Thanks to Dave 'Bolt-01' and Rich for sending over a comp. copy of Zarjaz #10:
Inside are some v. cool 2000AD-spin-off thrills, wrapped up in an awesome Flesh-themed Leigh Gallagher cover. Actually, I did a Future Shock type thing with Leigh some years back. He's good.
Yep, this is a pretty damn good ish. I particularly like the Flesh: Extinction story and Neil Roberts pulls off a niiice Redondo pastiche in a nano-sized Al Ewing thing.
As precogged a while back Z10 features "Unfinished Business" - a new Rose O'Rion short.story written by, uh, me and featuring some totally wunnerful illos by Dylan Teague, whose Thoroughly-Good-Eggishness goes waay beyond the call of duty.
It was a lot of fun to do.
You can snag yrself copies from comic-shops like Forbidden Planet or directly from the Futurequake Shophere.
The Hardest-Tweetin'...er, I mean, Hardest-Workin' Man in Rap - The Based God, himself - dropped his #ULTRARARE! #BITCHSHAKETHATASSONMYDICKWOOWOOSWAG! #NEW! #MIXTAPE! #REDFLAME a week or two back.
Regulars will be aware that we're rather partial to bit o'Lil B out here in the storm-wracked wilds of South Somerset. Here's my favourite cut:
People in the street often confuse me for Dylan Ettinger. They stop and point, say "Hey. Ain't you - ?" A couple times I've signed autographs, just to get rid of irksome town-centre stalkers.
Nope, I'm not Dylan Ettinger. I'm a bit skinnier than him, but I understand why people sometimes get us mixed up.
It's flattering, of course, but a bit of a drag when you're out eating a meal with your wife.
Anyway, here's the real Dylan Ettinger. I doubt if anyone confuses him for me.
Ensemble Economique: Brian Pyle...blahblahblah....Starving Weirdos...blahblahblah....etc, etc...various reccids on Amish and Digitalis (which I really must stock up on)...blahblahblah...then the newish one on Not Not Fun...also: RV Paintings. And, uh, fire-walking.
All of which += the sound of many boxes being ticked for me right now.
"The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods." - M M.
So, then, I don't suppose anyone would loan their helicopter to ferry The Remarkable Doctor Circle Brophy and myself to the Sun Araw show at The Croft in Bristol tonight? Mine's being serviced.
No...? Didn't think so.
He'll prob. never play the UK again. Ah, well, never mind.
My APB for local drivers willing to deliver us to the venue has fallen on stoney ground. The most encouraging answer I got was: "Sunn O))) are playing The Croft...???!!!"
"No. Sun Araw."
"Oh. Who?"
So I shall content myself with, uh, doing whatever thankless task it is that I do on a friday evening, punctuated by the occasional James Brown-on-his-knees style weep. Which is pretty much what I did when I found I couldn't make it to the Dolphins Into The Future show a few weeks back.
But enough! Self-pity doesn't suit me. Besides, you can't buy it in purple. Well, not in my size.
In other breaking Bad News, I found a Hudson-Ford single this afternoon that I didn't have. Oh much joy!
But it was scratched to fuck.
Bring on the dancing horses...the ones with people inside them.
The second ish of Brazilian Pulp mag Startling Adventures rams the zeppelin mooring-mast at full speed. Contains an old short story of mine - "The South Will Rise Again" - which is actually part of a larger thing - a Zombie Western, fer sure - though this works as a standalone story in its own right. No zombies in this section, but instead there are...well, you'll have to read it and see.
Hail to the ever-excellent Mo Ali who supplied an illo for my story and a v. cool short story of his own. Some other pals of mine put in two-fisted prose appearances, incl. Fritz and the afore-mentioned Anthony Whuddafugger.
Kudos to Dan for his efforts - for pursuing his seemingly-endless dream-quest and finally getting this out, live-to-paper. But it was also a group-effort; folks coming together from all round the globe to make a mag that's both by the people and for the people. Everything is author-owned. Please support this endeavour by buying or, at least, spreading the word about it. Dan's wallet is on the line here.
