This is early Steven Seagal:

You’ll note the accent, the slimness, the breaking of teeth.

It comes from a film called Out for Justice, which I’ve seen, but don’t remember much of. Anyhow, in the grand scheme of things, I give a nod to the use of a cue ball and whatever cloth he has there to break teeth.

Below is Steven Seagal now:

This is from a film called Kill Switch, which I haven’t seen and, y’know, probably won’t. I don’t think I could survive that accent.

Reportedly, in later films, Seagal has taken to having his voice dubbed, because–I’m making the leap here–he’s barely understandable in his mumbling on camera. Maybe he’s actually doing this voice, but I’m not sure if this makes it better, or if this makes it worse. However, there is a moment in which he breaks some dude’s teeth rather impressively, so despite the weight gain, the accent–have I mentioned that enough?–and all that, we know it’s still the same Seagal.

Watching videos of the later films is rather like watching this awesome wreck in which no one gets hurt, and everyone walks away fine, and you say, “Fuck, you are lucky you are not dead,” and then the same dude does it again, just to prove it wasn’t a trick. Clips from later Seagal films seem to suggest that he shouldn’t be acting, that he’s lucky to have this film, but there he is, again and again, and even in interviews where he is misquoted and said to be claiming to be God (he is claiming all sentient beings are Gods, at least that’s how I took it). Of course, in the same interview he’s also claiming to be clairvoyant. Maybe he is. Who knows.

Does anyone know where I might be able to pick up a cheap version of Octavia Butler’s third novel, Survivor?

It hasn’t been in print since the eighties since, from what I understand, Butler didn’t like the book, and it didn’t have a lot to do with her series it was set in, but I’m tracking down the stuff I haven’t read, and second hand copies of it are going for seventy five bucks and ridiculous shit like that. I’m doing a bit of poking round on the net, but I thought I’d ask in general just in case someone’s seen it cheap round; not that I’m against paying such costs in the name of research, mind you, I’m just exhausting my other choices first. I haven’t tried Sydney library databases yet, mostly because I think that will be a long shot, but would there be, by any chance somewhere, a cheap second hand copy or a file of it online that I could get pointed too in the name of research?

(Also, it seems while removing spam off the main blog, I have accidentally deleted a bunch of comments. My apologies if yours is gone now–it wasn’t intentional.)

A few weeks or so ago, I mentioned I was writing a new story that I planned to call ‘Convicts’. I had a good opening line. I had a good premise. It sounded good.

Shame it was shit. I spent a lot of time trying to make it work, especially the voice of the piece, but it was too much like narrators I had done previously (mostly, it resembled the narration from Beneath the Red Sun (which is the novel Across the Seven Continents of the Underworld, but with a new title)). Worse, it wasn’t saying anything new: I could see how I had said the same thing in previous short stories, and the structure was one that I just couldn’t get jazzed about. Sometimes a short story will work for me because I’m doing something different, technically, than I have done before, and that makes it interesting. But this thing, this thing was dead in the water, and I spent a few weeks flipping it round, trying to make it work. I gave a voice to the girl, though I initially wanted a single view point from the male narrator, but she turned out to be dull and without purpose. The main narrator wasn’t dealing much better. His main characterisation seemed to be that he was detached. Well, he was. Detached from being interesting, from plot, from style, from narrative, from purpose. I was a victim of my own success, it seemed, in creating detached men.

Yesterday, I was staring at the words, rewriting the first thousand words again, and I realised, finally, that the thing had to be trashed, so I did it. It happens, and I moved to another idea, this one more interesting, ambitious, and technically challenging. It involves essays of Octavia Butler’s work, in fact, but as to how that will work by the end of the piece, I’ve yet to decide. Still, it feels better, feels more solid, and more importantly, it takes me away from doing the things that I have been doing for the last year. About time, really.

I have no idea if other writers are conscious of the shape of their body of work. Perhaps it’s pretentious even of me to talk about it, or to think it, but there’s a kind of arrogance mixed into writing, and my particular arrogance is not to view my work as this piece or that piece, but as something that comes together on extra levels when viewed as a whole. What that means is that I’m always conscious of the work that I’ve done behind me; whether it was good or bad doesn’t hugely concern me, as a lot of it is taste, and I tend just to spot the flaws in my stuff once it’s done. But what I do keep in my mind are themes, interests, types of narrators, styles, forms, and the like, and I do this so that I can watch for repetition and sag in my body of work. To keep going, to keep being interesting, you need to change things up, to push the boundaries of your interests, to give different takes, to make, within all of your work, a set of arguments, themes, and obsessions that continue to inspire. Now, I don’t mean that this is something that is done for the reader, because I honestly have no control over he or she, but I mean that it is something I need, that I want. If I’m not doing it, I feel as if my work is stagnant, and maybe that, really, is the most pretentious thing I’ve said in this post yet, but just kind of go with me here, because what I’m saying is that that story was all those shitty things, and I had to scrap it.

