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Ask Me Things And I Might Answer, Maybe

I started doing Fanboy Rampage!!! – which was kind of comics journalism, maybe, I guess? – because I was bored and had access to the internet at my day job, and that was a real time/place kind of thing; it found an audience, and when I quit doing that, Matt Brady approached me about writing for the then-in-the-process-of-beginning Newsarama blog. My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I remember that it was Fanboy Rampage!!! that also caught the eye of Annalee Newitz, who was local to me at the time and we met up at some book reading she was doing after saying hello on the internets, and that got me an invite to io9 when that was being prepared. I feel like I kind of fell into it, if that makes sense? I wanted to write and be a journalist, but that all really started happening after I had done something that I didn’t think of as journalism at the time for a couple of years. Maybe there was something in my voice that people liked, or perhaps it was just that I’d proven that I could consistently put out content on a daily basis for a sustained amount of time. Who knows?

(If I hadn’t started Fanboy Rampage!!! when I did, I don’t think anything would’ve happened the way it did, had it happened at all. I think I really gained from the fact that it was the early days of the comics internet, as we now call it, and there just weren’t that many people out there doing what I did. There was me, Kevin Melrose, John Jakala, Alan David Doane… I’m sure there were others, but my memory is failing me. I remember it being more about message boards than blogs at the time.)

Because I have free time, I got myself a Formspring. That’s me above, answering a question from David Goblitz about how I got started in journalism, but you can ask me your own questions over here, dear reader. Part of me hopes that I’ll get asked questions by Tom Brevoort, considering how often I raid his Formspring for material for Newsarama.

Be warned: I will likely raid questions/answers for material for this blog.

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“Even the Music has got a Serious Hygiene Problem”

Tonight, the city wears dirty slut perfume and matching outfit. The rain has stopped, leaving the streets with wet greasy hair, strands of pulp blocking the drainage. All the flyers of every party of all time have gathered at the plughole of life. I’m standing on the balcony of Dubtek’s nightclub, holding my hand over my mouth. High above me, projected from the roof, lasers paint a dark cloud with colour, chameleon to the beat. I’ve come out for some air, but even the music has got a serious hygiene problem and there’s no escaping it. It’s my first ever gig in Manchester, and the place is one giant filthy arse-wipe loudspeaker, zero panache. There’s no sign of my challenger. When I walk to the edge, look down, I can see waves of people streaming out of the club, lit by stuttering lights. A purified canal runs back of the club. Some tables, chairs, a couple of sun umbrellas, all wet and soggy but no matter; it’s the small gaps between the rain that count, and learning how to live amongst them. Clouds of cheap shop-bought hormones lift from the young bodies.

From here, an excerpt of “Homo Karaoke” from Pixel Juice by Jeff Noon.

Noon was one of those writers whom I was madly in love with, back in the late ’90s, when I was also mainlining Philip K. Dick, The Invisibles and Bill Drummond like there was no tomorrow. Weirdly – perhaps because he kind of dropped off the face of the world? – I ended up entirely forgetting about him until he recently re-appeared on Twitter to promote the re-releases of his earlier work and his first new novel in over a decade. When remembering him, I had one of those How could I have forgotten? moments; Noon’s use of language and literal metaphor – for want of a better way of putting it; lines like “clouds of cheap shop-bought hormones” to describe perfume, and the like – were amazingly influential to me, shaping the way I wrote back then. Noon was amazingly important to me as a writer, although you can’t see it now. I’m glad he’s back, and I’m embarrassed that I forgot about him for so long.

(I should find some of that earlier writing for this site, sometime.)

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366 Songs 214: Up With People

The mish-mash of genres in “Up With People” is something that kind of fascinates me; the gospel-inflected backing vocals, the ska guitar, the soul horns, all covered with Kurt Wagner’s fragile (weak) indie lead vocal. It’s a confusion that works, something that pushes an inclusive agenda suggested by the title of the song, if not necessarily its lyrics (Although, maybe those lyrics are inclusive as well, in a different fashion; maybe we’re all “screwing up our lives today”). That everything goes together so well in this song is a surprise, but a pleasant one. With so many ingredients, it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to see the whole thing fall apart.

Oddly, I hadn’t heard the original version of this song before; I know it from the Zero 7 dub mix, which I’d discovered via some compilation or another, more than a decade ago:

Even stranger, it turns out that Zero 7 covered the song using its own arrangement rather than the original, with Sia as vocalist, and it turns it into a different experience altogether:

It’s more of a… performance, perhaps, than the Lambchop original; Sia works the whole thing more than Wagner’s relaxed take, but it’s not in an unpleasant way. There’re important stories about the differences in musical genre to be found in the comparison, I feel…

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Elsewhere On The Internet…

Sounds pretty deep, right? And also, to those who enjoyed the original Arnold Schwarzenegger movie back in 1990, somewhat unlike the source material (Well, a source material; the original Total Recall was loosely based on a Philip K. Dick short story, which I’ll get to in a minute). Yes, Arnold discovered that his memories had been tampered with, and yes, that theoretically left him in a situation where he was as much a mystery to himself as he was to the audience… but only up to a point. After all, this was an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie; you could pretty much predict what he would end up doing before the movie had even started with a degree of certainty (Spoiler: It likely involved some level of violence and no small amount of puns and quips, the latter of which, sadly, will be missing from the new version. Colin Farrell has already told reporters “I don’t have one-liners” in the 2012 movie). The original Total Recall didn’t ask “Who is this man?” as much as yell “We don’t know who this man is necessarily, but boy, can he kick ass – in space!”

