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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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10:22 pm
[Link] | http://www.writertopia.com/awards/campbell%20
Well, well. Congrats to Friend of the Show Liz!
Addendum to last post - or better than my fantasy mancrush, Michael Swanwick. LeGuin's dragons were imperious, magnificent bastards but Melanchthon wins in the all-time heavyweight motherfucker dragon award. Seriously, read Iron Dragon's Daughter. It's for grown-ups.
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11:46 am
[Link] | I've just been tasked with writing something about dragons.
What can you say about dragons that Ursula LeGuin didn't say better than anyone fifty years ago?
Bugger.
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02:23 pm
[Link] |
Bloody hell, is that Chrissy Hynde!?
You know, chaps like me don't ever get those musical sing along relief videos. There is not a single person involved I would listen to. A punch of po-faced nobs singing 'Everybody Hurts', a song so miserably awful that if I ever hear it again, I plan to slash my own throat with a tin lid, praying that the blood somehow chokes a member of Panic at the Disco or something.
So it is nice to occasionally feel included in dopey, well-meaning pop moments.
Although, if you've read Bad Seed, you'll likely view Screaming Jay in a different light...
Anyways. Admire the cheek of the whole thing and have a look at some real musicians, miles away from a Pro-Tools suite, making a cheerful, lovely clamour.
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06:08 pm
[Link] |
Just thinking
On a dare, I recently read seditionist Orson Scott Card's novel, Wyrms.
I remind you, Card once promoted the idea of rebellion against the United States government if gay marriage was made legal.
It ends with a weird, pseudo-sexual attack on a woman by a gigantic squid thing. Lots of lovely descriptions of tentacles in her womb and all that. I shan't go into details because the whole thing was rather awful.
But I think something clicked as to why conservative thinking is so horrifed by anything sexual at all. Please recall than in the last few months that crazy Irish woman who condemned gay dudes while shagging a kid behind her husband's back and that State Rep. who graphically described her lurid fantasies of anal sex as another reason to deny gay rights.
Motherfuckers are filthy minded. Like, appallingly so. They fill their heads with grotesque monster sex (Hi, Terry Goodkind!)because it terrifies them. Sickens them. There's a laser-like focus on deviant sex they envisage, a kind of morbid, picked scab fascination, that curdles.
Anyway... I should think more about this.
Also, the girl is fifteen. And the whole thing is a lesson that if you like shagging, you'll die.
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01:08 pm
[Link] |
Now I'm living in correctional facilities
If you're like me, you'll understand that 1988's debut album for N.W.A was one of the genuine highpoints of a musical decade that boiled and writhed with ideas.
Straight out of Compton is political, savage, brimming with anger and in my opinion, a useful historical document and also just sodding great.
But it's also really funny if you just cut out everything but the swears:
http://www.ni9e.com/nwa.html
Oh, and bikers have stolen an undead pirate's skull in Germany. Sadly, not the pitch for the Best. Batman. Story. Ever. Just boring old real life...
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/pirates-head-taken-off-again/story-e6frg6so-1225833605152
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11:39 pm
[Link] |
Tricks are something a whore does for money... or cocaine!
Magic is in a sorry state these days, ennit?
I'm not talking about weird voodoo rites and learning Enochian and rabbitting on and on about the Kaballah. No, not today. I'm talking about sleight-of-hand. Prestidigitation. Stage magic.
A lot of people make fun of magic and, you know, there's a fair case for it. One only has to think of Tony Wonder and Use Your Allusion, yes? But I love magic. I love the showmanship of it. The history of it. I love the bone-deep symbolism of it. When we cut a woman in half and put her back together, if that's not a shamanic moment, I don't know what is. Strange little holdouts of real arcane lore, encoded into our world. The old showmanship kept alive in the new. I love the suits, the sexy assistants, the magic words. All of it.
To any of you who have met me, it should be no surprise I tried very hard to learn magic as a child. Every weird kids does, don't they? I'd wager a penny you've tried to palm a coin or two in your day. Sadly, my hands are snaggled and broken, scarred and unable to even form a guitar chord. Now that I'm older and smarter, shaking hands rob me. But that's ok. For me, the pleasure was always in watching the sinister men with sharp moustaches be about their work.
