The Indian Rope Trick

Considering the phenomenon of the disappearing writer from Poe to Saint-Exupéry via Rimbaud over on 3:AM Magazine




"At the heart of every writer lies a paradox. Whereas the other art-forms (music, theatre and film in particular) have a natural communal element, writing necessitates a monkish solitude but also a desperate clawing desire for recognition. The turbulence between these two states is the stuff that can make or break a person. Added to this are life’s natural disasters and the neuroses/bohemianism of creative types which have blazed a trail of glory and destruction from John Clare through Sylvia Plath and d.a. levy to David Foster Wallace. Whereas every successful writer’s path is more or less the same, every doomed one has a unique tale to tell..."

Plus there's a short piece on the decline of the modern love song and a celebration of the late great Arab Strap on Friday I'm In Love

"Since the heyday of Motown and Brill Building, the conventional love song has been in terminal decline, ending its days senile, piss-stained and pleasuring itself in that circle of Dante’s Hell known as the Tesco music aisle. Attention must turn leftfield then, to those who address affairs of the heart from a more discerning angle, with a hint of surrealism or debauchery or the gutter. The great love songs of our age have been a diverse fare; Nick Cave bashing a muse’s skull in by a river, Tom Waits singing sea shanties to hookers, Kate Bush hunted by wolves and Leonard Cohen receiving head in the Chelsea hotel. It’s found in the sordid and haunting affairs of Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Mark Lanegan and Smog. It can have a backdrop of Stalinism (Bowie’s ‘Heroes’), depression (Tindersticks’ ‘Travelling Light’), narcotics (Spiritualized’s ‘I Think I’m in Love’), the loneliness of telecommunications maintenance workers (Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’), paedophilia (Gainsbourg’s ‘Ballade de Melody Nelson’), sadomasochism (the Velvets’ ‘Venus in Furs’) or even the holocaust (Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘In an Aeroplane over the Sea’).

There were few finer practitioners of the dark arts of the soul than Falkirk’s finest Arab Strap; named appropriately and romantically enough after a cock ring. And ‘The Shy Retirer’ is arguably their finest moment, a lament and celebration of a fleeting moment when boy meets girl in nightclub, both off their faces on disco biscuits. A doomed moment of letting go and transcending all the shite of the everyday even if it is a temporary or illusionary reprieve, “Another bloated disco, another sniff of romance I’ll forget / we promised to ourselves before we came out we’d do something we regret / these people are your friends / this cunted circus never ends / I won’t remember anything you say.”