Stone Cold Pimpin'

Simon Sellars interviews Simon Reynolds about J.G. Ballard

One of my fantasy projects that I toyed with for a while was a book on Ballard and Eno. They do seem of a type in some ways and they are patron saints of postpunk to an extent. But the project founders immediately owing to the fact that they are so eloquent about what they do and such brilliant writers, that there’d be zero role for any critic or commentator. There’d be very little to mediate or interpret, as they’ve said it all, so much better. They know what they are doing. I suppose you could historicize them, contextualise them. Ballard with the milieu he emerged out of in the Sixties, which was based around the ICA, right? And Eno with the UK art schools.

In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything ideas-based. There’s this wonderful Englishness. You imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky and soda in the Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications. Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except much better because he’s a far better writer, and a better thinker too – more original, more convincing. Eno is almost like a British Barthes, in some ways.

Posted by Ted Mills at 07:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speedy read graphic novel about an animator's trip into the bizarre totalitarian world of North Korea, where George Orwell seems to be a prophet. Rambling narrative, good comic timing, and a journalist's eye for detail. As you can see, I got it from the library! 

Photographed by mills70

Posted by Ted Mills at 01:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Japan's most popular crime novelist, says the blurb, and I believe it. Zipped through this, even waking up early this morning just so I could finish the final 25 pages! A desperate housewife kills her gambling, philandering husband and her workmates help her dispose of the body. Things start to go wrong almost immediately with their plan, but Kirino keeps the twists coming, until you feel sympathy for nearly everybody. Also a good examination of the underclass of Japanese society and the squeezed middle class. 

Photographed by mills70

Posted by Ted Mills at 01:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Vintage, 2003
Mark Haddon comes from a background of childrens books, which partly explains the simple, straightforward storytelling of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Yet the tone, and the clinical POV of its autistic protagonist allow for all sorts of adult ironies to make their way in. The novel starts off with a murder--of a next door neighbor's dog--but it is Christopher's desire to solve this parochial mystery that leads to the uncovering of secrets and real human pain--about his father's life, his mother's, and some of himself. Shades of Vonnegut-like distance and cartooning, but at heart a empathetic tale. Without the POV device, Haddon's tale would be a depressing story of a developmentally disabled teenager and kitchen sink melodrama. But as it is, its revelations are heartbreaking, because they are played so objectively.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Penguin Books
1959 (1979 reprint)
My friend Jeff literally gasped when I told him I was reading Philip K. Dick for the first time. He of course has been a fan for years, and quickly rattled off a list of must-reads in his bibliography, including a biography which will give some context.
Dick novels are hard to find used here--the Public Library has a few, and the Book Den has at most one at any time. This is not a reason for me not reading earlier, just a fact. There's something groovy, then, in picking up this Penguin UK paperback, a thin novel--it feels like a coffee break.
Time Out of Joint is an early work, and tells the story of Rangle Gumm, a 40-something layabout who starts to suspect that his small-town suburban reality is not what it all seems. Objects disappear in front of him, leaving only the object's name on a scrap of paper. His young cousin finds old magazines and phonebooks that don't correspond to the era. The cousin also builds a crystal radio and Ragle begins to hear pilots passing overhead, talking about him. And why does he keep winning his local paper's mail-in quiz?
The publication date was 1959, and not only is Dick presaging all sorts of recent alt.reality movies like the Matrix and Truman Show, but part of what I liked about this novel is his depictions of life in late-50's America. He understands the phony veneer of post-war suburbia around the same time Twilight Zone was doing the same. The early chapters are now a glimpse into how people thought and acted back then, just before Dick bends their reality. He gets the consumerism that we are still suffering from, the "reality" that America creates around itself to keep out the messy Real. Baudrillard would have a field day with the book; so would Zizek. I breezed through, and got a kick in the pants--fun stuff.
For a much more intelligent consideration of the novel, for those who have read it, check out The Four Levels of Reality in Time Out of Joint by Yves Potin.

Posted by Ted Mills at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ballantine
1945 (rerelease 1985)
Cornell Woolrich is sometimes considered the lost voice of Noir fiction. Whereas Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler have their place secured, Woolrich is terribly out-of-print for the most part, with his books going for high prices on Amazon, and no publisher really putting out a comprehensive re-release. Yet he wrote "The Bride Wore Black" (under the name William Irish), which had been filmed several times, wrote "Rear Window" (you may have heard of this little Hitchcock film), and most recently the Banderas-Jolie "Original Sin" film was based on one of his stories. The Believer featured a nice retrospective a few years ago, and yet, still he's hard to find.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes was lent to me by a friend, and is my first Woolrich novel to read. It dates from the '40s, is more a post-Depression piece than a WWII one, and features the classic noir trope of inescapable fate. The novel is in two halves. In the first, a millionaire's daughter, saved from a suicide jump, relates how her father has become mentally enslaved to a poor psychic. The psychic foresees a plane crash and the millionaire cheats death, from then on hanging on his every word. He forecasts the stock market, and the millionaire makes more. But then the psychic foretells his death...in the jaws of a lion! At midnight! On a certain day! The once confident man now becomes unraveled--after all, the psychic has been right up to now...
The second half follows Shawn, a detective, who doesn't believe in all this, and is determined to figure out what's really going on (while falling in love with the once-suicidal daughter, Jean). Is it extortion? Woolrich cuts back and forth between the last night of the fate-condemned man and the detectives sent out to follow the psychic. And surely the lion is a load of hooey...except! A lion escapes from a traveling circus that night! Yeh, you heard me...
Ludicrous as it all sounds, Night takes it all seriously, and places its readers in the position of the unbelieving investigators, who reveal one fact-based clue only to be confounded with some otherworldly event. This oscillates back and forth towards the climax, which includes a desperate game of roulette, right up to a surprise conclusion literally as the clock is chiming midnight. The ending, which I won't reveal, allows its question of fate to remain ambiguous.
Woolrich's writing can often be overly prosaic, and I did skim a bit when he seemed to be padding. But it's rough and mean enough, which lashings of black dread, to appeal to noir fans everywhere...if you can find a copy.

