006: BEYOND THE EVERYTHING SHOP

LOVECRAFTIAN RETAIL

Good morning from Yeovil, South Somerset, where men in black cowls with heads like pterodactyl skulls skulk in the gloomy, unlit, cobble-studded alleys that abut Nandos.

Recently returned from a short, much-needed break in Devon and stopped off in Tiverton on the way back. Really like Tiverton. We ended up there last year: it’s not been gentrified yet, my kinda town. While my wife checked out the charity shops I went for what the Letterists called a dérive - a ‘drift’ - or what we in the West Country call a mooch. Wandering around with nothing much in mind apart from the anticipation of lunch.

Tiverton has a really great Everything Shop - so named because it has the potential of selling, well, everything. The Tiverton one is called Homefayre and it’s a beaut. This picture completely undersells it as this is just one of three different entrances / frontages. It’s huge.

There are stairs leading up to a sort of Minstrels Gallery that winds round the edge of things with sudden, unexpected routes back down and unlikely, often surreal retail juxtapositions. This time - it’s my second visit - I discovered that there’s an upstairs-outside bit that seems to contain some garden-related products (and… other stuff). It must be out on some sort of ledge or platform or an inner flat roof within the building - I can’t quite figure it out. And here we get to the crux of what an Everything Shop actually is. There are rules, y’see.

1. An Everything Shop is not a Department Store. It’s far more lo-fi and disparate, more like a repository or an archive that you can buy things from. Neither is it an indoor market nor an old-fashioned hardware store. No siree! They have their own particular / peculiar vibes.

2. An Everything Shop is capable of inducing a sense of meditative calm when you wander round it. Zen Shopping, innit. The chill polar opposite of the senses-overloading near-panic consumer experience provided by your local supergrocer: the glaring overhead lights and LED advert screens, the shrill, tinny, decade-old tracks by Mariah Carey and Beyoncé (though, to be fair, the ASDA in Yeovil has a pretty good Disco-Boogie playlist they sometimes roll out). Time sloooows down in an Everything Shop. It’s like Object-Orientated Mindfulness. Or something.

3. No only does Time deviate from the rules of Classical Physics in an Everything Shop, but Three Dimensional Space also starts acting the fool. The best Everything Shops have an Escher Maze like quality to them: there are odd nooks and crannies everywhere; rooms lead off into other rooms which lead to yet more chambers, tunnels and stairwells - each stuffed with anomalous, brightly coloured fare - conventional topological logic feels like it’s being constantly upended. Like a TARDIS, an Everything Shop appears to contain far more than its spatial allocation allows. You get lost and confused, but in a good way. Wait. Was… that room there before? Where did that door come from? It’s like a film-set where someone keeps moving the scenery and the props around every time you’ve passed. Part Escape Room, part a moveable cheapjack feast for the eyes, Everything Shops seem to flaunt the rules of Euclidean Geometry. This is Lovecraftian Retail, but denuded of its Cosmic Horror tropes and replaced by cake decorations, bootleg Power Ranger figures and bright, gaudy moulded-plastic objects you didn’t realise you needed until you saw them. Pharoah Khufu’s burial chamber if it were filled with Hanna Montana colouring books, fluffy cushions with repeating Warhol-esque skull motifs and tubes of Gorilla Glue.

4. The lighting is dim, the walls are made from roughly painted stonework. A soundtrack is optional, but if there is one then it is always subdued and jaunty-sounding, almost subliminal, featuring tunes that seem oddly familiar yet impossible to identify, whose identity forever hovers just out of reach. Don’t go looking for any speakers, because you’ll never find them. The music seems to hang in the air, unobtrusive, otherworldly.

5. Sales staff can be found in little DIY’d hardboard ‘pods’ or behind Edwardian dark wood counters with ancient tills that are positioned at seemingly random points throughout the Everything Shop. You just kinda stumble on one - always at exactly the right moment, just when you want to pay for something. It’s like the Laws of Probability have gone skew-whiff here too. And the staff are always lovely and helpful. It feels like a dream. And perhaps it is.

