Wednesday, 23 December 2009
Merry Christmas To All My Reader(s)
I'll be offline for a week or so, so Merry Christmas to Steve and the random surfers who find this page by accident while surfing for porn!
Monday, 21 December 2009
Galactic Medal of Honour
I picked this up second hand a couple of years ago and finally got around to reading it (while waiting for Yellow Blue Tibia to show up from Play.com). I have friend who used to be forever extolling the virutues of this, so when I saw it I snagged it for later eading. The copy I got is an old Pan or Panther or NEL (not sure off the top of my head) paperback from the 70s but it features really ugly cover art that's been kind of putting me off reading it. Don't judge a book by its cover, I know, but if it's not Foss or Burns or maybe Frank Frazetta, then I'm not interested!
This is by Mack Reynolds and was apparently first published in 1976, but from the word go is incredibly old fashioned! Obviously, it's pre-Star Wars and pre-cyberpunk, and those two caused a continental shift in SF, but even bearing that in mind this book comes across as creaky and old fashioned. Don Mathers is a Sinatra-swinger and ne'er do well kinda like one of those guys that shows up in Harry Harrison or Bob Sheckley novels, all three martinis and pinching the waitress's bottom. At the beginning of the novel the guy breaks up with his fiancee, and it's heavily implied that she hasn't "come across" (as I bet Don would say). She leaves him for the mining corporations of Callisto because "I'm a trained secretary, you know!" Score one for women's lib!
The main thrust - the phoney war and stupid or eveil people who keep the war machine going - is very Pohl/Kornbluth, and maybe Reynolds thought the anti-war theme was topical in the 70s. I guess so, but if you compare this The Forever War, say, it really shows the dearth of wit and SF imagination at work. This one of those SF novels where the future is just like today but everything is prefixed with electro-, auto- or synth- to show that it's not just coffee but futuristic snyth-cafe.
It's structuarally rather poor as well, with a big long bit in the middle where Don goes along with the swindle (he's been convinced to be the fake hero of a fake battle with the fake aliens) and reflects on what a fake he is. Reynolds doesn't really bring his existential malaise alive in any real way, and all this looks like padding to me (this is a fix up of a story first published in F&SF, IIRC from the copyright page - I don't have it with me as I type this at work). The final worm-turns moment happens in the last ten pages or so, but it could easily have happened fifty pages earlier. It's interesting, I guess, in that the socialist arguments against war-mongering capitalists are very explicit, but really even that is probably too explicit having been put in the mouth of a character who is clearly present just to be such a mouthpiece.
All-in-all a disappointment,even though I wasn't expecting much. I had hoped for something a little more 70s scurrilous - a big tits and rock music sort of book or the kind Norman Spinrad or Mick Farren used to write, but this was very seemly and old fashioned. In the movie that ran in my head, Don Mathers was played by an aging Jack Lord in a roll neck in the sort of performance that makes you queasy everytime he gropes the starlet half his age.
This is by Mack Reynolds and was apparently first published in 1976, but from the word go is incredibly old fashioned! Obviously, it's pre-Star Wars and pre-cyberpunk, and those two caused a continental shift in SF, but even bearing that in mind this book comes across as creaky and old fashioned. Don Mathers is a Sinatra-swinger and ne'er do well kinda like one of those guys that shows up in Harry Harrison or Bob Sheckley novels, all three martinis and pinching the waitress's bottom. At the beginning of the novel the guy breaks up with his fiancee, and it's heavily implied that she hasn't "come across" (as I bet Don would say). She leaves him for the mining corporations of Callisto because "I'm a trained secretary, you know!" Score one for women's lib!
The main thrust - the phoney war and stupid or eveil people who keep the war machine going - is very Pohl/Kornbluth, and maybe Reynolds thought the anti-war theme was topical in the 70s. I guess so, but if you compare this The Forever War, say, it really shows the dearth of wit and SF imagination at work. This one of those SF novels where the future is just like today but everything is prefixed with electro-, auto- or synth- to show that it's not just coffee but futuristic snyth-cafe.