Here's a good Cornell Woolrich site.

Posted by Ted Mills at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of my favorite and most influential writers, Harold Pinter just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not only do his plays explore the frightening recesses of the modern mind, but the man loathes Bush with a passion. Good on ya!

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Russell Davies has been documenting the vanishing English Cafe for a few years now on his two blogs. Now it seems his paean to the classic British slap-up meal, eggbaconchipsandbeans, is to be turned into a book. I know I want a copy, not just for its celebration of this utilitarian meal, but for his enthusiastic writing:

Continue reading "EBCB: an excerpt" »

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After thinking about setting up a books database on my computer using Booxter, along comes a Web-based flickr-style version called LibraryThing. Designed by Tim Spaulding, it uses ISBN, bar codes, Amazon, and straight ol' manual input to create a db on the web to represent your collection. You can then link to it and show people that, in fact, you have way too many Star Wars Universe novels for a 35-year-old man.

As you can see, I've already signed up, entered a few books--from my reading pile at work--and installed their blog widget on the left-hand side. Ain't it amazing?

Posted by Ted Mills at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I quickly stopped by the annual Planned Parenthood Used Booksale at the Earl Warren Showgrounds. This is one of the biggest sales in S.B., and apparently last night's opening was a madhouse. I wanted to go, but I was teaching class, so I just hoped there would be something left.

I ran into John Ridland, former poetry teacher of mine, and translator (I wrote on his book here). He had some nice words to say about my bimonthly column and this very blog, and I was glad to tell him that it's back in business. He also had recently gotten into Modern Japanese Lit through a friend and was very much into Junichiro Tanizaki. Yep, Tanizaki is a good one to start with, more so than Soseki. Of course I put in a good word for Kobo Abe.

I didn't pick up many books this year, but I did get three: Richard Brautigan's The Abortion (only later did Jon point out the irony of picking this up at the Planned Parenthood sale); Geoff Dyer's but beautiful: A Book About Jazz, which some blog or another turned me onto months ago. Now it's too late to thank them/him/her. Finally, the media contact/organizer Stephanie, who had been yakking back and forth with me on email, had saved a copy of Burroughs' Interzone for me, after I had written about my WSB Binge in my column. Wasn't that sweet of her? It turned out that book was a first-edition hardcover, too! Niiiiice.

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Virgin Books
2002
My cultural knowledge of William S. Burroughs used to go a little bit like this: "Naked Lunch"...ah, hmmm..."Naked Lunch" (the movie). I knew more about him as a reference, from bands I like (Steely Dan, Soft Machine) to a voice to sample ("Language is a Virus" and "Sharkey's Night" for Laurie Anderson). So it made sense to pick up this very breezy biography by Barry Miles, who has also actively reconstructed some "definitive texts" of Burroughs' works (and after you read the book, you realize how brain-busting that must have been).
This is the story of a man who leaves his small town, sees the big wide world, does a whole lot of drugs, achieves fame, achieves poverty, then returns to a similar location to live out the rest of his days. Funny how that happens. Of course, in the meantime, he winds up influencing the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Miles traces the themes and influences running through all Burroughs' works and makes valid the writer's own claim that all his writing is one large book, with familiar characters and ideas turning up again and again. Just as some film directors start off as comic artists, Burroughs started off as more of a skit writer, composing "routines" with his friends based on wild characters, seeing where they would leave. "Junky" certainly has that quality from the get go; "Naked Lunch" is the culmination of that style. The later cut-up works are microcosm versions of the routines.
At some point Burroughs became so paranoid, and believed that people were just "agents" working for some unseen force, and that women were aliens. He actively pursued Scientology in its earlier stages, when it was a version of Wilhelm Reich's theories (Burroughs went through the e-meter business and became a 'clear') and not a money-making cult. Reading about this made me realize how much Cronenberg put into his film of Naked Lunch--not just an adaptation of the novel, but a psychobiography of Burroughs.
Miles' book is essential reading for anyone interested in jumping into Burroughs' work, not just because of the overview it gives of the books, but because so much of his life appears in his novels, that I would imagine a reader would be lost without it.
So therefore I picked up Junky right after putting this book down. Will read it soon....
In the meantime, here's a page of cut-up machines. And a page of assorted texts.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oxford University Press
1989
Am I having an artistic identity crisis or what? Jeff Kaiser recommended this book--it's a very thin book--for those interested in grants. And I'm interested in grants...in the future.
This form of moolah procurement is still very popular, 20 years (!) after Deborah Hoover wrote the first edition to this book (she followed it up four years later with the second, and then kept shtum through the internet and email revolution).

Continue reading "Supporting Yourself as an Artist - Deborah A. Hoover" »

