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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Christian Read" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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02:16 pm
[Link] | The Tale of How from Shy the Sun on Vimeo.
Dear livejournal. Twitter is a bunch of arse.
You don't deserve this though.
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08:04 pm
[Link] | Dear Livejournal.
You are boring me and no one talks to me anymore. I am going to cheat on you with twitter for a while because I am curious about twitter.
mrchristianread.
Declare yourselves, earthmen.
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07:08 pm
[Link] | So today I spent the most I've ever spent on a haircut here:
Where I resolutely avoided all eye contact with the girl in the middle, while a dyke got one of those awesome rockabilly-dyke cuts.
And apparently got the same haircut as Mike Nees from Social Distortion. If you know who they are then, 'you're a white suburban punk. Like me.', as the story goes.
Synchronicity had me then. I'm a pawn in it's game as it lures me and my little white dog off a ledge.
I came perilously close to buying a suit that would have cost more than a month of my Sydney rent on a fine black suit, broad enough for my chest and shoulders, decorated with Dias de la Muerte stitching. It was one of the handsomest things I have ever seen.
Give me your blood! I shall sell it and buy my Death-Suit!
Give it to the Christian.
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10:09 pm
[Link] | http://www.comicsalliance.com/2009/06/24/the-best-dirty-comics-by-great-artists/
Chris Sims, the world's finest comics blogger, has done a quick round up of some of the most famous comics artists who had to, or chose to, work in porno comics.
You know, the older I get, the more curious I am about writing something like that but I fear I'm too shy and mild-mannered*. I think it's because the older I get, the more interested I am in gender politics, the more I like pin-up art. Go figure.
Anyway, that's a fun piece.
*Also, because the current comics erotica seems to focus around pregnant and too-smooth oriental boys getting eaten by gay lizards in high school. And homey don't play that. That's not right.
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07:34 am
[Link] |
Hey noddy noddy
So yesterday, I was sitting in the pub, watching junkies merrily shoot up in the park. Highlights included watching a kid's mum come and drag him away while he was still on the nod. She was smiling and in high heels. I watched another chap, apparently unable to find a vein, get the needle literally stuck in his vein.
It took a crowd of people to get it out.
Deals done merrily, in a park in the middle of the city, half a dozen people on the nod as I drank a cool beer and watched.
A pretty girl, wearing glasses, staring slack-faced into her lap. Fits passed from arm to arm.
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12:08 am
[Link] | Midsummer. The longest night of the year. Goddamn you, Monsieur Soleil. You win this round.
That being said, I met Richard Morgan the novelist today. Been meaning to read his new book 'The Steel Remains' forever.
Lovely chap!
Which isn't stopping me looking out a window at midnight only to see the goddamned mockery that is a blue sky!
How do you know when you're becoming unhinged by sleep dep and the face-dissolving horror at paying nearly 20 Australian dollars for a fucking packet of sandwich meat I know I'm going on about this a lot but it is genuinely throwing me off. I think it would anyone but as I've spent the last ten years resolutely sleeping at six and trying to wake no earlier than noon, it's a bit of a stretch to get used to. In fact, I can safely say without fear of hyperbole that it's ten times worse than WWI and a butcher's hook and advocat combined.
It's not actually the light that's the problem. That's irritating and all but... no big. It's more that sudden nervejerk jangle of alpha and delta and gamma waves being violently tugged about. Circadian rhythms suddenly become an untuned cacophony. Cues your body gives you, once confidently whispered into your ear suddenly shouted or grunted by madmen and beasts from offstage.
Right. No more whinging.
I just wanted to get that off my chest.
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11:33 am
[Link] |
See Brick yet?
China Mieville, who is awesome and if you disagree, you need a punch in the soul, defends Tolkien. It's an interesting article from the man who once described him as 'A wen on the arse of fantasy'.
http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/06/there-and-back-again-five-reasons-tolkien-rocks.html
Now, I'm on record as having no time at all for the Lord of the Rings books. The Hobbit is out of my league to discuss as it's for kids. But I sort of really dig on the faux Old Testament styles of the Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.
