‘The next time you wish you could find the right words to say to someone who is hurting, just remember that dogs are a man’s best friend without ever speaking a word to them. Simply be present and have sympathy.’
Author: Sue Young
Quote Of The Week
‘There is the pain that made me cry and then there is the strength that made me stop crying. So I am glad the pain came because without it, I would not have discovered my strength.’
Quote Of The Week
‘Listen, you can’t have regrets, because everything is supposed to happen the way it’s supposed to happen.’
It Ain’t Over…Endurance
God waits for our reaction. He watches how we handle the adversity,
whether we handle it with love and self sacrifice,
or chose darker, destructive emotions.
Regardless of the fact that we may want to scream and shout
Regardless of the fact that we may want to break down and cry
He watches for our reaction
He hopes beyond hope that we are patient
That our patience knows no bounds
He BANKS on us, hoping we are loving and compassionate
He BETS on us, hoping we are caring, accepting and understanding.
He HEDGES that we endure our suffering with dignity and grace.
And whatever will be, will be for our good and for the good of all.
I Wish I Was A Vampire
There’s a story behind this, that I feel is more important than the thing I wrote, so I’ll explain the inspiration behind it first.
When I was about 32, (yes, a long time ago) I remember thinking quite strongly that although I loved my husband, and he, me, I couldn’t control him, in any way.
I know, I know, why should I want to? I’m not meant to. How dare I ! So maybe control is the wrong word. Okay, how can I put this…I believe many people, rightly or wrongly, are subtly manipulating everyone else, and some people are doing it blatantly. It’s become a social skill. Maybe it was always a social skill, a way of communicating, or perhaps getting what one wants. How sad. Why can’t we all be honest?
What you see is what you get. No walls. No façade. No mask. No games.
So…I couldn’t control him. I couldn’t manipulate him. It seemed every other f***** around him could. It was at that time that I felt the sin of envy come upon me.
I felt…impotent. Useless. Weak. The Pixies might sing, ‘Where Is My Mind?’ but I was singing, ‘Where Is My Guile?’
I thought I should have some power, some feminine wiles and then I thought about how nice it would be, for me, to be a vampire, full of hypnotic mind games and occultist tricks. I guess at the time, I was watching how certain people could get him to do certain things, but if I said the same thing, it didn’t work. So it was a case of, why can’t I be more like such and such?
I went up to a person (his younger brother) who seemed to be having some influence over my husband and I said, ‘How come you can get Ste, (my husband) to do this, that, or whatever, but if I was to say the same thing, it wouldn’t have any impact?’ The poor guy just smiled and shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He was obviously embarrassed and a little bit baffled. So I approach the husband and ask the same question and he says. ‘It’s HOW something is said, and not WHAT is said,’
But to me, that just smacked of vampire. I felt that I’d missed out on some very special things simply because I refused to make a political move. So I wrote this and it helped a little and I never tried to control things again.
To my chagrin, I discovered that it was just brotherly love and I couldn’t compete with that. The relationship dynamics were different. So I’m very happy to say that I relaxed and stopped trying to control things. After that, I found they got better by themselves very naturally. What I also discovered is that it is better to be patient, to be open, to learn wisdom, then it is to have guile.
Wish I was a vampire
To charm the charmless
To manipulate who I chose
To not have qualms
To lack integrity
To have duplicity
How do I make you bend to my will.
To want to.
Making friends
And influencing people
To have you eating out of my hand
Hypnotism- fast food style
On the bus
In the home
During the news
Quick, clean, undetectable
But I am mortal
Without spells
Magic is not within me
I can’t make anything happen
No powers of persuasion
No way to make you change direction
Or chose a different milk shake from your usual
It’s all beyond me
This charm lark
You don’t have to be a vampire to make it work
But it helps.