An Everything Shop makes an appearance in the short story ‘Moa Crowhide’ in my New Abnormal anthology, but that one is to be found in the Outback of some parallel-world Australia. It was loosely based on a real-life Everything Shop that once existed in the bottom half of Middle Street, Yeovil, just up from where Wetherspoons is now and where Key Markets once was, a mere 100 yards or two from where I grew up. As a young child this shop was an endless source of wonderment to me. It was full of bizarre cheap toys, sticky sweets and assorted oddments: key-rings and pen-knifes; plastic Roman Legionnaire swords and cheap spud-guns, piled high with cluttered ephemera. In the darkened back room was a wall of back-lit fish-tanks. I would wander in, my head full of Kirby’s Karloff-inspired Hulk comics and early Ditko Dr. Strange. It was like walking into another dimension, one stuffed to the brim with colour and amazement. In ‘Moa Crowhide’ the proprietor is named after Mrs. Dodge, one of our nearby neighbours and mum to one of my school pals.

There was an Everything Shop on East Street, Bridport, Dorset, called Whites, I think, that was an absolute classic. It seemed to stretch back what felt like miles in proud defiance of 3D Space-Time. We used to go in there with the kids on days out when they were young. But that disappeared not long ago, during Lockdown. I miss it.

Sad to say, there aren’t many Everything Shops left now - they’ve been replaced by branches of Poundland which are, of course, the complete opposite of an Everything Shop. Like a dimensional breach or a fairy ring, you can come upon an Everything Shop by accident from time to time. When you do, be sure to treasure the time spent there, for they do not fully belong to this world.

Go Global-Local! Embrace your own Inner Tiverton. Allow yourself to slow, to find stillness within and simplicity without.

Yer pal, Kek

I’m Kek-w. My day-job is writing comics, books and a bunch of other stuff. When I have time, I like to make music and art. If this newsletterzine tickled yr synapzees, please consider pointing yer pals at my Subscribe Page: https://humane-debris-ed6dfb.beehiiv.com/subscribe. “Send moooore weirdos!”

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WRITING COMICS WITH KEK

Previously, I covered how the late, great John M Burns transformed a page from one of my scripts for THE ORDER (below) into a series of sumptuous comic book images. Then, I reverse-engineered the script page back through my outline and development process - or what I like to call Making Shit Up. Let’s stick with the same script for a little while longer while we mine it for more info and tips.

THE ORDER was an Historical Fantasy strip that ran for seven series in 2000AD. It contained stories set in different eras and featured a mix of real historical figures, public domain characters from classic fiction and ones that I created specifically for the strip. Now, it just so happens that this script fragment contains a pair of real-life personalities: Benjamin Franklin, the inventor and former American President, and Sanité Bélair, the Haitian revolutionary, which leads us nicely into the next topic: RESEARCH.

Like writing itself, there’s no right or wrong way to research something - you either know how to find something out or you don’t - but I would like to add an important caveat here: when researching, as in journalism, it’s important, if possible, to verify your information from multiple sources. If you’re using the Internet, then be aware that content is increasingly being generated using unreliable / inaccurate AI resources or has been cut n pasted by either bots or people from one cheapjack clickbait wiki to another along with any inaccuracies embedded therein. Factor in how many sites have fallen victim to political bias, rewrites and historical erasure - particularly during the Rise of the New Right in the last decade or so - and DOUBLE CHECK. (TBH it’s a really good habit to get into whether you’re a writer or not, and one always worth restating).

You don’t need a degree in History to write Historical Fiction, but some passion for the period or the people is essential. The same is true of any writing project in any medium or genre. If you’re not engaged with the subject matter, then don’t expect your readers to be either. THE ORDER wasn’t a Bernard Cornwell novel, so my own research was never a deep academic exercise or biographical dive - it didn’t need to be - but I always like to soak up the flavour of a time, place or character so that I can write about it / them with some degree of conviction and hopefully take both the artist and the reader with me.