It's structuarally rather poor as well, with a big long bit in the middle where Don goes along with the swindle (he's been convinced to be the fake hero of a fake battle with the fake aliens) and reflects on what a fake he is. Reynolds doesn't really bring his existential malaise alive in any real way, and all this looks like padding to me (this is a fix up of a story first published in F&SF, IIRC from the copyright page - I don't have it with me as I type this at work). The final worm-turns moment happens in the last ten pages or so, but it could easily have happened fifty pages earlier. It's interesting, I guess, in that the socialist arguments against war-mongering capitalists are very explicit, but really even that is probably too explicit having been put in the mouth of a character who is clearly present just to be such a mouthpiece.
All-in-all a disappointment,even though I wasn't expecting much. I had hoped for something a little more 70s scurrilous - a big tits and rock music sort of book or the kind Norman Spinrad or Mick Farren used to write, but this was very seemly and old fashioned. In the movie that ran in my head, Don Mathers was played by an aging Jack Lord in a roll neck in the sort of performance that makes you queasy everytime he gropes the starlet half his age.
Friday, 18 December 2009
Save A Prayer - Le Bon on Le God
So, first we get John Taylor on 40 years of email, and now we have Simon Le Bon heading off into Richard Dawkins country to prove conclusively once for all the total non-existence of god.
Clearly these hair-spray pop rockers have hidden their world-class minds beneath of facade of pastel-jacketed champagne sipping, model boffing vacuous white funk. I await Nick Rhodes's commentary on the prsopects for peace in the Middle East!
Erm, as for the topic at hand I'm a contented atheist and don't require either Simon or Richard to put my case for me. The world is empty of meaning or purpose, a pointless random ramble from womb to tomb. You've got to laugh, eh?
Clearly these hair-spray pop rockers have hidden their world-class minds beneath of facade of pastel-jacketed champagne sipping, model boffing vacuous white funk. I await Nick Rhodes's commentary on the prsopects for peace in the Middle East!
Erm, as for the topic at hand I'm a contented atheist and don't require either Simon or Richard to put my case for me. The world is empty of meaning or purpose, a pointless random ramble from womb to tomb. You've got to laugh, eh?
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
The Piano Has Been Drinking
It's late, I should be in bed, but I've got to share this live version of The Piano Has Been Drinking by Tom Waits. It's from the compilation record Bounced Cheques, which was passed to me on cassette by my friend Pete in 1981. It's the greatest thing ever!!!
Meet The Residents!
Ah, the many ways to ruin an evening's writing! One that afflicts me is the old “Hm, I wonder if there's anything on youtube from...” some half remembered show, comedian or musical act. Monty Python is a constant source of distraction (despite owning it all on DVD) as is the Alexei Sayle collection and the Muppets. Music is ever tempting, and recent work killers have included Talking Heads, the Sex Pistols, the Beatles ... well, lots of music, obviously, because YoutTube was invented, more or less, for music video. Which brings us to my latest lost evening(s) of work courtesy of The Residents.
I discovered The Residents in a about 1981 or so on Radio Pictures, a late night music show that used to run on Sunday nights on New Zealand TV. In the the gilded days of my halcyon youth RWP ran right before the Sunday Horrors, a regular horror movie slot that played anything from Universal classics, through Corman, Hammer and into early period sleaze and slasher films like Massacre at Central High and The Incredible Melting Man. RWP was where I first encountered people like The Birthday Party, Stray Cats, Duran Duran, The Tubes, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Talking Heads, ABC, Grandmaster Flash, Blondie, THe beastie Boys, Depeche Mode, Culture Club, REM, The Cure, The Fall and so on and so forth – the usual suspects of 80s alternative pop and rock, I guess. Man, Sunday night was the greatest - rock and roll followed by sleazy cheesy greasy horror. Life doesn't get better than that, at least not until you're old enough for sex and drugs.
