NEWD

A creative supplement to Bare Essentials: The Best of Nude Magazine

Editors: Suzy Prince & Ian Lowey DESIGN & Art DirectION: Oswin Tickler oswin@smallfury.com Val Palmer v.palmer@csm.arts.ac.uk FEATURED Designers: Helen Ingham Just turn the handle.

Will Quirk & Will Biggs The art of noise.

Fernando Rodrigues & Lauren Pires Stitch this: The rise of indie crafting.

Henry Griffin & Rachel Sale The mischevious art of Jim Flora.

Fran Mullin & Marie Poumeyrol Journey to the end of the night: A personal excursion through noir writing.

Val Palmer & Oswin Tickler Front/rear cover. Cold Fish, Babylon by the sea: A postcard from Coney Island.

Nude’s association with Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design began in the winter of 2005, when we were invited to give a presentation on the magazine as part of a two-day design conference at the Cochrane Theatre, organised by lecturer, Ken Hollings (whose 2007 article for Nude on Coney Island can be found on page 15).

Suzy and I opened proceedings at 10.00 am on the first day of the event and, not ever having given a formal presentation of any description and feeling daunted at the prospect of giving a talk to a theatre full of students, we had tried to ease our nerves by reassuring each other that if our own university experiences were anything to go by, most students would still be laying in bed at such an early hour. However, as we shuffled on stage to face a full house, we immediately recognised that we’d grossly underestimated the conscientiousness of the modern student. Still, there’s nothing like being thrown in at the deep end!

In retrospect, it might perhaps be considered a little odd for us to have been giving such a presentation to design students. Particularly as, at the time, Nude was a decidedly non-designed magazine. However, given that former Sex Pistol, Glen Matlock, was also participating in the same event, being interviewed that afternoon by illustrator and designer, Paul Burgess, we figured that the idea was to present Nude as a magazine which, in spite of its rudimentary design, had something valid to contribute editorially – in much the same way that punk rock had allowed many to make themselves heard without first needing to spend years in their bedrooms finessing musical technique.

HI-ARTZ PRESS The Hi-Artz Press is an independent print studio founded by Helen Ingham, specialising in letterpress and lino-cut printing. Helen, who interned at Nashville’s Hatch Showprint, is both a Central Saint Martins’ graduate/lecturer and a dedicated letterpress obsessive.

She is a collector of vintage type, print blocks and machinery – a selfconfessed ‘lead-ite’. Helen has been at the forefront of the letterpress renaissance over recent years, it’s re-appraisal spawning a host of surface imitators, whom she refers to as the ‘latterpress’ movement. Although her technology is rooted in the past, Helen’s work continues to evolve, with her affectionate and humorous focus fixed firmly on the idiosyncrasies of our everyday culture.

Nevertheless, as well as being open and receptive, the audience at the Cochrane Theatre that morning was also a tough one, with a number of students gasping their astonishment at our woeful lack of knowledge about fonts and grids etc. But the simple fact is that both Suzy and myself came to Nude from editorial backgrounds, and really hadn’t given too much thought to the importance of design as a component of a magazine. Consequently, whilst we sincerely hoped that those in attendance gained something from our appearance at the conference, we certainly left the event with much to think about in terms of the look and layout of Nude. And with the timely assistance of a friend who was seeking to move from the editorial to the design side of magazine publishing, Nude, from the very next issue onwards began to take on a much more designed appearance.

www.hi-artz.co.uk

Yet, whilst we have certainly become much more adept over subsequent issues in ordering visual and written information in far more engaging page layouts, we are still very much writers and editors rather than designers and our lack of formal design training no doubt remains obvious to the informed eye.

However, it was perhaps the distinctly non-designed nature of the early issues of Nude that prompted Val Palmer, a Senior Lecturer at CSM, to approach us with a view to having students and fellow lecturer Oswin Tickler, collaborate with us on designing a number of page layouts.

After an extended period of gestation and some funding from the CSM Research Office, this has finally come to fruition in truly impressive fashion in the shape of Newd, which forms an essential part of our retrospective, Bare Essentials: The Best of Nude Magazine (2003 – 11).

Indeed, for us, viewing the work that the students have produced for Newd, it is especially gratifying to see some of the written articles from those early editions of the magazine republished within the kind of strikingly dynamic, eye-catching visual context that they always merited. So thanks all involved at CSM for that.

Ian Lowey Co-editor – Nude Magazine

This heartfelt celebration of the joys of home-taping is a slightly amended version of the original article that was published in issue 7 of Nude (Winter 2005).

Since then, of course, the cassette tape has been rendered even more obsolete with the advent of the iPod and similar such ‘portable media players’.

Oh, well…

As a teenage boy, I often spent time hanging out with mates in bedrooms listening to music, comparing acne and rating the desirability of female schoolfriends on a scale of one-to-ten. The usual sort of stuff. And it was during one such occasion, round at a friend’s house, that I discovered something in his Woolworth’s-bought cassette storage carousel which has stayed with me ever since: a home-recorded tape with the words ‘Metal Mayhem’ scribbled down the spine in blue biro.

