Bike For Three! - 'More Heart Than Brains' LP - release date announced!

"The album has been announced officially. "More Heart Than Brains" will finally see the light of day on the 18th of May on Anticon Records.

Vinyl and compact disc.

These tracks:

Beginning
All There Is To Say About Love
Lazarus Phenomenon
Nightdriving
There Is Only One Of Us
No Idea How
Always I Will Miss You. Always You.
The Departure
First Embrace
Can Feel Love (Anymore)
One More Time Forever
MC Space
Let's Never Meet
More Heart Than Brains
Ending"

Can't wait!

More info here.

Writing tips from Clark Ashton Smith

"The main objective of the short story is to stir the reader's emotions. How you stir them or what emotion you stir is not so important as the fact that to hold the reader's interest you must stir his emotions. You must be able to create various emotional effects thru your characters, action, description, setting, etc.

Constant practice is the key to success. You cannot learn music without practicing it, neither can you learn to write without writing. I suggest that, for your own benefit, you write a few hundred words depicting an emotional experience. Write up one of your own experiences or invent one. But remember that you are writing it with the purpose of stirring an emotion in the person who reads it. The sketch is not to be a story but merely an incident-no opening explanations are necessary.

When you are reading a story watch for the passages in which the author is relating an emotional experience and inducing the emotional feeling in you. By studying how that particular author is doing it you will be better able to do it in your own work."

Full text here.

More bits & bobs:

Atmosphere in Weird Fiction
Fragment of an Essay
On Fantasy

Further nonfiction by C.A.S. may be found here.

Felix Gilman - 'Thunderer' & 'Gears of the City'

Just finished the latter. Good stuff.

The former has been pegged as 'High Fantasy' - more a marketing manoeuvre than anything else I suspect. I didn't read it as anything so simply defined - there are elements here comparable to Borges and also That Genre/Movement That Everyone Keeps Saying Is 'Dead'. In other words, there are many things about these books that mark them out as something a lot more interesting than straight Fantasy.

'Gears of the City' is also refereshingly different from most of the fare you might find on the Fantasy shelves in Waterstones - gritty, gloomy secondary-world Steampunk with, it seemed to me, also a nod to WWII Britain and The Blitz. At times the pace flags a little, at least in comparison with the first book, but that's really quite a minor quibble - the level of imagination and quality of storytelling here is at times astonishing.

Felix Gilman is definately a writer I'll be following with interest in future.

'The Dark Eidolon' by Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith

Full text here.

Reading 'The Dark Eidolon' again recently reminded me why it's one of my favourite Ashton Smith stories ('The Last Incantation' being another). There are no heroes, no happy ending, no redemption, no hope. The characters are inexorably dragged onward and downward by their own obsessions, weaknesses and mistakes, culminating in a great big fucked up mess. Nobody wins. It is a relentlessly bleak tale of stupid, petty, and very human vengeance.

There are some wonderful images, ideas, and phrases here: "a dark liquid full of star-cold lights" and the sudden appearance of Namirrha's "house" (not a palace, a sinister citadel, or anything so clichéd) to name but two examples. There's a fundamental dreamlike weirdness at work here that I can't quite place but find utterly compelling.

M. John Harrison is quoted (in my edition of 'The Emperor of Dreams') as saying that C.A.S. "helped point the way to the hard-edged British fantasy of the 1960s and '70s". Having read the likes of Harrison's 'Viriconium' stories and also the works of Michael Moorcock (who I would also count as a huge influence) I can definately see the truth in this statement, but I think Ashton Smith's stories are also very worthy of the attentions of current day readers and writers. He deserves to be read and rated a lot more highly than he is.

People keep telling me that the New Weird is "dead", whatever the hell that means - well, I think that if that's the case then now is a more appropriate time than ever to embrace all that the "old" Weird has to offer.

The ever-amiable Mr Papaya

I like 'Fringe' a lot. OK, so it's can be a little formulaic, and the actor playing Broyles is really just playing the same character he played in 'The Wire', and maybe the show's open to accusations of being an 'X-Files' ripoff - a similarity I noticed immediately, as someone who never missed an episode of the show at the time. I prefer to think of it as a post-millennial take on paranormal investigation, with J.J. Abrams bringing in the kind of things that make 'Lost' such damn good TV.

I particularly like the way that Dunham possesses fragments of Agent Scott's memories and the way that this is used - emails, phonecalls, meetings with the dead(?) man that only actually happen in her head, her mind's way of translating the shreds of his consciousness. I really like the isolation-tank sequences as well, where Dunham finds herself present within scenes of Scott's memories but can't actually hear everything that is said, for instance, because he wasn't within earshot himself at the time. Great stuff.

