…and that’s that the cover of every romance novel you have seen is now alive, thanks to a man with a sparkling green guitar.

(Thanks to Jhayne)

In the trailers before the new Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, began, there was a promo for the new Tom Cruise film. In it, he might play a German, but he seems not to have any kind of accent going; he does have an eye patch, though, and he is trying to kill Hitler.

Well, I thought, it couldn’t be worse than that.

Two hours later, I emerged, fairly sure I had been wrong in that simple assumption, and unable to tell you why the Quantum of Solace was important to the film.

I like to think I’m an intelligent guy. I get by. But other than the vague suggestion that the Quantum of Solace was a shadowy group of powerful, international figures who enjoyed replacing world leaders without any moral compunction so they can make money, I had no idea what they wanted, what they were doing, or why the guy in charge seemed to want to bank up water in poor countries and then install puppet dictators and make them sign agreements to pay for the Quantum of Solace to sell them water. Perhaps the Quantum of Solace was just about selling water and making everyone feel that the environment was important. Or perhaps the Quantum of Solace didn’t really have much to do with this project. It seems financially unsound: destabilise a country so you can get control of the water board. I mean, destabilising a country is costly, I’m sure. Just as sneaking in with dynamite and blowing up rivers to create a catchment to do this. Also, you know, that sounds as if it would go a little noticed.

Not, y’know, that Bond seemed to care.

In fact, I’m sure that if someone had caught Bond, in the middle of the film, and tortured him about the Quantum of Solace, the conversation would have gone something like this:

We must torture you, Mr Bond, to know what you know.

Who?

Good lord, James, you can’t be serious? Women are like objects to you, and that film was ages ago, and seriously, didn’t you kill the guy involved there?

Oh.

How’d that work?

Oh.

Um.

Don’t suppose he told you about the Quantum of Solace?

Seriously now, I have a hot poker and your genitals are showing.

What have you been doing for the last hour and and a half?

…

Seriously, again with her?

So, Quantum of Solace?

Oh.

It’s okay. I know how it goes.

Is that what I’m doing here?

I suppose so.

I liked Casino Royale. I thought it was easily the best of the Bond films I’d seen, and while that might seem like a backhanded compliment, I did enjoy it, and I’d missed going to a cinema, so I thought the new one would be at least a safe bet for a Sunday evening.

I was wrong. It’s an awful film, plain and simple. The actors in it are decent, but the whole thing doesn’t make any real sense, and what sense it does make requires you to remember the previous film a lot better than I did. In addition to that, the action scenes are poorly directed, and there’s no real sense of what’s going on the moment Bond isn’t in a vehicle of some sort (though he does have fights in cars, boats and air planes, which I suppose is something). Worse, however, is that there’s no real engagement in any of the politics that seem to be lurking in the background. The greyness of world politics? The poor people Bond walks past in his suit and with his attractive girl? The environment?

No.

But then, I suppose, Bond was never meant to address such concerns.

Over the weekend I was talking, briefly, about William Shatner’s album, Has Been, and most specifically the cover of Pulp’s ‘Common People’.

If you’ve forgotten how awesome it was, here’s a mash-up of good old Spock and Kirk cartoon slash to the song, and if you’ve never heard it, now’s the time to do so. If you think it might suck, it’s alright to think that, but you’re wrong.

The Last Short Story crew have released a list of stories they consider the Year’s Best by Australian authors.