But magic is in a ragged state. Criss Angel looks like he could give you crabs with telepathy. 'Ah! Fuck you! Your mind has been freaked out the back of your skull! Here's an X-Treme mop and bucket to sop up your mynde!' He's a talented man, of course but I don't want to see miracles at the hands of a back-up dancer for Linkin bloody Park. Penn Gilette seems to be on a messianic journey to fix the world through a careful mix of libertarianism and screaming obscenities at people as a form of documentary. He's sort of turned into a bullet-catching Christopher Hitchens.
David Blaine... corpse-faced goon. I've always rather thought that getting attacked by the undead could be simulated by having a conversation with the man. His bloodless, eerily expressionless face staring, staring, hovering outside your window. You could shoot him and he'd still keep coming, eyes like meathooks, weird anti-charisma slowing your steps.
Log from Disapointment.com (sp?) once decided to throw sausages at David while he was suspended over London. He's a good chap, Log.
The Pendragons? Insane, jailed. Angela Funovits, the Surrealist... she sort of floats in front of a camera looking like a late night ad for a New Age Music compilation CD, blathering on about the healing power of a cold-reading. And then there's the hacksaw careerist side of magic, with such living scum as the Baby Psychic, a man who genuinely deserves to die.
Misty Lee has some great moves and brings the glamour but the autographed headshots on the site for ten bucks a pop and the band sort of remove the mystique for me. Where are the David Devants of this fallen age?
Thank the saints then for Ricky Jay.
You'd know Ricky Jay if you saw him. He was in the first season of Deadwood as Sawyer, the card-sharp. He's been in a bunch of Mamet films. He was Captain Amazing's lawyer. But, I think, he's simply the best magician I've ever seen.
He's not an imposing man. A portly fellow with a plain voice behind a beard. But he has presence and something I think is dying out in the entertainment arts entirely: Gravity.
But best of all, as he does his magic, he will gently, authoritatively, instruct you on the history of the great masters from the past. See, Ricky Jay loves his craft, his art, in a way that few people love anything. And, if like me, you can't help but be entranced by a lesson in secret histories.
Here's what I mean. Don't watch it for the tricks, although the tricks are fantastic. Just listen to him talk.
Look at that, an old trick, made radically new by dint of it's antiquity. That's a pretty good trick in an of itself. The four queens three ways trick is gently, lyrically told. The words, my friends, the words. Here is a high art, he says with his hidden flair. You will not be spoken down to, you will enter a rarefied air but it's up to you to enter into elegance. You will be presented the coat but no dressed.
All this without discussing his ability to kill a man, well, not a man, perhaps a beloved housepet, with a card. Or his command of picaresque sharks and the rules of poker. I don't play cards, meself, for reasons too boring to go into but if I did, I'd be willing to lose a lot of money for the pleasure of watching the con.
There is of course humor to be had here but, if I'm not mistaken, that's just for television appearances, bread and butter work. And if I'm not mistaken, his presentation of gambling mechanics is different than magic.
I'd also recommend you have a look at the Sword of Vengeance trick he does. It's based on the life of one Ogami Itto, a name more of you should know. As I have a rather large tattoo of Ogami Itto's shopfront, you might understand that it means a lot to me.
I'm not sure why I'm writing about this, other than the bit about Blaine made me laugh. But here, nestled in the dark, sore and alone, it makes me glad that there are Veterans of the Trade like Ricky Jay, men of dignity and learning still in the world, who'll invite us into their deliriums on the proviso we show some respect.
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04:31 pm
[Link] |
Regrets, I've had a few.
So, it looks like LJ is pretty much dead in the water.
I've gots me a twitter account but it all just seems a little too abstract, the old twitter, for the likes of me. I like to talk, you know?
I like blogging but I don't like this weird vacuum of silence I seem to be blogging in to. Although, I did just get what I can only imagine was a stream of invective in Cyrilic, so, you know, there's that.
I have about twenty really long articles and weird research essays I've got up under blind cuts that I just haven't been bothered to proof and roll out. Just, you know, why bother?
I'd say this is pretty much the end of this journal unless things pick up.
So... anyone know any good tools other than blogger.com and the really obvious ones?