Had this song going through my head all day; don't know why. Haven't played it for yonks.
Always felt this somehow succeeded in reaching out towards some vague, ill-defined form of self-prophesised disappointment; auto-predictive unrequited something...
The Geography of Rejection. Destination recast as Kiss-Off.
The song's protagonist decides he's been spurned in the flimsiest way imaginable - and you sense he knew that it would happen along; that he was complicit in his own rejection by accepting the terms of the deal: "the equator"...how non-specific and nebulous, how curiously circular...now he's left chasing his own tail; caught in-the-round as the song - simultaneously an expression of both his half-arsed ardour and his own ill-focused disgruntlement - finally fades into gaseous exasperation and evaporates. Peeters out.
"But I thought we had an agreement. But you said..."
But, really, he knows that they never did. It's himself that he's angry at (though "angry" is too strong a word) for not being good enough...it's his own standards that he fails to meet - not hers - being dumped merely confirms what he always suspected and which he now knows. The world's not big enough - the equator not wide enough - for him to escape from himself.
She left, but he can't.
A weariness slowly envelops the song, settles over it and threatens to smother it; the vocals - initially a baroque, elongated sigh - a mild protest - eventually run out of steam along with the song. He's looking, looking...not for her, but for a way out. An exit.
To their credit the Mael Brothers never allow the song to sink into maudlin despair, so the feeling they've created persists - it hangs in the air, still cycling round and round - long after the last note has departed.
Yeah, it's a good song. A great one.
Let's push it out into the air - out into the world - and let that feeling finally dissipate.
SHAKY KANE: "THE BULLETPROOF COFFIN" / BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL / ETC
Well, of course, you've ALL been reading Shaky's new comic The Bulletproof Coffin...
Of course you have...haven't you?
HAVEN'T YOU!?
Best comic / floppy (or whatever we're calling them nowadays) of the year - or I'll tear up my collection of Jimmy Olsen 80-page Giants!
It's what every comic should be: FUN...engrossing, synapse-ticklin' good fun; fulla lurid candy-floss n freakshow colours, recognisable-yet-trickmirror-distorted archetypes and brain-bending retrofuturistic concepts that fold back in on themselves; if it's PoMo, then it's PoMo-by-default because Shaky's own peculiar obsessions (and the way he bends them to fit his own imagination) will always remain Shaky's obsessions and m.o., so any referentiality comes purely from the fact that he's constantly referring back to his own interests / reference-points / body-of-work, enhancing, updating, re-mutating it / them...the Shakyverse is a constantly-expanding, yet oddly hermetically-sealed Personal Event Horizon - a weird bending of light and logic that hints at fresh cosmic vistas while somehow - via some loophole in the laws of comic-book physics - looking at the back of its own head.
He's never - ever - stopped being Shaky Kane - has always remained true to his game - and that's what counts.
I could talk about meta-narratives that arc back across nearly 30 years of work, of themes and cross-associations and linkage; of how certain tropes or characters or situations re-emerge at points, bisect themselves, turn into something new; of how X and Y relate back to so-and-so or the fact that Scene Z in Bulletproof Coffin is, errrm, a reference to blahblahblah; that I've got paintings - paintings, goddammit - in my wardrobe of proto-incarnations of Red Wraith and Coffin Fly that date back 15 years; or tell you stories of him sending me sketches and finals of The Hateful Dead Bubblegum Card Series sooo long ago I can't bear to think about it...but I won't.
It makes it sound like the guy is just endlessly reworking old ideas from his sockdrawer or approaches his Art with some degree of contrivance, which I can assure you is certainly NOT the case. Shaky is just Shaky; he does what he has to do - usually with absolutely no thought whatsoever of who / what his audience might be...and that's why it's so fucking gratifying to see him (finally) get some serious kudos and exposure via this series. I know him well enough to be able to say he would still do the things he does - furiously drawing away in the small hours - even if they were to be never seen or read by another person. It would be heartbreaking if that were the case, but it's true nevertheless. I mean, those bubblegum cards...who in their right mind would've done that in a pre-Internet universe?
