There are too many writers in the world. Too many bad writers. I’ll include myself in that group. No, not false modesty, just how it rolls for the sake of this tale. But you see I have an excuse. I use my bad writing to introduce you to good writing, great writing, writing that will change and inspire you. What purpose is there for bad writing other than to make you yearn for truly great writing?

So, here you go…

Wendy Erskine is a great writer. A true original. A writer whose first collection of short stories Sweet Home contains some of the finest tales ever written. Clever, sassy, nuanced, with a rich seam of dark humor. Erskine’s stories of working class life in East Belfast have been hailed by critics as works of brilliance and her book has been nominated for several awards. Though experience suggests Erskine has worked on these stories and crafted them into things of beauty, they appear so fresh, so fully formed, so organic, that they may have just fallen like ripe fruit straight from the tree.

Go on, take a bite.

Born and raised in Northern Ireland during The Troubles that most dangerous and murderous time in the province’s history, Erskine has produced a wry, wise, funny, and utterly compelling collection of stories. She is the kind of writer that makes you fall back in love with reading. A magician who pulls the Ace of Spades from behind your ear while you’re still wondering how it was removed from your tightly gripped hand in the first place.

Her collection of stories opens with a three-part tale that is compelling and disturbing in equal measure. “To All Their Dues” is centered around a beauty parlor, and the lives of three people: the owner Mo, the local villain Kyle, and his wife Grace. Kyle is a psychopathic character with a pulsing menace few crime novelists have ever imagined or described in such chillingly simple and unforgettable terms. But if that weren’t enough, wait till you meet his wife.

Erskine has a remarkable eye for detail, for character evinced through thought and action, that reminded me of John Updike, Fitzgerald, or the Scottish writer James Kelman.

That long thin scar, running along the inside of your thigh, lady in the grey cashmere, what caused that? Those arms like a box of After Eights, slit slit slit, why you doing that, you with your lovely crooked smile, why you doing that? The woman with the bruises round her neck, her hand fluttering to conceal them. Jeez missus, is your fella strangling you? Bt you don’t ask, why would you?

While the second tale “Inakeen” works, its ending felt slightly contrived in a way that J. G. Ballard sometimes forced his stories to fit a purpose. Even so, it’s a small quibble but is another story that sticks long after reading. “Observation” about two teenage girls and an older man is a powerful work about what’s left unsaid between knowing and action. “Locksmiths” is about the troubled relationship between a daughter and her mother just released from jail. “Last Supper” deals with a manager covering for two employees having sex in a diner’s restroom. “Arab States: Mind and Narrative” and the devastating “Sweet Home” (parts of which I had to stop reading because it hit me so hard) show a writer who is in full control of their talent and knows exactly what she wants to say and how best to say it.

But how to interview such a writer? By email of course. But let’s not get too serious, or ahead of ourselves. Let’s start our interview with Erskine as if this was for one of those teen-pop magazines like Smash Hits:

Writer of the Week: Wendy Erskine

Starsign:  Taurus.

Favourite color: Duck egg blue.

First record bought:  “Ma Baker” by Boney M.

Favourite food: Green papaya salad, really hot.

First gig: Depeche Mode, the Ulster Hall, 1983.

Favourite band: Velvet Underground.

Favourite singer: Small Faces era Steve Marriott

Favourite artist:  Maurice van Tellingen

If you were Prime Minister/President what would be your first law: No one can earn100 times more than someone else.
 

 
A full interview with Wendy Erskine, after the jump…
 

 
Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) once said that “Heroes are made by the path they choose, not the powers they are graced with.” Artist Butcher Billy chose a path which eventually allowed him to use his superpowers to their greatest potential. Like all superheroes, Butcher Billy balanced a dual life of graphic designer by day, and iconographic pop artist by night.