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc.
1989
Like so many peeps, I have a hard time with procrastination. This is especially baffling for me, because I find these days I procrastinate over things I like to do, and wonder what the hell's wrong with me. I was a much better procrastinator when I was younger, when I took ages to do boring school assignments and chores, preferring to write, draw, read, etc. Now I have a hard time jumping on the computer to edit film, or work on After Effects, and such. Is it the technology? Is is fear of completion? What? What? What??
Goddamn it all, I need answers. Well, I didn't find them all in Neil Fiore's book, but there are some nice "mind hacks" (to borrow a term) inside. The book, you may not be surprised to hear, is recommended over at 43 Folders, the boosters for Dave Allen's Getting Things Done. Books like these are always easy to read (and finish, bwah), so why not, I asked.
The book comes from 1989, B.E.M. (Before Email), so when Fiore makes note of "Inboxes filled with letters" he's talking about paper. (Tell me, grandad, what was it like in an office back then?)
And of course, the book is designed for the executive and/or office worker who, let's face it, has nothing but sucky things to work on anyway. When you die, nobody will remember you for the 2001 semi-quarterly report of potato vendors. Such is life.
But there's plenty for artists and creatives and before I forget the sage (and just plain) wisdom, I'll write it down here.
* Making the mistake of identifying too much with a project, until any opinion on the project is taken as an opinion on yourself. Therefore, "...procrastination can serve as a delaying action and as a way of getting past your perfectionism. If you delay starting your work, you cannot do your best and so any critiscim or failure will not be a judgement of the real you or your best effort." Although true, sometimes my best writing is done when I'm under the gun. I'd prefer not to be under the gun, yet neither do I judge my rush work as less than my own writing.
* Fiore compares a task to walking along a foot-long plank of wood for 30 feet. Easy? But what if it was 50 ft off the ground, suspended between two buildings? We'd find it hard to get across. But what if the roof we were on was on fire? We'd probably find a way to get across. Procrastinating, says Fiore, is when we raise the plank of wood ourselves and then set fire to the building--that is, we wait until the last minute until outside events force us to actually do the job. We create pressure that doesn't need to be created...
* It's all about word choice. In his most salient yet psychobabbly point, Fiore recommends switching the verb "have" with "choose", ideas of punishment and outside forces switching with rewards and free will. So don't say "I have to finish this assignment by 5 o'clock...or else!!". Instead say "I choose to finish this assignment (because this is the life I'm leading at the moment, etc. etc.)" Now whether this will enable my life script and/or send me into a shame spiral I don't know, but actually I find this a good way of looking at things, and certainly gave me a little new perspective (along with GTD) that allowed me to finish the music video I was working on. Weeks of "I have to finish this!" produced very little, because I was grouping it all together. Once I broke all that needed to be done into little batches of assignments, suddenly it was "I choose to finish one AfterEffects shot tonight" or "I want to/I bet I can..." etc.
* "Whenever you catch yourself losing motivation on a project, look for the implicit "have to" in your thinking and make a decision at that moment to embrace the path--as it is, not the way you think it should be--or let go of it. It's your choice."
* Other changes in your inner voice: Replace "I must finish" with "When can I start?"
* There is a link between chronic procrastinators and workaholics: "they are either working or feeling guilty about no working."
* Make a reverse calendar. Start with the end date, then plot out the other dates that run up to it. This does mean, however, that you must pull apart a majority of the small actions ahead of time, and make room for the unknown. This is easier said than done.
* Questions to ask yourself to overcome fear, especially when planning a project: "What's the worst that could happen?" "What would I do if the worst really happened?" "How would I lessen the pain and get on with as much happiness as possible if the worse did occur?" "What alternatives would I have?" "What can I do now to lessen the probability of this dreaded event occuring?" and "Is there anything I can do now to increase my chances of achieving my goal?" These are fair questions to ask, as long as you are not completely delusional and do them ahead of time.
* A lot of these suggestions are Buddhist. As is GTD. Dave Allen was a former hippie. Go figure.
* Telling yourself "I should have started earlier" is a waste of time. You've started, so do the work.
* "Only work will diminish your anxiety." I like that maxim. Also: "Procrastination is another form of work" (but not in a good way).
* Use reverse psychology: "I must not work more that 2 hours a day on this project." Guess what happens.
* Let go of larger goals (temporarily) in order to focus on smaller goals that can be accomplished sooner.

So that's about it (or what I marked down as interesting). Fiore hits the same points over and over, and I still have a hard time thinking about business people and why they should care about the stack of paper on their desks. I'm glad someone is there to help them out and who also, along the way, helps out the artist.
On a side note, this book came out in 1989, which isn't that long ago really. But one of the main ways to procrastinate--email and Internet--just didn't exist.