Well, he would.
He did.
That's why, if you've not bought this series, then you should.
Here's another five reasons:
Sorry, but I can't help pointing out that I (kinda) make an appearance in #4:
I've always wanted to appear in an Image Comic. Fourth Wall n all that. It's a reference to...ah, knickers - who cares. It's just v. cool. Screw Grant's "Fiction Suit" - I didn't even need to get out of bed and put me socks on for this. Thanks, Shaky.
Now I just want Rob Leifield to put me in the next reboot of Youngblood.
If there are any similarities between the Shakster and Kirby, then it's the fact that he (also) spits out more concepts-per-minute than just about anyone I know. So, so much for the self-referentiality / meta-narrative jag; just as well I didn't mention it, huh? I've been lucky enuff to hook up with him a couple times in recent weeks and, well, he spins more ideas in a casual conversation than most people do in a month, a year. That's why he's Shaky and we're not.
He's also one of the funniest / warmest / loveliest guys you could ever meet. He makes me laugh. A lot.
(Yes, yes, I know I promised Part Two of the Official Kid Shirt Shaky Kane Interview ages ago...I recorded an hour-long tape over the phone, but 80% of it was just the two of us messing-about, laughing, chucking silly shit around, in-joking, and the rest was, uh, salacious unprintable tales of bad behaviour by Comic-Book Pros that would put Bleeding Cool out of business. Sorry.)
A few weeks ago, Shaky introduced me to Dave Hine - the poor fellow who has to make sense of The Shakyverse - the Stan to S's Jack - and he's an extremely nice bloke too. Amazingly, our paths have never crossed before. Taunton boy, I think. He's writing some character called Batman that you might have heard of.
Hine and Kane: the best four-colour team-up available right now.
It reminds me of - memory's a bit hazy here - a very old Bruce Sterling story in which stoner lo-tech balloonistnerds ascend to reclaim abandoned US and Soviet spacestations and create an off-surface society / network.
D HARLAN WILSON: "CODE NAME PRAGUE" EXCERPT / "THEY HAD GOAT HEADS"
"The Nowhere Incident": a chapter snippet from D. Harlan Wilson's filthcoming novel Codename Prague leaks out as part of Dream People #34.
Now this is weird: I can remember posting a picture of the book's cover-art ages ago, when it was first announced, but couldn't seem to find it anywhere in my blog archives. But then when I Googled on it, I found it.
Phew! Thought I'd imagined that for a second.
Also convinced myself I'd run something on D Harlan's recent collection of short stories - They Had Goat Heads - can remember downloading the cover n everything. Wondering now if I accidentally posted it on another blog...?
Now I'm wondering whether I'm just absent-minded or whether DHR's fiction auto-erases references to itself. Which sounds oddly feasible. Either way: here's a nice colourful picture for you to look at.
Salvaged / restored footage; not seen this film before. This and "Q Quarters" were always my favourites...(this is Remodelled Bowie, I guess; and that one was Prefigured Scott, maybe. Always loved the coughing at the end, but not going to post it though; not tonight).
Re-edited for afterthoughts:
Can't leave this post alone for some reason - peripheral thoughts keep cycling around in my head, along w/ the song. I expect I've even posted about this before (it's a perennial fascination to me). At the time, it *ahem* felt like The Associates had picked up a ball that Bowie fumbled (or rather, refused to carry any further; a new manager, a New Career in a New Town beckoned...) and which Scott could've picked up after "Nite Flights", but instead continued to watch from the Subs Bench before ambling onto the pitch with "Climate of Hunter" and playing a different game altogether...
*shrugs*
Those two songs in particular are beautifully hollowed-out, numb-yet-languid; an unlikely collision of minimalist precision and baroque swirl. The production's awesome in its sheer wrongness - press a button and see what happens - druggy and expansive, yet simultaneously claustrophobic, insular and hermetically sealed: a self-contained, self-referential soundworld, oblique but oddly emotional. It's all surface - hints and glimpses of some deeper interior, yet the listener feels trapped inside of something. A jewelled mirrorball of possibilities or frozen expectation? The fascination is in listening-to - witnessing - these seemingly oppositional tensions.