It recently occurred to me, however, that I have not read Lord of the Rings in perhaps fifteen years and actually cannot remember very much about it past the first book. Aside from the fact that Tom Bombadil is shite.
Anyways. Have a read of this and tell me where you stand? Tolkien: towering inkstain shadow over all fantasy or bumbling old racist out of his mind with the clap? That's obviously the only two positions to take.
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12:46 am
[Link] | True story.
Knocked off work early today as I'd gotten in tremendously early. As a poet and a weaver of dreams, working in the medium of light and electronica, you understand I work up a mighty tiredness.
Got home, kicked back for a nap. Woke up. Nine o'clock. It's still so bright at this time of night, I genuinely thought it was the morning. Christ, you should have seen the excuses I was thinking up. Viking attack, Australia lost at sea, my leg, severed by a vengeful landshark, Galloping Leprosy Fairies giving me a case of the Skin-Splatter.
Also, two in the morning is a bright as noon. Mistaking 21 for 9 is earily doable. But then again, so is mistaking 16 for 4.
You know about seasonal depression, right? You don't see the sun for a month, vampires attack you. Wait. I'm thinking of something else. You don't see the sun for a month, melatonin drops and you burn a church down and wear corpse paint?
No, that's right, you just get the blues.
Well, fuck that. I like the goddamn night! I like knowing which end of day is which!
Norway! What kind of a two-bit screwball operation are you running here!?
This aggression will not stand.
I hereby declare war upon the sun.
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11:56 am
[Link] | Oslo on a Sunday is cripplingly boring.
What to do? What to do?
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12:06 am
[Link] |
Your everloving man
So: Mr. Cave. That's the sixth time I've seen him live, although to be fair, once was a lecture.
Ah, a great set. The old man (sans moustache, for those keeping count, which I have mixed feelings about) has still got the moves. A great set. I marvel at a man of his age remaining so skinny.
Of particular note: A very low down, sexy R&B version of Stagger Lee. A menacing, two drum set version of The Mercy Seat but best of all, a thundering, almost Zeppelin style version of The Weeping Song. Magnificent. You should have heard it.
Ah, you should be with me tonight my friends. We'd drink until we tipped the bottle over and cut limes with long knives and talk about card games and sailors and shirts with horses on them and french cuffs and Cuban-heeled boots.
I'd play you Townes Van Zandt and Charlie Musselwhite songs and smoke unfiltered cigarettes until the air was too blue to breathe.
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05:59 pm
[Link] |
McFly!
Bugger. Because of time difference and stamps, apparently my creepy flatmate story is gone.
Which is embarrassing because a question of my moral courage came up and I kind of feel pussified. If you're reading this, I'm on the case.
Weirdly, the whole post has disappeared and frankly, I'm a little creeped.
Maybe he stole it!
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02:59 pm
[Link] | When I'm not busy libelling everyone in site and preparing myself for a comeuppance of titanic proportions, or wondering if someone is going to advance that last post to my legal division to have me sued and/or executed by the draconian Norwegian Government...
...I'm loving Nicolas Cage.
Why?
Click it. Damn your eyes, click the link!
Then
depress
yourself
utterly
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09:16 pm
[Link] |
Danish Killer
This may be the last time you hear from me.
You see, I'm morally certain my new flatmate is a serial murderer.
I'm stationed in the company flat until further notice. I have one flatmate, K, who is a nice Chinese boy. I got him to say 'San Francisco' loudly last night. He's a nice enough chap, cooks all day, talks to his mum each morning before work on Skype. It's cool. After work, I come home and watch some telly and do my own writing. He... does whatever he does.
But today, H.R comes down and instructs me to take in a lodger for a week.