Fancying myself as something of an arbiter of taste when it came to music, my first instinct was to ridicule it. After all, as far as I was concerned, though a case could potentially have been made for the enterprise had it been comprised of classic Black Sabbath and some of the more credible exponents of the new wave of British heavy metal, this was largely histrionic cock-rock workouts produced by long-haired men in Spandex.

Thankfully, I’ve had two-anda-half decades to get over my affront at what I then perceived as a contemptible musical crime and generally I like to think that I’m now far more accepting of other

people’s tastes – or at least better able to keep my opinions to myself.

Consequently, the memory of this otherwise unremarkable incident serves me less as a reason to feel superior than as the first time I can recall anyone having made a mix tape.

Recording stuff from the weekly Top-40 run-down with a microphone pointed at the radio was one thing, but compiling all of your favourite tracks on to one killer tape was quite another. And thinking back, I can only assume that the reason I’d never made a mix tape myself was that I hadn’t owned the requisite equipment. And so, as soon as I was able to afford even a less-thandecent stereo system, I made sure I bought one with twin cassette decks.

After which I immediately set about compiling numerous mix tapes, both for myself and for friends (and received not nearly enough in return).

Now, inspired by the books Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture (Universe/ 2004) edited

by Thurston Moore and the more recent, The Boombox Project: The Machines, the Music and the Urban Underground (Abrams/ 2010) by photographer Lyle Owerko, I felt it was time to pay tribute to my old mate and to anyone else for that matter, who has ever gone to the considerable effort of laying down a bunch of tracks on a C90 and christened the resultant mix something endearingly dumb such as the aforementioned ‘Metal Mayhem’ or ‘Funk ‘n’ Disco Megamix II’ (a homemade mix tape I recently picked up in a charity shop).

Both books, in their own ways, serve as loving celebrations of the mix tape as forms of homespun folk art. And whilst, as you might expect, The Boombox Project serves to fetishise the ghetto-blaster and highlight its role in the development of Electro and Hip Hop, Mix Tape features anecdotal stories and the cover artwork and track listings of tape comps compiled by and for American alt.culture luminaries such as Glen E. Friedman, Naomi Yang (Galaxie 500), Jim O’Rourke and Richard Kern.

The trouble is, that such affectionate celebrations of particular strands of popular culture all-toooften also serve as their epitaph.

And with the advent firstly of the burnable CD followed by the MP3, the creation of mix tapes has effectively become a lost art.

But whilst this is not intended as some kind of impotent rant at the irresistible rise of new technology, I can’t help feeling that in our eagerness to embrace digital formats, we’ve lost something a little special along the way in the form of the cassette tape. After all, it was the cassette player which first liberated recorded music from the static confines of the home or discoteque and turned it into the portable commodity we now take for granted.

And to judge by how often both cassettes and boomboxes appear on T-shirts, purses and other items of hipster apparel, it’s clear that this all-but-obsolete music delivery system continues to hold a special place in the affections of many a music lover.

Towards the end of the Eighties, I was involved in the UK hardcore scene. This was a genre that relied on communication between bands and individuals that shared left-wing views (you know; don’t eat meat, don’t buy BASF, in fact, don’t have any fun whatsoever), but holding the whole thing together was something even more radical – the humble blank tape.

Remember, this was way before file-sharing, downloading and so on; and just like a Ronco compilation album, this music was not available in the shops, so the only way you could hear it was through some kind soul sending you a tape through the wondrous Royal Mail.

Certainly, in terms of mixtaping, running to a full hour-anda-half, the C90 presents by far the most generous canvas on which to create your sonic masterpiece.

By comparison, you can only record up to 70-minutes of sound on a burnable CD. As such, those extra 20 minutes go a long way in allowing you to craft a musical mix which in your mind (if not on your actual tape), should begin with the muchsampled words, ‘This is a journey into sound…’

As anyone who has ever made one knows, a good mix tape is so much more than just the laying down of a random selection of tunes. Compilations may have narrowly-defined themes, such as B-sides, cover versions or even artists beginning with a specific letter of the alphabet. One of my all-time favourites was a tape called Godawful, which was put together by a friend and which consisted of American Christian recordings from the 1950s and 60s, and which incorporated the spoken word parable of a young boy who, as punishment for taking the Lord’s name in vain, is forced to inflict corporal punishment upon his father!

But for me, the secret of a good mix tape lies in the unlikely juxtaposition of different musical sources and genres into a coherent and truly unique whole which embodies a certain logic – if only to your own ears. Ultimately, the mix tape becomes something more than just the sum of its component parts and as such, marks the point at which you become not just a mere consumer of popular culture, but a creator of it.

Unfortunately, as we all know, the corporate record industry has long taken a dim view, and an often heavy-handed approach, to such forms of creativity. Indeed, long before it became obsessed with online file-sharing, the BPI would insist on alienating the record-buying public by printing the message ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ on the inside sleeves of albums and insist that radio DJs deliberately ruin their audiences’ enjoyment of a record by talking over the beginning and end of it, as a spoiler tactic designed to deter home-tapers. The record industry’s simplistic rationale was that every record taped equated to one lost sale. But this, of course, could only be the rationale of be-suited beancounters. Sure, some people may have taped Top-40 records off the radio, but most of these wouldn’t have cared enough to have gone out and bought the singles anyway.

