life

The Arena of the Unwell

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Well, it was only a matter of time. Illness has descended – I’ve been feeling rough for the past week and having difficulty sleeping, but this morning I woke up with an upset stomach at 2.30am and knew I wasn’t getting back to sleep. As a result, I found myself watching this weeks episode of Heroes (nothing worth getting excited about), this week’s episode of Chuck (only the second episode I’ve watched so far of the second season, and it doesn’t look like I’ve missed anything), and I also finally got back to watching Season 1 of Rome (which was as impressive as ever – and it was also the episode with the Gladiator combat, which was brilliantly done and one of the most genuinely gory things I’ve seen in a while – HBO shows always push the boat out when they do that kind of thing). I’ve taken it easy today, and am starting to feel better – I did also manage to get most of the work I needed to complete done, and am currently bouncing between exhausted and perky. I’m going to stay up as late as I can, simply because I’d like to have something resembling a decent’s nights sleep. Only time will tell, of course…

As a brief addendum, I’ve now added to my collection of Fake Album Covers (and may be doing some more once I get some of my current work out of the way) – only four new ones, but I’m rather proud of them, especially oddball Euro-folk album ‘Nobody Listens’ by Karl-Friedrich Muller (for which I went as far as creating an entire tracklisting, most of which still makes me titter to think about – everything from ‘Loneliness and Antlers’ to ‘Kill Me for a Biscuit’. If you want a look, you’ll find them here.

Dig Your Own Hole

/ saxonbullock2000 / 3 Comments

Updates aren’t very frequent, mainly because the Uber-Ultra-Secret Project is currently eating my life. I don’t know if it’s the lack of anything major to distract me (both in a positive and a negative way) or if it’s simply that I’m becoming obsessed, but it’s certainly getting very difficult to not work on it. I’m feeling the need to write as a compulsion which, to be honest, kind of new for me – I’m usually exceptionally good at finding excuses not to, but at the moment I can barely be stopped. I’ve got some proofreading coming up this week, which is going to help take my mind off things for a while (structure is sometimes very, very useful), and I’ve worked out that with all the money I’ve got coming in, I can currently survive up until the beginning of July – admittedly, that’s on a damnably tight budget and not really having anything that closely resembles a ‘life’, but it’s also meaning I can do things like my work on the Secret Project, and that I’m not going to have to go and get a horrible day job quite yet (My fingers are remaining crossed that this doesn’t end…). So for now, this is me- poised at my keyboard, and typing like the very forces of hell are right behind me.

On a musical note, I’ve actually been able to pick up a stack of CDs in the last month or so for extremely equitable prices (the highest price I paid for any of them was £3) – I’ve notched up Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys (which is possibly a little too retro for my tastes), Neon Bible by Arcade Fire (big, epic, passionate and doomy, it’s widescreen rock that’s a long way from the kind of middle-of-the-road nonsense that currently pollutes the airwaves), Ta-Dah by Scissor Sisters (which I think has to be officially labelled as a disappointment – I love their first album, but this is very samey, and I’ve yet to make it all the way through without getting bored), Pretty Odd by Panic at the Disco (exceeedingly Beatles-esque and very good fun, but it’s not quite varied enough to work as a Sgt. Pepper take-off – once I get beyond the halfway point, all the songs start sounding the same), The Black Parade is Dead! by My Chemical Romance (A Live album which is pretty good, and I’m developing a bizarre soft spot for MCR, slightly helped by the fact that the comic book MCR frontman Gerard Way is writing – The Umbrella Academy – is damn good stuff), Dig Your Own Hole by The Chemical Brothers – (A massive, huge electro album that’s epic enough to excuse the couple of tracks that are really just burbly filler – climactic track ‘The Private Psychedelic Reel’ is like a galaxy-warping cross between ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ by the Beatles and the ‘Through the Stargate’ sequence from 2001: A Space Oddyssey), Greatest Hits Volume 2 by Madonna (Nowhere near as good as The Immaculate Collection – also covers a much smaller time and shows that between Vogue and the ‘Ray of Light’ album, she really didn’t do much of note. It was £1.50, that’s my excuse…), Speakerboxxx/The Love Below by Outkast (an absurdly sprawling double album that’s far too long and simultaneously shows everything that’s both right and wrong with US hip hop/R+B – the comedy interludes get wearing, and there’s a bit too much jazz noodling on The Love Below, but there’s also some genuinely brilliant stuff here, and Speakerboxxx is a fantastically listenable rap album crammed to bursting with hooks. I liked this a lot more than I expected, and if they’d sliced it down to one album it would be downright amazing), and Parade by Prince and the Revolution (An album that has the bad luck to be the ‘soundtrack’ to Prince’s bloody awful movie Under The Cherry Moon – especially annoying since it’s an absolutely brilliant album, showcasing exactly how good a musician Prince was back in his mid-Eighties glory days (and, I would say, how much better he was with decent collaborators. Things weren’t quite the same once Wendy & Lisa jumped ship and the ‘Revolution’ ended).It’s the kind of album that runs the gamut of almost every available style, and among the camp funk and gorgeous pop (this is the album where you’ll find ‘Kiss’), there’s also ‘Sometimes It Snows In April’, an absolute heartbreaker of a ballad that once again persuades me that melancholy strikes a strong chord with me at the moment…). I think that’ll be enough to occupy me for a while…