One of those nights my mind was entirely blown by The Resident's One Minute Movies. I couldn't believe what I'd just seen and heard! This was years before I saw any underground movies or heard much in the way of avant garde music. I'd maybe heard some Stockhausen or Varese at High School music, but this wasn't anything like that noise, it was beguiling and tuneful and funny! It was immediately clear to me that it was the most important thing I'd ever heard since I first listened to Dad's cassete of Sgt Pepper'sonely Hearts Club Band when I was ten.
A couple of weeks later (I can't remember what the timeline was, frankly) I was browsing in the record shop, dreaming about having enough money to be clever and cultured, when I saw it: The Commercial Album by The Residents – that was it! That was the group I'd heard, those were the songs! I had to own it and I think my birthday must have been near (I hardly ever had enough money to buy records) and Mum and Dad bought it for me.
The Commercial Album consists of forty songs, exactly one minute long. It's perfect: each has room to develop a single musical idea, with none outstaying their welcome. While one might wish some of the more interesting ones hung around a bit longer, even the more difficult numbers never become boring. The liner notes on the CD state:
I read on wikipedia (so it must be true!) that they bought forty minutes of commercial time on a San Francisco top 40 station and played every track once over the course of a day. I wish I'd been a round to hear that!
I played and played and played this up in the spare room of the house while me and my friends played D&D or pool on a the tinny little record player Dad made me from old speakers and some junked turntable he'd picked up. My mates were mostly into AC/DC and Pink Floyd (I liked them, too) but back in those days we all seemed to have far more elastic tastes in music. There didn't seem anything odd about listening to Aqualung, say, then London's Burning then Devo. Mum and Dad – whose taste runs more to My Fair Lady and Camelot, and in their more risque moments, trad jazz – were rather nonplussed. Mum much preferred Tom Waits, and called the Residents “That plinky plonky music.”
Anyway, the second Resident's LP I got was even more spectacular, a compilation of tracks from various albums and EPs called Nibbles. THis record features some of my favourite songs ever – Blue Rosebuds, Constantinople, Santa Dog and The Spot (the latter recorded with sometime collaborator Snakefinger, who was responsible of another Radio With Pictures favourite of mine, The Man in the Dark Sedan). Over the next few years, I bought a lot of Residents LPS – the Mark of the Mole, Meet The Residents, Not Available, Tunes of Two Cities, Have a Bad Day, Wormwood, Icky Flix – and got to see them a few times when we came over to the UK (the night they played in Wellington in the 80s, part of the 13th anniversay tour, I was in a play and couldn't go).
The Residents are really important to me. They have a unique artistic vision that mixes art and satire and horror and sci fi in a bewilderingly genial mix of noise and weirdness that I find irresistible. When I was a a kid, I was fascinated by the way they deliberately obscured who they were - they were always masked in photos and performance, and they never listed personnel on their records. It's taken me a while to properly understand that this wasn't just a gimmick, but a crucial part of The Residents enterprise. It not only doesn't matter who they are, it'd be a distraction from the songs. If we knew who they were, we'd only wonder about them more, and try and project our knowledge of them inot the songs, in the way people try and interpret Beatles songs (regarding I Am The Walrus, John Lennon said "Let the fuckers work that one out"). More than a tease (though it's also an anti-op a tease) it leaves the middle of the music blank for the listeners benefit. We can put whatever we like in there unmoderated by the artist's biography or ego.
Last month I blogged about a speech given by John Taylor (of The Resident's contemporaries Duran Duran) on the value of remoteness and obscurity of an artist. I realise now how close what he describes is to my own experience with The Residents, from the life changing first encounter to the obsession fuelled by the mystery of them. The Resident played this game very deliberately, and still play it today (although it's not hard to find out who they are, they still avoid publicity, and of course the joke is that they aren't Paul McCartney or Abba or anyone else larking about, which were among the rumours that washed around when I was at Uni, they're just a bunch of obscure Californian hippies).