More cut-from-the-final-draft (although, in this case, it was reworked and reappeared) from my Time work; this comes from today’s piece, which didn’t really come together the way I wanted it to, sadly. Ah, well.

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“?”

Having one of those busy days, again: re-writing my Time story for tomorrow in addition to posts for SpinOff Online, Robot 6, Newsarama (seven posts for them today; thankfully, they’re short), Comics Alliance and Digital Trends means that I am keeping myself busier than the average bear, which means I am sadly ignoring this blog. More later, if I have the chance, or tomorrow if I don’t, I promise.

(Image from Uncanny X-Men Annual #14, by Chris Claremont, Art Adams and a whole host of inkers – I have no idea which one of the five listed in the credits for this issue actually did this panel – with colors by Brad Vancata.)

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366 Songs 213: Love Interruption

“Love Interruption” is more a sketch than a song; it’s essentially a riff with a slight attempt at a chorus that feels as much like an afterthought as anything or everything else. Despite that, though, this is a great track. The repetition is enough to make it sound complete, especially with the arrangement it’s given with the organ and the wonderfully, almost wistful backing vocals throughout the whole thing (“I want love to…” over again, not coming to a conclusion; I kind of love that); it sounds short and a little lacking, yes, but not necessarily in a bad way. It finishes and you want to listen again, hear more. If only more songs had that going for them.

(That said, if someone wants to write a bridge for this song, I wouldn’t say no.)

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The Gravity of His Position

The news that Jonah Lehrer is resigning from the New Yorker having been revealed to have made up “quotes” from (and about) Bob Dylan in his most recent book Imagine: How Creativity Works (Oh, irony of ironies, that title) is as depressing as it is surprising. This statement from Lehrer on the matter, just depressing:

The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I also owe a sincere apology to Mr. Moynihan [Matt Moynihan, the journalist who uncovered that the quotes were fake]. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed. I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker.

The thing I just don’t understand about this is… there was no way this was never going to be discovered. Even if we didn’t live in a world where the Internet has made it amazingly easy to fact-check things, Lehrer was writing about a musician who fans are obsessive about, so the discovery of “new” quotes was always going to be of interest – and looked into – for/by them. It’s one of those “I don’t understand why he’s done it” things, because he had to have known that he was going to be found out. It’s as if there’s some epic self-sabotage going on here.

I had – back when it seemed as if Lehrer was simply stealing from himself and recycling without telling anyone – a lot of sympathy for him, knowing just what it’s like to have to continually come up with new thoughts over and over again. But this… this is just sad. He’s killed his career with this. People will never take him seriously again.

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Eat Hot Logo, Nort Scum!

I’ve been re-reading a lot of 2000AD recently, and something that’s caught my eye as much as the thrill-power of the individual strips is the design that’s on show. The above logo, for example, isn’t the kind of thing that necessarily works in every possible outlet, but… there’s something really great in a classic 1980s fashion about it, right…?

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“A Cold Manila Fist That Closed Around My Fragile Hopes”

My art school rejection letter arrived as a cold manila fist that closed around my fragile hopes. When I closed my eyes, I saw the little animation from my TV favorite The Prisoner; Patrick McGoohan’s scowling Buddha face inflating to fill the screen before two iron gates closed across it, eternally barring his escape. I imagined the walls of my room extending to the infinite horizon.

From Grant Morrison’s Supergods.

I remember being rejected from Glasgow School of Art, a year before I got accepted to Grays School of Art in Aberdeen; I’m not sure that my mind invoked The Prisoner (Although I had just recently discovered that show, and become a fan), but the sense of frustration and hopelessness in the (melodramatic) passage above definitely seems very familiar to me.

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366 Songs 212: You & Me

For everyone who’s always wished for a blend of 1970s solo John Lennon and early 2000s Super Furry Animals, may I introduce you to the beautiful solo debut of the latter’s Cian Ciaran:

I love that melancholy comedy, the opening “Whatever happened to all the people/That gave a fuck?” is one of those lines that’s both funny and hopelessly sad, especially when matched to that beautiful string line (The sadness isn’t just there for that first line; by the time you get to the chorus, the wonderfully double-tracked vocal of “You and me,” it’s almost swoon-worthy in its lush lostness). The slow, delayed drums, thudding along in the background, are the Lennon touchstone here for me, although the sparseness and emptiness in the arrangement as the song opens definitely helps. By the end, as everything’s built with the guitar, strings and harmony vocals, it’s pretty much turned into a Super Furry Animals track, but that’s nowhere near a bad thing.

My soundtrack for today, even though I’m hoping the day is more upbeat than this song. Just lovely, really.