The kind of girl you read about in New Wave magazines…

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Time for a brief update – with the small proviso that I’m very, very tired right now. It’s been another one of those weeks when lots of reviews come in at the same time, and I end up breathing a sigh of relief that I’m not trying to fit a day job around these antics. Work is always good, and this week has been an enjoyable one, with plenty to do. I’ve also had… well, I’ve had some news that means I have a new project. And I can’t say what it is. Or what it’s for. All I will say is that it’s going to be occupying me for at least the next month, and it’s going to be a massive amount of work. And it might be good news. But then again, it might not. Either way, if I don’t update much over the next few weeks, that’ll be the reason why.

I’ve also been writing like crazy, although that might be reducing slightly thanks to the Uber-Ultra-Secret Project. I don’t want to lose my 750-a-day quota (although the aforementioned project will be helping), and I’m getting the feeling that it might be wise to give myself a day off fairly soon. An actual, not-doing-anything day off. Only problem is, there’s an awful lot to do on the U.U.S.P., and it’s becoming a bit of a compulsion. However, I may have to be strict with myself, as energy is going to be vital at various points over the next few weeks. Plus, I’ve got proofreading happening in a week’s time. Plenty to do. And not much time to do it.

One advantage of being busy? I barely noticed that this was the first Valentine’s Day in a very long time that I’ve spent single. There’ll be a few landmarks like this that will hit me like a ton of bricks, I’m sure – but this one didn’t even dent me. I think that’s what we’ll be calling ‘progress’ – at least, for this week…

Who On Earth Is Saxon Bullock? (A Re-introduction)

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Hi There! Thanks for popping by. I may have missed the new year by a considerable margin, but there are a few new people on my friends list (and who knows who may be randomly dropping by), so I thought it was probably the right time to say a proper hello. Consider this the blog equivalent of those TV episodes where an officious villain/authority figure turns up and demands to know what’s been going on, thus meaning a convenient explanation of the show’s setup for any viewers who may have missed the first ten episodes. I did this kind of thing last year, and I figure it’s a sensible thing to every so often let people know who I am, and exactly what this blog is about.

So… hello.

My name is Saxon Bullock (a gift of nomenclature that means I regularly get people staring blankly at me and saying “Is that really your name?!?” It’s a question that usually makes me wonder exactly who would want to pretend that their name is Saxon Bullock?). I’m a 34 year old freelance writer and proofreader who’s been writing for a variety of magazines and websites for just over eight years. I’m currently based in Manchester in the UK, I’m a regular contributor to SFX magazine, up until recently I’ve been reviewing for Channel4.Com/film, and I’ve made my first steps into the world of writing novels, with my first book – a fast-paced, comic-strip sci-fi romp entitled The Hypernova Gambit – which is finished, and currently being looked at by various publishers.

This blog goes through different phases- sometimes it charts the ups and downs of my life, sometimes it’s an outlet for my writing worries, and (at least fairly regularly) it’s where I gabble on at length about SF and Fantasy TV. I’ve been fascinated by long-form storytelling from a very early age (mainly as a result of growing up with the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who), so I always find watching TV an educational experience, even if it’s only trying to work out why a particular show doesn’t work. Most of my TV related talk comes under the heading of “TV EYE”, while I’ll often blog about films, books, comics, and anything else that comes to mind.