NumbGlam.
They were bonkers live.
I keep wondering: where's that ball now? Does it even exist anymore and - fuck it! - does it matter if it doesn't?
HELLVETE / U.S. GIRLS / SYLVESTER ANFANG II SPLIT REVIEW
Preluude: Tom Bugs walks past and I flag him down.
"Who's playing? Oh, the Kraak Records boys..."
"You going later?" I ask.
"Nah, I'm rehersing." He shrugs and laughs. "Always rehersin'..."
He walks off dn Stokes Croft, half-muttering to himself: "Always rehersin' for something..."
Part One: Thee Sicke Minstrel's Tale.
Despite battling a nasty bout of flu, Helvete kicked off the proceedings with a solo live-extrapolation of the psych.medievalism he explored on his excellent "De Gek" LP (which I've been meaning to write about for nearly a year, dammit!! But I'll def. be pickin' over it soon in a one-off special 'Vinyl Picks' wordcast): building up a constantly-shifting spectral structure constructed from layered keyboard drones - a soft mirage of a building glimpsed from different angles, different points in time, a composite memory / Venn audio-overlap of...tones from the intro of some Germanic ballad from 1464 blending in with a sour-sounding 1966 Cale viola-drone, Warhol's Factory remade as some sort of broken Grail Myth sound-poem. Or that's how it seemed; ghostly and indistinct, solemn yet tender, each layer decaying and falling away from under three or four others.
Behind him, footage of a vintage Dream-Machine endlessly rotating on-and-on; a MemoryDredger tm, the OST to Reptile Brain Invocation #3 ("We filmed it for an hour," said Glen, laughing. Or maybe it was Ernesto.); a few weeks ago I tried one of those internet d-machine simulators wh/ gave me a bad headache within two minutes and eventually induced a bowel-movement rather than some Eternal Archetype; this time I saw imaginary typographies - pseudo-Cyrillic glyphs, woodcuttings of Rammellzee-like word-forms, snippets of some made-up left-brain language; Gothic-looking ghost-characters and alien fonts that seemed to be a lyric-sheet, a libretto designed to accompany Helvete's musical descent into something that sounded foreboding, yet stately and beautiful. ("Hahaha. Well, you are wired differently, dude," said Ernesto, laughing - yeah, it was definitely Ernesto who said that, when I told him I'd seen words, not animals or nebishes or whathaveyou. Ernesto's done this...this re-imagining thing where he's made his own version of a Konono No. 1 track - not a remix - on the forthcoming "Tradi-Mods Vs Rockers" LP and I can't wait to hear that!)
By this point, Hellvete had added a bowed banjo to his arsenal of Burgundian-flavour'd drones, soursweet sombre overtones that sounded like some ergot-smeared fugue - the smell of woodsmoke was drifting thru the venue now, rotting pendants blowing in a bitter wind; women wept, clutching at their rags for warmth while The Velvet Underground played at the funeral of Duke Louis de Mâle.
Banjo-as-timemachine: it's 1730 now, or maybe it's 1927 and Hellvete's plucking at his strings, playing the years - the decades - blurring time and space as he transmutes the music into a sad Appalacian ballad cum dirgesong that summons up the dreams of lonely French migrant workers, the broken mountains and ridges of a pre-coaltrawled Virginia - timeless and untainted by everything except regret.
Lovely.
Interluude one: Bart Sloow, he s'funny; he makes me laugh - a lot. His beard is back, but not as bushy as before - he had a full-on Flying Dutchman at one point; a ghost clipper-skipper's sproutage that made him look as if he'd just stepped out of an old painting (you almost expect him to have flaking oil-paint pigments instead of skin)- he mades my face feel nude, makes me wanna grow a stop-film animation beard, like now. Sloow's putting together another fest. - by accident this time - when he gets back from tour I'll mail him and post some details about who he's got playing; it sounded pretty cool. He has some new tapes out and kindly gave me a copy of the new Majutsu no Niwa one - "Ecstatic Crystallization" - I'm gonna give that a biig blast tomorrow. I'll let ya know how I get on.