For most music-lovers, however, given that there was always far more good stuff out there than most could possibly have afforded to buy, home-taping represented an effective way of keeping abreast of the mass of releases and making informed choices about what one wanted to hear more of. Consequently, for me as for many people, tape compilations have down the years opened up hitherto unexplored musical vistas and inspired me to go out and buy LPs and singles by the likes of Mazzy Star, the Electric Prunes, Moldy Peaches, Ladytron and Lee Scratch Perry to name but a few.

However, in most cases, mix tapes exist as far more than mere product samplers, having been

Due to the nature of the music, you could easily fit an entire band’s output on to one side of an SA90. The first tape I ever received was from a fellow named, Danny, who was living in the vast metropolis that is London – his address seemed glamorous and exciting at the time – although I have subsequently learned that Finsbury Park is a bit of a letdown. The tape features Los Microwaves’ ‘Time to Get Up’, Simpletones’ ‘I Like Drugs’, CH3’s ‘You Make Me Feel Cheap’ plus tracks by TSOL, Stark Raving Mad, 7 Seconds, Bad Brains and many more. It was almost a Now That’s What I Call Underground US Harcore Vol 1, and at a stroke it expanded my knowledge of this weird (at the time) music and gave me some much-needed cred as I walked the mean streets of Ashton-inMakerfield.

One of the most legendary tapes to do the rounds in 1983/4 was the classic Siege demo. This US band were faster, more aggressive and simply way ahead of any UK

specifically created with a generosity of spirit to share with (or impose upon) others on dull motorway journeys or long-haul flights, or as gifts for boyfriends/ girlfriends (the unspoken message being, ‘hey, I’m pretty cool: stick with me’).

And to this end, there can be no truer nor personalised gift of music than that compiled by yourself.

For in the words of Thurston Moore, ‘Trying to control sharing through music is like trying to control an affair of the heart – nothing will stop it.’ Ryan Crabbe

punk plodders. And without this simple cassette, Napalm Death, Carcass and many others would have sounded completely different – so you could make a strong case that it changed the sound of mainstream metal too.

Siege was never released by any label: it thrived on word of mouth alone, and by the time you got hold of a copy, it was several generations removed from the original recording and sounded even more distorted, angry and insane than it already was.

Try to achieve that trick with digital – no chance! Analogue allowed you to push the VUs way into the red without such unholy drags as ‘clipping’ ruining your apocalyptic fun.

The siege demo was eventually released a few years ago on CD. It’s still a fantastic piece of Boston-based HC, but to my ears it sounded weak and not nearly as exciting as the fifth generation overloaded version that had done the rounds in the UK for years.

Jamie Owen

A review

Cold fish

by Steve Sparshott

steve@sparshott.org http://readgetwellsoon.com Shamoto is the unassuming owner of an unassuming tropical fish shop in an unnamed town. One night he is called to a supermarket where his daughter Mitsuko has been caught shoplifting. In a meeting with the furious store manager, a power structure is clearly established, as Shamoto and wife Taeko bow deferentially and the manager threatens to call the police.

Then Murata steps in. Larger than life and clearly sketchy as fuck, Ferrari-driving ‘Uncle Yukio’ is the proprietor of tropical fish megaplex Amazon Gold. He quickly persuades the store manager to let Mitsuko off, leaving Shamoto and Taeko in his debt – he pretty much owns Shamoto-san and his family before the film’s title even appears. So when he starts to make Shamoto offers – the first of which is to take Mitsuko on as an employee at Amazon Gold – Shamoto is literally unable to refuse.

As Murata quickly worms his way into the lives of Shamoto and his family, it soon becomes clear that he didn’t get where he is today by adhering to the rule book. Uncle Yukio and his wife Aiko like to get into bed with people (financially, literally, or both) – then kill them, for both pleasure and profit, and dispose of the bodies (“make them invisible”). The extremely unwilling Shamoto is forcibly drawn into their schemes, lying to the victims’ relatives and the police, and helping with the body-disposal ritual while aware that he may well be the next victim.

He’s not so much their dogsbody as their dog, and as they abuse him verbally, psychologically and physically it’s inevitable that he’ll eventually snap. When he does – spectacularly – the blood, guts and body parts go off the scale. Based loosely on truth, Cold Fish’s story has a strong Sweeney Todd/Delicatessen Grand Guignol flavour, but the way it’s told is grounded firmly in reality. And although the invisibling technique does involve soy sauce, there’s no actual cannibalism. Yukio and Aiko are fine additions to cinema’s extensive collection of murderous couples, and they make the young punks of Badlands and Natural Born Killers look like rank amateurs.

Cold Fish is a relentless sequence of scenarios in which everyone – even the mild-mannered Shamoto – treats everyone else like shit. But its vicious misanthropy is wrapped around a very strong, dark comic core, and the violence and resulting gore are both impressively realistic and gleefully over the top.

Its runtime of almost two-and-a-half hours is excessive; an inexplicable longeur in which we’re shown the body disposal ritual for a second time could have been reduced to a few choice cuts. Otherwise, though, the film cracks along, steadily ramping up the unpleasantness in a hugely enjoyable fashion.