Born in Brazil, Butcher Billy (aka Billy Mariano da Luz) started drawing pictures from the day he first picked up a crayon and waxed blank paper with art. He grew up in a world of unnerving political turmoil which he filtered through comic books, TV cartoons, and eighties pop music. He grew up and studied and became a graphic designer. But somehow creating art for others was not enough. In the quiet of the night, he started drawing pictures that revealed his true identity. Pictures of pop icons as comic book superheroes, movie stars as subversive heroes. Butcher Billy was born.

He started sharing his work online. His pictures were soon picked by sites like the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and of course, Dangerous Minds.

As a longtime admirer of Butcher Billy‘s artworks, I dropped him a line and he very kindly replied. Now in an exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds, Butcher Billy discusses his background, his artwork, his inspiration, and his favorite artist.

Okay, let’s start with the easy ones: Can you tell me something about yourself? Where were you born? How did you get into art? When did you start drawing?

Butcher Billy: I was born in south Brazil in 1978. My childhood scenario was the last few years of a decades-long military dictatorship. Although the difference between that and a full democracy was hardly noticed by a six-year-old introvert kid, I do remember watching everything live on TV—the news reported rights movements, protests on the streets, military police everywhere. That ended up mixed with all the goodies the 1980s had to offer: pop music, blockbusters, Saturday morning cartoons, comics, fantasy books, video games etc.

So as much as I couldn’t understand, there was a sense that the world was going through uncertain, turbulent times—while also I was getting exposed to all these exciting new discoveries as a child. That dual feeling is something that I carried through life. It even reflects on my body of work now, in which you can often see two (or more) different concepts clashing.

I believe I started drawing as soon as I was able to hold a crayon with my own hands. I have always felt the need to express myself through art.

What happened next? What inspired you? How and why did you start creating your own artworks?

BB: My teenage years in the 90s were absolutely immersed in pop culture, while I observed the world going through all the changes in politics, religion, society, technology etc. So of course pop art caught my attention early on, for the use of popular everyday symbols, and comments on any of the aspects of society and human behaviour through irony and parody.

However, when the time came to go to college, graphic design ended up being my choice—the concept of becoming a full on artist as a way of earning a living was too subjective to me at the time (that clash of feelings again).

After college I worked for years as a graphic designer in ad agencies, becoming increasingly frustrated. That’s when I decided, just for fun, to start playing on my sleep hours with all of those early creative influences in cinema, music, comics, games, art, politics, religion, history etc. By releasing personal art projects online, I began to spread my name and ideas out there, until I felt secure enough to let go of everything and finally become an indie artist.

I wasn’t even thinking about working for brands. What I wanted was to create a body of personal work by developing my own ideas, without interference. And through that decision I indeed found that freedom, in which now I’m actually able to choose if I want to work for a brand or not, when I want, and only if it’s the right fit for me.
 

 
When/why did you take the name Butcher Billy?

BB: I still had an agency job as a creative director back in 2012 when I had my very first pop art series ready to be released. As I said before, I decided to do it as a way to just have some fun and relieve work frustration. I had a bit of a local rep in advertising, and as much as I didn’t have any ambitions on a side project, I thought it was important to create a persona to separate that from the corporate work I was doing, which was very different in concept.

So that’s how I came up with Butcher Billy—at first I thought it would be a great way to stay anonymous, and kinda worked initially. However, soon after when the artworks began to go viral, the fact I was using a pseudonym actually helped to make people even more curious about who that guy was. “Nobody cared about who I was until I put on a mask” (saying that with a ridiculous Bane voice)
 

 
What has the response been to your work?

BB: I try to achieve that state of collective mind where art communicates ideas all over the world, often without words, for people of distinct languages and cultures who understand the same message. In that aspect it’s always great to see how far an art piece can go when I release it on the internet—considering how different the concept of popular culture can be in some places.

Also spreading your own ideas and style means that people will approach and hire you because they want you to do your own thing for them. In that sense I’ve been invited to collaborate with brands from Japan, Scotland, EUA, England, France, Germany, Netherlands etc. Projects can be as different as TV series props, beverage packaging, movie posters, vinyl sleeves, book covers… I was even asked to design a pizza box for a record label, as merchandising.