Posted by Ted Mills at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Top Shelf Comics
2003
Blankets is a huge tome of a graphic novel, one that took artist/writer Craig Thompson 5 years to complete, and only took me a few hours to finish. Ach, such is art.
The story, a realistic tale with dashes of magical realism and fantasy, concerns Craig, growing up in a strict Fundamentalist (are there any other kinds?) household, and struggling with his faith when he falls madly in love with Raina, a girl he meets at Christian Ski Camp. She lives in Michigan, he lives in Wisconsin, and they soon consummate a long-distance relationship that leads to the central action of the novel, Craig's decision to stay with her for a week at her family's house.
Craig's family is ruled by a domineering father (who Thompson draws a little bit like Stalin), an invisible, but not weak, mother, and a younger brother who doesn't have the most loving relationship with. He's not exactly his brother's keeper. The visit to Raina's house mirrors Craig's broadening worldview that primes him to leave the church. Raina's parents are breaking up, but Dad still comes back every day for a few hours and puts on a brave face. The couple communicate through notes stuck to the refrigerator. Raina has an older, more rebellious sister, who has left the Christian home and immediately married a lunkhead and dropped a sprog. Raina also has two adopted siblings, both with Down's Syndrome, a decision that made sense to the parents when they were kids, but now they are growing up physically, but not mentally, is fully taxing them.
Thompson gets all the details right in this slow, studied portrayal of young love, though tempered with debates over sin and battles with shame. The fundamentalist church comes across as one big gathering of alpha male high schoolers, with little difference between the mullet-heads that bully Craig, and the block-headed churchgoers who will choose ideology over family. With Christo-fascist James Dobson currently pulling the strings in Washington, it's a shudder-worthy look into a sub-culture that is isolationist and miserablist at its core, but one that has its eye fixed on a theocratic state. The anti-art/anti-creativity propaganda drilled into the children through the church, as seen in Blankets, is, well, it's child abuse, not to mention the whole body-shame-guilt crap.
Thompson grew up in this sort of environment, but like others who escape the fundamentalist craw, he knows his Bible, and Blankets occasionally departs to tell stories from the scripture that complement the main plot. His explication of Ecclesiastes--one panel the existential angst of the original text rendered in jagged Grosz-like ink work, the other a Sunday School happy bunny version of the Christian "correction" added later--is especially enjoyable.
I don't know any of Thompson's previous (minor) work, but his flexibility of style from realism to expressionism shows his young mastery of the form. This is his second book, but the first to be in this realist style. What he does for a followup will be of interest--having purged himself of his childhood trauma, will he have anything left to say? (Supposedly the next book is an "Arabian fairy tale".)
Craig Thompson has a website and an interview here at Fear of Speed.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hesperus
2004
It was national poetry month last month, and Santa Barbara crowned its first poet laureate, Barry Spacks, who I covered (with some tardiness) for the News-Press in my column. However, I missed publicizing, but still managed to give a shout out to, John Ridland, the poet who was one of my professors at UCSB back in the day. He was giving a reading of his own translation of Sándor Petőfi's "John the Valiant". After a few nice email exchanges, I received a copy in the mail. Being poetry, it was a quick read.
According to the introduction, John the Valiant is Hungary's national poem, a work of children's lit that speaks to young and old alike. The Hungarians look upon it like we look on Alice in Wonderland or Wizard of Oz, a text that keeps giving. People can quote huge chunks of the text, apparently.
Earlier translations, when they could be found, were prose, but Ridland's translation returns to the original poem's four line stanzas, and rather regular, child-like rhythm. This makes for some awkward rhyming, as the original Hungarian (presented here on the left side of the page) keeps the rhythm and rhyme throughout.
The story is simple enough. Besotted young country lad John Crack'o'Corn has to flee the farm and his love Nel after accidentally letting his flock of sheep disappear. He winds up joining a traveling army and fights on the side of France against the Turks, singlehandedly rescuing the King of France's daughter in the process. He refuses the princess' hand as he's still in love with Nell, only to get home after an incredible further adventure (he winds up riding an eagle like a horse) to find Nell dead.
A nice, suitably gloomy ending, but Petőfi was told to keep the story going out of popularity.
The second half suffers a little from the unplanned sequel syndrome, as we find in Hollywood a lot these days, and Petőfi throws in more fantasy--Giants, witches, assorted bad guys--to keep the punters happy. It ends on the island of fantasy, the only place he can ever reunite with his love. It's a strange book--if there's anything missing it may be the author's voice that would successfully link these disparate episodes together, something only found in the original language. I know so little about Hungarian literature that the book is interesting just in the way it has broadened my mind. Plus, it's short! Thanks to Professor Ridland for having the good sense to pass it on to me.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Regan Books
1996
Recommended on a list of "socialist (leaning) sci-fi" which I think you can still find here, and then doubly recommended by my friend Chris, and then found for a dollar that very afternoon in a used book shop (dontcha just love syncronicity?), I finally zipped through this after it sat on the To Read pile while I finished Austerlitz.
Now ten years' old and adapted into a musical of all things, the novel takes the Wizard of Oz and retells the tale from the Wicked Witch of the West's point of view, opening up Oz into a rethink, where the Wizard is an authortarian ruler, Animals who can speak are persecuted like Jews, and Elphaba (the witch's real name) is a misunderstood atheist who suffers from being on the wrong side of history. History, as you know, that is written by the winners.
Not to say that Elphaba is good and Dorothy bad--the novel is not just a mirror-reverse. Instead, the tale is a complex journey of conflicting desires and sad figures, and a slowly dawning sense (for the witch's atheist beliefs) of predetermination, which we readers sense is Nabokovian in nature. Gregory Maguire creates characters that breathe, and successfully places within a completely different world without snarkily referring to our own, or breaking the fantasy. Characters talk from within their subculture, and we have to divvy out their belief systems. Explication be damned. Elphaba (the name comes from, ah-ha, L. Frank Baum's initials) winds up a tragic, misunderstood character, and Dorothy a well-meaning but oblivious agent of death.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Penguin/Putman
2001
If last year's "Most Important Book" was City Comforts, this year's has got to be Getting Things Done, by productivity guru Dave Allen. My personal path to Allen was this: wondering what shareware/freeware apps were essential once I had my G5/OSX...Phil sending me a selection of links...one of those links being the blog 43 Folders...them recommending (nay, internalizing) Getting Things Done, or GTD as the hep cats call it...the library having a copy.
I have since turned into a prosyletizing GTD-head, turning on my friends Jon and Jeff to its tips and tricks, and on a bigger level, making large adjustments in thinking to handle the amount of tasks the creative person has. So many ideas we have, we artists, so little time to do them. Allen writes for the executive, but his system of lists and folders, and his mental system of prioritizing (the classic triple Ds of "Do Defer Delegate") and solving tasks is for everybody, and has already paid off for me in big ways. The desk at home remains clean...every night. Small tasks, like phone calls, emails, and the like get taken care of right away. Large tasks and projects are broken down into smaller to-do lists. The email has been sorted out and in one night I took care of an Inbox that was spilling over with 450 emails. There's nothing so edifying as crossing out completed tasks one after the other.
I haven't done everything (yet) suggested in the book, and not everything applies or is of use. For example the "43 Folders" idea that the blog has taken for its name would be good if I was an executive with many paper-based projects and a big filing cabinet (the 43 includes a folder for every day of any particular month and one each after that for each following month). But I'm not, so that can wait. I still need to clear my desk of crap (mostly magazines), and I still want to have a proper sorting out of the filing cabinet and toss out old bills. (This sort of talk would lead to a sarky quote from Jon: Ted! You're not Getting Things Done!!!)
In conjunction with the book (which I have now bought, because it's something you want to have around), I am using the "hipster PDA," an idea that grew out of the geeks who champion GTD. It's a daytimer made out of 3x5 index cards and a metal clip. Totally customizable, and requires no batteries, stylus, or expensive software. You also don't feel like a twat if you lose it. The missus is embarrassed about this because she thinks it's a cry for help (or a least a cry for her to buy me a PDA), but I assure her that it's not. Jon now has one, to which his sister responded, "Hipster here means poor, you know that, right?" So we are now calling our HPDAs the iStack. (Jeff recommends pStack, as there's nothing "i" about it, but I don't know.) You can see a photo of mine here.
43 Folders also has a rough summary of the book here, but the book is so dense, it might not make too much sense (or have the necessary impact).