This aspect of the show is particularly relevant to me because memory and our relationship to the past are pretty central themes in my own writing. It's nice that I can actually engage with a mainstream US TV show in that way, it restores a little of my faith in big broadcasters.

When looked at in an overview maybe 'Fringe' doesn't seem that impressive, but it's the little things like that, or Walter Bishop's hilarious utterances (every time I watch an episode I end up talking in a "Walter Bishop voice" for a while afterwards - sad, yes, and annoying for others) that keep me watching.

HalfLife 2 - 'Escape From City 17' and 'Black Mesa' Mod

A short film based on one of the finest computer games ever made.



The trailer for an upcoming HL2 modification that's basically a remake of the first game. Looks marvellous: it's a pity that it doesn't look like it'll ever be available for the XBOX 360 though, which is my format of choice seeing as I gave up on the PC as a gaming platform years ago - I just don't want to get into the tedious cycle of upgrades or buying new machines. This is one instance where it'd be great if Valve got involved, bought it up, started selling it for a fiver or a tenner, and released it via the Game Marketplace on Live. PC gamers will probably hate that idea because as it stands they'll just be able to download it as a free mod. Nobody likes paying for things if they don't have to...

I'm not hugely into videogames these days, haven't been since my teens, but there are a few games and franchises that inspire real enthusiasm. HalfLife is probably top of that pile.

On a related note by the way, if they ever make a HalfLife movie I think Bill Murray (pictured here with flowers in his beard) would be perfect for Dr Breen:

I reckon good old Bill could nail the role. We rarely see him play the badguy, and he'd bring just the right kind of dry humour to a big screen version of the (not so good) doctor. Incidently he also bears a resemblance to one of my university lecturers!

'What's in the box?'

http://www.whatsinthebox.nl/

Very cool. Cinema meets FPS shooter, embraces its tropes, and takes the whole Cloverfield POV/camcorder thing to another level. Makes me want to play through HalfLife 2 again.

It's quite strange/interesting to see the HUD used in film, from a semiotics point of view: we're used to seeing such a barrage of condensed information in videogames but in this context it's something relatively new I think.

Ridiculous Pulp Paperback Covers - 'Where Were You Last Pluterday?" by Paul Van Herck

I came across this today and sort of wish I'd bought it. It looks bonkers.

The title itself is amazing, utterly Lintian. "Pluterday" LOL.

Hope it's still there next time I visit.

I heart Photoshop. A lot.

Just wish I had a faster PC on which to run it. Grrr...

(Looks better full size)

Fantasy Centre, Holloway Rd

I was introduced to this remarkable place today by a friend. I don't know how I missed it.

According to the website it's "the only shop in Europe specialising in science fiction publications of all eras" and, established in 1971, it may even be "the oldest surviving specialist SF bookshop in the world".

I never really considered that anything like this existed, certainly not in this day and age. Rows upon rows of old pulpy paperbacks with garish covers, signed first editions, Sci-Fi & Fantasy as far as the eye can see. I walked around with a big gleeful childlike grin all over my face. If I had the money I'd have bought the entire place.

For the last few years I've done all my book buying online, simply because it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier. I'm rethinking that now, feeling slightly bad that perhaps it's that kind of thing that contributes toward the hard times currently facing many an independant bookshop. I doubt I'll change my habits entirely overnight but it's made me think.

'The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft'

Many thanks to my good friend and fellow Apocrypharium contributor Ad Zu for making me aware of this potential monstrocity:


"Universal and Imagine Entertainment are gearing up for "The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft."

The studio has bought the film rights to Image Comics’ graphic novel, with the project a potential directing vehicle for Ron Howard. The book bows April 8.

U sparked to "Lovecraft" because its take on classic horror fits in well with the studio’s library of monster fare featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and the Wolf Man, the last of which is being brought back to the bigscreen later this year.

Created by Mac Carter and Jeff Blitz, book borrows elements from Lovecraft’s life, such as his family’s struggle with mental illness and his own bouts with writer’s block, and transforms the young writer’s darkest nightmares into reality when he comes across a book that puts a curse on him and lets the evils he conjures up loose on the world.

Lovecraft, who died in 1937, is considered one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century.

Carter, a commercial director, will pen the script and serve as executive producer alongside Blitz.

Carter and Blitz both helmed commercials for Anonymous Content, working on spots for such clients as McDonald’s, Yahoo, Coca-Cola and Toyota. Carter has since gone solo and has helmed more than 100 ads for clients.