Directed by Sion Shono with uniformly excellent performances and cinematography, Cold Fish is another Far East winner brought to you by Adam Torel’s Third Window Films. Let’s be clear:

This is not a nice film about nice people, but it’s terrific fun. www.thirdwindowfilms.com

The British Condition, middle class guilt, anxiety, awkwardness, imperfection, ugliness, fallibility, nostalgia, the liberal left, cynicism, perversity, quaintness and hypocrisy run as themes throughout much of Oswin’s work. He mixes national and global issues with semiautobiographical situations and experiences, further emphasising the inward looking navel-gazing selfimportance for which the British are notorious.

Alongside Smallfury, Oswin is a design lecturer and suffers from an obsession with vernacular lettering and pictographic signage. www.smallfury.com

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This article was originally published in Nude, issue 6 (Spring 2005) to coincide with the publication of the book, The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora by Irwin Chusid (Fantagraphics). Since then, Chusid has compiled two further collections of Flora’s work in the form of The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora (Fantagraphics/ 2007) and The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora (Fantagraphics/ 2009).

His artwork may have adorned numerous LP covers in the pre-Rock ’n’ Roll era, but there was certainly nothing square about the syncopated design of Jim Flora: a man who has had a profound influence on a whole host of contemporary illustrators.

I wish I could claim that I first discovered Jim Flora’s unrestrained, angular illustration quite by chance: that whilst digging through a stack of old vinyl at a boot sale early one sunny morn’, I came across something called Redskin Romp by Charlie Barnet and his Orchestra sandwiched between albums by Peters and Lee and Acker Bilk, and fell immediately in love with the cover, caring not a jot about the vinyl inside. And that, after my epiphany, I made it my mission to track down more artwork by the man whose signature appeared on the sleeve in tiny letters close to the foot of a trumpettotin’ injun. For that’s kind of how it happened for the likes of illustrators Shag and Tim Biskup, and the graphic designer Melinda Beck.

Of course, these are all American and it’s quite probable that Flora-decorated RCA Victor and Columbia Records platters by the likes of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Sauter-Finegan and Lord Buckley never made it over to our shores in sufficient numbers to subsequently become the cultural detritus of a bygone age, to be sifted through at boot sales.

Consequently, I have to confess that I originally happened upon the work of Jim Flora in the pages of a book called In the Groove: Vintage Record Graphics, 1940–1960 by Eric Kohler (Chronicle).

And since that eye-opening encounter, I’ve seen the playfully grotesque spirit of Jim Flora manifest itself not only in the creations of the aforementioned Shag, Biskup and Beck, but also in those of Gary Baseman, J. Otto Seibold and a whole host of other ace contemporary illustrators.

Yet, in spite of this, Flora who passed away in 1998, remains an obscure figure. Hopefully though, a new book, The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora will go some way in introducing Flora’s ‘syncopated designs’ to a wider public.

The book is the fruit of what was clearly a labour of love on behalf of the music historian, Irwin Chusid, himself a kind of one-man cultural salvage merchant who has rescued numerous forgotten treasures from the scrapheap of time in order to introduce them to new and appreciative audiences (producing CD reissues of the ‘space-age bachelor pad’ music of Esquivel, the quirky cartoonish compositions of Raymond Scott and the refreshingly naïve-sounding children’s orchestra of the Langley Schools Project, to name but a few).

The book features interviews with Flora himself as well as appreciation pieces penned by those who have known and been inspired by him – all of which paint a picture of a warm-spirited, cat-loving jazz aficionado who was both surprised and flattered to have been rediscovered by a new generation of artists and illustrators so late in his life. But ultimately, it’s the work itself that really counts, and it’s reproduced in this large-format tome in generous proportions.

Happily though, Flora moved on to become, amongst other things, an illustrator and writer of children’s books.

However, his work wasn’t all playful frivolity. While still at college in 1938, Flora hooked up with a wild-eyed protobeat writer, Robert Lowry, to form the Little Man Press. Here he produced woodcut illustrations, which were often quite dark in tone, to accompany Lowry’s fevered short stories. Lowry eventually became a critically acclaimed writer who was lauded by no less a man than Ernest Hemingway. However, he was subsequently diagnosed as schizophrenic and sectioned, eventually dying broke and lonely. But then, that’s a whole other story…

Like Miro, Picasso and Kandinski reinvented for a party-loving, post-war generation of ‘hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin’ daddies’, it’s not too fanciful to imagine that words like ‘screwball’ and ‘zany’ could have been conceived principally to describe Flora’s colourful, kaleidoscopic output long before they were misappropriated by the likes of Jerry Lewis and our own hairy cornflake Dave Lee Travis.

Flora seems to have benefited immensely from the artistic freedom which came with his being there at what was effectively the birth of the illustrated record sleeve at the beginning of the 1940s. ‘I got away with murder didn’t I?’ was his own summation of the situation.

Of course, it didn’t last. The coming of Elvis Presley et al marked a major shift whereby records could be sold in part on the strength of the artist’s sex appeal; moody photo portraits were in — doodles most definitely out.

A follow-up article chronicling the troubled and chaotic life of Jim Flora’s one-time cohort, Robert Lowry, was published in Nude, issue 9.