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And you can read it here. Maybe that's old news, but last time I was at his site (while I was reading his "Master of Space and Time") it was a plain ol' html thingy with not much in the way of updating.
And it's from his blog that I found Alien, in 30 Seconds, Reenacted by Bunnies. Yay!

Posted by Ted Mills at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at the always wonderful and data-deep UbuWeb, there's a complete look at Aspen, which, from 1965 to 1971 was an exclusive magazine "in a box". Each issue was different, and each contained a jumbled assortment of items, ranging from art prints and essays to flexidiscs and Super 8 film spools. Contributors included some of the best known names in art at the time. I'm sure the surviving issues are worth thousands--UbuWeb presents the full archive to watch, listen, and read.

Posted by Ted Mills at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Modern Library
2001
It's like a novelistic version of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, said Jon, which was good enough recommendation for me. However my experience of Austerlitz is really a tale of two readings. The first half was unwisely choosing to read the book at home, at night, as my bedside reading. For a novel that rambles, stream-o-conch' like through various stories and ages, with very few fullstops and no chapters, this was a poor choice for the late night read. It defeated my poor brain at every turn. Once I finished "Getting Things Done" at work, I brought in Sebold's book and on breaks got into the second half and was done in days. The second half, coincidentally or not, is where the rough edges of a plot begin, and where the novel becomes less experimental.
The title character is a wandering eccentric, who makes friends with the narrator, and whose stories and search for his vanished history take over the book, such as what happens in Heart of Darkness. Austerlitz discovers later in his childhood that he was spirited out of Nazi Europe by the Kindertransport, to be adopted by a Welsh family. Years later he goes looking for clues to his parents by retracing the transport route back. It's a journey into an old Europe of evocative places and place names, and the empty center for those who want to go looking for history after it has been annihilated. There are no conclusions, only infinite possibilities.
By the end I was rather underwhelmed by it all, as it ends on such an uncertain note. But I did like this passage on time:

And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

Why yes, it most probably is...

Posted by Ted Mills at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

TOR Books
1992
Gould's book takes a sci-fi premise--teleportation--and throws it into a coming-of-age story for young adults. This got highly recommended by someone on BoingBoing, and being YAF (Young Adult Fiction) promised a quick read.
Davy Rice learns he has the talent to "jump" to locations he's been before one night when he flinches from his father's drunken, physical abuse. He pops up in the safety of the school library. He does so again when he runs away from home and nearly gets raped by a truck driver. From these grim beginnings, we follow Davy as learns the limitations and benefits of his powers, but most importantly tries to seek "closure" (eek) over his abusive dad and his absent mom.
I have to say I was ready for the sci-fi, but wasn't prepared for the touchy-feely psychobabble. Davy spends quite a lot of the book crying, weeping, and blubbering. Even more amazing, he hooks up with an older woman called Millie (older as in college student), who becomes his shoulder to cry on, and is so well-adjusted she's like a cut-rate family counselor (and the voice of the author). Now, that's some sci-fi! The more the tears roll down his face the more she wants to sleep with him. Don't try this at home, kids.
The first half of the book is all logistics, as Davy funds himself by robbing a bank, creating a little safe house apartment in NYC, then gradually extending his knowledge of places (he can't teleport to places he hasn't visited). He gets revenge on Daddy Dearest by making him believe his son's a ghost, a similar tactic he does to the truck-drivin' rapist. He makes amends with Mom, just before she is blown up by a terrorist (!), spinning us into the book's second half, a riff on "with great power comes great responsibility." The NSA want to know who this teleporting kid is, and how he's able to get onto planes and subdue terrorists. Davy has a special desert oasis hideout where he brings his vanquished foes, dropping them from 50 feet in the air into the water. Also on his tail is Brian Cox (who hopefully will be played in the film, if they ever make it, by Brian Cox) his nemesis at the NSA. By the end of the book, Davy confronts all three father figures (Dad, terrorist, and agent) and Gould does a good job wrapping everything up without a shootout or a speech (those come early, usually from Millie).
I enjoyed the novel for what it was, although I skimmed all the times the waterworks got turned on. What pleased me most was the ordinary uses of teleportation. When Davy is traveling to scout out new locations, his flight is delayed five hours. He teleports home, sets the alarm, then has a nap up till boarding time. Now that's a super power!

Posted by Ted Mills at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Random House
1991
I picked up my first Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell novel for two reasons; the story was centered around the London Underground and because I had seen the TV adaptation of Dark Adapted Eye. I have to say I'm slightly disappointed, even though sticking with the book to the end. Halfway through this convoluted tale, filled with strange variations of loser characters, I did not know the plot. There's a large former schoolhouse in London that is let out by the landlord Jarvis. This includes Alice, a woman escaping both a dull husband and her newborn child; Tom, a busker who scrapes by and takes up with Alice; Jed, who keeps a falcon; Tina, a freewheeling spirit with two children, one of which is Jasper a rough 10-year-old who thrill seeking is undertaken by riding the roofs of underground trains. There's also a dark-clad figure, Axel, and his companion who dresses up in a bear suit and terrorizes passengers with confrontational theater.
Jasper, Jed, Jarvis: three "J" males. Try keeping these straight as the narrative jumps between them. There's also Tina's mother Cecilia, who lives elsewhere and who had unmentionable, suppressed Sapphic longing for her longtime friend Daphne.
I kinda expected all these lives to intertwine in strange, unexpected ways, but so many of them are loners and socially inept that, despite renting rooms in one big house, they don't. Of a main plot, there is the one of Alice, escaping a controlling marriage and finding a controlling relationship with Tom, until being seduced by the dark charisma of Axel, who, I don't think it would be ruining anything seeings I guessed it in the earlier chapters, is a mad bomber. I finished the book, and I'm relieved.
Though mentioned as a book about the underground, the author shows no affection for the system--the tube is portrayed as dark, polluted, and full of strange, pleblike people. Oh well.

