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Today’s column comes to you late for a number of reasons. First, there were email troubles and I spent a season of my life in two separate chats with two very helpful tech warlocks for two totally different companies in order to re-right the electronic ship. This involved much wrangling of MX codes and other assorted DNS bullshit and I would be a happy man were I to never set foot in those sticky halls ever again. Incongruities now being rectified, I shall hopefully never have to. Secondly, yesterday was a day of much rejoicing in our household and also a day on which I personally did weigh the passage of time, what with those monsters being a whole thirty years old? Christ. Let us dive in and we can be out of here and back to Kanto in no time and all shall be copacetic.

Cometh the hour, cometh the ‘mons! Of course 27.02 came and went and so wrapped up were we in festivities that in the end, I gave up any designs on wrapping this whole thing before bed and instead retired to a dark corner of Viridian forest with my bugs. I picked the tiny one up shortly before six and we headed straight home via the dumpling place, thereby enacting a super effective Pokémon/Chinese combo, straight out of the ‘Winning At Fatherhood 101’ playbook. Understand, I wasn’t entirely certain if she was totally physically ready to be the main pilot on this flight but here we are, setting out into the known unknowns with her at the joy-cons and daddy as an assist for walls of text.

To sit with her as she made her first, baby steps on this journey, into this world was…choice, to put it mildly

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I really have kept it to the knuckle today. This is partially because I was informed by more than one person that I went overlong on Saturday but also for some other unknown reason. I have been utilising tools that I had not understood were being discussed and termed as ADHD distraction / victory tactics, whereby when your spicy brain rails against unloading the dish washer, you go and empty the litter tray instead. This avoidance feels like a victory and also has the added bonus of being really damn productive. The logical extrapolation of this of course then offers one the opportunity to unload the dish washer as opposed to hoovering the lounge that is now covered in extraneous litter. I’m attempting to dual wield this weapon alongside a Just Do One Thing mantra. It might even be working.

They’re actually gonna do it. I mean, I don’t think anyone thought for a moment that we lived in a world where they wouldn’t because money as per but yeah…it’s happening. I only ever experienced these gen one games when they were not red and green but red and blue and/or yellow and/or ‘Let’s Go’ and the catching/nix battle system in those latter, more recent games did not grab me. While there seemed little to figuratively grab, the way my brain works prevented me from walking away from doing the thing they want you to do when it would be a sensible time to do so. I got stuck and I walked away and go I did not.

Of course because of the way that time works and the way in which I have personally fallen through it in a very physical sense, I originally experienced Pokemon Blue and Yellow on the OG Greyboy, hence I never got to see any actual colours and it wasn’t until a whole age of this world later that I even got to see them on an legitimate Gameboy Colour (eternal props to Canterbury’s legendary Level Up Games) and never these vivid iterations on the Gameboy Advance because by that point I was briefly over it. All of which is to say that they have me now and I am cranked up to the nines on Kanto’s finest.

I’d happily negotiate a deal whereby I give them whatever they damn well please in return

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It is true that we skipped Tuesday this week. I may also have skipped Sunday and Monday and while Wednesday did happen in the end, the pox held both offspring and myself in its thrall for a deathly span. I spent much of my time inside the dying hole working via home, from whence I could broadcast from a predominantly horizontal configuration. While we did not perform the ritual here, any real or imagined efforts to bring an end to our bloody embrace were but a pyrrhic victory, for I have endeavoured elsewhere to bring about a new era of noise and/or alchemy and I present the following, such as it is, as penance for my absence.

The TNA store front is risen and the tee is back! I have had some comments that the featured rendition of Lemmy Cat is, if anything, too laid back but he’s evidently living his best life in this depiction and who am I to stop him? The accompanying advice is, I think, sound advice and that which I give my daughter daily on the drive to the place wot teaches you things. You can’t go wrong and if you do, I can be sure you were really listening. For those of you whom are truly far too cool for school and always have been, there’s a notebook for your “very important” and not at all compromising notes, as well as a mug shaped receptacle complete with fair warning.

If the most exciting thing about all of this was the fact that the shirt comes in either white or black, I could go and lie my weary body down but it can’t be because this is. I have long been of the opinion that whatever differences any one person might have from another person; be they predicated on racial difference, cultural difference, religious difference, sexual preference, gender, taste in music or daytime television, whatever…these are either reasons to celebrate the proverbial spice of life or they are nonsense divisions, devised to divide us.

that much talked about One Percent are screwing the rest of us here on Earth six ways from Sunday

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I came to the beginning at the end but this time I did it to be absolutely certain, Dear Reader, that I wouldn’t be lying to you. I’ve kept it…more succinct for today and shan’t keep you from your très romantique endeavours overly long. I myself have a stupidly optimal Daddy/Daughter date to make and she will not be kept waiting. While I shall not expatiate here, the issue of timekeeping did come up this week and I decided to take my own sweet time to gather my thoughts on the subject before attempting to explain the importance of and nuances therein.