Imagine’s Brian Grazer and Howard are producers. David Bernardi, shingle’s senior VP, and director of development, Chris Wade, will serve as co-producers.

Image Comics also publishes the popular "Spawn" books, as well as "Witchblade," "WildC.A.T.s," "The Walking Dead" and "Youngblood.""


To say I'm unenthusiastic about this would be an understatement. A "directing vehicle" (what a great choice of words!) for Richie from 'Happy Days' whose previous pictures include Most Boring Film EVAR 'Apollo 13'. Scripted and produced by people notable for doing Coca Cola commercials. That isn't even the worst part though.

It's not as if the big screen's seen much in the way of HPL adaptations in the first place, certainly very little that's been any good. In the face of that, then, I'm not exactly greeting this news of what looks to be some kind of comedy biopic with much hope. Would Lovecraft approve? Probably not, he was a bit of a dour sod by all accounts. I don't either.

I doubt this typo would have pleased the author...

A couple of quotes showing that Hodgson's attitude toward the porcine might not have been particularly favourable:

"As the sounds ceased I saw something was rising up through the middle of the "defense". It rose with a slow steady movement. I saw it pale and huge through the swaying, whirling funnel of cloud - a monstrous pallid snout rising out of that unknowable abyss.... It rose higher like a huge pale mound. Through a thinning of the cloud curtain I saw one small eye.... I shall never see a pig's eye again without feeling something of what I felt then. A pig's eye with a sort of hell-light of vile understanding shining at the back of it." - The Hog

"It was a gigantic thing, and moved with a curious lope, going almost upright, after the manner of a man. It was quite unclothed, and had a remarkable luminous appearance. Yet it was the face that attracted and frightened me the most. It was the face of a swine." - The House on the Borderland

Full texts of 'The House on the Borderland', 'The Night Land', the Carnacki stories, and more of Hodgson's fiction is available to read online via places such as Project Gutenberg.

Hodgson was a writer ahead of his time in many ways and although reading him is sometimes pretty tough going (the cod-archaic style of 'The Night Land' a case in point) I believe he made a lasting contribution to Weird fiction. China Miéville's excellent introduction to this collection, now unfortunately out of print (I bagged a copy before the prices shot up) is well worth reading for anyone interested in the author and his works.

Spring cleaning

I've taken out all the music posts on this blog and put them into another one. I decided they were cluttering this one up. It's probably part of a slippery slope which will end in me pidgeonholing every single post and eventually every single thought into a separate category and blog. Let's hope not.

Also I've bitten the bullet and started "Twittering" or whatever the damnsilly verb is. Yes, I can even be a curmudgeon about technology. The URL's http://twitter.com/alexcarnegie in any case.

The hightop sneakers of Monkey Island

See here.

WANT.

I was a huge fan of the Monkey Island series and Lucasarts adventure games in general when I was a kid.

Goodfellas VS Peanuts

Movie Roundup - 'What Just Happened?', 'Timecrimes', 'Fears of the Dark'

Keeping it brief because I'm a bit busy...


'What Just Happened?' is a bit of an odd one. Tries to be a quirky exposé of the Hollywood shark-pool, comes across as a bit of a smug Hollywood in-joke. Bruce Willis typifies this, and reminds me of Charlie Sheen in 'Being John Malkovich': yeah, we know, you can laugh at yourself. What a good sport.

Another phoned-in performance by DeNiro who's shown us of late that, like Al Pacino, he'd play a ham sandwich if someone paid him enough and would still give the impression that he wasn't really trying.

When the film ended I didn't feel like I'd gained much from the experience really, or indeed been on much of a journey during it.

The soundtrack's nice though. Buck 65 and Nick Drake feature among others.



'Timecrimes' (or 'Los Cronocrímenes') is, without wanting to sound patronising, actually a fairly good achievement for what appears to be quite a low budget film - especially seeing as it's Science Fiction of a sort, dealing with time travel. You'll have to suspend your disbelief a bit here, as the characters do not react in a particularly natural way to a lot of the events, and sometimes the time-travel is used as a quite clumsy narrative device that at times becomes predictable - you're meant to think "ah, so that happened because he did x when he went back" but it's no great stunning revelation. All in all, there are worse ways of spending the hour and a half-ish that it takes to watch this movie.

'Fears of the Dark' ('Peurs du Noir') is a collection of black and white animated shorts of a Horror pursuasion that's not too bad at all. The first and last segments are definately the strongest, the latter in particular using the format's sense of light and dark most effectively. It was also nice to see (although not throughout) what looked like traditional, rather than CGI, animation. Of the three films I'd say this is the one I'd most recommend.