I frequently include reference material and links in my scripts so that the illustrator can see the place / clothes / vehicles / people I’m writing about. This drives some artists crazy, while others write me thank-you notes. Every artist / collaborator has a different outlook or needs, but you have to work with them first - or have an upfront chat - in order to find out what those might be. Sometimes the research / reference conversation can step outside the script and be expanded on via emails or phone-calls. The artist might ask me for additional material or to clarify references or plot points or tone. John Burns had his own reference library - not to mention decades of experience in illustrating historical material (it was Fantasy and Science Fiction he was less keen on) - so had personal visualisation aids / a toolkit he could call upon in addition to my own thoughts and input. David Roach is similarly dedicated to getting things ‘right’, especially if we’re dealing with specific times and places in collaborations such as SAPHIR or NIGHTMARE NEW YORK. David will frequently send me photographic / painted references that I may have missed in my own trawls. Sometimes, he’ll ask me if we can add / ‘write in’ a specific location or object that he thinks might give a particular visual flavour to an episode or scene, so research isn’t always a unidirectional thing - it can be collaborative too.

Some artists might ignore your references because of time / deadline constraints or because it doesn’t work for them, they don’t have the chops to illustrate it or (hopefully) they have a better idea - and that’s all fine, of course, except when they go completely off-road and draw Marie Antoinette with a goatee beard or have a Mini Clubman Estate parked outside the saloon in Deadwood and the first you know about it is when you pick up a copy to have a look at in W H SMITH.

The point about research is that it’s meant to add richness and depth to a piece of fiction. But sometimes you can dive in too deep and drown in the details when all you really needed was a taste of salt water and a glimpse of a couple fish. Research for research’s sake is all fine and good (and can be a lot of fun), but if you’re a jobbing freelance writer on work-for-hire rates there comes a point where you’re just busting your own chops. It’s about finding the right balance in servicing the story’s needs and inspiring / enlightening your artistic collaborators rather than overwhelming them.

THE ORDER was a Fantasy strip set in divergent timelines and parallel ‘Realms’, so it was never fully focused on, um, verisimilitude. A large part of THE ORDER was about deliberately creating anachronisms - visual and narrative juxtapositions of objects, technologies, people and their value-systems, rubbing them up against one another until these juxtapositions create sparks that catch fire in the form of Story. Fantastical tales that hopefully might tell us something about the characters and possibly even ourselves. So research has other functions: it’s not just about faithfully recreating some unified ‘truthful’ version of the Past (as if that were even possible) - but more like wandering around in the woods, gathering up sticks and other potentially flammable materials to see which might best start a narrative blaze.

As someone who grew up in the epoch of Peak Post-Modernism (and has more than a passing interest in Semiotics) all this talk of visual juxtapositions has got me thinking about signs and signifiers, narrative deconstruction, and how we ‘read’ and decode visual information, etc. Comix is a visual medium an’ all that, so it’s not particularly surprising that they were one of the first things to be visually co-opted and unpacked by Pop Art, along with adverts, packaging and other assorted consumer debris. Comics have a short, concise and somewhat intense history of showing us things about ourselves as a society or species that we’d sometimes rather not see, as well as exposing the flaws and fault-lines in how History is frequently presented to us. Comics short-circuit Time and Space in all sorts of unexpected ways.

Sorry, I could talk about this stuff all night, but I know most of y’all only really wanna know is how to write comics. All this is incidental - additional layers to our - cough-cough - craft, but if you are interested in any of this, then maybe start by checking out Bruce Sterling talking and writing, a few years ago, about the concept of Atemporality in story-telling. I think that if yr serious about creating things that have historical elements / components, then it’s not only worth researching the facts as best you can, but also the myths that surround them, as well as studying how other writers present and reconcile those sometimes conflicting views, and also gaining some sort of understanding of what constitutes ‘History’ and how that is something which is perpetually in flux. But, yeah: it all depends on how deep ya wanna drill down into all this and what yr trying to say in your story. Sometimes the smell of salt and fish are more’n enough.

One last research-related topic I’d like to briefly touch on - (and IMHO it’s one of the most important tools you can have in your back-pocket as both a writer and a human being) - is this: CURIOSITY. Read anything and everything. Store it, stack it up, shuffle it all like a deck of cards - (yay, we’re back to juxtaposition again; and might that not be one of the main underpinnings of narrative tension and, thence, drama?). You never know when a stray factoid might proved useful! Gardner Fox and John Broome certainly did. The more info you absorb across a wide spectrum of disparate and seemingly unrelated topics the more narrative and thematic ammo you have at yr disposal - unless, of course, you end up going completely insane like the hapless protagonist in a Lovecraft story. Trivial, profound or profane: some that nonsense you’ve accumulated in yr skull might one day turn out to be prime story-telling tinder. It all carries equal weight in the Grey Matter Domain.