It’s life, I guess.

Setting the opening scenes on Oscar night 1983 adds a sort of realistic texture to the movie, putting the characters into the same historical and cultural type context that we live in… but I think there’s also a little subtext here–I don’t think it is a stretch to guess that the writers chose Oscar night 1983 as a way of comparing Mason Storm’s violent retribution to Gandhi’s non-violent protest. Mason never finds out about Gandhi winning the Oscars, but his friend at the police stations does, and cheers for Ben Kingsley’s win shortly before being shot dead. This seems to indicate that pacifism can only go so far, that we are dealing with violent people and that at some point you need to decide that enough is enough and bring violent retribution to your enemies the way Mason Storm does. You can’t just let people walk all over you–you need to take them to the blood bank, it says.

The only real weakness I can find in this argument is that Gandhi is an actual historical figure who really did use non-violent protests to bring independence to India, and in turn inspired other movements across the world, including the one that ended segregation in the United states. Mason Storm, on the other hand, is a fictional character and still was only able to get revenge on a couple of people. I’m sure it made him feel better to say stuff like, “That’s for my wife. Fuck you and die,” but I still think Gandhi’s method has a better track record, in my opinion. I mean I could be wrong. I’m not though.

Still, the movie is great.

–From Seagalogy, by Vern.

Out of a vague curiosity and desire to read something different, I picked up Seagalogy, a study of the ass-kicking films of Steven Seagal, and I really can’t justify it more than that.

I don’t know what I expected with the book, but so far, I’m finding it pretty funny. It’s almost like a parody of pop culture criticism, wherein people write thesis’ and huge articles about the importance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr Who, and do it in that tone that suggests that they really want their obsessions to be taken seriously, and to be seen as important. That’s always bugged me, simply because, really, they’re not. The subtext is often thin, the themes one note, the final product dodgy, and so on and so forth; but in Seagalogy, Vern acknowledges that Seagal’s films aren’t art, and even as he goes through making a theory that the films have a correlation to Seagal’s life, and represent his own interests, he does it without any seriousness, without that pitiful whine that often comes through in pop culture criticism. Vern simply doesn’t care. You understand that he loves Seagal’s films for what they are, and has a theory about them that he wants you to dig, but there’s a good sense of just not giving a fuck if you take it or not, at least at this stage of reading the book.

But mostly, it’s funny, and I’ve surprised myself and stopped reading Lydia Millet’s new book–and I fucking love Millet–to read this.

A potation that Pepsi deserves plenty of praise for, as amazingly it actually tastes as sickly as it sounds. The drink’s slightly thick texture and peculiar taste making it akin to sucking down some slightly watered down shampoo. A pot of Pantene perhaps — only worse.

Link.

It began, I figure, when I downloaded Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

I was having a conversation with someone, though I’m not sure who know, about how Jackson had been a pretty decent pop musician in the eighties, but what’d we’d all remember him for now would be the zoo, the whiteness, and the children fucking allegations. After that, I had an itch to download the album, which promptly turned out to suck like you would not believe, and left me wondering if I did indeed know what I was talking about. I mean, sure, Billie Jean isn’t a bad song, but all I could think while hearing it was how I wished there was an Alien Ant Farm cover of it like there was of Smooth Criminal. I missed that video clip with the monkey and the tracksuits. In searching for covers, however, I did come across Chris Cornell’s version of Billie Jean, and was reminded that I shouldn’t wish too hard for covers, because when Cornell hits that chorus, you can’t help but laugh.

Anyhow, it began there, this period of bad music. Well, perhaps bad isn’t the right word: ordinary music. Music that bored me. Music that I listened to once, maybe twice, and left it where I found it. My lowest moment was the Gnarls Barkley album I downloaded, thinking that, yeah, sure, the millions of people who dig them can’t be wrong… but you are. All their songs sound the same. Also, they’re boring. I couple of runs through the Odd Couple was enough to convince me that I needed to escape this horrible cycle I was on. Sure, it wasn’t costing me money, because I was downloading these albums, trying before I was buying, but I hadn’t yet hit anything with that buzz in it. I got the third Bloc Party album, Intimacy, hoping that it might capture what I loved about the first album, and not what bored me about the second, but instead I got this thing that opens with sounds vaguely reminiscent of fire alarms, and doesn’t go anywhere interesting with it at all. From that, I had a brief moment where I thought Death Cab for Cutie for reasonable, until I came to my senses and realised it was just my soft rock pop thing that I fall into occasionally misleading me. The new Mogwai album, Hawk is Howling, is the same Mogwai album that they released last, and it sounded vaguely familiar to the one before that, and sure, it’ll be okay to put on while I write, because anything without lyrics is good for me when I’m writing, but I was starting to feel as if that Jackson album had tainted me, and I couldn’t escape what was, at its core, an emptiness.