Essentially, I just wanted to say a big hello, and that any comments, greetings, or random comments would be very gratefully accepted. Please feel free to introduce yourself- and hopefully there’ll be something happening around her fairly soon that might actually make you want to stick around…

Pleased to meet you. How’s it going?

P.S.: For anyone who’d like to know more about me, here’s a lengthy selection of facts, truths and outright oddities about me, culled from a meme that’s been spreading like wildfire on Facebook – 25 Random Things that you may (or may not) want to know about me…

I was born in a cross-fire hurricane…

Photos and Snow Days

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Sometimes, it’s all about timing. When I went down to Cornwall, I knew I was intending to meet up with Tris, and that we’d been planning to do a truly epic photo-shoot. I also knew that it was happening right at the beginning of February, and Cornwall is hardly a place where you can be guaranteed decent weather at the best of times. When I got down to Cornwall, it was lashing it down with rain. It then continued to be pretty damn unpleasent for several days, and I crossed my fingers, hoping against hope that Monday the 2nd would be okay, that we’d at least be able to get some shots done.

As it turns out, we got a window. I woke up on Monday to find blazing blue skies, and barely a cloud to be seen. We’d already sorted an 8.30am start (we really weren’t messing around), and proceeded to voyage across various areas of Cornwall, from St. Austell to Truro to Redruth to Portreath, taking an absurd number of photos along the way and having a ridiculous amount of fun. And yes, there were a few flakes of snow along the way, but thankfully they didn’t last long. At least, that was the case until about 3.30 pm, when we were taking some shots in and around Portreath Harbour. There was a light dusting of flakes happening, we were up by an old Watch-Hut at the end of the Harbour, we were just talking about heading back to Tris’ place for a while – and then we blinked, and suddenly we’d gone from a light dusting to a full on blizzard. In Portreath. This kind of weather happens very rarely in Cornwall, and it just kept on going – we retreated giggling to the car, and were amazed by how deep it was getting by the time we got to Tris’s abode. By the time we’d decided that our hopes of getting out again for some landscape light-painting shots, it was so deep that we had to call up my Dad and ask him to pick me up in the car-park of Camborne Tescos, as there was no way Tris’ non-4×4 car was going to get up or down the hills near where he lived while still remaining in one piece. During the icy walk to Tesco, I had what would have been a very nasty fall in the snow if I hadn’t been carrying a large and thankfully rather shock-absorbent rucksack on my back, and the whole thing was rather surreal, with nearly two inches of snow having arrived in an absurdly short amount of time. An odd end to a fantastic day – it was simply wonderful to hang out with Tris again. We’ve had our ups and downs over the years, but I’m exceptionally glad to have him as a friend, and that we can still snap back into our familiar patterns of bizarre humour, while he’s also turned out to be a rather fine photographer – you can check out his Flickr photo stream here, including some pictures from the shoot. In total, we took nearly 500 shots, resulting in a 4 GB DVD rom almost completely full of photos of me. Gulp…

Of course, the snow also filled me with general fears that my flight would be massively delayed – but as it turned out, after plenty of suspense and some unhelpful calls to a customer information line, the actual flight went pretty damn smoothly. I had a 90 minute delay at Bristol, and that was that. My sojourn in Cornwall was over, after having had a lovely and very relaxing time, and I’ve spent the last couple of days getting back into the swing of things. Getting up at 6am this morning didn’t exactly help me with some of my recent sleep problems, but it did mean that I got heaps done today, and I’ve also recommenced my determination to keep writing. I am, however, way too tired at the moment to make too much sense. Some more in-depth analysis soon, once I’ve got my current burst of proofreading out of the way…

Distant Lights

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It’s bleak and blustery outside, with wind and rain and brooding grey skies – in short, typical Cornish weather. My journey down here was transformed into a bit of a saga thanks to some serious fog at Manchester Airport- resulting in a near-three-hour delay on the flight, which took a certain amount away from the ‘hey, air travel is just as much as the train, and a lot quicker!’ It was my first time doing it this way, though, and the actual journey part (once we got off the ground, and past the interminable waiting) was over ridiculously quickly, which was something of a relief, since I was (a) rather emotionally fragile and (b) running on only three hours of sleep. Since arriving, I’ve been realising exactly how tired I am – a combination of hard work and bad sleep has left me very fatigued, and a certain proportion of the holiday is simply going to be me, staring off into the distance, enjoying the simple act of not doing anything.