This man towers over me. I'm six two easy and I have to tilt my head up at a straining angle. He's gotta be six seven if he's an inch. He has skin the colour of chalk. I mean that quite literally, he's almost albino pale. It's not the milky white skin I know some of the less social advanced of you crave - it's the paleness of a dead bird buried for nine months. His hair and beard runs the gamut from a startling red to grey to white.
He's Danish and clearly thinks he speaks excellent English. The weird thing is, when I ask him a simple question, he answers a different one. Each one, about the game Anarchy Online. I'm not kidding. Each. One.
'Have you been to Norway before?'
'For five years I play! I are big fan, could you say!'.
And on it goes. No need to labour that point.
He's on the couch now. Watching Mythbusters. Every now and again, he - I'm not making this up - mutters to himself in the whisper of the committed sexual sadist 'yesssss'.
Which is a change from when he told me that he'd take the bedroom near the toilet because 'I use it a lot.' And heaps better than when I caught him staring into space in the poorly lit lounge room. My suspicions were truly up when I turned my back on him and got that sudden feeling of R-complex danger. I spun to find him looking down at me with a Cousin Randy blankness.
The worst: He has one eye that droops like a stone in a sock. It is slightly differently coloured than the other. Paler. It tracks independently.
My current prediction: Thursday afternoon, I come home to hear K gently sobbing from behind the new guy's door.
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08:40 pm
[Link] |
A grave man.
They say count no man happy til he's dead.
Tomorrow, I may be a cheerful man indeed.
He listens to the television at a level so low I can barely hear it standing next to the set. I sprung him last night, wandering the house at four in the morning in a pristine white shirt. I saw him picking skin off his nose and eating it. He pisses once every fifteen minutes. I was preparing dinner and he came in, pushing into my space. All up in my space!
I saw into his bedroom. It was spotless. Bed made like a hotel. Suitcase closed and zippered.
Oh fuck. I'm really going to die.
But then again, gonna see Nick Cave on friday. Work's paying! Curious to see how it feels without Mick Harvey. So, no dying till then, eh?
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11:59 pm
[Link] |
Behemecoatyl
I know I should be posting about terrace houses and kippers and Vikings but the fact is, Oslo shuts down at seven, stays closed on Sundays and is so mind-numbingly expensive it's like being punched in the mouth, very hard, every time you walk into a supermarket. It's also been wet and cold for days.
So I've been watching fillums.
Anyways. Go watch Starship Troopers 3. I think you'll have to go very far to find a bigger fan of the original than me. I also thought Starship Troopers 2 was actually really great and really sad. But this latter one has some really bleakly funny things to say about... not so much fascism like the first two did... but more about the NeoCon agenda and the relationships between war, religion and consumer culture.
Also, lots of people exploding and guts all over the shop, so there's that. Really, though, the whole thing seems a big fuck you to the dreadful old Libertarian nutbag who wrote the books. And in turn, gave rise to a generation of polyandrist little fascists.
With a surprisingly well done little touch of approaching Lovecraftian horror.
Very curious about your thoughts.
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09:49 pm
[Link] |
Hettar was the coolest.
David Eddings died yesterday.
You know, a lot of people gave David Eddings a lot of jip and whinging. Mainly idiots and the misguided who say things like 'China Mieville has unlikeable characters.' Or who blanch when you mention the supernal genius of Stephen Donaldson. Or look at you like a cat shown a Chaggal if you mention any other Zelazny but Amber. Or who think they have a right to an opinion about fantasy but who've never read any Moorcock, not even fucking, fucking... Hawkmoon.
I say. Fuck. That. Noise. Give Eddings his due, I say, so hear I am.
When I was about eleven, I read the Belgariad and I was in motherfucking love. I started reading from a very young age. I've mentioned several times that the first novel I ever read was 'Wizard of Earthsea', a book to this day I stand in awe of. But this was back in about '81. So an early reader of fantasy, then.
