The Polaroid Press is a collection of short stories and journalism, blending fact, fiction, photography and toy cameras written between January 2008 and January 2009. The idea was to document the world outside in all of its insanity and inanity, and hopefully leave a little bit of art for people to take home and stick on their fridge.
1
M83 – Highway of Endless Dreams
“7am.
Dusty Road.
I’m gonna drive until it burns my bones”
There isn’t really a better way to start. The two M83 shows I saw this year were absolutely incredible, and Highway was a highlight both of Scala set and the simply stunning St Giles in the fields set. The track has a vast space you can wallow and swim in, and it’s has this thump of celebration throughout. It’s also best representative of the friendship Marky Mark and I reforged over the last few months, something I’ll cherish as a highlight of the year.
“When they pin me to the wall I’ll say ‘I’m with America!’”
The Indelicates were the most contemporary of the vindictive lyricists I listened to this year, and I listened to an awful lot. Their abum was the first thing I played wen I moved into Alice’s place, which – lest we forget – lasted for four months. The track’s in here partly for that, and partly for the drunk discussion Gillen and I had in the cab from Bristol to Chrissy’s old place, but there’s a separate blog in that soon. Finally, America: My perception has changed in a huge way in the last few months, and the election was a wicked night spent in the company of Nick Parkinson from ROH. Any night involving roast dinner at 1am is ace by me. Obama’s speech would have made me cry, and I not been an hour too tired by then.
3
Los Campesinos! – We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
“I hope my heart goes first,
I HOPE MY HEART GOES FIRST!”
So, culture eats itself. Kieron takes responsibility for the song and album title, trough remarks made to Gareth. turns out I have my share of blame too, recommending him Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, an introduction to my – and now his – most important literary figure. It led to being offered a spot in the next tour ‘zine and was a huge boost of confidence while I reeled from the shock of Alice breaking up with me, more on that later though.
4
The Submarines – The Wake Up Song
“All this just to go out for the day”
I ummed and ahhed about which Submarines track to slip onto the Ten. Part of the rush of cultural brilliance that was November, Honeysuckle Weeks was sunshine pop exactly when I needed it, a burst of brilliance. Versatile, fun, exuberant, the whole album just cheered me up. And still does.
“Christ was an extremist,
With a kamikaze soul.”
So, Mister Luke Haines. I got the record last lear, but only really started to listen to it late last year, around the same time I picked up …Malry. Funky, nasty, dangerous, album and track make me want to cultural strike in painful ways, attack instead of defend. The dark nights and streetlights conjured are appealing in all the worst ways, and the album is cemented besides Unknown Pleasures and In The Aeroplane Over The Sea as an all time favourite.
New York, 2008. A wonderful trip, the highlight being the night I met Etgar Keret at a screening of Wristcutters, A Love Story. I would later take the gang of us to a club, dance to Los Camp! and The Pipettes, drink an ungodly quantity and vomit up 8th Avenue, waking only in my bright blue pants on top of a bed, arms spread like Jesus, sore. None of which coveys how still and beautiful an instrumental this is.
7
Los Campesinos! – Heart Swells/Pacific Daylight Time
“I feel you’ve ruined me forever”
I got my heart ripped out and stomped on, thrown into pity and wallowing, but also chasing every opportunity I could to stuff that horrible, shitty void.
“I don’t want to sound trite but you were perfect”
Because cherishing the memory of all that we were is just as important as anything else, and I will always smile to think of all we did together.
You see, I never really got We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed until after the break up. And now it works wonderfully. And that’s just the perfect track, really.
8
The Long Blondes – Nostalgia
“Don’t you worry,
About the pretty creatures in the street,
The pretty creature that I’d like to eat up for breakfast,
That’s all in the past.”
And at first it’s about leaving behind the memories of what I wanted and what I’ve done, accepting that those temptation will always remain but that I’m never going to act on them. And then it’s about being robbed about the chance to move into the future, because nostalgia works both ways, and you can conjure romance in anything, really. Telling that I found this track around abut the time Ali and I had friction over Kate (not Kate Jackson).
9
Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip – Waiting for The Beat to Kick In
“You control your emotions,
It’s as simple as that.”
Songs about songwriting and the thought process behind it don’t work, and then this wanders along, a wonderful combination of anger and reflection, blended with the noir aesthetics I’ve grown a huge affection for over the last year. It’s inspirational too, though admittedly bitter by it’s close. I remember walking to McKelvie’s from Ali’s when I heard this for the first time, and I played it twice on the way back.
