Cheapa skips: out now! /  by Garth Jones

CHEAPA SKIPS - THE FEEL BAD SESSIONS, '20/21 is a collection of shorts written during, but not necessarily about, the pandemic.

It’s chockers with environmental angst, WASPy beach town cannibalism cults, brain machine interfaces, seedy small town crims, gnarly bush justice and much much more.

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PRAISE:

“Spike, snort, huff and toke on twelve grams of the sordid, the jaded, the gonzo and the profane. Cheapa Skips is a hit of the pure stuff - balls deep and punk AF, Australian sleaze right in the mainline” - J. Ashley-Smith, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of Ariadne, I Love You and The Attic Tragedy

“Garth’s writing is like Bret Easton Ellis, Nikki Sixx and David Lee Roth had a literary baby” - Sebastian Vice, Outcast Press

"An exhilarating ride that oozes the true underbelly of Australia our mainstream media ignores"- Justin Hamilton, Big Squid

“12-Fuck Faced pieces of Totally Irresponsible Prose covering Women to Daddy to Music to Life. And I'm here for it” - Duvay Knox, The Pussy Detective

“A back stage pass to the after party of the post-apocalypse” - Whiskey Leavins, The Devil’s Own Piss

THE DREGS OF THE ROCKET FUEL HUSTLE @ PUNK NOIR /  by Garth Jones

Privilege is the ability to carry on thinking the world is just, to be immune to its cruelty by virtue of your station.

I realised that a lot later.

What a wanker, eh?

It was ten AM and fifteen seconds or so.

The Centurion’s Elbow, Lord Street. Heavily gentrified but still vaguely hip inner suburban Thrivesville.

Sometime in February.

“Just don’t do it,” I said, tapping nine bucks, total, for a house sauv and Diet Coke.

I put the drink, the soft one, down in front of them, and settled my perch.

“Kill yourself, I mean.”

Read the lot here.

Preacher: Episode 1 /  by Garth Jones

Well, shit. 

Here’s the precis: Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Sam Catlin’s Preacher adap is a rip-roaring, punk rock salvo, a bloody white-knuckle hell-ride, true to the outlaw spirit of the source whilst taking flagrant liberties and coming off shining.

Dare I say it, the potential is there to even elevate the material.

As you’d be well aware, AMC’s Preacher is based on Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s iconic ‘90s Vertigo book. Profane and gleefully juvenile, the book nonetheless wrestled with weighty themes: crises of faith, toxic masculinity and the scabrous myths of the American Frontier all of particular concern. The book could veer from heartfelt romance to scatological trauma and then careen into heart-rending scenes of grue-soaked ultraviolence- little wonder stoner auteurs Rogen and Goldberg were so passionately into it.

Which is not to say Preacher (the book) is a sacred text: having re-read the series for the umpteenth time recently, it’s fair to say the text has aged unevenly, with vast stretches of threadbare dead plot air and awkwardly dated politics in places. 

Still, more often than not it’s a wildly entertaining oddity, an Irishman and an Englishman’s meditation on a mythical America stitched together from a patchwork of film, television, comics and literary references. As such, the book offers solid bed-rock on which to build a contemporary, tele-episodic evisceration of “‘Murkah” and all its foibles.

The plot, as if it bears repeating? Texan Preacher Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper) is imbued with the Genesis force (the heavenly offspring of some molten angel-demon how’s-yer-father) and hits the road with ex-girlfriend Tulip (Ruth Negga) and Irish vampire Cassidy (Joe Gilgun) to hunt down an absentee Heavenly Father for an overdue explanation as to why he’s abandoned creation.

If you’re new to Preacher, it’d be remiss of me to spoil the gonzo lunacy our core trio encounter on their quest- suffice to say, Sex Detectives, poncey Anne Rice vampires and a corpulent shadow-Pope are just the tip of the proverbial.

Sure, the cast might not have been anyone’s first choices* to play Ennis’ indelible characters (well, Gilgun, perhaps), but, as the first episode concludes, you’ll struggle to imagine any other players in the key roles.

It’s vicious, it’s blasphemous, it’s puerile yet nonetheless thoughtful, hilarious and loaded with nuance. Strap yourself right the fuck in, amigos- Preacher’s here to tear you a new one every Sabbath-eve (you know what I mean, Antipodeans).

* I used to make the impassioned call that the cast of Deadwood should just have been transplanted wholesale. Wait, did I hear somebody say ‘nerd’?


Power trippin’ at 22 /  by Garth Jones

The ‘90s were an arid decade for sternum crushing, crank fuelled, just the facts (and the occasional epic stoned interlude ma’am) rock and fucken roll.

We flirted with the programmed, post NIN nerdcore of Fear Factory, plumbed the horny down-tuned incel confusion of KOЯN and exalted in the chugging misery of Soundgarden and their ilk, but shameless, drug chuggin’, shaggin’ and skull flayin’ guitar music had become a niche concern.

Enter one Dave Wyndorf, a New Jerseyite who’d spent the ‘80s in an act called Shrapnel, and who founded the doom and psych inspired Monster Magnet practically in his rock ‘n roll dotage, ie his mid thirties.

Monster Mags honed their sound over a couple of sludge-fuzzy EPs and albums before striking MTV gold - that used to happen - with the tripping balls party starter ‘Negasonic Teenage Warhead’ (now also an infuriating X-Men character), from third album Dopes to Infinity.

Check out that clip - someone made a lot of money with a ropey green screen and an asteroid set back in the mid ‘90s.

I was 21 when the follow up, Powertrip, dropped in 1998 - though I didn’t really get across it until it turned into the score for Friday night fire up sessions in dad’s back shed a year later - which makes me, well, you do the math.

Powertrip is a seminal, wall to wall classic - a relentless slab of sleazy-beefy, horny-high af riffage. This was cocky, leathered up, cosmic stuff with tongue jammed firmly in cheek, the likes of which I’d not yet encountered (Zodiac Mindwarp came later).

Wyndorf was 42 when it arrived, which is quite neat, in a useless and quickly discarded framing device sort of way. 

I couldn’t believe how fucking old he was.

Now it sounds like a relatively wise age to start writing about what you know for sure without fear of embarrassment, anyway.

(Opinion sure to be revised in -)

Wyndorf is sixty three now, for the non mathematicians amongst you, and still out there bringing down the thunder.

Saw them a few years back, but, uh, don’t really remember much.

Good night, I assume.