A lot of you cats might not be aware of this but before then, fantasy was just beginning to break out of the ghetto it had been in forever. Then came the year 1982 and fantasy arrived like a cannon. Terry Brooks had just rang out the cannons with Shannara. Magician was selling like hotcakes and then there was Pawn of Prophecy, by David Eddings.
For right now, I'm going to ignore a pretty important fact: those books are all really bad. Yes, even Magician. No, I don't care what you think. But I was probably ten by the time I found out about all these fantasy books. I never liked those dull English children's fantasies like Alan Garner. So I read a lot of non-fiction, focusing mainly on shit like frankensteins and loch ness mummies. But then I read David Eddings. The back covers! God! I was suckered from the first sentence! There were prequel chapters and maps and prologues and, ah, it was marvelous!
And the story! Imagine, 10 year old Christian, shaking the book so that Garion would break his weird curse of silence! Descriptive phrases like 'His blue entrails spilled out'. Silk stabbing every motherfucker who looked at him funny! I tried for years to teach myself the Drasnian secret language! And Zedar! I learned the word Apostate from that book. In those days, there was a grey, ambiguous character I tell you.
A bit older, perhaps too old and along comes Sparhawk. Martel the albino and all the rest. Church politics, evil gods, all that good stuff.
Soon after, a birthday and, oh, I'll be kind to myself. Along comes sixteen, which we'll say is the same age I became disenchanted with Tolkien. I also became disenchanted with Eddings. The flaws are terrifically obvious now, of course. The books are racist, profoundly nostalgic, notably sexist, patriarchal, monarchic, pastoral and the list goes on. The later books Eddings wrote were, to me, unreadable. His non-fiction was utterly weird axe-grinding conservatism. Anyone choosing to put the critical boot into Eddings probably won't receive an argument from me. I haven't read those books in fifteen years or more but I can remember them with an appalling clarity. Without those books, I doubt I'd be the man I am today so, I guess what I'm saying is that David Eddings in better than my dad.
Well, no. I'm not saying that. Obviously. I mean, who didn't want to smack Ce'nedra in the face. Slapper.
However, I offer up two defenses of the old man. One, he was the best of those terrible mass-market fantasists. While he aped Tolkien's worst flaws, at least he chose not to ape his world. And without those mass-market guys, I think many of the strange, dark, flicking-tongue novels I treasure today would never have seen the light of day. So we can forgive them at least a few trespasses, perhaps. Besides, what have you done that's so great you gurning pod of bastards!?*
The other defense, well, it's not even that. I am profoundly aware I will never enjoy novels with the same unrestrained, unironic, uncritical eye as I did the Belgariad by David Eddings when I was ten. This is a good thing, make no mistake and I'm not pining after some bullshit lost innocence. I'd never trade knowing how to read a book with a dim child's excitement. I just remember how excited I was when I was a kid. How deeply I was involved with that story. Thinking what a wonderful time a man must have writing books like those.
So goodnight David Eddings. You wrote some books I loved as a boy so very well. So cheers. I'll have some whiskey for you tonight.
*One of you has a pretty good answer to this...
Edit. The writing in this is terrible but I'm bloody exhausted and it's twelve thirty at night and it is still. fucking. bright. So a new draft later.
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11:18 pm
[Link] |
Twenty years ago, my ideas were treated with disdain and discharge.
Blah blah, Europe is an enchanted wonderland of pixies. Who never refuse to serve me beer all over a long weekend...
Meanwhile, in other more important news:
Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus: Great film? Or Greatest film?
"Don't you worry Mr. President. We'll blow this bastard straight back down to hell" bellows the Destroyer captain, moments before whispering "It rises!" as the Megalodon destroys the ship with an eerily scientifically accurate attack.
Hilariously racist Lorenzo Llamas. Ah. Ah. When they start talking about nuking what is, well, just a big octopus... Christ. No spoilers but... poor, poor San Francisco.