Time keeping is important because time is all any of us really have. One should not assume that one’s own time is more valuable than anyone else’s and while, yes, if you are “important” enough, people will wait for you, this should not be a given or taken for granted and doing so certainly does not make one a better person. It is beholden of us to respect the time of other people as we would respect their existence, as we would expect them to respect our own. That said: Everyone and I do mean everyone is five minutes late some days and everyone has had days where it is necessary to wait or work a little longer in order to make things happen for other people. Knowing this, understanding this and being understanding of other people when they and/or yourself are in this position, absolutely does aid in making you a better person and it’s within your power to choose that reality and that version of yourself on the daily…

So yeah. It finally happened. We are signed. The Heat Inc. have signed. We have signed with Republic Of Music and Album II (as it shall be known for just a little while longer yet) shall be with you…sooner than you or I might have thought. Well, I expect the singles shall at any rate. As for the wax itself…this year, he said, with some confidence. I include here, for your convenience, a little artwork in progress and please believe me when I say that I’m pushing my luck in doing so…

It’s a pretty poorly kept secret that this second record was actually recorded not that long after we released the first, ‘Asleep In The Ejector Seat’ back in (checks) the latter portion of 2023 and the master has been in the can for a good while after that now. I shall go so far as to say that we are very happy with it, enough so as to spend a good couple of years hunting for the right deal to bring it to your hands and ears. I think it deserves this much and I am incredibly grateful to my brothers Incorporated: V, Rigot, and Marco himself. Without you and your belief, your passion and dogged determination, none of this would have happened the way it is now happening and I would not have it any other way. You are all the band I needed, even if I haven’t always deserved it. I see ya.

we look forward to working with them in the extremely near future to bring you Rock ’n’ Roll as intended

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I was contemplating on keeping today’s column relatively to the point but I always set out to be brief and I usually get sidetracked along the way. We’ll see how it goes but there are a number of reasons why I’m considering this, chief among them being Time. There is a whole slew of admin mulch that needs to get done this week/month pertaining to social media and portfolio stuff and betwixt that, the band, and togging stuff in order to feed the child, I’m not sure when exactly I might find time to breathe. And if I’m totally honest, I have become quite partial to that particular activity. Breathing, that is.

We recently shifted publication days from Mondays to Tuesdays…last week I think, primarily so as to allow for a little more headroom but now I’m eyeballing this Thursday post and considering its longevity. I would have quality over quantity any day and I posit that neither shall happen if I become any further out and/or burned. If I recall correctly, the original incarnation of this thing eventually levelled out as a two-posts-a-week type thing and if this iteration ends up being a version that occurs on Tuesdays and Saturdays? I could make peace with that.

Speaking of The Column That Was, I came upon this very shortly after the first wave of The Apocalypse and never found a chance to talk about it. ‘Hot Damn!’ by Chloe Sells is the book about the cabin that belonged to the guy by the girl who was his go-to and it’s every bit as beatnik ramshackle as that sounds. I have a feeling it ended up getting optioned during cut-up sessions for Album II and that’s about as far as it went at the time. I’ll mea culpa to being a total dilettante with literature that comes across my desk at times but please understand, that we are talking about volume and bandwidth and the period in which I came into possession of this particular copy was that period and that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

there’s an equal dose of material that makes me pretty sure about where he would have stood

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If you aren’t familiar with, nor can you decrypt the exact parameters that might define a Fuggler or delineate it from a Labubu, then I cannot help you. It is simultaneously true that you are safe and I am in fact the one that requires saving. The former of these lifeforms are breeding like quintuply cursed rabbids ‘round our house at present and the situation feels increasingly untethered from any kind of controlled descent into The Chaotic Realms. I can’t even blame it on a usual suspect either because I am entirely to blame and I was totally blindsided by the insane dental factor, specifically where it intersects with the fluff factor. If they weren’t such…unique beauties, they might even be cute and the reverse is a balanced hypothesis.