After all, I do desperately need to let the world know that I saw the Dr. Horrible thing on the weekend and found it marrow-melting horrible and spent the whole time basically cringing in Fawlty Towers-esque embarrassment.
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02:01 pm
[Link] | Ok. I'll pay this.
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10:28 pm
[Link] |
Truly, he is lost to us
As the kids say... Win.
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12:15 pm
[Link] | http://buchanan.org/blog/did-hitler-want-war-2068
And here is profoundly ignorant Pat Buchanan lauding Hitler for his peace-loving ways. No. Profoundly ignorant is wrong. Here is a man blindly ignoring facts he knows to clear the reputation of Adolph sodding Hitler.
A preacher and 'Christian'.
I don't know if this will mean much to you if you're not aware of WWII history but trust me, it's bad.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats
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01:53 am
[Link] | Sagan and I drew different conclusions from our experience [debating creationists]. For me the confrontation between creationism and the science of evolution was an example of historical, regional, and class differences in culture that could only be understood in the context of American social history. For Carl it was a struggle between ignorance and knowledge.
Conscientious and wholly admirable popularizers of science like Carl Sagan use both rhetoric and expertise to form the mind of masses because they believe, like the Evangelist John, that the truth shall make you free. But they are wrong. It is not the truth that makes you free. It is your possession of the power to discover the truth. Our dilemma is that we do not know how to provide that power.
Which is what you should gently say next time you're at a party at some middle class puke with a great job in computing start booring on and on about stupid religious hicks. And if they do go on, punch them twice in the dick and say the second one was from me.
It's by Richard Lewontin, a mate of Sagan's.
Although it does bring me rather abruptly to my next point:
http://controversy.wearscience.com/
A bit of gentle satire on just that theme.
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02:14 am
[Link] | This is doing the comic rounds: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/13/6-month-jail-sentenc.html
Which, in my mind, proves once and for all that BoingBoing is by ghastly, smug little prongs who should have their ghastly, smug little faces sewed to dogs.
Spent four hours in a hospital today, getting scanned and probed, my wretched, awful leg strapped down and hooked while great machines bellowed and howled and menaced.
Why do hospitals leave patients in hallways? I'll never fathom that. A beautiful woman asleep and whimpering with pain. An old woman staring at me with bird-eyes filled with anger. An old man ignoring me as his mangled arm clasped a bar, wishing I'd just fuck off out of his eyeline. An action I proceeded to undertake.
Christ. Never get sick, friends.
Never die.
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02:13 am
[Link] | Any budding Biblical scholars out there who know about the Grievous Angel? I know the very basics but I'm wondering if there's any strange apocrypha or tradition about the strange figure I ought to be aware of.
Also, while I think of it, can anyone think of a politicised horror novel? I can think of a few Kim Newman short stories but that's it. Total mental block. I feel like Martin Luther's brilliant comment on the book of Zechariah, 'Here, I give up.'
Cheers.
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03:09 am
[Link] | Sadly, Day 3 ended my detox experiment as I gave in around six o'clock.
One of four factors may have contributed.
1) Rainy, moist weather has always set off the pain. All old man 'I kin fill it in yon bones, tis rain' jokes aside, humidity has always affected my pains and today, rain, no rain, muggy, moist, was just awful. By dinner time, it honestly felt like invisible goblins were driving rail spikes into my kneecap, then twisting the bones up with sticky, moist green fingers.
2) I watched Beowulf and the shock of seeing naked CGI Doug Holgate required medication. Sorry Hellhammer, but you need to tell me when you're doing these side projects. Anyways... that was boring and the dragons looked stupid. And is it just me or does anyone else want to punch Crispin Glover in the dick? Crispin Glover, if you're reading this, I don't know if you're an ok guy or what but sorry mate, I want to punch your dick up you until you look like you have a weird, vaginal extra navel. No offence to you.