I’m also slowly getting to a more philosophical place relating to my current life situation. There’s been plenty of time to think about it, combined with a couple of things happening which I’m going to draw a discrete veil over, but I’m starting to feel like I really don’t want to be angry about this anymore, and that I’m looking forward to a point where the bruises will go down, and I’ll be able to think about the good stuff without it hurting quite so much. I’m surviving, I’m coping, and I’m aiming towards the future in a number of intriguing directions, and that’s something I’m fairly happy with right now. I’ve got four-and-a-half more days down here (including meeting up with Tris on Monday, which looks to be (weather permitting) a seriously fun bit of adventure), and I’m going to do my best to enjoy them.

One Thing Leads To Another

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…aaaand we’re back.

Things have been somewhat quiet here of late, and – in a break with the tradition of the last twelve months – it’s not because I’ve been spending most of my time curled up in a tiny ball weeping, or howling in despair at the sky like a very low-rent King Lear. Instead, it’s been mainly the fact that I’ve actually been pretty damn busy – one of my main projects has been a pretty drastic overhaul of the website (which isn’t finished as yet – there are still some tweaks to do), and I’ve also been writing. Actual, genuine, no-holds barred writing. I’ve notched up over 20,000 words since January 1st, and (without giving away too much) I’ve got a schedule I’m trying to stick to, and am succeeding so far. We’ll see how it goes. More than anything else, the last week or so has been one of the first points in a while where I’ve actually felt like I’m doing the right thing and going in the right direction. Doubt, fear and other negative emotions have been fairly regular bedfellows for me (for somewhat obvious reasons), but I now feel like whatever I’ve been through (and whatever I’m going to go through – I’m aware of the fact that this emotional rollercoaster ain’t over yet), I’m going to be alright in the end. It’s something I haven’t felt for a while, and am rather glad to be feeling now.

The work helps – I’ve had a selection of things to do over the past two weeks, and have actually had that familiar ‘Not quite enough time in the day’ feeling beloved of freelancers, which means that no matter how hard it may be to keep things going (and how infrequently it may arrive), you’ve gotta be doing something right.

So things are okay. Yes, there’s room for improvement – but now, I feel like at least there’s potential for improvement as well. Plus, I’m off on holiday to Cornwall in a couple of days, which promises to be a much-needed fix of countryside and quiet. And I’m generally hoping that this positivity vibe doesn’t simply turn out to be the hush before the metaphorical custard pie that’s been hurled in my direction finally hits…

Free For All

/ saxonbullock2000 / 5 Comments

I don’t normally comment when famous people die – it is an odd moment, when someone who seems like part of the furniture is suddenly no longer there, or when someone who seems utterly guaranteed to have a long and prosperous career is abruptly gone – but I just found out that Patrick McGoohan has passed away, aged 80, and I’ve simply got to say something.

The Prisoner had a gigantic effect on me. It first entered my life when I was around six or seven – the series was being repeated on ITV at some absurd time like 10am on a Sunday morning, and I can remember being both utterly terrified and entranced by it. It was particularly the appearence of Rover that burned into my brain, with the first sequence in ‘Arrival’ where Rover appears and smothers the one Village member who runs in fear being a standout. I can remember ‘Arrival’, I can remember the end of ‘Living in Harmony’, where the Western backdrop falls away and Number 6 realises exactly what’s going on, and – although it took me watching it again nearly ten years later to realise it – I also remembered the utterly crazed final episode ‘Fall Out’. It stayed with me, and I was always aware of it, but it wasn’t until my teens, around the age of 16 and 17, that I finally tried to catch up with The Prisoner, and found myself gripped by one of my occasional crazes. It’s an amazing show – both fascinating and deliberately obtuse, crammed full of weird symbolism and bizarre self-indulgence along with moments of absolute genius. Just getting to grips with the levels that the show was prepared to work on was a major task, and McGoohan’s portrayal of Number 6 was part of that – sharp, charismatic, and steely, along with enough of an edge to make you suspect (as anyone who reads about the background of the show will discover), that McGoohan could be an absolute bastard to work with when he wanted to. But, it’s one of those rare occasions (the only other one I can think of right now is Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor) when an actor’s performance and identity expands outwards to almost become bigger than the show.