People talk a lot (and for good reason) about the big changes that sobriety can bring to a person’s life and they’re not wrong. It can change your life and life can be pretty damn good on the daily. Understand me: I’m not saying that sobriety itself is easy. Not in a hundred-thousand years. Sobriety can be hard, really hard and it requires being ready or becoming ready for a change but as an old friend of mine is wont to say, we find our own level and we choose our own hard. What can be easy, is making the decision that this is something one might want for themselves but I don’t think it’s necessarily for the big reasons that you might do it or see apparent in your life, particularly in the all-important immediate reality of a person who may or may not be an addict or have an addictive personality.

It’s in the little things, those little luxuries that suddenly aren’t affordable when you have a monkey on your back

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This week has either been relentless or my spirit begins to weaken. It could be a combination of the two. Rest was an absent friend last week and I fear I may be burned at both ends and in this analogy I may be the candle or a film strip suffering from freak dual exposure. As is often the case in the life of a person who has made making things (often intangible things) their pleasure and their business, it’s either the dearthful, barren in-between lands wherein nothing is happening or it’s everything everywhere all at once.

For no healthy reason, the deliberate optioning of “down-time” in whichever of these two, utterly discrete situations one might find themselves feels like anathema to the creative self. It feels sinful and full of sin. The directly apposite opposite of the axiom may in fact be true then, that for the wicked there is too much, nay an abundance of rest. I need to lie down in a dark room and not talk to anyone for a minute.

If you’re reading this as it goes live there is a solid chance that we are in the studio and indeed in the midst of February’s FOTO FOLIO. These workshops initially came about because because neither me nor my camera particularly like the rain and October through April is generally cursed with regards to photo walks in the out of doors. Actually, I say that my camera dislikes getting wet but in actuality it’s most likely weather sealed. I however, am not and that would be my point if it had not already been made by The Schneider. Whatever. A wet model hiding under an umbrella is a very specific shot and not necessarily the stuff afternoons are made of, hence we decided to move the party indoors during the late autumn/winter/spring months.

they provide incredible value for an afternoon that tends to be as instructive as it is productive

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Yes, yes, yes, I’ve taken a brief haitus but I am very much still here and working my way back to you…I think! I do plan on posting again in the near future and these new posts shall all (for the most part) be FREE for all, at least for the first month or so before they shall then go to the archive where they may be read in their entirity at any time by paying subscribers.

If you enjoy any of this stuff - the writing, the records, the photography (or even simply catching a father totally making it all up as he goes along) it would mean a very real great deal to me personally if you might invite a friend or two to subscribe and read with us! It costs nothing whatsoever and needless to say, if you refer friends there are indeed benefits...

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Thank you for helping spread the word & stay noisy.

JD out.

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We had to forego our morning cuddles and a story in the big bed yesterday and I was at pains to do so. It’s not very often that I skip a Sunday with her and for good reason. Those slow starts, those quiet times together while the world just breathes are part of the fabric of life and to squander them would be a sin, if such a thing exists. That said, I had good enough reason to need to be elsewhere. Understand that I would have taken her with me but due to other birthday celebrations elsewhere, she would have had scant suitable company with whom to spend the body of an afternoon, despite how much I think we might have enjoyed the journey together.

Hence I placed her in the care of The Mothership for the day, albeit with a dispatch of sourdough bread, ripe avocado and some strawberries for a semi-bougie breakfast. She did insist that I kept some of the punnet of strawberries and became upset when I tried to give her all of them to take with her. Apparently Daddy should also have strawberries to enjoy when we cannot be together for whatever stupid reason. This child.

It was the ragù that was promised and more. Having made the trip out to foggy West London for Mr. Simoncelli’s birthday celebrations, we were spoiled with an afternoon of fine dining, excellent company, and some album III ruminations. I have been privileged to partake of his cooking a few times over the years and it’s always the most authentic experience. The man chops half a baby carrot for fifteen minutes and it goes into the pot and despite my scepticism, something must happen between then and when it’s served because the result is the most considered manifestation of nom that ever did nom.

It’s always nice whenever we have an excuse to come together for a reason that does not involve noise

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As one might imagine, post motorcade escapades, The Garage was high on my list of priorities. I was going to take the car to some place out on the nether regions of town but Mr. P had a guy who was somewhat closer to the office, hence I spent a cold twenty minutes on their forecourt first thing. In these situations, I generally try to say as little as possible so as not to make it ever more patently obvious the degree to which my knowledge and/or skillset as it pertains to car stuff is close to a zero sum game. My father would remind me about the screen fluid and explain what that is and where to put it and how much. In turn, I would like to say I remember these valuable life lessons but am unsure of where precisely to file these discrete, presumably quite essential packets of knowledge.