Posted by Ted Mills at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Harry N. Abrams
2001
Herbert Lottman's book on Man Ray and Montparnasse, at that time in history the center of the art world, is one of the best books I've read about the pre-WWII art scene. Most of my previous reading on the Surrealists have come either from their own texts, or in the stodgy writings that accompany art books. But none gave a sense of time and place as this history of a neighborhood.
It's not exactly a book on Man Ray, but the American born, reluctant photographer (nee frustrated painter) serves as a conduit through which passes nearly every single important artist of the early 20th Century. Man Ray moved to Paris, believing he would be a painter, but wound up paying the bills with photographic portraits. His subject/client list is enviable: apart from the group of Dadaists and Surrealists that haunted the cafes there, he photographed Gertrude Stein, Eric Satie, Marcel Proust (the day after he died), Picasso, James Joyce, Hemingway, and many more. He was able to stay above the fray of many political/artistic fights and divisions because of his portraiture, and never earned the wrath of Andre Breton.
Lottman reports all this in the context of how these artists spent their time--sleeping with their models and mingling with people of all nationalities at the cafes and clubs that lined the street. They moved in and out of tiny studio apartments, and they opened and closed galleries. Man Ray had several major love affairs, first with the infamous Kiki, who is the model in his most famous early work, Lee Miller, his student and lover who then went on to a successful career in her own right, and a few other dalliances.
The world that we get to look into in the book is refreshingly modern, but also long past, especially when one considers how important creation and art was to all these people (well, except Duchamp, who had a successful career doing as little as possible). It would be hard to imagine such vigorous defences of art made today.
Anyway, a bloody quick read, to be had on Amazon for cheap, printed on lovely thick glossy paper, and full of relevant photos (although I would have liked more).

Posted by Ted Mills at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Viz Comics (U.S. Release)
1999-onward
Near the completion of this fan-subtitled version of Urasawa's manga masterpiece, Viz Comics announced they were finally bringing out this title in the States, scuttling what was til then a 17 volume labor of love. I was fortunate to grab a Bittorrent file of Vols. 1-16 off the web just before they disappeared for good.
So consider this a preview.
If American comics have to go through the rigmarole of dopey "They aren't for kids anymore!" articles every couple of years, imagine what it would take to get something like this unfolding manga serial taken seriously. Yet out of anything I've read this year, this multi-layered comic has be one of the most satisfying and emotional experiences I've had for a long time.
It's a genre-busting series that combines sci-fi, horror, and adventure elements into a generation spanning plot. Influences and allusions abound: Stephen King's "It", Patlabor 2, The Seven Samurai, Dennis Potter-esque time jumps, The Stand (King again!), and much more.
At the center is failed rockstar Kenji, who is currently running a mini-mart and looking after his sister's baby daughter. Yet his childhood comes back to haunt him, when it is suggested that a religious cult, the leader of which is a man named "Friend," is plotting to take over the world, using a secret plan that Kenji and his friends designed back in elementary school as a joke. As Kenji assembles his old school friends, now all in their thirties and a various stages of their lives, they try to figure out through their collected faulty memories who Friend could possibly be, and how to stop him.
This is just the launching pad for an adventure that jumps backwards into the past, forwards into the future where things haven't turned out for the best, and into a virtual world where the memories of their 1970s childhood are replayed and "corrected."
Never, unlike other series, did I get the sense that Urasawa was just making this up as he goes along. Like The Sopranos, otherwise meaningless exchanges and scenes from the early volumes return much much later, revealing their deep meaning and throwing me for a loop. The manga is full of mysteries and unanswered questions, and each time one is answered, 10 more mysteries present themselves.
The emotional core of the manga deals with the idealism of youth and the failures of adulthood, and whether that can be regained despite (or because of) impossible odds. We see this in Kenji and friends, but also in Kenji's niece Anna, who grows up to be a sort of savior herself.
"20th Century Boys" is also quite frightening. The pacing is cinematic, with big scares revealed in full splash pages. The face of "Friend" starts as a device out of suspense film: shrouded in shadow, we assumed his identity will turn out to be a character we've already seen in broad daylight. But as 20th Century Boys progresses, "Friend"'s face becomes a thing of horror, causing paralysis in those who gaze upon it (we only see reaction shots). It's a device that Urasawa uses again and again, and he always finds a fresh way of employing it. (I read the fansub as a slideshow on my LCD monitor, so I never see the pages ahead of time. It's an excellent way to get maximum frights out of the comic!)
Urasawa is still writing the manga, and some of these series can stretch to thirty volumes and beyond. In Volume 16we jump ahead in time again and a new whole chapter of the story begins to open up, so I believe we're nowhere near the finish. And now that Viz will start bringing out the series officially, we'll have to wait for them to catch up. Unless Urasawa drops the ball near the end, this will be one of the most important mangas in recent memory.
P.S. Bush-haters may notice that the story of a religious cult that orchestrates its own terrorist attack to take over the government is...a bit familiar. But having been started in 1999, Urasawa's comic is either prescient or tapping into the same evil forces in the air that are now part of our reality.
P.P.S. Now that I've discovered this whole underground of fansubs, I'm going to be reading a lot more manga!

UPDATE (5/25/06): From Wikipedia: "20th Century Boys is still running strong in Japan, and currently has 21 volumes so far. It seems to have been inspired in parts of the story by the works of Stephen King, containing allusions to It and The Stand. It was recently licensed by Viz (2005), however at Urasawa's request it has been rescheduled for release after Monster finishes its English serialization due to a change in art style over time."