Of course, none of this applies now, but it’s good to look back on issues we have struggled with and are now resolved. It’s comforting when we see where we’ve been and how much we’ve learned. As soon as you stop fighting something, it seems to go away. It’s good to be reminded of the past, especially when it leads to learning, evolving as a human being and ultimate education, which results in a more peaceful and happier life.
If you dig out your old poems/verses/things you have written, you can see how important it was for you to feel those things at the time, how far you’ve come and how much you’ve evolved and grown. An old poem/piece of writing is like a snapshot from the past, which may have counselled us at the time, and may still even help us in the future.
© Sue Young
Dear Cheese
Dear Cheese,
I hope you will remember when we spent many sultry nights of melting passion together, under the grill. I do recall, I snuggled up to dill pickle in the serving hatch, but, you must believe me when I say, it meant nothing to me. Do you remember that everything went so well until that fateful night? Bacon came along and stole your heart. Don’t think I didn’t see you together in that burger bar. You lied to me. You told me you were a vegetarian.
How I cried and grew moist, then went limp. I had to sit in a colander for an hour, draining my tears. It takes all my energy to get my bony green ass from one side of the kitchen counter to the other these days. I am going off. I am perishing. I feel that these once proud florets will never feel your cheesy sauce again. I pray that you will see the error of your ways. Of course you knew your future did not belong in a bun with bacon and you took off.
What I can’t believe though, what really rocked my world, was when you went with the lettuce. I thought I was the boring one, but really, lettuce? You’re really scraping the bottom of the crisper now aren’t you? Is that my competition? Is that the best you can do? I mean lettuce and cheese don’t even go together, much. We were always a much more complimentary combination. Everyone said so. We went together like broccoli and cheese, because that’s exactly what we were. I am your destiny. Come to me, before I lose my mind completely and run away with the Bechamel.
Yours Faithfully,
Broccoli…not boring and certainly not as boring as lettuce.
P.S Cauliflower told me I was tasty. Look what you’re missing.
P.P.S Yes, take one last look Buster ! I’m outta here, on my slightly browning stem. Bechamel…hello…you are very pale and interesting these days…
© Sue Young
Quote Of The Week
‘Like nature, like life, the storm will pass. The night will end. Spring will come.’
Quote Of The Week
‘We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.’
Quote Of The Week
‘The most painful thing, is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.’
Whatever Happened To…Brix Smith
Brix Smith Start is a vocalist, guitarist, composer, presenter and fashionista. She was born as Laura Salenger, raised in Los Angeles and studied theatre and literature at Bennington College in Vermont. She decided to call herself Brix after The Clash‘s Guns Of Brixton song and moved to England, when she met and married Mark E Smith, lead vocalist of The Fall, in 1983.
She collaborated musically on the Fall’s album Perverted By Language, bringing a more contemporary sound to the band. After divorcing Mark E. Smith, Brix began a relationship with violinist Nigel Kennedy, but she broke up with him and returned to LA to study drama further, where she waited tables, and got parts in soap operas and t.v commercials. She was about to start a new life in Courtney Love‘s band Hole, but instead returned to England after an offer to collaborate on Fall albums Cerebral Caustic (1995) and The Light User Syndrome (1996).
The Adult Net was first created with Fall band member Simon Rogers in 1985. They put out a cover of psychedelic rock group Strawberry Alarm Clock‘s 1967 hit, Incense and Peppermints, which was released on the Beggars Banquet label.
I first heard of Brix, when I bought her album on a whim. I didn’t know who she was and I hadn’t been introduced to her via The Fall. It was around 1990, around my twentieth birthday, I had some spare birthday cash and I was in HMV. A post teenagers dream. So, I did a double wham-my and bought two albums, on the hop, which I still have. Everything was still vinyl in those days, and on the cusp of the CD revolution.