None of the albums were bad, you see, they just weren’t very good, they just didn’t matter to me, and neither did they want too.

The Drone’s new album, Havilah, which I bought, was much the same as these, though it has a few stand out tracks like ‘Oh My’. But mostly, it lacks the sense of whole that was in their previous album, and the roughness that was in the ones before that. I like it because I like the band, but I know it’s not anywhere near their best, and I suspect they’re just cruising on this one, rather than pushing themselves. At the very least it’s better than the new Augie March album, which I’d forgotten I’d heard until I was going through my playlist just a moment ago. Apparently, I heard the album four and a half times, and couldn’t begin to tell you one interesting thing about it.

There have been brief moments, however: the new Mercury Rev album isn’t bad, and A Silver Mt Zion’s 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons, which I finally got around to buying, is pretty damn decent, and proves that I should’ve got off my ass ages ago.

But I’m painfully aware I’ve become lazy throughout the year, that I’ve just relied on old albums, on bands I knew, and that I am in need of something new, something with that catch that makes you go, ‘Fuck, yeah.’

Personally, I blame Michael Jackson for this state I’m in.

From Strange Horizons:

If Surrealism was a revolutionary movement representative of the liberation of a previously dormant collective imagination, A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, edited by Jason Erik Lundberg and Janet Chui (who also contributed striking illustrations), a lovely little book encompassing a vast collaborative collage of imagined plant specimens, is a quiet inversion, a patient investigation of the fantastic in literature. Too much attention to the actual tenets of Surrealism as a framework for understanding A Field Guide to Surreal Botany would probably do the book a disservice, as, due to its necessary subscription to formula, it doesn’t necessarily align itself with the more disorganized, chaotically free expression of “the real functioning of thought” (as Andre Breton defined the movement in his seminal Surrealist Manifesto). Surreal, in this instance, is a stand-in for unreal, a signifier of the presence of the fantastic, and the book, counting among its contributors a number of writers closely associated with the community of speculative fiction, succeeds as an investigation of the idea of fantasy and its purpose, generally, within the literary community at large.

The book contains 48 entries, each written by a different author and describing a different variety of surreal plant, a project similar to that of Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts’ The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases which chronicles an imagined medical history playfully constructed by an impressive list of bestselling and award-winning writers. The entries in A Field Guide to Surreal Botany are perhaps not meant to be read all at once, or even in sequence, as the uniformity of presentation and often relatively minor deviations in content (for example, the dimensions of the plants themselves and the size and color of their leaves and flowers begin to feel redundant as one ventures further through the slim volume) undercuts the inherent beauty and import of the project itself. Reading the book cover to cover, as I did, invites the impression that the individual entries are perhaps inherently slight and the project itself too whimsical. As a whole, however, the endeavor assumes a general responsibility greater than the sum of its parts: that of the creation—through the accumulation of painstaking physical descriptions, elaborately contrived anecdotes, and clever origin stories—of a new world that strives to simultaneously infiltrate and fantastically reimagine the one in which we currently reside.

Also, it seems like I’m coming down with the flu, or sickness, or something resembling the first steps of a horrible death.

We can only pray it’s the last.

There had been fruit cake in my fridge since Xmas.

It was sitting in a plastic container, cake bought back from my mother’s, because I’m not a huge fan, but I must’ve figured at the time that it’d be okay over the Xmas period. At any rate, I promptly forgot about it, and it sat at the back of the fridge, for months until, last night, I decided it had to go. It was bin night. So I took it out, popped the lid, expected some kind of smell, a lot of fuzz, a lot of green, a lot of… well, things that weren’t there.

Instead it looked like the fruit cake eleven months ago. A little dry, I guess, but in no way suggestive of an inedible quality.

Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad, I thought?

In other news, the cover of Polyphony Seven has been making the rounds, and it’s shiny:

The book will now be released in February of 2008, and it contains my story, ‘There is Something so Quiet and Empty Inside of You That it Must be Precious’. You can, however, pre-order it at the Wheatland Press site.

Y’know, I think this was the only short story I wrote this year.

It got a little lost in the election, but Nowhere Near Savannah came to an end on Wednesday.

