009: THE GREAT FIRE OF DUNELM

BURNING DOWN THE HOMEWARE SECTION

Good morning from Yeovil, South Somerset, where, last night, the local branch of Dunelm almost burned down.

My pal JM reminded me that this was only a month or so after a rampaging maniac had smashed in Dunelm’s windows with a hammer. And not long after a bin was torched in the nearby Bus Station, as documented a couple of newsletters ago. In Yeovil, like Marineville, anything can happen in the next half hour! And frequently does. Speaking of which…

*Cue: X-Files music*

Recently, I’ve been documenting examples of Spontaneous Human Evaporation (SHE) around town, because, well, someone has to…

SHE is a far more widespread phenomenon than most people realise. Perhaps you’ve encountered examples of this in your own home town - human beings who have seemingly disappeared into thin air, leaving only their clothes behind, but you’ve struggled to get anyone to believe you. They’ve sneered, laughed in your face, called you crazy like the protagonist of an early 60s Steve Ditko back-up story in Tales to Astonish, as you rush desperately from bar to bar reeking of rum, telling your incredible tale to disbelieving commuters and day-drinkers, only to discover in the final panel that you are the alien. But it’s okay, you’re among friends here on HUMANE DEBRIS. We won’t mock you. SHE is real.

I’m determined to get to the bottom of this bizarre phenomenon. What has become of these missing evaporees? What happens to them? Where do they go? If you’ve had a Close Encounter of the Evaporating Kind, write and tell us at HD. If enough of us band together and go public with our evaporation stories, the authorities will have no choice but to believe us! “B-But what,” I hear you croak, “if I get a visit from The Men In No Clothes?”

Yes. I too have heard whispers of these terrifying characters: a trio of hairless, freshly-waxed men, nekkid except for small black pork pie hats, that knock on the doors of hapless evaporation investigators and witnesses in an attempt to silence them. Are they real - part of some covert, unclothed government agency - or just a paranoid South Somerset myth? Who knows.

Meanwhile, I hope you are all keeping well, grabbing some Late Summer sunshine and some downtime too when yr able.

Gonna introduce a new / occasional featurette this time round: READERS LETTERS. (No, not those kinds of Readers Letters!) Is that a Stan Lee-esque innovation - a newsletterzine with a letters column? Sounds like it should be, but I bet someone else has probably beaten me to it. It’s been really great hearing from you all recently. When I started the zine I hoped we might be able to build some sort of little community or tribe, but this has exceeded my expectations. Thank you. I was surprised how many ppl contacted me to say they enjoyed reading the seagull pee-poop piece; getting pooped on seemed to resonate with some of you! Gonna try’n keep this issue a bit shorter - no lengthy music pieces this time round; I don’t want reading this to feel like geography homework.

Take care! Don’t evaporate! Or, if y’do, please come back and let us know what happened.

Yer pal, Kek

I’m Kek-w. I write comic books, films, TV and books. If you know anyone who you think might enjoy reading the HUMANE DEBRIS newsletterzine, please point ‘em at the subscribe page here: https://humane-debris-ed6dfb.beehiiv.com/subscribe. LET THE TRIBE INCREASE!

But if it ain’t working for ya, then fret ye not, there’s an Unsubscribe button sat at the bottom of the page, wallowing in the mud like a hippo with an itchy back. Thanks for making it this far - sorry ta see you go.

WRITING COMICS WITH KEK

So I ended up writing a very different column to the one I meant to. My pal Emma recently asked some questions, not specifically about writing practice, but broader ones about the nature of doing creative stuff, topics that touch on the psychology of creative work, I guess; how to get started and keep going, how to get stuff done, deal with set-backs, etc. All framed within the wider, vaguer context of 'how do I become a writer / artist / musician?' So, we're going back to basic principles here with a few notes under the general heading of HOW TO GET STARTED.