Much of what was great about the show was thanks to McGoohan, and much of what was head-scratching, peculiar or just plain daft was down to him as well. It’s not 17 episodes of perfection – there are ups and downs – and yet, there’s so much to discover in there, and compared to most of its contemporaries, it’s like a transmission from a strange, Kafka-esque alternate universe. My passion for the show may have cooled a little from its teenage peak, but my love of the show’s sheer experimentalism and the way it expanded my horizons hasn’t. It’s still a formative experience, part of the architecture of my mind, and always will be, and despite McGoohan’s refusal to talk much about the show in his later years (you can probably count his interviews on the fingers of one hand), I think he knew that it was what he was going to be remembered for. Like many demented artists, he had a glorious peak that he then found difficult to top, retreating to L.A. and doing plenty of work, but nothing that ever seemed to come close to the strange motherlode he tapped with The Prisoner. I can’t help wishing that his last cinematic appearences of any note were in better films (A Time To Kill and The Phantom, for heaven’s sake), but he lived to a healthy age, had more of an influence than he ever expected, and his characterisation of Number 6 will always be one of my televisual heroes. And, in my head, he’ll always be sat at the wheel of that Lotus 7 racecar, on his way to deliver that resignation and kick off the whole quest towards discovering who Number 1 really is.

R.I.P, Mr McGoohan.

The Heart of Saturday Night

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The first full week of 2009 has been somewhat odd and intense for me. After the intial pleasentness of New Year’s Day passed, all the slightly less pleasent aspects of starting a new year in my current situation started rearing their ugly head, and by the beginning of the week, I was skewing back into a very familiar feeling of depression. Events weren’t helped by the simple fact that the first week back is always going to be slow, that I’m a freelancer who’s in the middle of attempting a fairly major career change (along with all the other changes I’m having to cope with), and that no matter how bad or good I’m feeling, there is something inherently dispiriting about sending out lots of stuff and hardly getting any replies. I have, at least, got a healthy chunk of work coming up at the end of January, but that was matched by learning that one of my few review outlets is changing hands, and likely scaling back any potential for further reviews. To be honest, I knew that kind of thing was going to be thin thanks to my Manchester-based life, but it is somewhat as if the door has slammed behind me, and I’ve now got to make this work. Combine this with the general atmosphere of random despair you can get from even a glance at the headlines, and it’s easy to not exactly feel tickitiboo right now.

However, from Tuesday onwards I bounced back – since then, I have been occupying myself with a combination of getting some writing done and a heavy redesign of my website, and it’s been going pretty well. The writing is part of an ongoing quest to get myself doing a certain amount every week, and the website is a combination of getting the ‘work’ section of my site correct, and redesigning it so that it does its job better and attracts search engine hits more. I’ve been doing this thanks to plenty of advice from my Web-design-savvy friend Tris, and it is turning into a somewhat massive job – I’m essentially rebuilding the whole site from the ground up, and throwing a serious amount of new content on there as well (including a gigantic collection of reviews). Once it’s done, I’m hoping that it will help – and, to be honest, it’s helping to have something to do right now. I’d far rather be spending my time doing stuff that’s going to help in the long term, then simply be panicking and running around like a headless chicken, which is often my default situation when I don’t have much work on (another reason for questing for more proofreading – the structure of it does me an awful lot of good). I spent yesterday on a mission to get my hair cut and buy a new coat – and, amazingly, was successful on both counts, while this morning I went shopping, and was happy to find that my rough target for spending and my estimate of what my trolley of goods would add up to was almost exactly the final total on the receipt. This afternoon, I’ve been finishing off a project, and tonight I’ll be relaxing with pizza and a movie (probably a second watch of the wondrous WALL-E), as it’s back to the grindstone tomorrow, with a review to finish, podcasts to listen to, and more work to do on the website than is comfortable. All in all, however, 2009 is off to a fairly good start.

Endless Endless

/ saxonbullock2000 / 1 Comment

I saw this a little while back, and now that someone on my friendslist has posted it, I’ve watched it again and it’s still four minutes that’s truly breathtaking. Something calm, relaxing and kinda transcendental for New Year’s Eve (and please, expand it to full screen- it’s something that needs to be seen as big as possible):

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

I really haven’t had an especially good 2008. Here’s hoping that 2009 is better. Whoever and wherever you are, have a fantastic and very happy new year.

See you the other side of the new year divide…