Mark Charan Newton

Now here’s a man who knows how to play a guitar AND grow a good beard.

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I’m going through a phase where I love abandoned buildings. And there are a lot of them around. They’ve got some strange romance about them. A lost time. A building that says, ‘I was once great, and now look at me. I wasn’t always like this. I used to mean something.’ It’s pretty humbling. Your [...]

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Taken from my old blog…
This is an interesting one. The Fortress of Solitude is a book that’s difficult to catagorise. With brief genre moments, and certainly many nods towards SF / comic book fandom, it describes the lives of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. One white, one black, both growing up in Brooklyn. [...]

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I recently came across this scrapbook on Edward Hopper. I’ve been a fan of Hopper’s paintings for some time now, and there’s something about his work that really unlocks something within me. There’s such a wonderful quality rendered to his scenes—that which is unsaid, not painted. The missing artifact or person. I often wonder about [...]

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The longer you listen, the better it gets. Still, it’s hypnotic to watch this guy mix. Play close attention to around the two minute mark on Moon Rover, where he starts getting Rather Bloody Good with the needle. And nice to see them being brave and tampering with classics in an interesting way, rather than [...]

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Matlock: a strange mixture of old and new. Chrome, brass and leather-trimmed bistro bars stand alongside shabby collectible shops. Old ladies prefer the company of old ladies in tea rooms with steamed up windows, and that haven’t been decorated in years. Walkers stride through traffic with a nonchalance and purpose of street kids in Delhi [...]

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I like this concept. I think I could subscribe to something like this:

A pocket lifestyle guide from 1835 to be auctioned this month provides an insight into the aspirations and anxieties of young men about town on the eve of the Victorian era… Like today’s men’s magazines, The Young Man’s Own Book furnished its readers [...]

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Taken from my old blog, because I was reminded about it recently.
A performance artist hangs in statuesque pose. Knee bent. Upside down. The pose of the famously pictured man on 9/11. And this artist is effectively frozen in time. Which is the metaphor at the heart of Don Delillo’s latest novel, Falling Man. That of [...]

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I’ve received the first chunk of the edit of Nights of Villjamur from Peter Lavery. It came with a slip saying “Hope it’s not too much of a shock”. I looked at the manuscript. I laughed.
Time to lose the ego.
It’s funny, because I’ve seen interviews where Neal Asher talks about Peter’s scary pencil. I sent [...]

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Something a little melancholy for the weekend. Mad hair.

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