Memories as if from some kind of terrible fever dream have been coming back to me this past week, particularly those that relate to that time nearly five years ago and what I was doing/writing about in the lead-up to shuttering the first incarnation of TNA. It’s strange thinking back to that time, mostly because it was a strange time but also because the space between then and now feels like it’s somehow occurred in far less time than physically possible. There have been…at least two seismic upheavals in the intervening years, a whole lot of stuff that went double down and an equally large quota of shit that got picked up and summarily let go, for one reason or another.

While passages are indeed hazy to the point of near total obfuscation, I quite vividly remember Her in grub format and now she is a whole five-and-a-half years worth of tall. I recall writing tracks for the new album that shall hopefully be this album, which is to say the second one, very much while she was eating lunch in a high chair behind me in the kitchen. I don’t think anyone is about to dispute the myriad ways in which time is weird but it bears repeating.

I have seen both the very good film that they made of this and also ready Larry Clark’s ‘Tulsa’ enough times to know

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It wasn’t an especially late night, nor am I up especially early but this abuse of the snooze button screams The Struggle Bus. I chalk it up to back half of the week energy and we’re suited and booted, ready to roll in around forty minutes at a push with coffee to go. Kit Kat has the plague and is welcome to take it back home, far, far away from this realm so we’re a woman down in the lab, which is fine because it’s a rainy day in Soho out there and I’ve a pretty clear slate for the day.

The morning passes without event. I send that F2 to the showroom cabinet upstairs from whence I cannot be tempted and tell myself that’s the end of it. Two fairly regular togs come in looking for prints and I lead them both to the All You Can Eat Highlights Banquet that is Baryta Rag. That paper eats anything with high contrast / high colour contrast for breakfast and I like to think they feel as good as I do about this new plane of existence for them. Printing one’s work is nice. Printing one’s work well is transcendental.

Dean Friedman (yes that one) was in town and Mr. P might be a fangirl. We scored comp seats to a casual show at a pleasant little pub out in the sticks by way of windswept and interesting, north of the M25. He is an interesting song writer for writers of songs and has this keys run down of Handel’s wedding march that doesn’t go back on itself, which I’ve only ever seen pulled off beautifully the once before. Although now I watch it, Laura does go back. Regardless, it’s a magnificent mine or well from which to draw if you’re going to root around in the classics.

He also had an interesting analogy that utilised the bizzaro world of Clark Kent to parallel the whole American thing at the moment, betraying a certain affection for both the science and the fiction, as well as comics and may or may not be the estranged father of Nigel Blackwell?

Something about free lunches being anything but and not meeting anyone else’s idols, let alone your own

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Album four is on my mind and I haven’t even really finished writing album three and we haven’t released album two yet although we’re planning on doing so despite not having released album one fully yet. That sentence would be beyond ridiculous were it not for the fact that A. It’s true and B. I think we have the material? What catches me off guard thismorning is the knowledge that I would almost certainly perform some of those album four tracks differently now…which is wild to say for something that doesn’t exactly have all the lyric yet but yeah. I feel different. Time something something…

I mentioned the other day that the artwork for Album II is nearing completion on the legal side…I mean, artistically it’s where it needs to be, we’re just dotting the exclamation marks and crossing the sevens now and shit’s getting real because it turns out someone might be interested after all. Maybe. Maybe they even want to see what this thing looks like on wax. We should know for sure by the end of the week and have something in writing that I can point to and be like, “Look, see?! Someone’s interested!” That would be nice.

This F2 has been staring at me for the past couple of days now and it’s a damn good job that I already have my quota of F bodies (including both a stupidly beautiful FM2 and a black F3) otherwise it would already be incorporated. It’s a beautiful example of a legendary camera and this copy’s been recently serviced too, with a worryingly clean bill of health up to and including the meter, shutter speeds, and a mint set of light seals…

Off the factory line sometime late 1976, it’s…well…look at it. The slight brassing only adds to its dark lustre. The advance and shutter release action is…choice. Hmm. I’ll post it up here and perhaps the eldritch gods of the interwebs might take it far, far away from me…

They are eighty-six on the only brand of Sriracha that I would entertain but have a wide range of Encona concoctions

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The lower lumbar is grumbling once again but I somehow slept through the better part of eleven hours last night. My muscles atrophied.