Versatility is exactly what I aim for as a pop artist—I don’t want to be known as a t-shirt designer or whatever. I want to make art, and art that can be applied to anything.

It’s funny that my work seems to be a lot more recognized overseas. I’ve never been invited to exhibit in my own country. However, I had pieces showcased in cities all over the world like London, Dubai, Lisbon, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Birmingham, Chicago, Miami etc. Also I’ve had 2 art books released in France. Pretty sure that after I die they’ll hold an exhibition in Brazil—that’s how it works around here.

Who is your favourite artist?

BB: Hard to say! I admire so many people for different reasons—painters, designers, producers, musicians, directors, photographers, actors, activists, composers etc. But if I have to say just one, it would certainly be David Bowie. The man embodied everything, to the point of actually becoming art through his personas. He paid the price, and managed to remain down to earth. He also planned his own death to be an art instalment.
 

 
See more from Butcher Billy, after the jump…
 

 
At the end of March, the writer Séb Doubinsky should have been traveling across America giving readings from his latest novel The Invisible. Picture him in a busy, crammed bookshop wearing a plaid shirt, leather jacket with steel-rimmed glasses and neatly-trimmed beard. He sits at a table with a pile of books to his left, a glass of water to his right, the audience in front. Some sit in chairs, some stand around the edges with arms folded, heads tilted, all listening to Doubinsky’s strong, clear voice. There are questions then a long-line of bright-eyed readers waiting to shake his hand, take pictures, and get their copies signed.

In another reality this all happened. Turn the page, there’s someone at the back, leaning against shelves laden with bright, clean paperbacks asking:

What is your earliest memory?

Sébastien Doubinsky: My earliest memory is actually a patchwork of scenes from my childhood in America, between 1966 and 1968. I can see myself playing with my favorite toys, which were rubber Mattel astronauts, watching black-and-white Spiderman cartoons sitting upside down on the sofa, riding in my father’s dark blue huge station-wagon, going to Space Needle’s fun park and having a blast… Very vivid memories, in color, which have certainly influenced the very way I write, like Pop Art—or rather Anti-Pop Art, as Rosenquist called it—and Punk well, much later.

But a virus stopped all this. Doubinsky is in lockdown at his home in Denmark. If anyone could have seen such a deadly pandemic coming then it was him. He had already written about a similar outbreak in Absinth—the story of the Apocalypse with ancient Gods attempting a new order, the publishing of a new gospel according to Jesus (“Burn all churches”), and an outbreak of Ebola that claims the lives of the President and the Vice-President. There’s hope for us yet! Doubinsky saw it coming.

What the Corona crisis taught us: all useful people are underpaid and all useless people are overpaid and decide who will live or die.

Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider that gave him, in some unfathomable way, arachnid powers of strength and agility to jump great heights, climb walls, and have a tingling spider sense that alerted him to danger. At some point, most kids want to be Peter Parker, but then they give up on their imagination and subscribe to another’s imposed order.

August 1963, copies of The Amazing Spider-Man #3 were in bookshop carousels when Sébastien Doubinsky was born at a Parisian cinema. Spidey was fighting a new enemy the “grotesque Dr. Octopus.” Doubinsky’s parents had been watching a Hollywood western. They never saw the end of it. Celebrating the birth of a son was more important. Arriving at a hospital, Mother and child were doing fine. Father then found some work in America. Doubinsky spent his early years growing-up in the States watching TV and marveling at the unchanging blue sky. What’s your earliest memory? “I already answered that.”

Back in Paris, Doubinsky discovered a copy of William S. Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded while visiting his Aunt’s apartment on the Avenue René Coty. It was a weird looking book with a weird sounding title. Doubinsky sat down and read it. He was blown away. He might not have understood it but he knew he loved it. He had discovered his superpowers.

