strange radiation: the pool of radiance
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
Sep 5 08: things that make us happy
And so we reach the end of another week spent copy editing at Major Publication. Current music-in-head: Elvis Costello & the Attractions, (I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea, specifically the seriously kick-ass bass line. The bass lines in EC&tA stuff is always completely fabulous, and fractal with little moments of musical interestingness — little variations from verse to verse and even from line to line. Arranging their stuff for a cappella groups is surely a ferocious balancing act; you want to capture every little nuance, every great little bit, but then memorizing the arbitrary inversions and ornaments becomes an utter nightmare, so how do you standardize something that draws some of its coolness from the way it never stands still?
And on the subject of work at Major Publication: I love what I do for a living. Having wandered down several career paths that emphatically did not inspire that sort of happy, I know how lucky I am. Work at MP, when I get it, is particularly choice, because the people are great, the writing I am given to shepherd is already of high caliber, and the pay is sufficient for comfortable rent-payment.
This weekend’s plans are vague but include a mountain of laundry, meeting the visiting parents of a dear friend for lunch, and getting some exercise. Oh, and finding out how my niece’s first day of kindergarten went. She’s getting so big; I am so very proud of her. She and her brother are great kids and the thought of them is a source of joy when I’m blue.
Aug 30 08: drag names I have considered
Not that drag is my thing at all. But sometimes you stay up much too late and find yourself inventing alternate personae as you brush your teeth. You know?
- Semolina Pilchard Surrealist; not hostile, but certainly fierce. Like a warmer, fuzzier version of Strykermeyer, maybe. Assuming that can be done.
- Miss Partridge Peartree Edwardian hostess. Only seen at Christmastime.
- Alison Wonderland An innocent; a broad.
- Bananas Foster Hostess with the mostess.
How about you? Who are you when your brain puts on heels?
On a somewhat related note, I finally saw the episode of Project Runway from a couple of weeks back from when they made outfits for drag queens. They got some big names to serve as models, too: Varla Jean Merman, Hedda Lettuce, Sherry Vine. Or at least they were familiar to me, which must mean they’re big, right? Regardless, was fun. And surprising — here in NYC, you pass men on the sidewalk every now and then and your brain immediately say, “Off-duty drag queen.” But at one point in this episode we saw the dragistes out of character and the vast majority of them looked like jus’ random guys. Sometimes with no eyebrows, but still. I mean, heck, Mr. Varla Jean is hot. Who knew? The best analysis of the episode, if you’re interested, will be found at Project Rungay.
Am in Ogunquit, Maine, for the weekend, with a bunch of my old a cappella cohort. Fun is being had. Hydration is key. Hope those of you celebrating Labor Day this weekend are having a good time.
Aug 29 08: suckadelic darth blowout!
Yes, that’s what I said. Suckadelic Darth Blowout.
I was first exposed to this phrase by a chain of and-now-click-this that started with Amyknitty at the knitty blog. My immediate reaction, upon seeing the phrase out of the corner of my eye, was surely the same as yours: Best. Band Name. Ever.
But no, it was a piece up for bids as part of a pop-culture auction at Christie’s, where they sold Elvis memorabilia and Sopranos costumes and limited-edition vinyl sculpture-toys like this bunny. Which sold for $625, hello. Suckadelic is the artist(s?); Darth Blowout is the piece. And lucky for you — if unlucky for Suckadelic — it went unsold. You can still buy it for your very own via the Suckadelic website for a mere $1,500.
But what, you might ask, is Suckadelic? Beyond a word that it is really fun to write over and over? My best thumbnail summary is probably geek mashup fabulosity. Remixing of culture is their game: take a Stormtrooper doll and reproduce it in pink plastic a bunch of times, and you have Gay Empire Attack!, which Christie’s sold just fine. Or make a sculpture that is a simultaneous homage to Andres Serrano and Matt Groening and call it “Piss Bart.” (I don’t want to know what’s in the jar. Let’s not ask.) Those get filed under “Art” — filed under “Toys,” you find pseudo-Boba Fett figures that come with turntables and beatboxes, or Micronauts re-envisioned as Playskool Little People, all in their own totally respectable blister packs. (Apparently the difference between art and knicknackery is mass production. Andy Warhol, white courtesy phone, please.) And there’s music too: hip-hop samploramas with titles like Star Wars Breakbeats and Supervillains. Not as expensive as the art, but still: cool don’t come cheap.