I spend most of the morning going over yesterday’s column and worrying over cursed admin pertaining to the unique psyche of my spawn. It’s bracing stuff. This charger situation, particularly where it involves the charger for my Sony A Series is of concern. Admittedly it is a third party charger and they are third party batteries but this does not preclude concern. I left them on overnight, with one on said third party charger and another on a rather useful multi charger I found through work. The multi charger did the job, the third party did not and may well be consigned to that great big camera shop in the sky. This is far from being an ideal situation but I am ever more firmly of the opinion that it is better to know where one stands, even if that ground is not ideal, rather than be in the murk. Of course, this is a universal truth…

Artwork and minor legal hoops regarding Album II with The Heat Inc. are currently on a death march through what might be (but almost certainly is not) the final quagmire before I can say I am “done” with my part and can finally, in good faith, sign off. In retrospect, I have said this and I have been “done” with it many times over the past year and a half and each time I have been proven wrong in almost every way possible. At this point it’s mostly about having the necessary blessings of everyone involved, up to and including those circling the perimeter. If I have any really late-to-the-party advice I might proffer to y’all on this, it’s this:

You can fall out with anyone, even those you might never have imagined falling out with in a million years and it won’t be over anything you could have rightly seen coming because it’ll be something stupid. And it will bite you somewhere in the posterior every single damn time. Get an agreement on paper or in an email so as everyone involved knows exactly where they stand. Be “done”.

yes there is an instructor and yes she’s very nice and seems eminently capable but this is my one and only charge

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It’s the school run but not as you know it. I’m up and relatively at ‘em for quarter past seven and brush my teeth before curling up next to AD for five minutes. She decides that the anthropomorphic avocado I brought her back from the airport in Rome shall be joining us for breakfast and so he supervises Cheerios and school uniform the-donning-of while I take a fairly rapid albeit scalding shower.

I get into the office a little gone nine, after a longer “weekend” off and my desk has been turned into a familiar pho of crusty 35mm cameras, digital gear, and miscellaneous cables that make up for about 90% of my in-tray. Nestled amongst the semi-bridled chaos is a rather tasty and recently serviced Nikon F2, a Pentax K1000 (also eminently shootable for those who would grok film), and my archetypal lazy boi go-to, the Canon AE-1p…this one has seen better days. There’s also a bag of Pentax glass; specifically a very nice K mount 28mm, 135mm, and an oddball breed of 28-85mm macro zoom made by Vivitar that I found in the office at home and bought in to sell to Kit Kat. We make the exchange and old treasure is new treasure once again. Glass like that needs a good home and it deserves to be shot. They’re not making any more of it.

Lunch gets skipped and I barrel straight into what’s not quite the inaugural studio session of 2026. It’s a maternity shoot which is a little different but a nice surprise. I unpack the whole lighting/backdrop shebang from its Xmas hibernation, opting for lovely off-white (oyster, allegedly) backdrop that we picked up toward the end of last year, before discovering that none of my chargers have been functioning as intended, i.e. charging anything at all for the past twenty-four hours…

Someone who shall remain nameless suggests that the organisational layout of my charging infrastructure and its proximity to the beverage infrastructure might be to blame for this. I banish them to the phantom zone, smother a panic response and throw every battery I can find into whatever spare wall sockets are available and carry on regardless with the set-up.

One almost expects to begin seeing her repeated to infinity inside the eye inside the eye inside the eye etc

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Anyone who experiences mornings with a small person shall know this to be true. Those mornings? Precious AF and not to be Captain Bloody Obvious but it bears repeating: They are precious. AF. The little hands? The little feet? The messy hair that smells like biscuits? All factually accurate and being present for it, a gift. I was reminded of it recently and I am grateful.

Breakfast is a bougie peanut butter on rye and mixed seed sourdough, blueberries mostly for the tiny one, hot orange juice (with bits and yes, seriously, just microwave it for a minute and try me), and very good coffee. I put some cartoons on for her and try to snatch twenty minutes at my desk. Today’s post for socials is supposed to be landscape or ephemera and it’s supposed to be monochrome and I still don’t have anything.

I open up a file that has a whole bunch of scans of vintage Kodachrome slides I purchased at auction a while back. We haven’t had one of these in a while and so I jump in, eventually unearthing a stunning shot of a railway station platform / car park, circa sometime in the ‘60s? This ticks at least 1.5 boxes as far as my self-imposed brief is concerned and after a quick and totally unnecessary pass in Lightroom, I have a not-too-big jpeg air dropped to my phone for later this afternoon…

I check with a few people, work, the band to see if anyone has a better handle on where exactly we think it might have been taken… The UK? Most likely. London? Probably but where? My best guess is Waterloo although in my not-so-secret heart of hearts, I want it to be Marylebone. I hedge my bets on both and stick a pin in it for now.

It’s gone midday already but I realise that if we leave now, we can pick up a new litter tray scoop on the way

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