FIN.

Charlie Brooker on Literature: "Apparently 65% of us have lied about reading the great works of literature. We needn't have bothered"

"The other irony is that while people lie about having read highbrow novels in order to impress each other, a massive percentage of highbrow novels aren't worth reading anyway because the authors are too busy trying to impress the reader (who, we now know, probably hasn't bothered turning up). That's why so many contemporary novels seem to largely consist of a thinly veiled version of the author discussing politics and art and quantum theory over a carefully selected bottle of wine with the devastatingly beautiful mixed-race wife of an impotent international statesman and/or gangster (delete where applicable) before whisking her off to a swish hotel room to have expert animal sex with her all weekend until a pigeon symbolising the unions or something crashes into the window and blah blah blah blah BLAH. I mean, really, who cares? Mr Tickle had 20 times the raw entertainment value - and it came with pictures - so if you can't beat that, don't bother."

Full article here.

LOL.

Cue dullards calling him 'anti-intellectual'. There's nothing particularly 'intellectual' or worthy about stuck-up, elitist bullshit. I think Brooker's seen through the Emperor's New Clothes..

Terminator - Salvation

Looks good. Hopefully there won't be too much superfast, ultra-shiny CGI à la Transformers.

I've always liked the Terminator movies, especially the first. It'll be good to see the future in that universe, after The Machines have 'smashed the world' (to use a Lintian phrase).

Meanwhile, here's a Drum&Bass tune that's essentially a remix of the original Terminator theme:

You are -> here <- and there is no way back

"Lewin reflected upon the ones that we leave behind when we follow our path through life, that their lives continue unseen regardless, and of all that we might have seen and done had things occurred differently. Would he have been happier with these people still in his life, any more so than he was with his current lot? Would they be happier with him in their lives? It was impossible to know. Futile to contemplate. He certainly knew that he wished not to have stayed for a lifetime but for at least a little more time – one always wishes this when there is no more time left or opportunity to spend it."

The Life of the Mind

Watching 'Barton Fink' when you're blocked, feeling nihilistic, and undergoing a crisis of confidence in your abilities and the choices you've made in your life: good idea or bad?

Well, a Coen film is never a bad choice. It hasn't cheered me up any though.

Oh well. Mañana...

'Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline' - Time Magazine Photo Essay

Click here to see it.

I was struck by the Gothic beauty of these images, the aura of loneliness and potential long since buried that seems to radiate from the decaying, abandoned landscape. In particular image #5, the United Artists Theatre, is redolent of bygone opulence and decadence - it looks like a place abandoned in the middle of something, as if some great catastrophe event swallowed all the inhabitants rather than the more mundane and ultimately sadder reality. I have a feeling some of this imagery's going to work its way into my writing...

Canon? Balls.

I've an abiding hatred of being told what to like, what is supposed to have worth and what is not. The prescription of canon, of taste, of such a nebulous thing as quality - it has always struck me as parochial at best and elitist and fascistic at worst. We're all guilty of making value judgments, but those that have the weight of an establishment behind them seem to me the worst by far - they have the most influence and can do the most damage.

As a student of English Literature I've had to keep my natural instict to rail against the supposedly high-minded and gentil tyranny of the literary establishment at bay. It's meant that I've broadened my horizons somewhat: instead of remaining predisposed against certain writers and movements (e.g. the Modernists) simply because they are so critically acclaimed amongst the makers of canons, these sneering self-styled arbiters of worth and genre (or "chutney and jam" as Graham Joyce so aptly puts it in his editorial piece in 'Postscripts 13') I've decided to dismiss both this reaction against and also any pushes in their favour and merely judge them on their merits according to my own reading. I enjoyed and learned from these works not because they belonged to some bullshit 'official reading list' of high literature but according to my own judgment. I really do find the glorified herd mentality quite sickening: I thought that was something you only got in low culture, eh chaps?

I suppose in this post I'm announcing my own hostile intent toward canons. Add another 'n' and you get what I realise is a truly bad pun, but hear me out: canons are created to defend/maintain the status quo. Canons are destructive - but they create walls and barriers rather than breaking them. Canons are used by those within against those outside.

The only canons I believe in are the ones we create for ourselves and are only relevant to ourselves. Don't tell me what's "of high value" or "important": tell me what you like. Don't preach, recommend. I'll make up my own mind.