When did you first think seriously about becoming a writer and why?

SD: It’s rather a difficult question to answer, as there were many stages in this decision—at least until it became a rationally formulated one. I come from a very intellectual background, culturally mixed (Jewish and Catholic, but both my parents were leftists and radical atheists) and extremely open to other cultures. What’s more, both sides of my family had been very active in the French Résistance during World War Two, and I therefore inherited quite a strong human-rights ethic. All this to say that literature was not a passive element of my upbringing, but was seen as a powerful object that could serve the best or the worst causes, and that it was important.

Growing up I loved poetry, and for a long time wanted to be a poet (but also a painter, until I discovered I was colorblind…) but little by little, prose seeped in and took more and more space. I began to write some short stories in my late teenage years, but still not really considering dedicating myself seriously. The tragedy that sealed my writer’s fate was the suicide of my beloved cousin Bruno, then, like me, 20 years old. He had introduced me to punk and New Wave—especially The Cure, Bauhaus and all the darker stuff—and in his last note, he told me I should carry on writing “my great stuff.” That’s when the weight of words and the responsibility attached to writing hit me like a runaway train. That’s the day I really became, in my eyes, a “writer.”
 

 
More from Sébastien Doubinsky, after the jump…
 

 
A version of this article first appeared on Night Flight’s website in November 2015.

“I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF THIS IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. Absolutely bizarre…”

That was R. Stevie Moore’s response in 2013 when I asked him about his knowledge of an obscure LP containing fantastic studio recordings he had made forty years earlier.

Moore, as many of you probably already know, is a pioneer in home recording and an early champion of the lo-fi aesthetic. He’s also a beloved cult figure and considered by many to be the godfather of indie rock. His best songs combine the pop hooks of Lennon and McCartney with the avant-garde stylings of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. In 1976, Moore, who had already been self-releasing his solo material on cassette, put out his first full-length LP, Phonography, which was issued on his own label, Vital Records. To date, R.S.M. has racked up more than 400 releases and has written thousands of songs.

Even with this huge catalog, Moore would have typically known what had been made available, but this was not the case with the aforementioned studio recordings. In 1977, this material was included on a self-titled LP credited to a fictitious group called Hotgun. The album was released by Guinness Records—a notorious tax shelter label.
 

The Warhol-meets-Lichtenstein cover art for ‘Hotgun.’

In the mid 1970s, some savvy individuals identified a section in the U.S. tax code in which investments in sound recordings could qualify for a reduction in taxes. Situations varied, and the entire process was fairly involved, but essentially, this is how it worked.

The owner of a record label would solicit potential investors to license (or lease) a master sound recording from them, which would then be turned into an album. The program outlined by the label focused almost entirely on the tax benefits, rather than profit from the venture itself.

Generally, the label wasn’t even a record company in the traditional sense, and was established solely to market master recordings. Once an investor signed on and forked over their cash—ranging from a few thousand dollars to five figures—the label would take responsibility for overseeing the project. An essential undertaking for the label was having the master evaluated by an appraiser, one who was willing to place an inflated market value on the recording. There was much in the way of smoke and mirrors here.
 

The striking cover art of ‘Time to Give’ by Felix Harp on Guinness Records.

For the next step, tapes were turned over to the packager, who was in charge of putting the finished product together, which included having the artwork created and pressing up the vinyl in a limited run of 1,000 copies.

Somewhere in the album’s credits was the name of an individual or company listed as the copyright holder. These are the names of investors. Though investors didn’t actually have any copyrights related to the recordings, there had to be documentation that they did in order to take advantage of the tax benefits.

At the final stages, the packager placed the completed product in stores. The packager was also responsible for marketing, though, in reality, there wasn’t any serious attempt to promote these records. Most of the LPs that did arrive in stores just sat in the racks, as few knew they existed. It’s believed that large amounts of records were warehoused or destroyed, which is why many tax shelter albums are so hard to come by.

