A couple of days ago I received as part of a sanity-package from Amazon.co.uk Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic “Control.” I had to go the DVD route since there was little chance of seeing this black and white tale of grimy Northern English rock suicide on any one of Hiroshima’s crap-filled cinema screens.

Ian Curtis, for all of you under 40, was the troubled singer of Manchester’s acclaimed and highly influential band Joy Division, who later morphed into the better-known and altogether less-worthwhile New Order.

Being a great fan of Joy Division’s tiny but meaningful output (2 albums and a bunch of outtakes), I knew the intimate details of the now legendary story like the back of my hand, but was still curious to see what Corbijn, a Dutch photographer who had snapped the band in 1979/80, would make of it.

In the end the film had a highly disturbing effect on me. Concentrating more on Curtis‘ personal life - wife/girlfriend triangle and debilitating epilepsy - rather than the career of the band, the denouement left me practically in tears and also with an intense feeling of suffocation. I wanted to scream.

I don’t recall any film ever having make such an impact on me, which is all the more strange since I knew full well the miserable ending of the tale beforehand.

Such was the emotional response, it is actually difficult to say whether the film is any good or not. Certainly one could criticise it for rendering Curtis‘ bandmates as rather invisible, not to mention no insights into the creative processes that led to such amazing and innovative music.

Still, it is the many on-stage scenes of the band that make this something special. Instead of miming to the real recordings, the actors actually played them live, with a stunning degree of accuracy. Of special mention in this regard is the performance of Sam Riley, who has Curtis‘ voice and mannerisms down pat. Truly mesmerising and somewhat eerie to behold.

However, one wonders what people unfamiliar with the band would make of all this. Would the human drama of Curtis‘ screwed-up relationships and inner turmoil be enough to sustain it without having any pre-existing connection to the music? Difficult to say….

Yes, folks, the glorious news that you’ve all been waiting for - the new STAVKA album is nearly almost virtually just about ready for release! Woot! And when I say “release” I mean it’ll be offered to thegenital pubic at the wondrous STAVKA webstore where a glistening CD-R burn graced with my marker pen doodles and a cheaply photocopied jacket can be yours for just ten bucks US. Yay!

For a while there it looked as though this album was going to go the Zen route after several years of infuriating tussles with various bits of machinery (to be documented in a future post), all of which seemed hell-bent on blocking my creative endeavours and preventing them from coming to fruition. The Zen route does have its attractions, mind: finish an album and then never make any copies of it at all, because it’s all about the journey, not the arriving. Of course, the hardcore among you might go one step further and say, “Hey Mr.Stavka, why don’t you go the whole way and not even bother to record the album at all, and just keep it as an idea?” I must admit that I have been tempted down that particular alley more than once, but no, once the hell that is production is over and a few intervening years have er….intervened, it’s great to be able to sit back, throw the CD on and marvel at how I was ever able to come up with all that power pop goodness.

Mind you, I have scaled down considerably on the distribution front with regard to my musical outpourings. Back in 1998 when I first acquired the means to pump out my own fully-formed CD albums, I foolishly allowed my youthful enthusiasm to obscure reality, and proudly dished out copies of my latest to all and sundry: family, friends, Rabbis, insurance salesmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses, window cleaners, passers-by, homeless urchins and stray dogs. Only slowly did I come to realise that others might not be sharing my joy: noticing my CDs used as coasters, oversized necklaces or shiny rotating devices to scare off crows, I began to get the hint.

But indifference eventually turned to outright abuse. Here’s a typical conversation from that period, reproduced verbatim:

Suffering Artist: “Hello, old friend. A while ago I gave you a copy of my latest long player, a forty-seven song cyclical diaphonic chant about entropy and angst. I spent the last eight years making it: a real labour of love and an actual part of my soul, my being. Pray, ply me with encouraging remarks and give me a warm gooey feeling inside with your loving support, even though I am fully aware that my kind of music is a tad different to your usual fare of bland banal commercial fodder.”
Alleged Friend: “It’s shite. I threw it out with the fish offal.”
Suffering Artist: “Thank you, good sir. May all your children be born without arseholes.”

So, over the years I have gradually reduced my distribution to the point where I only give out copies of my wares to people who actively express an interest, and that area of the CD booklet usually reserved for a list of names the artiste wishes to thank for help and support remains completely blank. It’s as if the whole thing has come full circle: I began creating music with a bunch of mates back in the late 70’s, writing and recording solely for our own amusement and pleasure with no thought or need of a wider audience at all. Now I’m right back there, although through the internet I have had something of a revelation of late. After airing my music each week on the late lamented A-Bomb City Podcast I was amazed at the number of positive comments I got from listeners, as well as having a few requests for my songs to be used by other broadcasters in their own shows. And a couple of folks even bought CDs from the STAVKA emporium! Wow, that’s my pension sorted!

Strange though, how support and vindication has to come from total strangers in other countries rather than friends and family.