They're still going strong of course, and in the way of things that endure against the odds, have garnered a degree of respectability. There's no such thing as rarity these days, and You Tube is packed with videos and tracks from all stages of their career so go have a poke around and discover them for yourselves. Check out this fantastic version of For the Benefit of Mr Kite performed with the London Sinfonietta in 2007. The Residents plus Sgt Pepper's – magic!
PS - Uh oh! I just searched for Tom Waits. Curse you, You Tube!
I discovered The Residents in a about 1981 or so on Radio Pictures, a late night music show that used to run on Sunday nights on New Zealand TV. In the the gilded days of my halcyon youth RWP ran right before the Sunday Horrors, a regular horror movie slot that played anything from Universal classics, through Corman, Hammer and into early period sleaze and slasher films like Massacre at Central High and The Incredible Melting Man. RWP was where I first encountered people like The Birthday Party, Stray Cats, Duran Duran, The Tubes, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Talking Heads, ABC, Grandmaster Flash, Blondie, THe beastie Boys, Depeche Mode, Culture Club, REM, The Cure, The Fall and so on and so forth – the usual suspects of 80s alternative pop and rock, I guess. Man, Sunday night was the greatest - rock and roll followed by sleazy cheesy greasy horror. Life doesn't get better than that, at least not until you're old enough for sex and drugs.
One of those nights my mind was entirely blown by The Resident's One Minute Movies. I couldn't believe what I'd just seen and heard! This was years before I saw any underground movies or heard much in the way of avant garde music. I'd maybe heard some Stockhausen or Varese at High School music, but this wasn't anything like that noise, it was beguiling and tuneful and funny! It was immediately clear to me that it was the most important thing I'd ever heard since I first listened to Dad's cassete of Sgt Pepper'sonely Hearts Club Band when I was ten.
A couple of weeks later (I can't remember what the timeline was, frankly) I was browsing in the record shop, dreaming about having enough money to be clever and cultured, when I saw it: The Commercial Album by The Residents – that was it! That was the group I'd heard, those were the songs! I had to own it and I think my birthday must have been near (I hardly ever had enough money to buy records) and Mum and Dad bought it for me.
The Commercial Album consists of forty songs, exactly one minute long. It's perfect: each has room to develop a single musical idea, with none outstaying their welcome. While one might wish some of the more interesting ones hung around a bit longer, even the more difficult numbers never become boring. The liner notes on the CD state:
Point one: Pop music is mostly a repitition of two typs of musical and lyrical phrases: the verse and the chorus.
Point two: These elements repeat an average of three times in a “top 40” radio hit.
Point three: Cut out the fat and a pop song is only a minute long.
Point four: One minute is also the length of most commercials, and therefore, their corresponding jingles.
Point five: Jingles are the music of America.
To convert the jingles to pop music music, program each song to repeat three times.
I read on wikipedia (so it must be true!) that they bought forty minutes of commercial time on a San Francisco top 40 station and played every track once over the course of a day. I wish I'd been a round to hear that!
I played and played and played this up in the spare room of the house while me and my friends played D&D or pool on a the tinny little record player Dad made me from old speakers and some junked turntable he'd picked up. My mates were mostly into AC/DC and Pink Floyd (I liked them, too) but back in those days we all seemed to have far more elastic tastes in music. There didn't seem anything odd about listening to Aqualung, say, then London's Burning then Devo. Mum and Dad – whose taste runs more to My Fair Lady and Camelot, and in their more risque moments, trad jazz – were rather nonplussed. Mum much preferred Tom Waits, and called the Residents “That plinky plonky music.”
Anyway, the second Resident's LP I got was even more spectacular, a compilation of tracks from various albums and EPs called Nibbles. THis record features some of my favourite songs ever – Blue Rosebuds, Constantinople, Santa Dog and The Spot (the latter recorded with sometime collaborator Snakefinger, who was responsible of another Radio With Pictures favourite of mine, The Man in the Dark Sedan). Over the next few years, I bought a lot of Residents LPS – the Mark of the Mole, Meet The Residents, Not Available, Tunes of Two Cities, Have a Bad Day, Wormwood, Icky Flix – and got to see them a few times when we came over to the UK (the night they played in Wellington in the 80s, part of the 13th anniversay tour, I was in a play and couldn't go).