Part Two: "Just Flew in From Philly".
Megan Remy catches me sneakily checking out her pedal-array. Embarrassed at being busted, I sorta semi-apologise: "Sorry, I'm, uh..a gear-nerd. I'm curious about other people's set-ups. What pedals they use. I can't help myself." She's jet-lagged; but graceful. I make a vague wasn't-touching-anything, honest type gesture. She laughs and says it's okay. Sad Boss delay-pedal anorak does gurning face and the bullhailer in his head scrzzzes "Hands in the air and step away slowly from the artiste's equipment!" Busted, but extremely pleased to see she uses cassette-tapes as part of her live set-up. Cassette tapes are good; I use vintage Walkman players and 25-year old tapes myself, but nowhere near as well as she does.
Live, U.S. Girls sound like a somnambulant radio-show, all ether-hiss and station-drift, Megan singing thru a gauzy veil of pedal-treatments over (randomly-selected?) tapes from her css-stash. It's like she's her own DJ, picking out song fragments from a broken jukebox in her head and then broadcasting them via a phantom transmitter - herself - selecting sounds that hang in the air, invisible - inaudible - to all but a few. A Radio-Medium who channels ghostly whitegospel and Spector girl-group tropes - the micro-mixer and pedal-maze acting as an electrical ouija-board.
Intermittently, Megan switches cassettes while her pedals pump out wispy swathes of hisssss or fuzzed-out signalmulch; she pitchshifts tumbling squalls of feedback, softening them, taming them; and each tapechange sounds like an invisible hand moving the dial on some vast imaginary wireless-set...re-tuning itself, sifting down thru the spectral output of distant Radio-Stars; collapsing nebulae that use hydrogen clouds as their call-sign. “This is Radio Free U.S. Girls broadcastin’ on 6562.8 Å...”
She plays the mixing-desk like a piano, rapid flurries of hand-movements, tweaking FX-levels, EQs...flattening, fattening, expanding, dragging-out sounds, changing their shapes, pulling them apart...attenuating, diminishing...it is like a radio-show...ghostly, flimsy, tenuous, fleeting, ever-shifting; only allowed to exist by the sheer grace of Megan’s will...sounds woven in and out of each other like strands of phantom silk. “Beauty is tenuous,” her music seems to say, “grab each tender moment while you can, spin it out, transform it into something else...listen ...remember...”
Electronic beats arrive, sounding like Some Other 1982 – Soft Cell haunting the airwaves of Radio Afterlife...some brave souls start to Almost Dance – me included...the past is forgiven, reaffirmed, celebrated, transmuted into The Present somehow. All at once, but in a small, almost silent way.
Sometimes, music just begs to become something else.
Interluude two: Bram chuckles a lot and smiles. He reminds me of Chris Giles, that soft, inwardly-embedded geniality. "They've spelled our name wrong on the poster," he says, or maybe it was Tommy. No it was definitely Bram. "Silvezschter[unintelligible] Anganganganfang-an-an-angfan-agang. Huh?" He shrugs, like, whatchagonnado? Smiles and draws on his cigarette. Like: Life's too short.
"They called me Hell Vet-t-t-t-T," says Glen. He pulls a face and looks vaguely unimpressed. "Gah."
Life's too short.
Part Three:Cassetten Commune Comrades.