From Derek Raymond to Ken Bruen via Jim Thompson, James Ellroy, David Peace and Patrick Hamilton, the UK’s first lady of noir fiction, Cathi Unsworth, details the writers and novels which have inspired and influenced her own writing.

Saucer-eyed, with a black beret clamped firmly over his head, he beckoned to me from a Soho pub one rainy afternoon in 1993. As I went to shake his hand, memories of a dead girl swirled around my head: Dora Suarez, black-haired and beautiful, butchered brutally in an icecold Kensington flat just as she was trying to make her peace with the world. ‘All I know about Suarez was that it devastated me to write it,’ said Derek Raymond in that distinctive voice he’s described as resembling an iron parrot.

‘I don’t know whether I controlled it as well as I should have done. But as soon as I wrote it, I couldn’t bear to go over it again. I couldn’t face any more.’ He was well known to the rest of the reprobates in London’s most celebrated watering hole as Robin Cook, the son of the wealthy textile magnate who had turned his back on the upper class to pursue a life of crime in the Soho streets around us. His early books, the 1960s success de scandals, The Crust on its Uppers and Private Parts in a Public Place, dealt in detail with his loathing of the English class system and all its hypocrisy.

Years after, one scam too many to safely stay in London, Robin was exiled in France’s Massif Centrale, working as a labourer in his own vineyard. When one of his neighbours pointed out that, that was how he looked set to end his days, Robin pulled on his beret, turned once more to those distant London streets and was born again as Derek Raymond.

The ‘Factory’ series of books that he began in the late eighties, and which inevitably led him back to the saloons of Soho, stand as a benchmark in modern crime fiction.

Brimming with violence and disgust, laced with an in-depth knowledge of the street and fired with a fervent compassion for the fate of the victim, they turned the cosy, crossword puzzle confines of the traditional potboiler on their head.

He Died With His Eyes Open, The Devil’s Home on Leave, How the Dead Live, I Was Dora Suarez, Dead Man Upright and Not Till the Red Fog Rises comprised a body of work that asked all the really hard questions. Why are we here?

What is the point of all this suffering? Beneath the civilised veneer of our society, why do we continue to be so brutal?

Narrated by a nameless Detective Sergeant, the Factory novels stalk the bleakest corners of a vividly-rendered London ‘scoured by vile psychic weather’. An ex-army psycho chops up and boils his victims, leaving them all neatly stapled up in Speaking the same plastic bags. language as Raymond A broken ex-BBC and Thompson, writer drinks with his Patrick Hamilton lover who is plotting knew better than to kill him with the most, the dark help of a maniacal corners of the mummy’s boy. unhinged mind.

And poor Dora invites her own doom over the threshold and into her bed.

After I entered Derek Raymond’s universe, nothing would ever be the same again. He opened a door into a different world and I willingly followed him down there. Twelve years later, I have written my own first novel, The Not Knowing, where my own black-haired heroine walks the same London streets, unwittingly encouraging a familiar type of damaged man to follow her.

Dora Suarez opened up the possibilities of what the crime novel could be to me. As I searched around for more books to stoke the fires of possibility it sparked in my head, I soon came to realise Derek Raymond’s voice, though marginalised and misunderstood, was not a lone howl in the wilderness.

His own favourite noir author had been drinking at the same bar since the Peace riffed his own late Forties. Jim childhood nightmares Thompson, born of a very real above a prison cell bogeyman into four in 1906, spent his novels that sought life wrestling with retribution for alcoholism and West Yorkshire’s forcing out through unquiet dead. his typewriter, desperate visions of men in a similar predicament. Bungling, criminal amateurs, hotel clerks, wildcat oilmen, grifters, drifters and sinister sheriffs – all riddled with diseased obsessions, all spiralling towards the Hell of their own making, helped along the way by ruthless, venal women.

He then took a job on the West Texas oilfields, where he began his first serious writing amongst the hobos and roughnecks in the shadows of the wells. He rode the hard rails of the depression, drifting through the South in search of work and, while he did so, Thompson learned his territory inside out. Which is why, I think, Jim Thompson deserves the accolade for the greatest noir novel of all.

They were all strands of Jim’s own, cold, hard life. Thompson’s father, Big Jim, was the sheriff of Caddo County, Oklahoma, a place described at the turn of the last century as ‘the last refuge of cattle thieves, gunfighters and train robbers’.

Big Jim’s exploits in those wild times, the ruin he brought upon himself by gambling and drinking, the many desertions his family endured and his pitiful end inside an old people’s home inspired his writer son’s devastating prose.

Once you know you are inside the mind of a psycho, how long will you stay there? This book perfectly encapsulates the banality of evil that the true noir writer strives hardest to convey. And I found another master of the art back in pre and post-war England, circling the prostitutes in Piccadilly and haunting the pleasure palaces of Brighton.

Speaking the same language as Raymond and Thompson, Patrick Hamilton knew better than most, the dark corners of the unhinged mind.

Most of his childhood was spent in Nebraska, where Big Jim would dump his brood while he was on the run, and West Texas, where he would reappear, prospecting for oil and hoping for the big time. These locations provided all of the settings for Thompson’s later novels, along with the fuel of Oedipal rage. Jim was taking care of his family from the age of 15, working long, exhausting hours as a bellboy at the Hotel Texas, an experience that spawned three novels, A Swell-Looking Babe, Wild Town and Texas By The Tail.