I love it that somehow, people are finding ways to turn dorkiness into street cred. I mean, let’s take a moment to send radiant thoughts of fannish adoration at Jonathan Coulton and his songs about love and mad scientists and giant squids and heartbreak and deranged computers. Yay.
The geeks truly are taking over the world. Fear us.
Aug 26 08: [boggles]
Okay, the following reaches previously unguessed-at heights of WTFery: it’s the trailer for a new… web-based TV show? Would-be syndicated TV show? Once upon a time this would have screamed “public-access television”… well, anyway, for a something-or-other called The Multinauts.
I mean, here’s the description from the show’s producer, Telefantasy Studios:
The Multinauts is set in an pangalactic post nuke multiverse.Three heroes from different time periods are picked up by a holographic spaceship and sent on a mission to rescue Falco Quasar, a colony pilot when they are attacked by a mega corporation and it’s mutant empire.
…Yeah. Let’s go to the clip.
Seriously. If the Multinauts website (which has a much higher-res version of the video, if you wanna see it) and a few scattered references thereto didn’t insist that this was something happening now, I’d swear I’d been bounced back to 1983. The tone on the whole thing — website, video, production notes — is played pretty straight, which means that it’s either a well-meaning-but-abysmal artifact or it’s a totally genius work of parody. It gives that same slightly queasy down-the-rabbit-hole feeling that you get from Objective: Christian Ministries.
Upon several repeat views and some additional research, I think it’s the latter. Telefantasy has a long series of YouTube videos called DungeonMajesty — yeah, evidently these were originally made for public-access TV in Los Angeles — that have a sense of schlocky humor. And hell, they worked with Leslie Hall, the gem sweater lady. Bad promo copy aside, they can’t be doing this without a sense of self-awareness.
But still: Wow. Tell me this doesn’t make you want some of whatever they’re smoking.
Aug 25 08: can may I just say?
It bothers me that nobody bothers to mark the glottal stop in Hawai’i anymore.
And, for that matter, that the apostrophe in Hallowe’en has been similarly deprecated.
That is all.
Aug 24 08: tommy, I can hear you
Today I went to Fire Island Pines with Hugh and Randall and it was great: gorgeous weather, a wonderful beach, and ‘mos everywhere. True, to do it as a day trip from Manhattan means spending about as much time on the train (and the bus, and the ferry) as on the sand, but it’s hard to beat spending one’s day surrounded by handsome men with big pecs and small dogs.
On the other hand, you can’t go to the beach every time you have the urge to happily while away the hours, so I’ve been considering alternate plans. And now — can it be? A possible reason to spend a weekend in York, Pennsylvania? Possibly so: the 12th Annual Whiterose Gameroom Show, aka OMG Look Pinball!
Because really, where the hell is there to play pinball anymore? When I was working for Eclipse Comics, back while there was still an Eclipse Comics, I used to walk down to this pizza place on my lunch break to play The Addams Family. (And to eat lunch.) When I was new to NYC I would sometimes go to this place just north of Times Square. And when I was traveling more often between the coasts, the better airports often had someplace tucked away that you could go pass some time on your longer layovers (SFO and Newark both had good ones, for instance). But the days of the video arcade seem to be gone indeed, at least as far as this town is concerned; and even if you can find a place to blow a couple quarters there are rarely pinball machines, and if there are they usually don’t work. Alas.
So: anybody got a hot tip for someone with an itchy flipper finger in NYC? For the Whiterose Gameroom Show only comes but once a year, and it’s in York, PA.
Aug 22 08: talking with storytellers
So back in June — and yes, this is going to be one of those “what I was up to during the two months I wasn’t posting” posts — I went to the MoCCA Festival, an annual mostly-small-presses-and-self-publishers comics festival, and met one of my Big Damn Heroes: Lynda Barry! Of Ernie Pook’s Comeek and of One! Hundred! Demons! It was everything I could do not to swoon right there. She was lovely and she made every single person who came to get something signed feel like she was genuinely delighted to meet them. And, because she was there to sign What It Is, her new book about writing (it’s an outgrowth of writing workshops she has been teaching around the country, and it’s full of thought-provoking stuff), we talked a little about writing: apparently she feels that science-fiction writers are vital to the continuation of humanity, which was nice to hear. I told her about my gorillas-and-tulpas story and it made her laugh and clap her hands. And that, coming from one’s Big Damn Hero, always feels good.