First, a short ramble about my own journey which may hopefully offer up a few useful thoughts and tips. I was always a restless kid, drawing, scribbling, making stuff up, writing - most kids are, but that falls away for a lot of people as the responsibilities of adulthood take hold and they're presented with a sandstorm of consumer distraction-delights from an over-heated, on-demand mediascape. I tended to wind down from school-work and work-work by doing... yet more stuff. Creating things that scratched an itch in my brain.

By the time I was about 12 or 13 I was typing articles (on a clunky old Edwardian typewriter my dad bought me from Mabel's Dress Agency, the junk shop across the road from us) and drawing (well, copying, mostly) images for comic-book related fanzines. I was also writing, long-hand, Sword & Sorcery type stories, some of which got printed in zines and many of which didn't. In fact, a couple years ago, I found an old 1970's fanzine in a shop that had an advert in it for an Xmas issue that promised (among other things) a short Fantasy story by me that I have no recollection of writing. I must have done loads of stuff like that which I've completely forgotten about. It was a bizarre, unexpected flashback to another time. There was no money involved in doing any of this stuff, just a comp copy of the zine (if you were lucky). I mostly did it for my own enjoyment and entertainment.

My own backstory yields a few basic points that might seem bleedin' obvious, but are worth stating out loud and hanging onto when you hit a personal / creative brick wall. I'm laying these out as much for my own benefit as anyone else's. Memo to Self, etc.

1. Do what you love. Doing creative stuff that you really enjoy will sustain you - get you through the times when there's no money. Yep, we all have to pay the bills, but doing stuff you dislike, even if there's potentially a big payday, is a grind and can make you miserable. A really enjoyable hobby can keep you positive and sane if you have a day job that's driving you nuts. So, purely from a mental health p.o.v., creativity can be a life-saver, a distraction, an escape.

2. Cultivate a deep passion for the things you do. Try and make personal creativity a habit. Something you really want to do. I'm very aware that for many people that can be extremely difficult or near-impossible due to health, time / work / energy constraints, family responsibilities, etc. But if you are able to cultivate a creative habit - if you really want to do it, then you'll find yourself fitting it in around other things. Even if it's just 5, 10 minutes a day, those minutes add up over a week, month, year. Your need to Do The Thing has to supersede all the crap obstacles that you, your personality and environment place in your path. Call me an old hippy, but perhaps the Tao might provide us with a suitable model or metaphor: be like water and flow around any obstacles that block your way - rather than crashing into them head on or trying to aggressively power on through.

3.  Surf the Consumer / Producer Sine-wave. The 21st century offers so many distractions, online or otherwise - many of them potentially toxic - that it's easy to get sucked into consuming media, rather than pursuing the activities we love. (Obviously, for neurodivergent creators, environmental distractions, sensory overload and emotional overwhelm can be a huge problem, one deserving of its own piece). Finding the right balance can be hard: we all need downtime and rest, yet capitalism has trained some of us to inwardly call ourselves out as 'lazy' if we're not constantly 'producing' and making things, ie working. Productivity can easily become toxic if we're not careful: it's important to remember that and not beat yourself up just because you haven't produced an artistic masterpiece or 2000 words of perfect purple prose before breakfast, while holding down a full-time job or raising kids. This is supposed to be fun, remember? Think of Consumption and Production like the Tao symbol: two opposing, yet harmoniously co-existing forces that combine to make a whole. If, as a kid, I hadn't been mesmerised and mildly obsessed by Silver Age comics, Universal monster movies, drive-in sci-fi trash, the books of Robert E Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Mike Moorcock, etc I wouldn't have had the necessary brane fuel to write those fanzine articles and cheesy Fantasy tales. Which leads us neatly into the next point:

4. It's okay to borrow from your heroes. It's probably more obvious when artists and musicians do it (I'm thinking, for example, how Bob Dylan was such an obvious influence on early David Bowie, Ian Hunter, Steve Harley, etc before they matured into artists in their own right) than writers. But, yeah, it's fine when you're starting out to 'copy' the people who inspired you until you find your way, your own creative voice. In fact, I'm sure that's a basic mammalian / human survival trait, isn't it? The young copy the behaviour of their parents or elders until they learn to hunt, fly, whatever. Why should creative endeavours be any different? Think also of the enormous explosion of online fan.fict in recent years. If you're super-passionate about a certain character or IP, or deeply embedded in its fandom, then what better way to dip your toes into the creative ocean than writing fan.fict. It's also a great way to find a community of like-minded folk. Let's be honest: most fiction is basically just a form of fan fiction - it's built on a tottering tower of other people's ideas, existing tropes, genres, set-ups, etc. So much / so many of the ground rules, form and topic matter of Science Fiction, Horror, Crime, Adventure fiction come from so few: Verne, Wells, Poe, Dumas, etc. So, believe me, you're not alone in creatively 'borrowing'. We all do it.

5. Always carry a notebook / sketch book. My inner 8 year old still likes to scribble - ‘scribbling’ is a good word for what I do - and a notebook is my constant and necessary companion to jot down ideas, titles, scraps of dialogue, strange overheard factoids, doodles, characters, designs, logos, page breakdowns, organising thoughts, etc, etc. Of course, you can do all this on a phone too, using memo apps and the camera, but I’m ancient and I like to go old skool analogue hands-on. My preferred weapon of choice is the classic (and super-cheap) black Bic biro. I never leave home without this shit.

I hope this has been helpful for some of you, if only to remind you of things that might be obvious but are often left unsaid. Let's talk some more about this stuff next time round; perhaps we'll cover topics like perseverance, fostering resilience, dealing with rejection, finding ways into starting, sustaining and finishing work, creative self-care, etc.

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

First out the gate is a new double tape from Bristol’s ever-awesome Liquid Library label entitled A Graceless Pink, Drowned in Fog and Hostile Deities (LL always come up with the best, most poetic sounding titles!). It’s a gorgeously languid affair: meditative templedrone with splashes of sl. ominous C Ashton Smith tone colour in places - Angus MacLise for the digital age - a double-tape split between Zero Gravity Tea Ceremony and Carnivorous Plants: you can grab a copy here - and you should! ‘Envelop(e)’ sounds like some off-world Tantric Unboxing Ritual performed inside an Orgone Accumulator.

My pal, Hull-based performance / sound artist, feral poet and orchestrator of disruptive object-based practices, Yol, has just dropped a new two-track release, Two Bits, which, unusually for him (as he explains in the release notes) contains rhythmic music. Drum machines / rhythms, he adds, “[are] not as immediate as a brick or a fork and harder to control while I’m shouting and throwing stuff around.” Brilliant. And so is the music.

Well, of course Shoegaze / Hip Hop fusion is a legit thing too (I’m mean, didn’t Clams Casino and Lil B pioneer all this years ago?): atm, I’m really diggin’ ‘Hidden Powers’ by spiritcallerSnail (with ocurie and xtasane) on Glasgow’s Endogenic Noise Records. SpiritcallerSnail is an Elden Ring reference - which I’m sure all you fantasy gamer phreaks will know - while the track is a gauzy, tingly ASMR-inducing waterfall rush of autotuned vocals, piano cascades and rolling, rubbery-sounding Kick n Bass. Loverly stuff!

Continue as Amery by Amery is a terrific eight track PopRockPunk album on Nightschool Records. The single ‘Hotwire The Night’ caught my my ears a few days back: it sounds like, I dunno, an 80s FM MallPop version of Steely Dan - catchy as as fuck, with a kinda Jazzy minor-chords night-time cruising feel. There’s a gloriously goofy video for it that channels a retro Canadian Tiffany Darwish meets a Female Energy Waynes World vibe. It’s breezy and fun, but shot through with a wistful streak of 2am melancholy. In fact, the whole album’s chocful of bittersweet super-catchy pop nuggets like ‘Mountain FM’ and ‘Rocker Blues’.