The job also served as his baptism in booze: Jim turned to whiskey to get him through the nine-hours-a-night, sevennights-a-week routine.

Although he is more famous for those works that ended up on the big screen, The Getaway and The Grifters, Jim’s masterpiece was his 1952 tale of a hokey, West Texan deputy sheriff called Lou Ford. The Killer Inside Me lures the unwitting reader in like a newborn. Ford’s corny commentary about his day-to-day run-ins with the folks of his parish invites you to empathise, while at the same time, suggesting that you patronise this obviously not-too-well intellectuallyendowed lawman. Then, just when you think you have his measure, Ford drops his bombshell. He is a ruthless, sadistic killer and his girlfriend, Amy Stanton, is next in his firing line.

Like our other two men at the bar, Hamilton was an alcoholic who struggled with the legacy of his cruel and distant father, and set out his stall under the comforting glow of the optics; where better to observe the theatre of lowlife. He had their eye for the minutiae of the murderous mind; the crushing callousness of the pub bore. Many of his most awful characters are familiars of his father, who was described by the biographer, Michael Holroyd, as ‘a comedian equipped with a monocle but no sense of humour: a chameleon-like figure given to self-dramatisation, who nevertheless drank to be rid of himself’.In his centenary year, Hamilton has at last been resurrected, with a poignant BBC dramatisation of his devastatingly autobiographical between-the-Wars

his blockbuster noirs succeeded so spectacularly was the tidal waves of personal weirdness he brought to them.

The story is well known by now: the unsolved murder of his mother when he was ten and the substitute fantasy of saving Elizabeth Short – Hollyweird’s most spectacular homicide – that fuelled his breakthrough book, The Black Dahlia. The years as a teenage panty-sniffer, stalking rich girls in Hancock Speaking the same Park, wigging out language as Raymond on asthma inhalers and Thompson, and Jack Webb’s Patrick Hamilton book The Badge, knew better than transmogrified most, the dark over a further three corners of the novels that skewed unhinged mind. his own madness into the twisted heart of Fofties and Fifties America: The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz. His ambitions to seize the next two decades realised so far in American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. But his most affecting work is his most personal: the reinvestigation of the death of his mother, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy: the haunted requiem My Dark Places.

the only survivor precisely because he was a writer.

He had written himself out of Hell yet he carried not a shred of personal darkness around with him. It all went into his books instead, books which have only become greater and greater with the creation of his Jack Taylor character, an ex-Guard turned alcoholic private eye, trying and not always succeeding in putting together fractured lives in Bruen’s native Galway through the pages of The Guards, The Killing of Tinkers, The Magdalene Martyrs and The Dramatist.

But it was Ken himself, not his books, which was the trigger for The Not Knowing.‘You’ve met all of your literary heroes now,’ he pointed out in September 2001. ‘Now you have to write your own book.’How could I let my mentors down?

My journey to the end of the night was only possible because of the kindness of two men who wrote the darkest books imaginable, Derek Raymond and Ken Bruen. Both of them are not just literary heroes to me but proof of the ultimate aim of the noir novel: that those who confront their darkness

Although Ellroy failed to bring the killer to justice, he managed to bring his mother back into the light, mercilessly re-examining his own life and weaving in the complimentary story of retired cop Bill Stoner, who crossed the author over into his own personal séance for brutalised, unavenged women.

It was for precisely these reasons that the work of David Peace affected me so deeply. Brought up in Ossett, in the season of the Ripper, Peace riffed his own childhood nightmares of a very real bogeyman into four novels that sought retribution for West Yorkshire’s it all unquiet dead. Using Ellroy’s ‘LA Quartet’ in Cinemascope: as his starting point and Raymond’s Dora Big Bad America; Suarez as his soundtrack, Peace aimed his The ‘Gorse Trilogy’follows the downwards Hollyweird fire not just Peter Sutcliffe but at the inept, trajectory of an upwardly-mobile young Hardboiled;the institutionally sexist and racist police force sadist. We meet Ernest Ralph Gorse as mafia in Camelot; that allowed him to stay at large for so long. a junior De Sade in 1951’s The West dark dreams Pier, where he idly bullies his school in Disneyland.

While writing my own novel, I read Peace’s chums and stalks his first victim, the ‘Red Riding’ quartet – 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983 – over naïve Esther Downes, through the glamorous facades of the and over again. This was the psychically disturbed Britain Brighton seafront. Having delivered her of all her money and I wanted most to tap into, the lost voices crying like static in dreams, he reappears three years later in Mr Stimpson and the atmosphere, the dread, the fear, the non-stop nightmare Mr Gorse, playing more advanced confidence tricks on a rain. But the man who really helped me pick my path through Hyacinth Bucket-esque matron. the portal Derek Raymond had opened, was Ken Bruen. I met him in June 2000, in another boozer that at the time was a His mania burns itself to a crescendo in 1955’s Unknown meeting point for old and lost souls, the Station Tavern near Assailant, where he vents his increasing insanity on the unfortunate Barton family – meek barmaid Ivy and her vain, Latimer Road, London. The novels I had read by him at that preening father, an undisguised portrait of Bernard Hamilton point had set my mind on fire: Rilke on Black, The Hackman Blues, Her Last Call to Louis MacNeice, A White Arrest and painted in vicious strokes of loathing. As Gorse perfects his Taming the Alien. dark arts, his mind becomes steadily more unhinged, his brutal, misogynist appetites even harder to contain.

