might even consider a soiled copy of BATTLEFIELD EARTH.

Philip K Dick and Me

Next week is Philip K Dick 's 80th's birthday. For nearly a decade or so, when it hasn't been snowing, I've driven up to Fort Morgan, Colorado, where PKD is buried to wish him a happy birthday, leave some flowers and have a little chat about writing, failure, and the meaning of it all. Unlike the characters in PKD's Ubik Phil has never quite held up his end of the conversation. I won't be there next week because I'm 10,000 miles away in Australia but if you're in the neighborhood of Denver, Boulder or Ft Morgan you could drop into the Ft Morgan Municipal Cemetery next to I-76 and say hi from me. It won't be maudlin: I guarantee you there will be people there from Japan, France, Germany, Mexico etc as well as a few Americans.

Off On Me Hols

I'm off on me hols for a week, but I've scheduled a post for Sunday (exciting, eh?) and next week I'm going to repost a couple of pieces that you might have missed from the first few weeks of this blog when only Dec Burke, Ger Brennan and Peter Rozovsky were reading it. Please do leave comments on my PKD piece on Sunday and the others if you want. I will read 'em but in all likelihood I wont be able to respond until I get back. IF I get back I should say, in case the hubris gods decide that a plane crash or a knifing in a Jakartan back alley might wipe that smug smile off my face.