On the album’s title track Amery picks herself up, dusts herself off and carries on, singing, ‘Guess I’ll just try to continue as Amery…’ Referring to herself in the third person adds to the strange dreamy sense of isolation surrounding the song’s protagonist, while also making it feel personal and real. Listening to this song is like having a big ol’ consolatory hug from yer best pal. See? Things ain’t so bad! Amery Sandford has taken the lonely, lost AOR loserscapes imagined into life on early Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti releases and fleshed them out, given them form, populating her song-stories with characters marooned in small towns and suburbia who dream endlessly of lost crushes and escape.

If you’re in the market for some old school late-summer Pop that makes ya wanna crush an empty beer can with yr bare fist and wear a denim cut-off, hear songs you’ll never stop humming, then Continue as Amery will transport you to a late-nite parallel Party On mall-world where tomorrow is always another day and there’s a neon rainbow waiting for you at the top of the food court escalator.

READERS LETTERS

Always great to hear from my old pal, musician-artist-animator-educator and all-round Good Bloke, Matt Bower aka Wizards tell Lies, who mailed to say: “The bird incident reminded me instantly of Kurt Vonnegut's bird poop quote: "What's the white stuff in bird poop? That's bird poop too." 

LOL! I did not know Vonnegut had said this, Matt! He added, “I always remembered there being a Vonnegut pencilled illustration next to that line in one of his books. I feel like I misremembered it though.” Matt reckons this might be in Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus (which I don’t have a copy of either) - I couldn’t find anything online or a copy in our local library or Waterstones. A Vonnegut seagull poop themed illo definitely feels like the sort of thing this newsletter was always meant to cover. I’ll hand this over to you eagle-eyed readers to see if any of you can shed light on this affair. A special Humane Debris No-Poop Prize to the first person to give me the skinny on this drawing.

Matt’s mail also name-checked a handful of his fave 90s / OG Shoegaze and Shoegaze-adjacent groups n tracks incl ‘Gravity’ from the First EP by Moonshake which he beautifully describes as “a folky swirl of tremolo and distortion”. I’d never heard of Moonshake (presumably named after the Can track?), so Matt’s comment immediately sent me off time-travellin’ back to 1991 on a listening mission. Crikey, Matt’s right: that’s some serious tremolo on the track! Also likin’ that odd pitched-up to-and-fro loop that underpins the track, only finally revealing itself at the end. He also got me wondering if Folkgaze was a thing. And apparently it is. More on that next time round, maybe.

Thanks to Mark aka Meemo Boots (hope I read / spelled that right!) for writing me an honest-to-gosh hand-written letter. Crikey, just imagine if people started writing to one another again! (It’s just a shame that the Royal Mail is owned by International Distribution Services PLC who took £12,679 million in revenue in the last financial year, but are arguing that a “one price goes anywhere” postal service to any address, 6 days a week, is not financially sustainable) Weirdly, I just recently read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 whose plot circles around a paranoid postal services conspiracy involving so-called government monopolies and the Thurn & Taxis family. Maybe we need an anarchist postal co-op that uses mysterious black-masked riders and courier-pigeon familiars.

Anyway, Mark wrote to me using purple ink! And now I feel like one of the Bronte Sisters getting a missive from afar (Mark’s also in Yorkshire, coincidentally!) or part of some secret occult / horror mail.lit writers group. Mark kindly included copies of his Blank Signpost zine with the letter:

I dig the grainy b&w post-xerox aesthetic (interspersed with bursts of felt-tip colour cartoons and oblique prosetry); weirdly, they arrived the day after I’d watched a documentary about the use of shadow and liminal lighting in Japanese architecture and domestic aesthetics. Now, the two things are forever entwined in me brane. Mark is also embedded in this lot, who also have links to my pal, Robert Ridley-Shackleton, who popped up in earlier issue-episodes. I’m lovin’ how this newsletterzine is slowly unravelling network-knots of people, places and things just like the bewildered protagonist of Lot 49.

CHILL WITH KIKI

Make sure you catch the last of the Summer sun if yr able. Top up those Vitamin D levels. Try and shut yr eyes for a few minutes and let the world slide past. Better days are coming soon, I promise.