3) I watched Underworld 3: Rise of the Lycans. I missed Underworld Two: Fang Disco Hardon Wolfmans Inferno. So I wasn't quite prepared for Bill Nighy Science Guyhy homosexually whipping the superlatively talented Michael Sheen (Have you see Fantabulosa! Dude's amazing) they were both dressed up like guitar techs for Black Sabbath during the Dio years. I'm a tad shocked more people didn't take up painkillers after seeing it. Do you like this? Tell me why. Because I honestly felt like it was monstrous. I couldn't turn it off. Until I did. I shall never know if Wolfmans Spartacus was ever free.
4) I also, for the first time in my life, watched Jesus Christ Superstar. I was so shocked at how horrible it was that I would have injected drano into my eyes to take away the pain. Still, I like that song the conquering heroes Afghan Whigs covered. Nevertheless, tapdancing Rick Mayall pre-brainspazz was a bit hard to take. Also, watching cunts warble 'Jeeeeeews' over and over seemed somehow profoundly anti-Semitic. And I have no idea why.
So, that's it. Clearly, I'm not capable of a bad day without some panadeine forte and the odd Voltaren.
There's no hope. Cut off the leg. Replace it with a midget's sexy torso. I'm game. Anyone know a doctor with no morals, no hope and a sense of diabolical whimsy?
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12:03 am
[Link] | Day 2.
Harder. Feel like I've been woven. Like Nigel Kneele wrote the right side of me body.
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10:44 pm
[Link] |
End of Day One.
Kicking painkillers. End of first day.
So far, easy. Slight nausea. Booze definitely having less effect but admittedly, only a few glasses sampled. Interestingly, the booze also seemed to stay in my system far less long.
The weird thing is, noticing all the little wounds I've gotten and never really had to pay attention to. Remember in Thomas Covenant, when he had to do the V.S.E, the visual surveillance of extremities because he had no nerves and had to be vigilant against gangrene, so he had to inspect himself carefully? It's exactly like that, with less monsters.
Well, not really, but it's been quite odd, feeling all those 'thousand natural shocks' that I've never really bothered with. A scrape on a finger, a toenail poorly cut. Nothing worriesome at all just more.... curious.
Obviously, I'm limping considerably and rather more aware of the wretched leg but that's ok. Will need to spend a few days off the cane this time around as my back and shoulder feel like a sack full of cat skulls.
I know that people whinging about pain is boring but do bear with me. It's for science.
Also, looking like doing Witch King 2 isn't going to happen. The publisher has no interest in publishing it and we can't afford the rights. So... oh well.
Now, I am going back to wrestling with the hideously expensive version of Office Professional I have been given that still tells me I have the demo copy of Word. People who whinge about Microsoft bore my tits off, like it was that Nazi's face at the end of Raiders but this is quite beyond the pale.
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10:31 am
[Link] |
Pain-Killer-Detox
Day One.
Decision made to go a week without painkillers. They are having an adverse effect, especially when I drink, and it's been several years since I went any significant time period without them.
So, as of ten last night, no pain killers.
A poor night's sleep, woke up exceedingly early. But this morning, no ill-effects.
Crippled leg quite sore.
Am sorely disappointed I have not yet experienced horrific Trainspotting/Altered States style freefall hallucinations into madness and horror.
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01:30 am
[Link] |
RUBBISH
http://au.movies.yahoo.com/news/article/-/6723665/sundance-audience-shaken-by-brutal-killer/
Killer Inside Me is one of the best novels I have read in the English language and, in my opinion, is actually not the best Jim Thompson novel. He did better. So, you know... trying not to be hyperbolic but Thompson is that damn good.
So Dear Reporting Buffoons. Shut up.
The only issue here is how the fuck Jessica Alba got cast. Killer Inside Me is a tremendously brave novel, a book that deals with violence in ways that writers seem to have forgotten. It deals in starkly realistic terms with the pleasures of such power. With the joy of imprisoning humans. With the dark thrills of murder and torture and all that. These are things you must know about. Novels are a machine to convey such ideas and Thompson was a magnificent engineer.
If you haven't read Thompson, you must. You just simply must. He is a part of The Conversation. Any filmic venture dealing with him must be bloody, bold and resolute. So such snide, sniggering reporting must turn the stomach. Am I a huge fan of the director Winterbottom? No. I thought 9 Songs to be lazy and cheap. But it was brave.
Be brave, humans. Read Jim Thompson.
