The Red Ink

A short piece about friends and musical beginnings

Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash

14 West 55th.

Concrete, white slab. Glass. It wasn’t always so.
They tore it down to build something new.

Sounds of jackhammers smash and construction workers shout.
Building up and up.

A new edifice to the god in your pocket.

Before now, there were sounds.
Different sounds.

If you listen carefully, you can still hear them, floating up
through the cracks in the rain-soaked sidewalk.
Just audible. Tentative. Probing.
Laughs and clinking beer bottles too.

Wrapped in a coat, Gil humming a ba da doo
Miles, playing the melody on the piano as Bird snores in the corner by his open suitcase.

The gurgling pipes lining the low ceiling seem to accompany the music being made.

Hey, Gerry’s here. And he’s brought us some beer.
He replaces Miles next to Gil.

Miles taps out silent phrases to the floor, as he paces in small circles with his horn.

So many passed through. George, Johnny, Lee and others.

Concrete, white slab. Glass. It wasn’t always so.
They tore it down to build something new.

__________________________________________

This piece was first published in Jerry Jazz Musician. It was inspired by the fabled basement apartment Gil Evans rented in 1947 at 14 West 55th Street that became a sort of hang out for the up and coming New York jazz musicians of the day. You can read about it in more detail here.

Why we are just getting too good at pleasure

Photo by Viktoriya on Unsplash

The painkiller Fentanyl – the ‘one hundred times stronger than heroin’ wonder drug – has become a massive problem in the US. Videos of addicts lolling over themselves, bodies bent forward like human rubber bands, have become cruel internet memes shared millions of times. The neighbourhood of Kensington in Philadelphia has now become world famous for these videos and one can’t help wondering how we got to this. And there was me thinking heroin was lethal. How quaintly 20^th Century. The drug has even become the centrepiece of Donald Trump’s 2025 tariff wars with Canada, with his insistence that supposed flows of the drug from the Canadian border be stopped, or else he will invade the country and have JD Vance personally force-feed chlorinated chicken to Canadian children .

Just what the hell is going on in Seb Duncan’s new novel?

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

I’m going to tell you a story.

A teenage boy is tricked into committing a crime by an elder. The boy then becomes a gang member and rises through the ranks by snagging more recruits, and so the cycle continues.

Sounds familiar? Thought so.

No, it’s not an episode of Top Boy but a Victorian fable that was, like the hit Netflix series, based on real life. The idea that child exploitation was rife in the 19^th Century, and is still part of the experience of inner-city teenagers today, is an interesting one and this was the springboard for my new novel, The Book of Thunder and Lightning. But I needed more research, so I dug deeper.

Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash

My grandmother joined the circus.

Exactly when this happened is uncertain, but as a child I had visions of her as I knew her then, five foot tall with grey hair, stiff deportment, walking along a high wire or taming lions.

The crowd would shout and clap in amazement, at the feats of this ninety year old performer.

In fact, in my child’s mind, it was almost as if she was the main attraction.

A poster had been specially designed with her at the centre, sitting inside a cannon and waving, just before being shot out across the crowd.

Curly Victorian typography, above her head would announce:

My parents always referred to her as a bit of a black sheep.

This only made things worse.

Now a motorbike was jumping through a burning hoop driven by a bleating, furry black animal, pearl necklace flying behind her as she landed safely on the other side, albeit with a slightly singed ear.

As I became a teenager, I was soon distracted by teenage things and forgot that my granny had joined the circus.

When she passed away, I forgot to ask my mother about her mother’s curious past.
When my mother died there was no one left to ask about it.

In my maturity, the visions of her have become more vivid.

This time, a beautiful young woman, proudly curtsied, then with head held high,
the crowd applauded, as one more death-defying act had been performed.

My grandmother joined the circus but this is all I really know.

THE END

This story was featured in the Autumn edition of GoldDust

Virtual reality, creativity and dementia care

White wooden porches in front of colonial style houses line up on either side of the street. Rocking chairs, planters and park benches are scattered nearby. Above is an endless expanse of azure blue. A green lawn resembling the topography of a miniature golf course runs the entire length of the central area (the only feature that seems strange at a glance – what’s a golf course doing in the middle of the street?). This isn’t a friendly village in old town America, but an experiment in social care that could pave the way for how all assisted living facilities are designed in the future.

Continue reading “Another Dementia”

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

The Tinder Swindler, a Netflix documentary about a douchbag who cheats young girls out of money (after they have been primed with glamorous dates, including private jets and succulent sushi buffets) kicked off a new genre of digital Scamdocs that reveal the joys of 21st digital social interaction. It was fairly riveting.

Similarly a BBC Three documentary, Jobfished frames itself as a serious piece of ‘investigative journalism’ as it follows an equally glamorous brand communications company called Madbird, that has recruited a team of new employees under false pretences – think Fyre Fraud but with nauseating thought leaders. Even though the company’s website is replete with a prestigious client list and profiles of its experienced ‘leadership team’, the company turns out to be, wait for it…NOT REAL!!!!! WOW!!! Amazing!!!! Hashtag, digital ejaculation!!! OMG!!!

Continue reading “Jobfished – welcome to the #metafake”