Sylvester Anfang crawl out from the spaces between the frames of their own back-projection; they assemble in the shadows; Children of Fenris in rollerneck sweaters. This is the Full Monty, the fourteen-horned Goat of Brabant, cloven hooves and sharpened guitar-picks at the ready. It starts with something that’s a distant-cousin to Hawkwind or Neu, a home-brewed Motorik soup that eschews the incisiveness of Rother or Circle and replaces it with something looser – a baggy suit of clothes that runs down the road, floppy arms a-flailing, empty of any human occupant: Lo – and Behold! – there is no one inside, but see how it runs! - its armless sleeves pumping at the air, footless trouser-cuffs ruh-ruh-ruh-ruh-running in time to the drums. If Motorik was all about The Drive - the pulse of engine and heartbeat of driver syncing with landmarks as they flash past outside - then this is the sound of the driver removed from his car, his body dissipated – evaporated – from inside his Byrne-sized suit - running on ahead of himself; all corporeality abandoned – the trouser-legs a physical afterecho of the post-physical 'him'...they’re trying to catch up, his legs and arms, jogging in time to a headless-chicken rhythm that only he can hear in his non-existent head. It’s the pulse of Life that animates his bodiless clothes, his invisible heart beating inside his head.
Behind them, on the screen: kaleidoscopes and prisms, cascading lights, galaxies exploding in slow motion. The music’s a clattering pulse, a gaseous swirl of synths, a bruised fog scythed open by Sterling Morrison guitar rattle. We clap and woot.
(Instant DistortoMix courtesy of cheapjack mic on £30 pay-as-yer-go-fone)
Instruments are swapped, band-members repositioned. They play something from the Fifth Side of "Yeti", a jam positioned at right-angles to the tuff pre-Prog riffage of seites 1&2 and the Sandoz klaaangstruft of 3&4; at points, the interlaced guitars carrying an almost.echo of the less shrill / hectic moments of "Phallus Dei", and also that sonorous not-quite-raga chime of late 60's psych; there's a bit of the VU about the guitar-lines too, the accidental dissonance that comes from the interplay of different gauge strings, different playing styles, micro-tunings; Bram's firing off delicate little Blues-flava'd volleys underneath it all, while footage of naked witches frolick behind them and anarchocommune members play the bongos in their birthday suits.
Glen straps on a bass and takes point, shaking off his cold, tapping his foot and willing the band to get Into The Zone behind him as he stomps out a fuzzed-up Garage Rock nugget. And in come the chiming guitars, the droning guitars and the drums and they're off again, but this time its some smoky, dimly-lit basement in '66, a homemade light-show shining on the wall, stoned teenagers misquoting some English Beat Band, playing their guitars too loud, shaking their puddin'-bowled heads and shining for one brief glorious moment.
Anfang play psych.music as it was meant to be heard and seen, in a small intimate room w/ friends and like-minded souls: raw, messy, jammed-out n in-the-moment. Fuck The Big Score.
They stop for the 11pm kerfew but "the crowd call out for mooo-ooo-oore..."
"Just one more! Just another Five minutes!" someone yells. "We love you!"
"Ha! Five minutes'll turn into fifteen!" laughs Tommy (I think). By this point they'd all turned into one another.
"It doesn't matter - Time doesn't exist! It's all imaginary!" shouts another punter, everyone laughs and the band play a crunching, k'zoned-out Boogie jam and everyone lived happily ever after.
Epiluude: In the Qu-Junktions Office we talk about the Pros n Cons of Dubbed Wrestling Matches Vs Wrestling Matches in their native languages; "the wankiness that is Oasis"; the fact that Bram once had to sit thru a four-and-a-half hour soundcheck (!!!) by a Danish band, knowing that he would set-up his stuff and check in under 10 minutes. He's very patient, is Bram. And Ernesto has a very wise head on his shoulders - he made me think about a whole bunch of stuff - and Sloow is Sloow. They're lovely fellas, alla them, and i worried that I kept them up too late...
"We're not girrrrrrls," says Ernesto.
"I'll remind you of this at 9am tomorrow," says Tommy.
We record a jingle for Tommy's Dub-Lab podcast, Ernesto beatboxing into my phone and going "Tommy...Tommy..." in a squealy teenagegirl voice thru a pretend echobox. I will mix this down at some point and send it to them.