10
Los Campesinos! – Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks
“When the smaller picture’s the same as the bigger picture you know that you’re fucked!”
Because, really, they defined the year. And I think I can fly when I hear this track. And it makes me realise how important the wing of friends I have now are going to be as they carry me into tomorrow. And I met Julia, Marc and Anna, all of whom now have a special place in my heart, as well as Phil and the other LUC dudes, who have just been throughly sound, incredibly supportive and pretty much inspirational. It doesn’t matter how hard the blow, fuck it, we roll and recover.
+ 1
Scarlett Johansson – Song For Jo
“Do you remember,
How we’d fall asleep on the bathroom floor?”
Nobody should explain bonus tracks.
It has, in no uncertain terms, been a manic old month or so.
First up, I was commissioned by the lovely people of Last.fm to write their end of year feature, a gargantuan 7000 word task that I turned over in the space of a few days – I submitted with time enough to spare for a hot bath and a cold Scotch, West Wing DVDs to settle my addled mind. Combined with the king hell collapse of my heating system at home at home it was a suitably epic time, but I’m pretty pleased with the results. Check them out here.
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Secondly, I’m published for the first time in this moth’s issue of Plan B. Hooray! Two reviews (WhiskeyCats and Remember Remember) that have taught me a lot about how I come across in print. NOT TERRIBLY WELL, but I have time to earn and my flatmate got a kick out of checking out my words on the shelf at Borders. Thumbs Up!
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A long-standing project of mine and Julia Scheele’s is now up on Words and Pictures. Click the image for more.
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Comrade Gillen flung me a copy of the new Phonogram, and it’s bloody great. I’m going to save writing about Series 2 for a few issues, for reasons the structure makes apparent, suffice to say I’ll be making puppy eyes at the boys for a while so they keep me in their gang of inspiring bastards.
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To wrap up, I will have news of a little project for someone I’ve respected for a while coming soon, and I shall be at this next weekend.
I leave you to continue listening to the Karaoke outside of the window.
In November 2008 I wrote the editorial copy for Last.fm‘s Best of 2008. This 7000 word job had a five day turnaround time, and a resulted in a further commission to develop concept and copy for the Best of 2009 alongside the Last.fm design team.
words + pictures has the “official” word from us on Thought Bubble, but more personally I’ve just had some of the most fun of my life.
It has, for obvious reasons, been quite a difficult time for me recently. I didn’t let on to many people but I worried Thought Bubble might just wipe me out and break me. I had an incredible time though. I got to know Sarah and Julia better (a lot better given the etap room arrangement) as well Ellerby and Anna, who were just incredible to take us under their collective wing. Through them we met a slew of people who became a roving Team Comics, all listed in the w+p write up. This led to dancing and drinking and happy fun times, as well as some indigestible Nandos action. Highlights included spying in the casino with Clare, all the handclaps in the world on the dancefloor, yelling along to Talking Heads with Gillen, the indie comics panel, my sexy new suit, having Liz Greenfield buy a Robot Man photo print (with some excitement), ‘Narnia’ toilets, S&M toilets, selling out of the Robot zine, selling anything… it was a great weekend. More Please!
Photos to come, love and thanks to all really. I couldn’t have asked for more of a first time. In the meantime I leave you with this:
words + pictures will be officially launching at Thought Bubble Festival this weekend!
A table filled with small press oddities will be staffed by the words + pictures team of Cake Breath (a.k.a Sarah Gordon), Powered By Robots (a.k.a Julia Scheele) and The Polaroid Press (a.k.a Matthew Sheret)
Prints and stories aplenty on offer, including the group’s first collaborative project – a black + white collection of short stories about Robots! Rock!
Come and say hello to words and pictures in the small press area if you’re around, and visit the gang’s websites for more previews!
The Robot ‘zine was a short collection of comics and illustrations created by We Are Words + Pictures for the Thought Bubble Comics Festival, 2008. I wrote and photographed the short story The Robot Man, found below.
All this and, of course, The Long Blondes spilt.
I found out, along with the rest of the internet, at the start of the week. I’ve been thinking about the band a fair bit in the last few weeks anyway, and reading posts like Kieron’s didn’t help but make me mull it over some more.*
See, The Long Blondes aren’t quite one of those bands for me. There was no life-changing catalyst moment or ZANG, theirs was a much more insidious path to my playlist. 2006 was a year that saw the tail-end of a drawn out and complicated almost-relationship, by the summer of that year the power and self respect I had thrown away on it crawled back up my spine, possibly around the same time I heard ‘Wolf Like Me’ on my record player before going to a club. The Long Blondes had been a band I’d been peripherally aware of for a while, a bunch of well-dressed scenesters whose music had, frankly, passed me by. Well, sort of: every week at FROG or Panic! or White Heat I’d be dancing to something with a vicious little kick to it before asking the dj who it was and being told “Long Blondes mate”. The music held me to the dancefloor, made everything a little sharper though the vodka haze. And, like so many songs that year, it made me want to kiss girls.