The Residents are really important to me. They have a unique artistic vision that mixes art and satire and horror and sci fi in a bewilderingly genial mix of noise and weirdness that I find irresistible. When I was a a kid, I was fascinated by the way they deliberately obscured who they were - they were always masked in photos and performance, and they never listed personnel on their records. It's taken me a while to properly understand that this wasn't just a gimmick, but a crucial part of The Residents enterprise. It not only doesn't matter who they are, it'd be a distraction from the songs. If we knew who they were, we'd only wonder about them more, and try and project our knowledge of them inot the songs, in the way people try and interpret Beatles songs (regarding I Am The Walrus, John Lennon said "Let the fuckers work that one out"). More than a tease (though it's also an anti-op a tease) it leaves the middle of the music blank for the listeners benefit. We can put whatever we like in there unmoderated by the artist's biography or ego.
Last month I blogged about a speech given by John Taylor (of The Resident's contemporaries Duran Duran) on the value of remoteness and obscurity of an artist. I realise now how close what he describes is to my own experience with The Residents, from the life changing first encounter to the obsession fuelled by the mystery of them. The Resident played this game very deliberately, and still play it today (although it's not hard to find out who they are, they still avoid publicity, and of course the joke is that they aren't Paul McCartney or Abba or anyone else larking about, which were among the rumours that washed around when I was at Uni, they're just a bunch of obscure Californian hippies).
They're still going strong of course, and in the way of things that endure against the odds, have garnered a degree of respectability. There's no such thing as rarity these days, and You Tube is packed with videos and tracks from all stages of their career so go have a poke around and discover them for yourselves. Check out this fantastic version of For the Benefit of Mr Kite performed with the London Sinfonietta in 2007. The Residents plus Sgt Pepper's – magic!
PS - Uh oh! I just searched for Tom Waits. Curse you, You Tube!
Friday, 11 December 2009
Doll by Ed McBain
This is the other book I picked up at the Amnesty International sale for 20p a couple of weeks back. I've been interested in crime and detective fiction for a couple of years now, mostly as a model to use in my own writing. Solving a crime provides a nice set of plot pegs to hang everything else on, after all, and I've noticed that a lot of my fiction rather naturally gravitates towards this sort of mystery story shape anyway.
I've not read any of McBain's 87th precinct novel (of which this is one) but I've heard of them, so I was interested to give it a whirl (and at 20p, you can't complain). Rather than a series of plot pegs to hang other stuff on, the crime is everything here. Characterisation is pared back to absolute minimum. McBain seems to forget about it entirely for large stretches of the novel, and then suddenly remember that these are real people and so chuck in a few paras about one of his detectives worrying about being fat or another one who goes on a similar tangent about going bald.
A degree of sympathy is required for Steve Carella, who's kidnapped and hooked on junk by a strange sexy villainess. So we get a little about his wife and kids and some scenes where other detectives think he's dead and dwell on what a stand up guy he was. The reveal that Carella's not really dead is nicely done and fitted in with another minor plot step on the way quite well. The more I think about the plot elements, in fact, the more I appreciate this novel. Sure, it's somewhat dry in terms of character, and amusingly lurid melodramatic for a PoMo hipster such as I, but it's solidly constructed with some nice suspense.
I've not read any of McBain's 87th precinct novel (of which this is one) but I've heard of them, so I was interested to give it a whirl (and at 20p, you can't complain). Rather than a series of plot pegs to hang other stuff on, the crime is everything here. Characterisation is pared back to absolute minimum. McBain seems to forget about it entirely for large stretches of the novel, and then suddenly remember that these are real people and so chuck in a few paras about one of his detectives worrying about being fat or another one who goes on a similar tangent about going bald.