Charlie Brooker on 'Heston Blumenthal's Victorian Feast'

"This really is one of the most creative shows I've seen in quite a while; not in the construction of the programme itself (which takes the familiar "mission" format to provide a fairly spurious narrative), but in Blumenthal's inventive craziness. It's basically a bloke deliberately dicking around to extreme effect for an hour, dabbling in a weird form of art, seeing how far he can go. Halfway through, I realised why this was so refreshing: you very rarely see such genuinely ingenious and imaginative processes being followed this clearly on TV. Each course Blumenthal serves is like an edible Python sketch: meticulously constructed and very, very silly."

The full article from The Guardian can be found here.

Brooker's great - always funny, frequently (and deservedly) scathing, and absolutely one hundred percent on the money most of the time. For all the apparent grumpiness he seems like One Of The Good Guys.

I watched the programme last night and I have to say I agree. It was good fun. I'm looking forward to the next installment which I fervently hope is called 'Heston's Jurassic Feast' and in which he clones a velociraptor and uses it to make a very fine consomme.

'The Crisis'

Have you ever seen stone rot away in seconds or dissolve like sugarlumps in boiling water? That was on the day the ceiling collapsed and the shadows of airships fell through the building’s cracked ribcage. I recall them drifting corpulently like boats seen from below the water. It seemed like we ran for hours after that, never fully escaping the shade.

The start of a short new piece (click here to read more) that I'm working on and thinking of submitting for this year's Creative Writing Competition/Anthology at London Met.

Defaced

"He was never entirely sure whether the thing he did next - the thing he always did next, the thing he had to do - was because the woman before him was not the one he had become fixated with or because in a way she was, whether she bore too striking a similarity or not quite enough. He knew that when the deed was done (heart beating so hard that he thought he was dying) she was neither, and her face could no longer taunt him frustratingly with what was different and what was the same, what he had and what he had not, because it was no longer there. He watched her bleed out in the morning light, noting the final slow and steady breath as he cleaned his equipment."

Aldous Huxley - 'Brave New World'

I'm midway through reading this for, I am thoroughly ashamed to say, the first time (full text here) and had to stop and blog. It's marvellous stuff.

The most striking and chilling of Dystopias, I think, are the ones that go under the guise of Utopias. Huxley, like Orwell, understood this all too well. There's something missing in today's Sci-Fi that can be found in works such as these. We, who in the Postmodern era have become so blasé in our discrediting and dismissal of all and sundry, our aloof alignment to non-alignment, do not and cannot really appreciate the terrible power of all-consuming, unbending ideology.

Love & War

Last weekend I was very kindly invited to an event at the Institute Of Education that took place as part of Jewish Book Week - a talk/Q&A session with "emotional/moral philosopher" Professor Aaron Ben-Ze'ev entitled 'In The Name Of Love'. It was in part a promotion for his book 'In The Name Of Love - Romantic Ideology & Its Victims' which I have since begun reading.

The book examines romantic love from a curious perspective: on one hand it examines its changing nature and impact upon our lives in the modern day, and on the other it examines statements made by a people who have committed murder "in the name of love" - more specifically the killing of a partner or former partner. Each chapter begins with quotes from songs, poems, and the like regarding love but also those taken from interviews with murderers - and of course the interesting part of this is how utterly alike the sentiments expressed are.

As I'm currently grappling with a fictional character who is impelled toward terrible acts by the loss of love, this is all very interesting and useful stuff - all food for thought and the creative process. The canapes and miniature duck wraps at the reception afterwards (courtesy of the British Friends Of The University Of Haifa) were very tasty as well.

Tonight I finally got around to watching 'Waltz With Bashir'.

It has that odd look of a lot of today's computer assisted animation where everything's perhaps a little too fluid. That's not really a criticism, just an observation really.

I'll say what you're probably expecting me to say, because it's true: in visual terms it's beautifully done. I did feel however that for a film so concerned with the trauma of war it didn't entirely go as deep as it could have done into that theme/issue but instead preferred to skirt it with images, little allusory remarks, and so on. I'd tentatively suggest that it may be a case of 'style over substance' to an extent. I think I also miss a lot of nuance and feeling through watching it in subtitled form - but then I don't speak Hebrew and my co-viewer wasn't fluent either. All this aside, as a series of vivid snapshots of war though it definately succeeds.

The film's climax is shocking and extremely sobering, one of those times when everything goes a bit quiet in the room for a while afterwards. The abrupt switch (I won't go into specifics, you'll know if/when you watch it) brought to mind Theodor Adorno's dictum that there can be "no poetry after Auschwitz" - in the face of such horror, artifice is meaningless.