I don’t buy the album until the year turns though, tired of seeing it on so many best-of lists but having no real opinion of the band besides the pattern recognition of Dancing + Devilish Female Vocal = Good Times. It all just slipped into place: dark, sexually predatory, altogether broken, knife-like-lives knitting a stained quilt that’ll barely cover you and the anonymous other you left the club with last night.
And within seconds I got into the business of a Serious Long Term Relationship. One interpretation of this leap could be that in listening to the debut I saw some version of a life I was dallying with and got scared. It’s an inaccurate interpretation: after all, I broke someone’s heart to be with Alice and into an evolution of a lot of things in my life. I was soon to finish my degree, had already started reading for pleasure again, and was thinking about words a lot. Suddenly Someone To Drive You Home became an artifact, retroactively summing up 2006 and what I wanted to leave to settle for a while.
By the time I saw them at The Astoria for some NME show the way I listened to music, all music, was different. I had a pencil and paper, and was outside of myself a little bit. I could look around at the room full of people, all pretty similar to me, and see that removed from basement clubs and bedroom stereos there was a different kind of aura to The Long Blondes. They were a tight live act, letting Kate take all of the attention and revel in being the abusive sexual object. She could have hated the crowd, but she flirted instead. Flirted and belted out songs with more power than I’ve seen anyone do in The Astoria, she made the place tremble where it usually just swallows up the music. Between me, near the sound booth, and the crash bar were a lot of people a few years younger than me. Some were calm, sucking the sight and sound up, some were giddy and bouncing more than they had any right, all of them could well have been attending one of their first gigs. Imagine how cool that would have been? I saw doves supported by The Delgados, which christened me forever and always as a bass-friendly man who likes bands with words, interesting studio techniques, beards and jumpers. If The Long Blondes had been that first gig I could have been one of those vintage shop kids with amazing hair and a brilliant taste in classic cinema. I was envious to say the least.
Time Passes. I go to clubs less and less, and when I do they’re playing Justice. Vodka and I have a fight, whiskey wins. Other music happens.
When “Couples” came out I was undeniably disappointed. I nabbed a promo copy from Music and Video Exchange a couple of months early, quite excited to see what might be dredged up by that sumptuous voice and clever lyricism. I get sophomore slump. I get ‘Too Clever By Half’. I get bored.
Except, there is something that sticks in my head. It’s a thing made up of memories that sometimes didn’t stay buried, little impulses and surges that bubbled through from the lizard brain. That thing is ‘Nostalgia’. ‘Nostalgia’ is this fey nightmare, all of the things the Kate Jackson character that Cox wrote and Kate sang was never supposed to become but had to admit to being. ‘Nostalgia’ suddenly made her human, suddenly revealed that sad, sickly b-side to the noir stylings of life’s a-side. ‘Nostalgia’ broke my heart, and quickly became one of my most listened to songs this year.
The Long Blondes couldn’t just be glossy sexual pop for me anymore. Insights into dark nights worked both ways, suddenly, because they couldn’t just write about a fictional version of lust in the liminal classes, they wrote hope as well. Sequenced as it was on “Couples” before ‘I’m Going To Hell’ they, as a band, undermined the power of ‘Nostalgia’ by running straight from regret to pride in self-destruction, and that didn’t work for me. ‘Nostalgia’ was almost Kate’s apology, an act far too significant to throw away.†
I put off seeing them at the start of the summer, figuring I’d get to see them over the winter, and then Cox had a stroke and they faded away.
When Alice broke up with me a few weeks back one of my first actions was juicing up the iPod and playing the songs that had NO RELATIONSHIP CONNECTIONS, stuff I had cultural ownership of (Beirut, for instance, are ours, and therefore I cannot listen to them yet), which boiled down to anything pre-2007. The Long Blondes came out. Suddenly that nostalgia exploded, in the strangest of ways: Someone To Drive You Home became laced with odes to nights I actively rejected, but felt like I might be tangled up into again, repulsed and attracted to the entropic waltz it seemed built of; ‘Nostalgia’ itself bitterly recalls the act of deciding to see where the relationship could go, and realising I wasn’t moving into the future with anyone for a while was sobering; It hit me, not for the first time, nor the last, that these songs were really very good; I knew The Long Blondes had to break up. For my sake, they did.
