Paul Schiernecker

Author: Paul

  • Behind NME Lines.

    As my good friend Ben said yesterday, ‘I wish I had come up with that title’. Behind NME Lines is an exhibition of NME magazine covers over the last 60 years taking place at NEO Bankside until 6th October. As it turns out this is just round the corner form work for me so I headed down there yesterday to check it out with my banter-ridden Sahara companion Terri who it turns out knows absolutely nothing about music.

    The exhibition in itself isn’t that big, imagine an open plan downstairs of a house, fill it with blown up NME covers on easels and in frames and you are pretty much there. The interesting part is the layout of the magazine over more than a decade, a lot of that is down to technology of course but stylistically we have also come a long way, it seems bands are all too aware of what it means to get on the cover of NME (I’m instantly reminded of the scene in Almost Famous where Stillwater are told they’re going to be on the cover of Rolling Stone). The other thing it is easy to forget is just how many famous band shots were done as NME shoots. The Jackson Pollock-esque Stone Roses shoot, the Union Jack and still babyfaced Libertines first cover shot, Cocker flicking the V’s; these are all deep in our group consciousness and they are all here, it’s quite a humbling thing to behold. I can only look back on ten years worth and remember where I was in the world at the time that I bought that particular issue, but for some it must be a real walk down memory lane to see The Beatles and The Who on the cover and remember what that meant to them at the time, and also to think of how many bedroom walls those covers have been on.

    It is definitely worth checking out, and literally faces the sloped entrance of the Tate Modern if you need another excuse to get out of your life for a bit.

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  • Day before payday blues.

    Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to work when every month I struggle to make the money last. It isn’t even as if I’m living a lavish lifestyle, I’m a man of very simple means and very few wants, I just have too many outgoings at the moment.

    Last night I had to embarrassingly tell my girlfriend that I didn’t have £2 to get the bus home, and that we would have to walk. Stuff like that pisses me off but there’s no way around it. In other ways I like being the poor oppressed writer though so I can’t really say anything. It feels like everything I own is coming apart at the seams, nothing really works in the way it should, and I always have to double think any purchases I do want to make. In a way this frugal lifestyle will be good for me when I do strike it rich because I’ll truly appreciate what I do have.

    In the meantime I should probably just shut up, it could be a lot worse.

    Goddamn money, it always ends up making you blue as hell

  • Murakami.

    I just wanted to take a moment to comment on how much I am enjoying 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I’ve enjoyed everything of his I have read but this book in particular is really special. Maybe it’s the fact that shortly before starting this I was trudging my way through Fifty Shades, maybe it’s because I’ve put off reading it since Christmas because of the size and weight of the book and I know I’ll have to commute with it everyday. Whatever the reason I’m glad I got round to reading it now and I’m telling you to go and pick up a copy of any of his work because it really is quite beautiful.

  • Rant.

    What business of yours is it how I choose to conduct myself. Maybe you should just take a good hard look in the mirror you little TOWIE haired cunt. Go about your day and leave me to mine. What’s the problem here?

  • My 808th turned leaf.

    I really need to quit smoking in any capacity. Last night I ended up trapped in a dumb fog when I should have used the time to write, write, write. I made a promise to myself that if I wanted to be a writer I had to commit to it entirely, and let a lot of things fall by the wayside to do that. It looks like we’ve got another item for the bonfire.

    I’ve made my choice, I need to push myself into that square hole with all my might if I’m ever going to manage it. I still need a couple of days away from all this to think it through, hopefully this weekend will give me that.

  • 2005 me.

    I believe it was seven years ago today that I would have been filling my parent’s car with everything I had ever begged, borrowed or stolen and headed off to Buckinghamshire to begin my adventures as a fully flung student. It’s a time of my life I am still very hung up upon, a point proven by my obsession with writing about fictional versions of myself getting into all kinds of hi-jinx on campus. The reason it is so at the forefront of my mind today is that this morning I was at my girlfriend’s as her youngest sister repeated the steps I took seven years ago. Everything was boxed up, everything was thought over and considered, and then they packed it all into the back of the car and headed off to Roehampton.