Anna illustrated and wrote the final comic, turning in, I think, the best of the series: heart felt, honest, and real. When she told me that she couldn’t keep going anymore, we discussed how to end it, and Anna suggested that it would work with end notes on the characters. Things like Djae getting addicted to crystal meth, Michelle finding a nice boy, Cas having a moment wherein the trolley guy at his work got hit buy a truck on the way home, Dee going to America, and me, I go to a Vanilla Ice concert. But the truth is, those kind of end pieces only capture a little bit of the story, and sound a lot more finished that the comic was ever meant to feel in relation to its narratives. Nowhere Near Savannah was an autobiographical comic, and its beats and shifts moved to what was going on in life, and the theme, or at least what I began to connect with after the first half a dozen comics, was what it meant to be alive and living in your thirties, with shitty jobs, vague futures, and relationships that come and go, with various degrees of importance. I made a lot of jokes because I thought I was being funny and most people seemed to dig it. But there’s nothing in this that says that a permanent, closed up end was the way to go, and so after thinking the idea around for a few days, I told Anna no, we’d end, just suddenly, on her final comic.

Maybe that doesn’t sit right with some of you out there, but it sits fine with me. It’s life. Life gets in the way of the shit you want to do. Sometimes because it exhausts you, sometimes because it excites you, sometimes because it bores the fuck out of you.

Still, the thing is, Anna and I did Nowhere Near Savannah for a year. We were fourteen comics off the end, but it doesn’t matter: we did a cool thing, we did it for free, and I hope you all dug it while it ran, and that you have your favourites, and non favourites. I have mine, as the writer, and I have things I’d fix if I could go back, and things I’d do if I could finish, but this was a project I shared with Anna, and I have no interest in it if she’s not here to draw all the silly things that I think will be cool, and to later write comics that show me how little she needs me at all.

It was a pretty cool ride, though, and I hope you dug it while it was here.

I find myself in a curious place after yesterday’s election in the States.

I see a lot of posts today about the joy, the excitement, and how proud they are; people who are American and who aren’t have cried; people black and non-black; and I find myself, in reading these pieces, thinking about if any of these people can truly believe that real political change has come? No doubt some of the more extreme things introduced by the Bush administration will be taken out, but Obama and the Democrats have, to me, always sat on the wrong side of the right as far as I’m concerned, and I can’t help but think that there’ll be no huge difference. But then, that’s me, the cynic, and the truth is, I have no real investment in what happens in America, political wise (though I am aware that American politics influences the world, and that in Australia we are no more untouched by the bad and good things that happen there).

However, I also understand that yesterday was not, in a large part, about politics. It was about race, about culture, about history. I can see that, but the truth is, I’m a white Australian, and I’m as far removed from it as one could be, and I find it is false of me to sit here and say how much it means that this has happened.

Which is not to say that I don’t understand it, because I do, but it’s academic, and it isn’t in my blood, my culture, and my history.

This is Alaya Dawn Johnson:

Anyone who has heard me wax eloquent about politics (and not run away at the first opportunity) knows I’m hardly a huge fan of the democrats, and this especially includes Barack Obama. I’ve listened to and read his actual policies and he strikes me as a center-right politician of above average oratorical skills. I don’t agree with him on much. I obviously think he is vastly preferable to George Bush, but I wish that I didn’t have to compare my political candidates to murderous tyrants who should be impeached.

Last night I forgot about all of that. I tried really really hard to be the grinch that stole christmas. I did. I tried to remember Obama’s stance on Iran, and his weird middle line on gay marriage and the hundred other issues that I care about. But it didn’t matter. I got on the phone with my sister and I cried. My father was born in 1942. He participated in sit-ins in rural, segregated Virginia. He was the defendant in the seminal civil rights case, Johnson vs. Virginia, which went to the supreme court and desegregated the court systems a few years after Brown vs. Board of Education. He told me stories, growing up, of how he had to sit in the balcony of his town’s theater, because the gallery was reserved for whites. He didn’t mind, because the balcony had the better seats anyway. My dad saw a black man get elected president yesterday. My mom walked home from school during the DC riots after MLK was assassinated. She saw a black man get elected president yesterday.

I’ve had none of those experiences, but I saw Jesse Jackson in the audience during Obama’s speech and I thought: my god, none of us really thought this would happen. None of us. So, I’m happy. Inasmuch as Obama represents a moment utterly beyond himself, beyond his actual positions on actual issues, beyond any sort of mundane partisan victory: I’m proud that America managed to get here.

It’s in her blood, her culture, and her history.

That’s the only thing worth listening to today.