A degree of sympathy is required for Steve Carella, who's kidnapped and hooked on junk by a strange sexy villainess. So we get a little about his wife and kids and some scenes where other detectives think he's dead and dwell on what a stand up guy he was. The reveal that Carella's not really dead is nicely done and fitted in with another minor plot step on the way quite well. The more I think about the plot elements, in fact, the more I appreciate this novel. Sure, it's somewhat dry in terms of character, and amusingly lurid melodramatic for a PoMo hipster such as I, but it's solidly constructed with some nice suspense.
Rolling in filth!!!
The Guardian asks its readers what were the worst books of the decade, and book blog commenters fly from the wordwork like borer beetles on the wing to chew and feed on delicious edginess! Seven hundred comments and they're still frothing out like rampant spittle.
Compare with the various best of the year things they're running - forty or fifty posts per year, at that rate they'll get four or five hundred comments (and many of them are coming from the same people). I understand it's fun playing at being David Mitchell (not the obne that wrote the much derided Cloud Atlas, the other one) and squeezing out your hilariously scathing bon mots at the expense of easy targets (Ian, Zadie, the other Dave) but I'm still amazed and disappointed that so many supposed book lovers long for the chance to fart out these clouds of bummer gas. And Guardian readers to boot! I mean, I could believe it of the Mail, but come on guys, don't let the side down!
As some of you (note ironic use of plural - hi Steve!) may recall, I used to review books for The Zone (an online SF fanzine). One of the reasons I gave that up was the number of poor or average books you had to slog through and then spend time enumerating their problems. One of the reasons I started reviewing was as a way to focus my thoughts on what does and doesn't work in fiction to feed in to my own writing, and as time went by I realised that it was only the good books that had something to teach me.
Mulling over bad books is like mulling over bad relationships, dying a little more with every reminder. Bad books aren't like the unhappy families that Tolstoy tells us about. Bad books tend to bad in the same ways: wooden characters; murky, cacophonic prose; lumpy lurching plots; a poverty of ideas. They are, ultimately boring. By contrast, every great book is great in its own unique way. Every great book has it's own perspective, something exciting and new to show us (cue Love Boat theme). Every great book is a revelation and it astonishes and humbles me to realise the incredible variety and passion of human life and expression that's revealed by great fiction...
God, I can't believe I just typed all that. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Hudson, a fool and a hypcrite!
Compare with the various best of the year things they're running - forty or fifty posts per year, at that rate they'll get four or five hundred comments (and many of them are coming from the same people). I understand it's fun playing at being David Mitchell (not the obne that wrote the much derided Cloud Atlas, the other one) and squeezing out your hilariously scathing bon mots at the expense of easy targets (Ian, Zadie, the other Dave) but I'm still amazed and disappointed that so many supposed book lovers long for the chance to fart out these clouds of bummer gas. And Guardian readers to boot! I mean, I could believe it of the Mail, but come on guys, don't let the side down!
As some of you (note ironic use of plural - hi Steve!) may recall, I used to review books for The Zone (an online SF fanzine). One of the reasons I gave that up was the number of poor or average books you had to slog through and then spend time enumerating their problems. One of the reasons I started reviewing was as a way to focus my thoughts on what does and doesn't work in fiction to feed in to my own writing, and as time went by I realised that it was only the good books that had something to teach me.
Mulling over bad books is like mulling over bad relationships, dying a little more with every reminder. Bad books aren't like the unhappy families that Tolstoy tells us about. Bad books tend to bad in the same ways: wooden characters; murky, cacophonic prose; lumpy lurching plots; a poverty of ideas. They are, ultimately boring. By contrast, every great book is great in its own unique way. Every great book has it's own perspective, something exciting and new to show us (cue Love Boat theme). Every great book is a revelation and it astonishes and humbles me to realise the incredible variety and passion of human life and expression that's revealed by great fiction...
God, I can't believe I just typed all that. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Hudson, a fool and a hypcrite!
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