    It was an interesting and emotional thing to watch, especially given the fact that Sarah is a twin, and while she goes off to University Holly has deferred for a year to try a different avenue first, testing the water as it were. It is the first time they have really been apart in nineteen years and it is going to be a hard adjustment for both of them to make. I can remember the thoughts I had in my first weeks away, how I would fantasise about what my family were doing, and how they could possibly cope in my absence, but once that all moved aside I began to realise that although I was tied to them, and that link would never break there was room to become myself in a lot more ways. The freedom afforded to me by University was one of the greatest life lessons I have encountered and as such I look back on it with firm fond memories. It is a time when you are going through so much physically and mentally, internally and externally, and you really start to work out who and where you are, what you want to be doing, and you get an awful lot of lessons along the way.

    I would like to say good luck to anyone making those journeys this weekend, or in the coming weeks and remind you that it’s different and it is new but it is one of the best decisions you ever made, and it is well worth the debt.

  • Touching base.

    Last night I went out for cocktails with friends, I am aware that is an extremely wanky London commuter type thing to do but I am an extremely wanky London commuter type. They’re friends I’ve known since school, which means up to twenty years ago, and it’s an amazing thing to do, it’s like the Child Of Our Time documentary series, I honestly feel like I’m Robert Winston, but without the ability to even fathom a moustache.

    It’s interesting to see what guys you’ve known for so long have become, how we have all found love, we have all found careers (or at the very least jobs), we have all learnt so much and come so far together and yet we are still very close as people. We don’t just sit and talk about when a year seven was thrown in a bin or how we would set off fire extinguishers down the halls, we talk about current affairs, and music, and what we are all doing now, and our plans for the future, and it’s good to know that only one of them is married, and that only one of them has a baby on the way and that there is nothing wrong with being twenty-five years old and not really knowing exactly where your place is in the world, we can just be, and we are slowly getting our shit together but the age of being married and having a career and a home at eighteen/nineteen are dead and gone to us, we are the continuing teenagers, we are not quite there yet, but we are all working very hard, we were just coiled ready to attack for a lot longer than our predecessors.

    Peace.

  • Back to improvising.

    Last night was the second in a new season of the Improvised Comedy Workshop I attend. For those out of the loop improvised comedy is where you get up with no script, no characters, no idea and your audience give you the setup and you derive humour from it – like Whose Line Is It Anyway?

    It’s been a couple of months since I felt that energised, that ready to just commit myself to dashing about and acting stupid and it is so much fun. Once you get over the hurdle of any embarrassment you realise that nine times out of ten you are performing to people who are with you, they want to be entertained, they’re on your side. It’s a wonderful feeling to have when your self esteem tends to wain for no reason at all.

    Sitting in the pub with them afterwards I realised what a good group I get to perform with, and how really it’s a shame that we only have those few hours together on a Thursday night, they’re all so funny, all such characters and so supportive of whatever each other have going on, it’s a brilliant environment to operate in and I feel privileged to be a part of it.

  • Residue – a flash fiction piece.

    Detective Frank Horowitz entered the room like he owned it, and for all anyone else knew he may well have done, he wasn’t one for photos of family on his desk or requesting days off for school plays, that is, if he even had a family.
    Holloway walked over to the desk, pulled out his Parker and dug it into the mouth of Martin Yale (recently deceased).
    ‘This is foul play’ he declared.

  • Chuffed.

    I am overwhelmed by the response so far to my fundraising. I hoped people would catch on quickly but the generosity and messages have been lovely.

    I would like to personally thank Kate, Emily, Terri, Mex, Luke, Antony, Jade, John and Stephanie for their donations. I won’t forget where that first £120 came from and I hope there’s more to come from others.

    I’ve set the ball rolling on a couple of ideas to organise different things to raise funds, one of which I am particularly excited about but it’ll have to wait for confirmation.

    In the mean time go here to get in on the action.