They described a South London alive with the everyday clash of cultures – killer beggars, psycho-arsonist drug dealers, I have met a few Gorses in my time and Hamilton has him poetry-declaiming gangsters and cops who made all of the down to perfection. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about former look pretty. Bruen was as deep and as endlessly the Gorse Trilogy is that it mirrors Hamilton’s own descent thought-provoking as his beautifully fluid prose, which he from hopeful Brighton beginnings to nihilistically bleak coda summed up for me perfectly that day:‘I like to have a chorus on Worthing seafront. That ‘cross between Bertie Wooster and of street people as a background, that’s the way I see it in Satan’ that he describes is most probably the author himself. my head,’ he considered, in a Galway accent far removed from the iron parrot’s squawk, ‘from the Big Issue sellers, It is to the author who describes himself, in staccato be-bop people begging for money, the down-and-outs. I never have slang as the ‘Demon Dog’ that I must turn next. LA native, any trouble drawing on people.’ Ken’s gentle demeanour and James Ellroy, lured not just my mind away from the narrow the genuine warmth that radiated out from him were all the confines of the saloon but turned on a whole generation to more astonishing when I later discovered that he had seen the possibilities of the crime novel as devastating social more darkness in his life than many people could survive. history. Ellroy saw it all in Cinemascope: Big Bad America; Arrested in Brazil in his early twenties for being in the wrong Hollyweird hardboiled; the Mafia in Camelot; dark dreams bar at the wrong time, he was brutally raped and tortured by in Disneyland – and he saw his way through to writing it his police captors. His friends who were arrested with him all up over six novels that no crime writer can deny are the have all since killed themselves or disappeared. Ken was apex of 20th Century hardboiled fiction. Yet the reason that trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. But my own favourite is often reviled by Hamilton enthusiasts as the work of a middle-aged man now diseased by drink and disappointment. Perhaps it is because it demonstrates all-too clearly, Hamilton’s own darkest Ellroy saw places.

head-on become incredibly illuminated. Raymond always reckoned the Bible was the first ever noir, so to explain what he means by this I will leave the last words to Luke 12:3: ‘Whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light.’ Cathi Unsworth, Winter 2005

This article was originally published in issue 7 of Nude (Winter 2005), to coincide with the publication of Cathi Unsworth’s debut novel, The Not Knowing. Since then, she has had two further novels published, The Singer (2008) and Bad Penny Blues (2009), and has edited the short story anthology, London Noir: Capital Crime Fiction. She is currently working on a new novel, called Weirdo, which will be available in early 2012. She has also penned subsequent articles for Nude, on writer and musician, Lydia Lunch (issue 10) and David Peace (issue 12).

Since this article was originally published in Nude 10, spring 2007, the developers have moved in and Coney Island as we knew it has officially closed. No doubt it will re-emerge as a shiny upmarket marina, with all the offending health and safety issues nicely ticked off. Meanwhile, Ruby’s Old Time Bar and Grill is still in business, despite eviction orders.

Get there while you can.

Babylon by the

A postc

...the police came by regularly at dawn to clear the corpses off the beach...

The subway still follows the old rail tracks down to the ocean. Whole families pack themselves into the trains, loaded down with beer coolers and beach blankets, their kids racing up and down the carriages. Coney Island is all about the crowd: mass transport meeting mass entertainment. After 9/11, this whole route was lined with thousands of American flags.

With a $1.5 billion redevelopment threatening to turn Coney Island into a cross between Las Vegas and Disneyland, Ken Hollings visits this former ‘poor man’s paradise’ in search of freaks, geeks, tattoos, hotdogs, rollercoasters and an all round brash charm that is soon to be consigned to past.

Sunday morning in Brooklyn towards the end of July, and the temperature is already climbing into the high Fahrenheits. Across the East River, Manhattan is a sweltering mass of steel and glass. ‘What you wanna do today?’

I’m staying with filmmaker Mark Boswell and his wife Susanne, on a flying visit to New York to interview the dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham, but that isn’t until tomorrow. In the meantime Mark has come across an item in a local listings magazine.

Ruby’s Old Time Bar and Grill, established more than thirty years ago by Rubin Jacobs on Coney Island’s majestic Boardwalk, is facing an uncertain future.

Occupying cavernous premises that formerly belonged to the National Hebrew Deli back in 1934 and boasting a 45-foot mahogany counter, Ruby’s may soon be making way for a new community centre. Every day could be its last. ‘If I get a call to show up for work,’ an unidentified barman is quoted as saying, ‘that means we’re still open.’ ‘They’re starting to re-develop that whole area,’ comments Susanne.

‘Pretty soon the old Coney Island will be a thing of the past.’ ‘We should go take a look before it’s all gone,’ Mark adds.