After that I ran around stalking Shaenon Garrity, of the webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse, so that I could buy copies of the Narbonic collections and embarass myself with fanboy gushing. Never did find her, but I did manage to score copies of most of the collections. (But no Volume 1, sadly.) If you’re not reading her stuff, you should; both of them make it easy to start from the beginning. They’re great fun. Narbonic is finished now — you can read it from start to end and not only have a fine time indeed but also watch a creator hone her skills before your eyes. I also met the Wondermark guy and the XKCD guy and the Dinosaur Comics guy. And how cool is that?
And then I went to a meeting of the Secret Cabal and my gorillas-and-tulpas story was on the slab and, to my surprise and delight, they liked it. It needs a little tinkering — I really should attend to that — but it’s not far from being ready for sending out into the world. And that feels good, too.
Aug 21 08: mindbending
So I just found out that Cthulhu starts a tour of indie movie houses on Friday, which came as sort of a surprise because I first saw a trailer for it in May of 2006. I figured I had just missed the thing entirely, because any H.P. Lovecraft adapation1 with Tori Spelling in it has “Direct to Video” written all over its squamous, rugose forehead. But no! It’s out. And its early reviews have been more positive than I might have expected; I hear it has even won an award or two.
The current trailer confirms something else as well: there’s a gay-romance angle in amongst the human sacrifice and intimations of horrible things rising out of the sea. So what more could you want, really? This sounds so out-there that I may just have to see it, assuming it ever comes to NYC.
Oh, and my most favoritest thing of all is this phrase from the promo copy: “Caught in an accelerating series of events, he discovers aspects of his father’s New Age cult which take on a dangerous and apocalyptic significance.”2 Ha! Baby, that cult is about as old age as it gets.
Ia!
1 In this case it’s loosely based on “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931) and the Cthulhu mythos that (for those of you at home — hi, Dad) winds through works by Lovecraft and others after him, e.g. August Derleth. But it’s set in Oregon instead of New England.
2 We’ll leave the that/which issues aside for now, offensive though they may be.
Aug 15 08: the pause that refreshes
Right, where were we? Ah, yes. I was feeling twitchy and blocked and it was May, and I ended up taking a couple months off from the reportage. In the event that anybody ever wanders back along this way again, hi. Am not dead.
What have I been up to? I met one of my Big Damn Heroes, about whom more soon. I competed in the International Gay & Lesbian Aquatics Championships in Washington, DC. I went on one of my best vacations ever, to San Francisco: to meet a new family member and spend quality time with familiar ones; to eat well; to engage in tiki-bar mayhem (at the legendary Tonga Room1) and subsequent rampage through the Castro; to see old friends; to get a personally guided tour of Pixar Studios; to spread the gospel of Oh Hell; to behave scandalously because being 2,700 miles from home means you can get away with that sort of thing. I wrote a couple of new stories. (Wikipedia was jettisoned for now, but the tulpa stayed. Also: Mad science. If you want a copy, ask.) I saw Wall-E, twice, plus the Batman movie and the Hellboy movie, because I’m a big honkin’ geek. Also Mamma Mia!, because I am a homosexual and secure in my masculinity. I bought a Jesus Phone.
I am working fairly regularly in a profession that I love. I have good friends. I have stayed up until 2AM and beyond to watch Olympics coverage every night this week, because how can you say no to the women’s table-tennis preliminaries? And water polo? And sculling? Someday soon, like hopefully this weekend, I will start going back to the gym, because the smokin’ pair of trousers I bought in SF are already a little tight.
Life is okay.
1 Remember, the bar is [tɔŋgə], but the Pacific island nation is [tɔŋɑ].
May 28 08: when in doubt
Meanwhile, The Story With Wikipedia In continues to flounder. I realized today that I’d written four pages of my main characters blabbing on and wondering what the hell the plot was supposed to be. That is probably a sign that the author doesn’t really know the answer either.
I think I need to add a tulpa to the mix and see what happens.
Don't fret: there's more in the archives.