I wish Dorian a speedy recovery. Kate’s already announced that she’s working on solo stuff, which I’ll keep an ear for. Meanwhile I’ve got “Singles”, a compilation of pre-Rough Trade stuff, coming in the post.
Me: “Mark, did you ever really listen to The Long Blondes?”
Marky Mark: “Yeah, but I always preferred Sons & Daughters.”
I’d like some new music now please.
Matt, using his extra hour unwisely, 2008
* I bumped into Kieron a short while after he posted that, where he admitted “Comics have broken me. I mean, I just compared Kate Jackson to The Punisher.”
† It’s worth noting that Los Campesinos! do the exact same thing on We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed by following the schizophrenic confession of ‘Heart Swells/Pacific Daylight Time’ with the more-Los Camp!-than-Los-Camp! ‘All Your Kayfabe Friends’. That pissed me off for a couple of listens, before I realised what a wonderful “Fuck You!” moment it becomes. Also, there’s not much of a lyrical undermining that takes place, and given how much I like words that’s pretty significant. Also, Los Campesinos! reaching towards a calmer introspection feels a lot more like them stepping up and evolving than The Long Blondes doing it.
(Crossposted here I’m afraid)
So, here it is.
When The Polaroid Press started back in January the model always included me producing a physical document to accompany it. At first it took the form of the flyers, but the problem with me ordering 2500 copies of “A Life…” was that there was no fucking way I was going to get shot of them all. So I ordered half as many copies of “Before…”, but moved into The Lady’s with little more than a suitcase for four months, which somewhat dented my enthusiasm for looking at things with my name all over them and my drive to get them out there. But the principle was sound, I just needed something more, something to use them for.
My initial plan was to do half a dozen flyers and sell a couple of hundred of them as a bundle at some point down the line. But, frankly, that just didn’t feel right. So I started to plot a Polaroid Press “zine” that would be photocopyable and basic, a thing to tout my words in a more substantial form than the flyers. It was Sean who pointed out that that didn’t quite seem to fit with the project’s ethos. So at the tail end of September, motivated by The Lady breaking up with me and a long week of sobriety, I started taking steps toward producing a proper document, an almost-zine that had all of The Polaroid Press’s quality and quirk in a pocket-sized pack.
The results are better than I could possibly have hoped for.
Twelve stories, on the rear of prints of the Polaroids that inspired or accompany them, bound in a hand-stamped envelope with a new introduction for the collection. A “zine” in spirit, but just a little bit different, a combination of words and pictures that I really fucking love.
On November 15th I’ll be at Thought Bubble comic convention in Leeds, which’ll be the first chance to buy them in the flesh, a bargain at £3.50. I’ll be offering any remaining from the first run on the website after that (or perhaps earlier, if you e-mail and ask me very nicely) before seeing if a second run is worthwhile.
It’s been an interesting road, getting here, but hopefully this marks the start of the second phase of The Polaroid Press.
I’m really excited by the thought of that.
Matt, listening to M83 while staring longingly at The Polaroid Press pack, 2008
No update in an age, certainly not of a personal nature, so in an act of kindness (and as an exorcism) below are the major developments…
* I started an internship in the opening weeks of September at 176, a new contemporary art gallery in Chalk Farm. A little over a year old, the gallery showcases the artists and works of the Zabludowicz collection, and the current exhibition – Material Presence – is a varied and bloody interesting set of sculpture and installation work. I’m working as the Interaction intern, helping to involve the local community and entice them into the place. It’s going well so far, so fingers crossed there.
* I formed a band with Julia Scheele called words + pictures. The idea is that the band will make comics instead of music, a variation on an idea of Warren Ellis, who riffed off of the financial aspects of making small-scale comics anthologies. Mine takes that and runs off screaming “But why not treat comics like music?” Make short stories like singles, treat conventions like gigs, mythologise and have fun. Links and images to come, but we’ll see how that goes.
* I killed my facebook account. Basically, I’m uncomfortable with my habit of passing time by clicking refresh there. Everyone is. But it also stopped being useful to me. When an old school friend used it to send abuse to me in the guise of re-awakening a friendship I just decided ‘fuck it’ and deactivated the thing. No regrets there.
* The first collection of Polaroid Press stories is being compiled in between listening to music and lying in bed. I’m going to print about 20 odd in the lead up to Leeds and sell it while pimping words + pictures, if I get it done in time of course.
Enough about me, how are you?