Currently, scanlations are available here, but you must register: http://www.x3gen.com/new/manga_downloads_20thcb.php

Posted by Ted Mills at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Little, Brown
2004
Recommended by Jon, and my first LeCarre novel (after this, I think there will be more). This most recent work tries to figure out the world post-Cold War, in regards to spies, while backtracking and flashbacking to show the making of lead character and double agent Teddy Mundy. LeCarre evokes 1968 Berlin well--a hotbed of student activism--and what comes after, and Mundy's relationship with a fellow activist, also spy, called Sasha. We then follow his rather centerless, wandering life, never really sure of his identity (as the author points out, spies have to operate under an enforced and necessary schizophrenia.) Finally, we catch up with Teddy in the present day, long after the fallen Berlin Wall has put an end to Teddy and Sasha's careers. Now Sasha has come a'calling, with an offer.
LeCarre has been criticized for turning the last couple of chapters into a diatribe against the Bush Administration. He does get out some zingers: "It was an old Colonial oil war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judaeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America's post-Nine Eleven psychopathy."
Like Seymour Hersh, LeCarre believes we've been taken over by a cult. And it should not surprise you that I think that way too. But the reviewers make it appear that this is just a context-less rant. It's not. The novel is a traditional LeCarre spy narrative upended suddenly and violently by dismal post-911 realism. It's Smiley's People with the ending of Costas-Gravas' "Z". The fundamentalists on both sides are working towards the same goals, and both are enemies of reason. It's a sock-knockin'-off ending, and expects you to jolt awake from it.

Posted by Ted Mills at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rugged Land
2002
One of my favorite productivity sites, 43 Folders, recommended this book to all who have dealt with writers block and such, and so I decided to check it out. (At least I think it was 43 Folders--maybe it was a link from them to somewhere else). Steven Pressfield is best known for the book "The Legend of Bagger Vance," which was made into a movie with long title intact. The War of Art is a very short, lots-o-white-space manifesto on creativity, which can be read in one sitting. It can also be digested in one sitting, as the thought behind the 200 pages can be summed up this way: "Stop procrastinating. If you're a writer, write. If you're a painter, paint. Just get on with it!"
Not the most shocking advice, though it never hurts to read it again and again from different people. Because he is offering this to all sorts of artists, from screenwriters to sculptors, he keeps things general. But it's the general where his writing is at its snooziest. I learned much more from his biographical anecdotes sparsely dispersed through the book than from the generic self-helpy stuff.
Oh yeh, and it only takes two hours to read, giving you ample time to get back to whatever it is you're working on.

Posted by Ted Mills at 03:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Viking
2003
I came to this book for two reasons--one that I am interested in Eadweard Muybridge, as he is considered the grandfather of motion pictures (and a character in a story I am/was writing), two that I've read Rebecca Solnit's writing on Tom Dispatch, where she usually writes hopeful essays of an ecological nature. So when I heard that she had written this book on Muybridge and the birth of the modern world, I needed to check it out. And damn, can this woman write! This is the kind of history book I love, one that takes in disparate elements and demonstrates how they all snap together. The previous history of Muybridge I have read was straight hagiography and focused on his motion studies and his time in Stanford and Philadelphia. But Solnit is more interested in the years that went into creating a man who would change history--stopping time, in essence; making people aware of themselves as an image--and the society that surrounded him. Solnit brings in the railroads, San Francisco history, the emancipation of women, the last stands of the Native Americans, the birthing of educational and artistic institutions, and much more. Here is a sample paragraph which demonstrates Solnit's command of the language and of juggling several ideas:

Those great landscapists Russel, Hart, and Savage photographed the physical process of the building of the railroads, and when the line was open, Mybridge and Watkins both made extensive stereoscope series of the scenery along the route. Most accounts of the building of the railroad concentrate on just that: the heroic and unprecedented toils of the laborers and engineers that drew a line in wood and iron across the continent. But less visible webs were being spun. The transcontinental railroad was far vaster than any of the manufactorites of the East. It required unprecedented strata of bureaucracy, unprecedented degrees of managerial coordination, and it reached as far into the political and economic systems of the United States as it did into the landscape. The Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were the biggest corporations of their time and the first to have such extensive dealing with the federal, state, and local governments. The modern corporation's complex synchronizations first appeared there, and so did the penetration into the world on such a scale. First the railroads, then the networks for distributing energy, food, and basic goods, drew people further and further into a system; and more and more of them became employees of such systems. The independence of the frontier and the subsistence farmer retreated further and further. This was the moment in which many Americans first began to feel like cogs in the machine.

And so here we are today. One of Solnit's points is that the "Wild West" was the last gasp of a mythologized frontier that was about to become less wild and more regimented, just as authors were romanticizing the Native Americans while the Feds were busy killing the last "insurgents" off.
Muybridge comes across and driven, but private, only partly aware of the changes he is making to the world, and maybe not as honored in his time as he should be. The ultimate American success story, he retired to England where he was born, and died ten years later in 1904, the graveyard slab misspelling his name as Maybridge. Whoops.

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Who woulda thought?

The
Search for Alfred E. Newman

By way of Metafilter.

Posted by Ted Mills at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Metropolitan Books
1998
Ecology of Fear is Mike Davis' follow-up to his groundbreaking City of Quartz, that most wonderful alt-history of Los Angeles. Ecology of Fear is not so fiery, and concerns itself mostly with the L.A. basin's propensity to natural disaster. The chapters focus on one disaster type each: Earthquakes, Fires, Tornados, Wild Animal Attacks, and such. Later chapters approach the subject from a different angle--one traces the literary history of the destruction of Los Angeles (a fascinating chapter) and another is more of a revisiting of the themes of City of Quartz, that is of the class segregation and class war.
Davis shows a weakness here not seen in City of Quartz, in that his rhetorical tactics start to show through. When he believes a danger is real, he accuses the authorities of being complacent. When they are not, the authorities are over-reacting. Of course, this varies due to the danger, but it's still there.
The book drags a bit, as Davis tries to get every example of a disaster in their appropriate chapter. After a while, the rare L.A. tornado got a bit dull to me. I did, however, love his hagiography of disaster novels, and how their heritage is racist and reactionary--natural disasters usually being an excuse for a good ol' "final solution" style mass death, which we still find today in those awful "Left Behind" Bible-porn books. I also liked Davis' history of forest fires, which is a collection of dumb rich people building in fire zones and then watching them go up in flames. Mostly, Davis questions ideas of historical data--how can we say what is "normal" for Southern California when records have only been kept for 150 years? When the Owens Valley lake was drained, opponents protested this destruction of a natural object. However, at the bottom of the lake, they found tree stumps, evidence that very long ago, a drought had stayed long enough in California for a forest to grow. And we think a seven year drought is bad...