The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga…Peter M. Ball (Dreaming Again)
On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves… Peter M. Ball (Fantasy)
As We Know It… Lyn Battersby (Borderlands #10)
The Metawhore’s Tale… Lee Battersby (Canterbury 2100)
Seven Ages of the Protagonist… Deborah Biancotti (Scary Food)
Watertight Lies… Deborah Biancotti (2012)
Oh Russia… Simon Brown (2012)
The Empire… Simon Brown (Dreaming Again)
A Thousand Natural Shocks… Simon Brown (Borderlands #10)
Neverland Blues… Adam Browne (Dreaming Again)
The Glass Girl Looks Back… Stephanie Campisi (Shimmer)
A Pox on All Your Houses… Stephanie Campisi (Dog vs Sandwich)
The Gnomogist’s Tale… Matthew Chrulew (Canterbury 2100)
WinterCrystal Nights… Greg Egan (Interzone #215)
Angel Rising… Dirk Flinthart (Twelfth Planet Publishing)
This is Not My Story… Dirk Flinthart (ASIM #37)
Her Collection of Intimacy… Paul Haines (Black #2)
Creeping in Reptile Flesh… Robert Hood (Creeping in Reptile Flesh)
Unravelling… Robert Hood (Creeping in Reptile Flesh)
The New Deal… Trent Jamieson (Dreaming Again)
Machine Maid… Margo Lanagan (Extraordinary Engines)
The Goosle… Margo Lanagan (Del Ray Book of SF/F)
The Janus’s Tale… Penelope Love (Canterbury 2100)
The Constant Past… Sean McMullen (Dreaming Again)
The Funeral, Ruined… Ben Peek (Paper Cities)
David Bowie… Ben Peek (2012)
I Love You Like Water… Angela Slatter (2012)
The Hummingbird Heart… Angela Slatter (Shimmer)
Palisade… Cat Sparks (Clockwork Phoenix)
Ass-Hat Magic Spider… Scott Westerfeld (The Starry Rift)

Of more interest, however, was Ben Payne’s (benpayne) commentary on the Australian scene earlier:

This year saw, if anything, a further diffusing of Australian short fiction. If the last few years weren’t enough of an indicator, 2008 continued the trend toward anthologies and overseas markets and a further weakening of any regular short story markets on a local scale.

The year was always going to be dominated by Dreaming Again, the first mass market anthology of short stories we’ve seen for some time. How did it stack up? For my money, the results were mixed. The anthology lacked consistency, but was so large that it still managed to pull out a good number of worthwhile stories despite that. Worth buying, certainly. Whether it managed to hook any new converts to the cause of short fiction in this country is something time will, perhaps, tell. I suspect history will remember it most for the emergence of the promising new authors contained within (although there was some good work from more experienced hands too). As far as the authors contained within, I don’t think it stands as an accurate snapshot of the scene, but then, should we expect it to? Anyway, it’s a good book, when all’s said and done.

Beyond that, stocks looked thin for much of the year. There was a late flurry of books released at Conflux, in Canberra, including the excellent Canterbury 2100, a labour of love project for editor Dirk Flinthart which contained many high quality stories and which will no doubt become a cult classic. Probably the standout, along with Dreaming Again, of the year. Conflux also saw the growing Morrigan Books’ release of Voices, an anthology containing a number of up and coming local authors, as well as Robert Hood, who also released his collection, Creeping in Reptile Flesh, with some fine new work in it. In childrens’ fiction, Trust Me, an anthology of stories, appeared. Also noted without comment is Twelfth Planet’s 2012, a selection of science fiction and fantasy set in 2012, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and myself.

As I mentioned above, the magazine market appeared somewhat depleted, a continuing trend. The best news was that Aurealis managed to produce two issues, one a double, keeping, if not quite to schedule, at least respectably regular. I thought both issues had some excellent stories in, maintaining Aurealis’s place as one of the top markets in the country.

ASIM had a good year last year, and I thought this year they fell away a bit, but still produced some good stories. Once again, they kept to schedule, releasing six issues. Borderlands started the year well, with a strong Issue #10 following on from a weaker Issue #9 in December 07. Regularity again proved troublesome for them, with no further issues appearing as yet. The Australian Horror Association released their first issue of Midnight Echo late in the year. I thought it was promising, without delivering any real standouts, while other readers have been more keen. Certainly worth checking out if you’re a horror fan. And speaking of horror, Brimstone Press released three issues of their ambitious mass-market magazine Black, with a small amount of space allotted to fiction. The second issue in particular contained some strong stories. Brimstone also released another anthology of flash fiction. Noted without comment: my own webzine Dog versus Sandwich published a number of fantasy stories.

Last but not least, Australian authors continue to grow as a presence in international magazines. There have been some particularly impressive inroads made in terms of fantasy and new weird, with authors like Stephanie Campisi, Angela Slatter, Ben Peek, Kaaron Warren, Deb Biancotti, Cat Sparks and others now appearing quite regularly in international magazines. Peter M Ball is a very promising new author who is making a name for himself quickly. And authors such as Margo Lanagan, Garth Nix, Sean McMullen and Greg Egan continue to appear in the top markets with regularity.