See it. These are commands. I am commanding you. With my pulsing, argent brain.
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12:04 am
[Link] | Wandering through the streets of Oslo at midnight, half cut. Singing Babes In Toyland under my breath all the way. The night sky is never the night sky here. It's always Twilight. I'm told soon the sun will be a distant memory but for now it refuses to leave. Well, not quite true. Its juices have infused the night sky until it seems a rare cut of day.
Whispering the dangerman's advice in my mind at a social function. 'Whatever you do, don't act like you.' Marveling at the efficacy of such wisdom. Talking doomsday cults with women taller than me. Chatting about dead pulsars with Hungarians, Italians, Singaporeans and that's just shop talk. Our language halting at first, my accent barbaric, their English excellent but imperfect but finding a way, the air thick with strange grammar, delicious accents.
I may have made a good choice.
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12:23 am
[Link] |
Some kind of... intergalactic boss!
I promised someone at work I would watch some Star Trek Voyager. Because I'm still in 'let's be pals' mode, I am doing so. It is... agony.
Today, I had a barbecue down by the Vikingship museum. A warm sun in the sky until nine. Fine food. A view of Oslo from a fjord, looking at what seemed like castles poking their tongues out through forests of pine trees. Fishing boats in harbor. And at work, finally given over my own big project. I can say nothing except that having a general knowledge of seven thousand years of occult history is a rare skill but I'm glad to say it's one I need for this. And the work itself is getting more demanding. People are beginning to trust me, to come to me for writerly stuff. It is a fine sensation.
Ah, having a proper job is so weird.
Also, I notice we have some new friends reading the old Ell Jay. Why don't you say hi...?
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06:22 pm
[Link] | Pretty much every day, for ten years, I've been writing. I took a year off to go waste my time with go good people on a no good project in New York but even then, I threw myself sadly against the wall of comics. Fail, fail but that's the past and brooding will unman you every time.
But every day, I wrote an opinion, I thought about something and I had to put it down into words. I wrote comics and a play and a novel no one liked and pitched a movie and wrote another and wrote more comics and more opinion pieces. When you have to write to pay the rent, in my opinion, it does two things. Firstly, it utterly does away with quaint notions like 'writer's block'. You make the deadline. You write the script. You get back to the editor. You just do.
Secondly and most importantly, the process of writing is utterly de-mystified. It becomes unromantic. I imagine I feel the same way about writing that a mechanic feels about fixing engines. It is something you do well, it is something you enjoy but ultimately, it is a skill and not some quantum of your heart on paper. You become unembarrassed about sharing your private thoughts, you become immune to common judgments and you just write. It's that simple. You just do it.
Now, that isn't to say that I don't respect writing or treat it with the contempt of familiarity. It's a powerful thing to be read but at the same time, whenever I hear people talking about 'burning to write' or other such unemotional language, I tend to wince a bit. Our culture has some queer notions about the romance of the artist. Honestly, I think it's crouched in a kind of class-consciousness. Back in the day, only rich fuckers could afford to write for a living. Now anyone willing to live on the dole can devote a life to poetry or whatever. So writing is surrounded by this mysterious notion of suffering, of sacrifice, of some holy notion of art.
Why do I bring this up?
I did some fine work today. Just great stuff if I say so myself. The other writer was really impressed. One of the other people in my team was really happy with it. Then, the boss made a decision that rendered it and most of the work I did in my first week moot. Just unusable. Sure, I can probably salvage some of it but that isn't how I like to work. A fresh take every time. Some people think I'm mental for not saving all my drafts but that's just how I play it.
I don't think I could be as relaxed as I am about it without an awful lot of training, though.
Why am I telling you this?
Because, if in six months time I start to blow my stack and whinge and moan, I want you to remind me to be as cool as Bruce Lee himself about it. Can you tell me now is really not the time to get precious. OK?
OK.
I knew that you could.
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