Somewhere along the way - a result of a lifetime of soaking up useless background ephemera - I somehow knew; didn’t need to research (but a double-check confirmed it) that Ben Franklin had been the first American Ambassador to France and spoke fluent French, so would naturally understand what Captain Bélair was muttering to her First Mate in Panel #4 of the script… just as I also remembered reading somewhere that Franklin (like many of the American Founding Fathers) owned slaves - though research later told me that during his time in London and Paris in the 1770s / 80s he slowly shifted toward an abolitionist mindset. Facts I’d unconsciously carried in my head for years suddenly resurfaced and combined to ignite a dramatic conflict between two protagonists in a story I wrote decades later. So, to conclude:

If you want to be a writer, then my advice to you is this: read.

MERCH ALERT

Just a quick heads-up: a couple days ago I released a new album: TRANSIENT SOLIDS by BRAM Van BARTEK. It’s available either as a digital download or a super-cheap physical: a pro-duped / printed CD - (a detail from an old oil painting of mine) - in a cardboard mailer with a DIY hand-guillotined / glued cover and credits. Each copy as gloriously wonky, eccentric and unique as the music within. LTD EDITION of 20 - no reloads - when they're gone, they're gone!

I describe the album as “Lo-Fi Science-Fiction music from a parallel-1980s: eccentric, slowly evolving minimal electronic poly-rhythms that stumble and trip over their own analogue shoelaces. Raw, unpolished synth sequences that unzip and recombine themselves like broken DNA helices.” Bram Van Bartek is a character I created: an alternative-universe producer from Dein Neue Nederlans. Sometimes I write characters, sometimes I play them. The music Bram makes is deliriously wonky, clunky and wrong, as if early Acid House and Techno had taken a completely different path, one that never lead to 90s superclubs and generic Trance. File under: Forgotten Futures.

Now back to other people’s music in my semi-regular round-up…

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

Dunno about you, but I have a soft spot for self-proclaimed “Bubblegum Trap” rapper, Lil Yachty. His 2017 video for ‘Minnesota’ features the best ever use of an ice hockey rink cleaning vehicle. Confess I drifted away a bit in recent years, but his recent 14-track drop of unreleased tracks on Soundcloud via his Concrete Leak System account soon brought me back into the fold. This track’s kinda unexpectedly lovely:

Meanwhile, Avon Terror Corps return with Visceral Snacks by Weird Weather - an ominous-sounding, thrilling and forward-thinking collection of electronic pieces that you can dance, sway or sit and brood to. ‘Ring’ fuses metallic-sounding e-percussion with mythic, otherworldly glossolalia by performance-artist cum anthropologist Anna ‘Breadwoman’ Homler to summon up a sense of longing for something that never was and can never be. But if invoking imaginary gods isn’t yr fave way of spending a Tuesday, then get yr dance-slippers on and check out ‘Olive Green’ featuring Italian-but-now-resident-in Bristol rapper (and Young Echo collaborator), Franco Franco. I witnessed FF in full, fierce, unfettered 2am action back just before lockdown at The Exchange (I played at the same show - bottom of the bill, ‘natch!): forgotten who was providing the beats that night - Kinlaw, probably? Missed him when he did a turn at Strange Brew last year - didn’t expect him to play quite so early. That’ll teach me, eh? Anyway:

Finally, my old pal, dictaphonist extraordinaire, Joe Posset, has a great ongoing deeeep dive into the back-catalogue of the Union Pole label called ALL MY IDEAS ARE STOLEN. It’s a terrific, extremely engrossing read - a release-by-release labour-of-love trawl - and comes with the highest possible recommendation, so check it out now! Joe and I made an album called “Twangers” a few years back, recorded using handmade string instruments. Fun times!

CHILL WITH KIKI

This Summer make sure you take time to soak up some sunshine and touch grass. If you’re unable to do that, then try rolling around on warm concrete and wiggle yr limbs in the air like Kiki does. Take some Me-ow Time. Luxuriate. It’s good for ya. xx