Look down the list to some of the (ahem) less impressive international markets, and those in between the two poles, and you’ll see a lot of local authors emerging, and appearing with greater regularity. It’s possible that this explains, to some extent, the decline in local markets. The growing globalisation of the marketplace, especially through the growth of webzines and electronic submissions, means that more and more writers are turning to overseas markets as a first point of call, rather than working their way up through the local small press first. Whether this is a good or bad thing, perhaps only the perspective of time will tell.

It’s an interesting commentary, because, from my point of view at any rate, this has been a very quiet year on the local scene. There seemed to be less publications, just as there seemed to be less people doing things. It’s the way it goes, of course: the ebbs and flows of a tiny scene reliant on the moods of individuals and how much spare cash they’ve got.

However, what seemed to be missing, for me at least, was the spark of something exciting, something new, that I wanted to read. This feeling I have–because it’s not gone yet–is one of a general apathy with a lot of ‘art’ out there, be it a film, music, and piece of fiction. A lot of it just seems tired, rehashed, and uninvolving. I watched less films this year, read less, heard less, and while I don’t expect that to be any kind of empirical evidence that the world seemed to become a tiny dull thing in concern to the emotions that people were putting out in their work, it’s what I felt. But, honestly, the truth in this is that it might have been me, just going through a phase where I kick round, looking for new things and not finding what it is that I exactly want, and that indeed is how it goes at times.

Here’s hoping I’m not feeling that way this time next year.

I finally made my way to the end of Seagalogy by Vern.

You might note that by the way I said finally, that the book lost a bit of its shine, and it did, though it remained amusing throughout its whole.

The main idea behind the book is that, “It’s not just the presence of Seagal that makes it a Seagal film.” According to Vern, it’s the politics, the ideologies, the cultural interests, and the ability to throw someone through a window in a bar fight, if possible, that make this true. It’s not a bad theory, and I could kind of get behind it, but Vern, unfortunately, doesn’t have the critical ability to make such an argument work for three hundred pages. Part of it is his structure: He divides his book into chapters that follow each film in chronological order, and the chapters tell you what happened in each, while going off on tangents such as what a bad cop such and such was because of this, and that. Because of this, there’s no real development of that theme–you’re just suppose to see it lurking in the back of the films, the way Vern does. And, in fairness, I can see it lurking in the back, it’s just that I don’t particularly care about wading through reviews of films that, no matter how much Vern wants to make you believe there’s a body of work in place, are just kind of the same old shit.

Ultimately, in fact, after twenty seven film reviews where Vern doesn’t focus on Seagal’s personal life, personal interests, and the background of filming–there is a moment when Vern mentionsa conflict with mobsters, which I thought was interesting, and could be seen as an influence on later films–but because he doesn’t focus on this, and deliberately makes a choice not too, Vern simple reinforces the negative take of Seagal’s films: that they are very similar. That there’s really not that much going for them. That they’re not the work of a kind of action hero auteur, just as Vern’s book is not the work of someone with any real critical capacity.

Still, the book had its moments, so I got no hassle with my time in it. I just wish it had been smarter.

ALMOST WHITE RUSSIAN

2 oz Vodka
1 oz Coffee liqueur
1/2 oz semen
cream or milk
ice cubes

Pour vodka, semen and coffee liqueur over ice cubes and top up the glass with milk or cream.

MAN MADE OYSTERS

Cleaned oyster shells
Chilled fresh semen, the more the better
Ice
Lemon and pepper garnish

First clean the oyster shells in cold water. Do not use soap since the shell easily absorbs the nasty taste of soap. Spoon the chilled, fresh semen into each shell. Serve simply on ice with just a squeeze of fresh lemon and maybe a grind of black pepper.

Chef’s note: A true semen connoisseur might forego the lemon and pepper in favor of the non-adulterated semen flavor.

The author, himself, says, “My name is Paul Photenhauer. My friends call me “Fotie” and you can too. I enjoy food and cooking it - especially when I add a little semen to the dishes I create. No, I’m not joking and no, I’m not some sort of whacky freak. I’m just passionate about everything I do, including cooking with cum. Thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoy the book and the blog. I would love to hear what you have to say, so be sure to leave a comment or two!”

I think my Xmas shopping is complete now.

Thank you, Nick (My Milkshake Brings All the Boys to the Yard) Kaufmann (nick_kaufmann).