Life Stinks I Like The Kinks: Introduction
Tales of drunkenness and cruelty
For the past decade I have occasionally published Life Stinks I Like The Kinks, a magazine of writing about popular music, obsessive personality, drunkenness and cruelty.
I was recently approached by a publisher with a request to compile this writing into a book. The book will collect material from the six published issues of Life Stinks, some personal correspondence, hate mail, words I’ve observed scrawled on the wall above urinals and operating tables, cryptic lines muttered under the breath of robed lunatics who have been following me on my nightly walks through Kings Cross…
As I began work on the book, it became clear I still had a couple of issues of Life Stinks to publish before I could fall on the sword of my Kinks obsession and make it a complete body of work. I began writing on every Kinks album released between 1964 and 1993. I published some of this writing in a short run of mags, I’ll share some of it here in longer form.
From the introduction to the original issue, 2013. It’s a bit heavy handed and clumsy but I like that in writing sometimes, maybe you like:
“What best befits an author is to preface a work with its apology, ornamenting it with the guilt of necessity. After all, one should not beg attention without excuse.”
Nick Land, The Thirst For Annihilation
Life Stinks I Like The Kinks offers convulsive laughter at the idea of human dignity, laughing at everybody.
Laughing at everybody… except you.
You’re special. You have a unique quality that makes you exempt to ruin and degradation. There’s nothing funny about you, there’s no tragedy about you. Immortal. Eternal. Silk. Delicate veins of flower petal. For you, reading this is an exercise in sadism. You can make mockery of imperfection, all is beneath your pure, unflinching gaze. Your glorification is your every movement!
This is repulsive, an enduring fascination with the void, apolitical buffoonery, the cowardice of solipsism disguised as nihilism. There is crudity to all of this that betrays the cynicism of our age, and in your solidity and self assurance, it appears a baseless self-indulgence. This, then, is an outlet for your laughter.
Personally speaking, the sole purpose of this literary endeavor is palliative.
The title is an expression of the sickness of The Kinks and their fanatical audience. An unhealthy relationship with unhealthy music.