When the LPs invariably didn’t sell, the master recording was written off by the investor as a failed venture, using the inflated appraisal—which went as high as seven figures—as the basis for claiming a loss come tax season.

Though the label, like any other business, could write-off expenses, their much larger slice of the pie came when they leased a master recording, earning thousands of dollars per transaction.

Two of the labels with the most known releases are Tiger Lily, which was operated by Morris Levy, the notorious owner of Roulette Records, and Guinness. The albums these labels released, many of which are now quite rare and sought-after by collectors, are commonly referred to as “tax scam records.”
 

The self-titled Bloodsuckers album on Guinness.

Much more, after the jump…

 
Although it’s my own personal favorite B-52s release, the 1982 EP produced by David Byrne known as Mesopotamia is generally thought of as being one of their least successful records. At least it was critically savaged when it first came out, but to my mind it contains their very best work. The hiring on of Byrne, then at the height of his creative powers, I thought was an inspired move on the band’s (or label’s) part. Byrne introduced the polyrhythmic beats of Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts to the signature sound of the “tacky little dance band from Athens, Georgia’’ to great effect. I was a big Talking Heads fan, and a far bigger B-52s fan, so hearing elements of the Heads’ “Afro-Eno-era” sound melding with the wacky racket of the B-52s was heaven for me as a teenage rock snob. Byrne took the B-52s sound to a different place, and I felt nicely expanded on their sonic palette. The B-52s obviously felt differently, as Byrne was fired before a complete album could be recorded (hence why only an EP of the sessions was released).

Seriously, you have no idea how often I played this record. It falls into the “soundtrack of my life” category in a big way. But what many fans of the group do not know is that there are three very different versions of Mesopotamia: The “classic” shorter US/Warner Brothers EP version; the extended mix version mistakenly(?) released in Germany and in the UK by Island Records; and the 1991 CD version, which basically mixed David Byrne’s contribution right out of the proceedings…
 

 
The first two B-52s albums are classics, and to my mind perfect in every way, but a third album in that same style would have probably been one too many. Byrne’s involvement, for many fans and critics, took the band a little too far away from their inspired amateur beginnings. Perhaps, but who else but Byrne was capable of coming up with such amazingly funky polyrhythmic grooves back then? And haven’t the B-52s always been about the beat? David Byrne was on fire at that time creatively and was simultaneously working on his masterpiece score for Twyla Tharp’s Broadway ballet The Catherine Wheel. I’ve read that the B-52s felt that his production made them sound too much like Talking Heads, but hey, what a valid direction that was for them! True, certain elements of their signature sound were diminished (Ricky Wilson’s Venusian/spy-fi surf guitar for one, and Keith Strickland’s drums were crowded out by a drum machine), but other elements (Wilson’s striking use of dissonance in his compositions) are given freer rein with different instrumentation (like the nearly atonal “No Wave” brass section and sleekly synthesized bass lines) than the B-52’s normally employed. And it’s a much darker, dreamier vibe for them, for sure. Their sound was nicely expanded upon by Byrne’s “dubbier/trippier/hip hoppier” production approach, if you ask me, but the B-52s didn’t ask me, and it was their call, ultimately.

Still why not release a special collector’s edition of Mesopotamia with the original longer David Byrne mixes and the known outtakes: “Queen of Las Vegas,” (see below), the original “Big Bird” and “Butterbean” (both recut for Whammy) and the pretty Fred Schneider sung ballad “Adios Desconocida” (which you can hear here). In any case, the longer, “alt” David Byrne version of Mesopotamia, unavailable now for 40 years and never released on CD can be downloaded all over the Internet (it’s not hard to find). I don’t hate the 1991 remix of Mesopotamia, but I’d never choose to listen to it over either of the other versions. Ever. ‘Nuff said.

An absolutely slamming live “Mesopotamia” from the Rock Pop Festival, Dortmund, Germany, 1983:

 
Much more after the jump…