Known to the Canarsie Indians as the ‘Place Without Shadows’, Coney Island has always been a thing of the past, artificially kept and artfully maintained for over 250 years.

Originally a windswept peninsula stretching itself out along the Atlantic Ocean, it became cut off from the incipient borough of Brooklyn by a manmade canal in 1750, only to be joined back to the mainland again by an equally manmade bridge in 1823.

The railroad brought the first crowds straight to the seafront in 1865, their numbers only increasing with the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, making the beach at Coney Island one of the most densely populated places on earth during the summer months. And on a day like today the whole five boroughs are going to be there. ‘It’ll be thug heaven,’ says Mark.

The first thing that hits you off the train is the smell of fried food and salt, amplified in the summer heat. This is where the public first came to have its intelligence underestimated.

Writing in August 1905, campaigning journalist Lindsay Denison denounced Coney Island as the ‘concentrated sublimation of all the mean, petty, degrading swindles which depraved ingenuity has ever devised to prey upon humanity’. Two years later socialist author Maxim Gorky dismissed it as a ‘cheap, hastily-constructed toyhouse for the amusement of children’. That was back in the glory days when Steeplechase Park, Lunar Park and Dreamland dominated the seafront, offering every type of amusement known to man, and the police came by regularly at dawn to clear the corpses off the beach.

This was Atlantis Risen, Babylon by the Sea. ‘Every defaulting cashier, every eloping couple, every man or woman harbouring suicidal intent,’ according to Mr Denison, came flocking here to lose themselves in the crowds.

Today the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone and a no longer functioning Parachute Drop preside over a dense labyrinth of wire fences, walkways and fairground attractions. Most of the prizes on offer take the form of Bart Simpson dolls, Nemos or Hello Kittys hanging in identical rows, cloned in colours that look almost right but are absolutely wrong. Mark shoots a couple of hoops at one attraction, winning a teddy bear tricked out like a clown in red, white and blue frills.

Susanne’s delighted. The bear seems pleased too.

Out by the shimmering ocean, a giant plastic daisy sprays laughing children with fresh water.

We decide to go to Nathan’s instead. The hot dog was invented here on Coney Island back in 1871, but Nathan’s made it famous. Established in 1916, its slogan, emblazoned in green and yellow over the serving hatch, echoes the whole spirit of the place: ‘Follow The Crowd’.

e sea

card from Coney Island The Boardwalk itself is a vast human highway, packed with people. You can also see why it conjures up visions of dreamlike desolation.

Who’d want to be alone here, among the T-shirts, tattoos and taffee pulls? Ruby’s is at number 1213. A woman with a chain mail gauntlet is shucking oysters at an aluminium sink by the entrance. Inside, the mahogany counter seems to go on forever, receding into the dark interior where a family dressed in urban camouflage fatigues lounges on a battered sectional sofa. A busboy glides through the gloom wearing nothing but a sailor’s cap and a pair of khaki cut-offs: he’s thin enough to be the Human Skeleton in a circus sideshow.

We grab three stools at the bar and order some beers. Mark starts feeding quarters into the Wurlitzer. We won’t be going anywhere for a while. The old guy on the next stool down grins at us over the top of his draught Budweiser. He’s suntanned the same deep brown as the counter, wears a red T-shirt and has a noticeable squint.

In the right light he could be square-jawed actor Dick Miller’s younger brother. Mark nods at him. ‘Tastes good doesn’t it?’ he says. ‘Tastes better when you’re supposed to be working,’ the man replies. ‘Yeah? What do you do?’ The old guy squints and smiles again. ‘Safety guard on one of the rides,’ he announces proudly. Susanne leans in towards her husband as the old guy gets up to leave. ‘Did he happen to say which one?’ she asks. Mark gives a little shrug. Frank Sinatra’s ‘Summer Wind’ comes on the jukebox.

There’s a picture of Jackie Gleason and Bob Hope in drag on the wall directly opposite us.

‘We’re not going on any of rides now, are we?’

Susanne says. ‘Hell no.’

We order a couple of classics, a chilidog and a portion of fries, cover them in ketchup squirted from heavy-duty chrome dispensers and then grab a table strewn with bright yellow napkins in their outdoor seating area. Across from us a tour guide in a captain’s hat and a Hawaiian shirt is trying to persuade a couple of tourists to try a pizza restaurant on Neptune Avenue. ‘They serve the best slice in the world,’ he says. He carries a burlap shopping bag with ‘Home of the Tailless Monkey’ printed on it.

There’s still time for a game of racquetball on the beach, but first we check out the Coney Island Circus Sideshow, where you can buy beers and watch Madame Twisto contort herself inside a box of knives, Insectivora climbing a ladder of swords and the Goddess of Gasoline doing her fire-eating act. She keeps her fuel in a small hip flask and gives the audience a ladylike wink before taking another swig. It’s just too much fun. Next thing any of us know, the sun is beginning to set behind the creaking frame of the Cyclone, one of the world’s oldest surviving wooden roller coasters, and there’s an old woman singing ‘Hello Dolly’ in Russian to a backing tape on the Boardwalk. Time to head home before we decide to stay here forever.

Ken Hollings, 2007