Posted by Ted Mills at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dover
1904 (this edition 1968)
Strange that it took an American emigre to immortalize Japanese folk tales, writing at a time when the oral traditions he was capturing were dying out. Strange also that his Kwaidan ("odd tales") is so short, when Japan is brimming with ghost stories and monsters. Of course, there are other books in Japanese by Japanese authors of folk tales, but this is the classic, and Hearn became an honorary Japanese. Kobayashi's film of the same name tells five of these stories, but readers will spot that only three come from the "Kwaidan" volume, the rest from his other books. Hearn's insect studies are also included here--his essay on ants is particularly good, as he compares human society to the ant colony, and the colony wins. He also tries to get his mind around how humans would adapt to living with a hive/soldier ant mentality of pure selflessness, and doesn't succeed.
My friend Gerald gave this to me in 2003 on my birthday, along with The Glass Key by Hammett. I finally got around to it. In fact, I think I read it in Japan, but my memory is foggy--I surely don't remember the ants article.

Posted by Ted Mills at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While Google announces new acquisitions almost daily (the universal library is fairly mindblowing), Amazon makes little improvements which you only notice later. For example, I just added Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear to my "Now Reading" sidebar, and went to grab the URL. You can now read the first sentence of the book, and get a list of the books Davis cites in his book (all hotlinked) and a list of books that cite Davis' book (also holinked). It's a minor improvement on the site, yet quite cool.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Vintage
1985
I first heard about Steve Erickson's writing in a long artist-resurrection article by Brian Evanson in The Believer (one reason why I love the magazine). It was an examination of how Erickson was labeled the "next Pynchon" after the success of his first novel, and what happened to him since (quasi-obscurity). It was much later that I found his first novel in a used store for a dollar. Can't say better than that. It wound up being my read over the two weeks spent in Taiwan this November, so the novel and the country are strangely mixed.
Perhaps Erickson would want it that way, for "Days Between Stations" is all about dislocation, not just of place, but of character and place. There are several characters in the novel, which begins in modern day (the 1980s) and jumps back to the 1910s, but I got the sense that essentially we were meeting the same three people in different guises, whether or not they turn out (later in the novel) to be related through the decades. There are love triangles between Lauren (the first person we meet) her philandering husband Jason, and her mysterious downstairs neighbor Michel. But Michel could also be a version of Adolphe, a wunderkind who grows up to be an Orson Welles of the silent era, audacious and revolutionary in film as D.W. Griffiths. He's in love with Janine, the star of his film on the French Revolution, who also may be his half-sister, but she is "owned" by a unscrupulous rich bloke called Varnette. Janine, in turn, may be Michel's mother. Or maybe not.
This is not a straight-forward novel, and when we meet Lauren and Jason, they live in a Los Angeles that is turning into a large sand-dune, battered by desert storms. Later, we learn that the Mediterranean has receded so far as to run Venice's canal's dry. There are also time loops and mysterious fogs and experimental films and unfinished masterpieces and a cold snap that almost leads to the immolation of Paris. It's like Sci-Fi Romanticism, without any explanation how these events are happening. Erickson doesn't care how it happens, he cares what happens to the people it effects.
In the end, some of these questions are answered, some not, and the great romance that's promised remains tantalizingly out of reach.
As for reading, the opening takes some bearing-getting, but once I got to the silent movie sequence, I was hooked.

Posted by Ted Mills at 04:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dell
1968
When I was in the 5th Year (the equivalent of 10th grade in the States), I had a most excellent English teacher called Mr. Arbon. Our class was a bit above the usual, personally selected in the 4th for "advanced studies" and so were only about 15 in total. Twice during the year, Mr. Arbon would assign a book report, and choose individual books for all of us. The first time I was given Catcher in the Rye and the second time it was Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. Imagine writing a book report on that--I was too busy picking up bits of my blown mind to really write a report of any coherence, though I did respond by writing my own Brautigan-inspired short stories. Mr. Arbon then lent me all the other Brautigan books he owned, which was nearly all of them, but not quite.
In Watermelon Sugar was one of the missing, and I only read it recently. It's a thin book, just over 100 pages, and took me most of a day to read. How does Brautigan fare now? Well, I like him just fine, actually.
The story of "In Watermelon Sugar" describes a writer living in a sort of "new Eden"-like commune, a town called Watermelon Sugar, which also processes watermelons for all sorts of fantastical things. There is the main gathering place, called iDeath, and a villain of sorts, inBOIL, who represents the old ways. It's a novel of dualities--Watermelon Sugar is both a place and a thing; the location is both wilderness and city; it is finite and infinite. There are two women the writer gets involved with, one who goes astray and one who doesn't. There is a joy of life about the inhabitants, but death is a constant presence.
Brautigan's style is at times close to Japanese haiku in its economy of language and the jumps it makes line to line.
Over time Brautigan came to symbolize the hippy movement to many, and the idyllic nature of this novel suggests why--a glimpse of a downhome utopia threaded through with a gentle surrealism borne of the American forest. It's sort of my spiritual home.
By the way, there's a much better essay on the novel, which unearths its Christian mythos over at the Brautigan archive. There's also a more recent musing on the name of iDeath in an era of iPods and iMacs. Finally, here's a sample of the first few pages.

Posted by Ted Mills at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)