Also: I watched the film Dead Snow. A zombie film. Apparently it is amazingly wondrous.
This movie is perfidiously awful. It is Awful. It is Awful. It is Awful.
If you liked this film, I want you to do two things. The first is stop. Don't watch a film for a month. Then come back. I want you to watch some good films. No, do it. Some really good films. Go watch, fuck, I don't know... go watch motherfucking Cassablanca or something. Go watch Unforgiven. Go watch motherfucking Citizen Kane. Doctor Strangelove. Go watch something brilliant that clever people who watch film all day every day recommend. Go watch Kwaidan or Waltz with Bashir. Go watch something you can rely on to be grand and clever and wise.
Just... just reacquaint yourself with how to watch a movie.
Because if you like Dead Snow, you are either burnt out, or unequipped to watch film anymore. If you like this film, your opinion is suspect for a while.
The second thing I want you to do if you like this film is ask yourself what makes a good film. Seriously, what amazes you? Because if you like this film, you are being -distracted-.
I have heaps to say. Soon, I will talk about my dear, dear friend 2Hott's wedding. But it's been ten days and I still find myself inadequate to the task of discussing it. Like a mute man, given poetry burdens, given an orator's duties. A toungless man bidden to sing.
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03:33 am
[Link] |
They used to call Art, Temprance when my tarot was a lad. Then it was molested by a Scotch.
My old pal Sluis is in town. This has done two things.
One, gotten me out of my funk. Which means it's time to shave, shower and get back to work.
And two. Gotten me thinking about contemporary art.
Now, my tastes in art are fairly rudimentary. I like painting.
I'm dimly aware that painting is frowned upon these days. Some fairly useful feminist critiques, as well as a modern suspicion of agency, the myth of heroic painters, all that stuff, has made painting kind of obsolete these days. But I don't care. I'm happy to remain as sad and out of touch as ever. I'll just hold up here with my sad portraits of Christ, my love of weird old mystics and my beloved, frowned upon, desperately unfashionable Symbolists. That's ok.
But during this discussion, I frowned and said that trying to educate myself in modern art was, well, it's hard. And it is hard. I can't decode what I see in front of me, these days. I don't have the training. I'm frankly baffled at half the stuff I see in the world. I'm desperately out of touch with computers. I don't take photographs and so, don't understand how the world of photography is changing with the flickrs and the end of objects and on and on it goes. Show me a video piece and half the time I'll just stare blankly, completely out of my depth. As far as I can tell, Saatchi is some great enormous bully, making taste with his pocket book but no, apparently he's one of the great collectors and tastemakers. Jesus.
Stewart Lee has a great joke. 'If you only read one book this year... I recommend shutting your mouth'. Which is why Stewart Lee is a marvelous comedian.
So I do try to shut my mouth. But as I was having this conversation, Sluis says, she says: 'Christian, contemporary art is just a language.'
Which is fair enough. But is that all art is? Something that requires constant translation? Something that requires complex decoding?
I don't know. I just know that these days, a trip to a gallery fills me with intense feelings of alienation.
I also like Batman!
So what do you think, art lovers? Is complex interpretation all there is to it? Or am I yawping barbaric?
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12:59 pm
[Link] | Roland Howard died.
He was, in my opinion, one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived. Not necessarily because of any technical virtuosity but rather because of the eeriness of the sounds he sliced from the six strings.
His music was strange, erotic, violent. Unnerving. I remember being a 17 year old kid, first listening to the Birthday Party, listening to the strange, surreal images. Yes, it was always the lyrics that came first but without the jagged, knifeman's riffs, it wouldn't have been what it was.
Which is not to say Howard was not a great writer in his own right. While Mr. Cave left behind the surreal and moved towards the narrative, Howard stayed focussed on bleak, cryptic imagery. And, of course, he wrote Shivers.
Howard worked with... with everybody, really. I could never keep up with his career. I never even knew he worked with Thurston Moore until I fact-checked this article. Imagine that? From the maddening Lydia Lunch to Rollins to Ed K... the list is huge.
Ah, what am I telling you this for?
Here's the man himself, 'angels all pallid and wan'. It's not my favourite but it's something.
Roland Howard, dead at fifty.
Good night and God keep you.
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