In the dream the girl-woman who worked in the club told me she was quitting work for the night: Was I reaaaaady to dance, she asked, laughing as she disappeared through the door to the staff area. She looked a bit like Eleanor Whatserface from Fiery Furnaces, but prettier; early / mid-thirties.
I looked in the whole-wall trick-mirror, momentarily aware of my age. Hmmm, not too bad, I guess, I decided. I liked the way the trick-mirror lied. I'm a terrible dancer now, tho; a dad-dancer.
On my scalp I found an adhesive label which I peeled off; it was stuck up under my hairline where my skin-cancer had been ("You heal really well," the oncologist told me a few weeks ago when he gave me the all-clear and I was surprised to hear that; and for a second I thought he was lying: what, me, good at healing? But no, he's right, I came back from the near-dead about 7 years ago; maybe I am...good at healing.)
So, me and the nameless girl who looked a bit like Eleanor Whatserface danced - me in my lumpen elderly way; her more of an easy swing, a hip sway...then we're walking on the beach, feet crunching on shingle and the sunlight is almost dazzling...there's a lagoon bordered by shingle (a bit like Abbotsbury / Chesil Beach), but the place has a pseudoCeltic-sounding name that's impossible to pronounce, let alone write. And I'm very happy here. I feel 'forgiven.' She points down the beach; we're on a penninsula made from piled-up shingle; there's a building there, but everything's in the shape of a map - a drawing - rather than 3D and this is where we need to go: into History, into Memory; "This...this is where things get interesting," she tells me, laughing, and locks arms with me...
Then one of my children wakes me up to say she had a nosebleed during the night.
HACKER FARM: FILMS AT THE BREWHOUSE, TAUNTON, TONIGHT!
STOP-PRESS!
UNFORTUNATELY, TONIGHT'S FILM-PROJECTION THINGY HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO STAFFING TYPE PROBLEMS BEYOND OUR CONTROL - ONLY FOUND OUT THIS AFTERNOON; WILL HOPEFULLY BE RESCHEDULED FOR THE 20th.
MORE INFO WHEN I KNOW MESELF.
SORRY FOR ANY CONFUSION.
Won't be around much today; so only have time to say this:
A riotous assembly of words running (carefully) amok. Each in their proper place, though not always where you'd expect them to be. Sometimes they're happy, sometimes they're sad; sometimes both / neither at once.
[In Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy...] "the pope gets sued, a headless man falls in love with a bowl of rice, and architects dismantle the earth. A war breaks out over greeting cards. A suicidal amputee tries to kill himself. William S. Burroughs becomes an amateur archaeologist and Tao Lin drinks an ape-flavored smoothie.
"Between a breakfast of clocks, a lunch date with Adolf Hitler, and breakdancing in outer space, anything is possible in the work of Bradley Sands. Just never wear a bear costume to an orgy."
Contains the prose-poem / story "The Adventures of a Small, Ceramic Giraffe in Tudor England" which first appeared in the prestigious (Bradley's word, not mine) journal - The Kek-w Quarterly.
"There was this one guy," said Bradley, riding a stegosaurus side-saddle, "who wanted to get the poem tattooed to his chest (actually, it was Eric Robinson, a(nother) proud alumnus of your quarterly), but he realized it would be too long and, the last time I heard about it, plans to get a tattoo of one of my shorter poems with an entirely different giraffe."
BTW: the KW.QUART is not dead or on afterlife hiatus, just currently running on glacially-slow Kektime (can't believe I haven't posted since July - what happened to all the time inbetween? (Oh, Yeah; I remember: I had my house demolished!)) Basically, other stuff keeps demanding my attention; but fear not: "IT SHALL RETURN!" he intones in a booming reverb-soaked voice. I do have a post ready which I'll put up sometime...soon.
Longtime readers will remember that I contributed a story to an anthology a while back called Bradley Sands is a Dick in which all the stories were called "Bradley Sands is a Dick".
Well, Bradley most assuredly isn't.
His previous book My Heart Said No, But the camer Crew Said Yes! is available here. And I believe he has another one available fairly soon.