The first album I bought was Good Morning Vietnam, the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, from the film. It includes sixties pop classics like Nowhere To Run by Martha and The Vandellas and Sugar and Spice by The Searchers to bluesy numbers like I Got You (I Feel Good) by James Brown and Baby Please Don’t Go by Them, all deliciously seasoned by Robin Williams wonderful, witty commentary throughout. The album still sounds fresh today. Well, it would, the tracks are all from the sixties. But anyway, that’s another post.
The second album I bought was Honey Tangle by Adult Net. I just remember that life was good at that time. Well, not exactly good but certainly hopeful, there was a great deal of potential in the air, you know, some people daringly call it ‘optimism’, but that’s the nearest word I can get, to the general ambience of those days. It happens sometimes, don’t knock it.
But back to Brix. Oh, what an album and I thought she looked like a cross between the beautiful Blondie and the sassy Wendy James, from Transvision Vamp. I used to play the Adult Net album over and over again in a dilapidated bedsit far from home. Toasting bread on a three bar electric fire didn’t even dampen the positive vibes that this music exuded. It even inspired me to write some rather out to lunch horror stories, and there’s not many other albums that can boast that.
The line up of Adult Net, upon the release of Honey Tangle, included Craig Gannon, (guitar) Clem Burke (Drummer) and James Eller. (Bass) Although it had a huge impact on me, and I would like to think, many others, Honey Tangle failed to chart. Consequently, Fontana Records ‘let them go’ and they disbanded.
Richard Cook for Sounds, described The Adult Net’s debut single as psychedelic revival.
The band’s early singles were ‘spiky marriages between guitars and electronics that owed much to the raincoat-clad heyday of Factory Records. Glossy, jangly, sweet-natured pop music that would sound perfectly at home in the Top 40 radio play lists of some alternate universe’
– Stewart Mason, from All Music Guide Service Website
Three singles were released from the album: Take Me, which reached number 78; Where Were You (a cover version of the American rock band The Grass Roots 1966 single “Where Were You When I Needed You”), which reached number 66; and a re-recorded version of Waking Up in the Sun, which reached number 99. Those high chart numbers were enough to give people vertigo. All I can say is, there’s no accounting for taste.
Since those heady, early nineties days of psychedelia, acidic yellow and optimism, Brix has evolved from pop music to pop art. Just like Victoria Beckham went from the music business to the clothing business within a twinkling of an eye, (music’s loss, Helmut Lang‘s gain, yes, I know he’s retired, but still) Brix launched a boutique, called Start, with her husband Philip Start. She met him in a lift. He was behind the world renowned Woodhouse, a men’s clothing chain, which was successful from 1975 to 1999. Coincidentally, Brix bought her first husband, Mark E. Smith, his first suit, from Woodhouse. Philip and Brix dominated Rivington Street in Shoreditch, East London with three boutiques and an online store.(Unfortunately, they have recently closed down)
‘Colour is Fashion Prozac’.
‘Colour is a positive force and can manifest things. Seriously! A friend of mine has been wearing only green and he has become rich in all things. Colour has so much power. Just putting on the right colour can make you feel well.’
-Brix Smith Start
This is very true. I am wearing nothing but red right now and I am kicking ass.
She was on Gok’s Fashion Fix for a time. Nothing wrong with fashion. I love fashion. Ask my husband and he will roll his eyes as I’m a bit of a clothes horse myself. Brix is really into clothes, really obsessed and is really passionate about fashion.
I realise, having seen her in interviews, that she has evolved from music and she genuinely loves what she is doing now but I would like to ask her one question. ‘Any chance you might come back to music, just as a break from fashion?’
She might say, Nostalgia is good, but sometimes you have to leave it where it belongs, by the fire, in its slippers, smoking a pipe.
Or she might say, Yay! Wow, I didn’t know I had so many fans. Do you know what, I might just…pick up the guitar again.
Oh Brix, lovely that you love clothes, shame that Start has closed it’s doors, perhaps destiny is trying to tell you something, perhaps now is the time to take a small breather from the fashion world…
I look forward to your next album.
Things In My Head 