Well, fuck ‘em, it looks like it’s me who gets the last larf, as I lie here in my Beverley Hills mansion snorting cocaine from the arse cracks of a coterie of curvaceous concubines, playing the role of rock star with consummate ease.

And so the spring vacation is upon us, well, upon those of us lazy-arsed tosseurs who eke out a living as itinerant mystical sages in the Land of the Four Clearly-Defined Seasons. Yes, I am currently eschewing all things pedagogical and devoting myself entirely to the noble and nourishing pursuit of doing fuck-nothing until early April. Huzzah!

In keeping with last year I have consulted my financial guru and he has observed the birds in the sky, the tea-leaves in the cup and the configuration of a virgin’s intestines and tells me that I should forgo travel to foreign parts and instead take up my cane and sack and once more take the long road to somewhere domestic. He assures me this will save me at least £5, and so it is that on March 10th I will head north for a couple of weeks in the hitherto unexplored Chubu region of these here lands. When I say unexplored, dear reader, I mean unexplored with regard to my own feet, arse and lungs. Obviously a few other people have already been there, otherwise how are we to account for the vast number of beverage vending machines to be found there?

Now Chubu in Japanese breaks down into two Chinese characters, “Chu”, meaning ‘middle’, and “Bu”, meaning ‘bit’. Hence if we were to glance at a map of old Nippon, it would be after being that mountainous chunk in the centre between the two great urban slabs of Kansai (Osaka & Kyoto) and Kanto (Tokyo & Yokohama):

Well, I’m all agog with excitement, and have already planned out the trip in true nerdy fashion, with multiple copies of itineraries depicting schedules and timings, together with inventories detailing exact numbers of socks to be transported and where said foot-coverings are to be stowed once used and a-smellied.

Here’s the basic plan:

[1] Kanazawa - 3 nights. Old bits and gardeny things to gawp at. Possible side trip to venerable Eiheiji Temple if no Starbucks found.
[2] Takayama - 3 nights. Snowy mountains, olde worlde charm, cold turkey due to lack of Starbucks.
[3] Nagoya - 2 nights. A counterblast to the previous rusticity. Go to Starbucks. Look at big ugly city nobody likes.
[4] Matsumoto - 3 nights. More snowy mountains, old bits and a castle. Starbucks.
[5] Nagano - 3 nights. Snowy mountains, Starbucks.

A splendid plan indeed!

Hotels have been booked, railway timetables consulted - it’s all looking rather wonderful!

And as a tantalising taster of the visual delights that await, I do hereby solemnly reproduce here a nice photo of Matsumoto castle what I nicked off some other bugger’s site:

Ugh, just come to the end of a couple of weeks o’ slow torture. What? I hear you ask, were the natives keeping you in a bamboo enclosure buried up to the neck in the burning tropical sun? Oh no, silly person, of course not. It is winter now, dolt!

No, I speak of the activity I have recently been dragged into by my Greco-New-Yorkian mucker Mr. Danny Itoh. For we have been writing a faux English textbook allegedly to be employed upon the poor unsuspecting gruntlets out in some godforsaken rural backwater who “study” in a two-year grease monkey ‘n’ hairdresser college. So yeah, like it’s dumbed down to “me blue-eyed Aryan god, you slouching disaffected Oriental yoof with a stupid haircut.” Or somefink like that.

Anyways, normally one sets out on the road to publication with a good wadge of time before those nasty little things called deadlines appear. But oh no, not us. Mr. Danny Itoh informs me that the alleged textbooks must be landing on students’ desks by the first week of April. Hmm, wait a sec, so that leaves us with…..what the….?!??

And so it is without pause that I have been connected to sexy MacBook all hours of the day and night, usually in some branch of a well-known caffeine supplier famed for the economic rape of Ethiopia, desperately grappling with the duplicitous and gargantuan problems involved in the pea-brained scheme.

For ’tis not the actual material for said tome that is tricky (nay, as a professional headucator of long standin’ I have of course accrued and sequestrated away an whole bunch of crap wot I can employ in any hestablishment of higher learnin’ at the drop of a mortar board, or was that mortar shell?), no, my friends, it is the translation of said material from the cobwebby collywobbled lobes of your humble narrator to the helectronic page that is the nub of the problem.

See, these here computers look all shiny and nice an’ all, but when it comes do doing anything serious with ‘em, they go all uncooperative and try their hardest to block you in your creative endeavours. The worst offenders, of course, are word-processing softwares. You all remember that nauseating and annoying animated paper clip that would pop up in early versions of Microshaft Weird, right? You know, it would keep offering you suggestions that you didn’t want, and even when you’d actually worked out how to turn the bugger off, he’d secretly start screwing with you from inside the programme, monkeying with your lists, automating this, automating that, preventing you from moving this thing here without all these other carefully aligned bits to disperse throughout your project like startled pigeons.

I’d hoped that Mac’s word processor would be a little better - but oh no, same old shite here too, meaning that more than half of this would-be author’s battle is with the very machinery allegedly designed to help him.

Bah! Mumble-grumble, mumble-grumble….(slopes off into background and kicks something…