Zombie Lapdance

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when it comes to trash cinema, i take the opinion of my co-worker johnny motard quite seriously. which is why when his first pick "shallow ground" was checked out, and the store didn’t have "the delicate art of the rifle", i went to john’s second pick, the only sword and sorcery epic to come from italy’s horror auteur (goreteur perhaps?) lucio fulci.

i can’t say "conquest" had a recognizable plot, other than a series of apparently unrelated scenes containing either toplessness or dismemberment, and sometimes both. but it had something to do with a young man wandering through a land of stone-age grunts. the young man is different because he comes from an advanced culture that has invented the bow and arrow (although apparently they only manufactured one bow and about four arrows) as well as leather hotpants. while wandering he meets a han-solo character with eighties hair and the devasting weapon "femurs on a string". then they are attacked by unconvincing wookie-suited henchmen of a witch who never wears anything more than a gold mask and a spike-encrusted bikini bottom. the gold mask is because apparently she has a bad case of "butter face", but she overcomes her disability nevertheless by enthusiastically devouring human brains straight out of the skull without actually removing her mask, which the astute viewer will have noticed has no mouth-hole.

at the end the heroes manage to overcome evil by looking deep into their hearts where they keep the unconvincing glowing arrow effects.

oh, yeah, and the whole thing had both the clumsy italian movie sound design and half-assed dubbing, as well as ear-wrenching eighties synthesizer music.

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i finished "the best short stories of j.g. ballard" some time ago. i have to return it to the library soon, so i had better finish the blog analysis (blogalysis?) which i started earlier.

***********spoiler warning*****************

after getting through the experimental novelty stories at the back of the book, i started again at the beginning.

"concentration city", one of ballard’s first stories from 1957, forced me to re-adjust my map of speculative genre with ballard re-cast as the panamanian junction. it encapsulated elements which i had begun to identify with the far more modern NEW WEIRD(tm):

1.) improbably ornate public works.
2.) the city as farce.
3.) myopic urban perspective which cannot comprehend the basic facts of its own existence.

it reminded me of iain bank’s the bridge. in both stories the hero takes a train ride to discover the boundaries of his world, only to find himself, shockingly, back at the start of his journey.

ballard’s "the drowned giant" captures the atmosphere of dispassionate and surreal angst which will later be the calling card of m.john harrison and mieville. the giant rotting on the beach, a spectacle for the masses until it is quietly appropriated for the rendering plants, feels much like harrison’s "settling the world" where flatbed trucks tow the severed limbs of a giant out of the sea.

for this collection i see two separate themes; apparently in opposition to each other. there are the stories where the pressures of society squeeze the male protagonists bit by bit — hedging them into a corner. in "the overloaded man" it is the epistimological stimuli of an artifical landscape, in "the subliminal man" it is the pressures of consumerism, and in "billenium" it is the very space one needs to live.

and opposed to that are the apocalyptic landscapes of "the terminal beach", "deep end", and "the cage of sand". the imagery is beachlike, but not terribly gidget-ish. there the characters are set free from the goals and guidelines of the civilized world, resulting in aimless existential brooding.

for the austin readers, the international exhibition of neosymbolism has their opening night reception this thursday at "I.C.A. 201 E. 2nd Street", wherever the hell that is.

my former co-worker stano grezdo has several paintings in the exhibit, although he will not personally be attending. i have to say that stano is hands down the best slovakian rasputin-look-alike painter i know.

as someone who grew up behind the iron-curtain, there tends to be some fascist iconography in his work. this next painting is called "absolut control."

the following painting, titled "the buildings of the department of propaganda" was included in space squid #2, although it did not get the full-page that it deserved.

at one of stano’s receptions i attended he had a theremin player performing in front of a projection of WWII flying fortress documentary footage. so this event should be fun as well.

i regret i didn’t get a picture of the baltimore/washington international airport police as they rode around on their dorky toys with their canadian mountie hats and super-serious expressions.

why don’t they just use those supermarket cripple-scooters?

segways are the hula-hoop of the turn-of-the-millenium.

now, hula-hooping while segwaying, now that would be cool.

and that’s when i started to panic.

last may i attended WisCon in madison, mainly as an excuse to visit my family. and while i was skipping out on the last day of panels, my family and i went out into the rolling hills of southern wisconsin and we just happened to pass through sauk city, the home of august derleth.

for those of you not familiar with derleth, he’s the guy who transformed h.p.lovecraft from a little-known pulp writer into (in the words of rick klaw) "the most over-rated writer of all time."

sauk city has three things going for it: it’s the home of culver’s frozen custard and butterburgers, it has a dam, and it has august derleth. leystra’s restaurant is a block from the bridge over the river. one side of the restaurant is kinda diner-ish (i had a very dense and delicious butterscotch pie, and the sundaes look very good as well), and in a shadowy nook, decorated in the wisconsin "supper-club" style is augie’s room.

once i got the waitress to turn on the lights, i could browse the numerous derleth factoids and photos on the walls.

augie went way out of his way to research his horror stories.

remember when writers had poise?

here, the august derleth society celebrates the hwy12 bridge re-dedicated as the "august derleth" bridge. it’s pretty much the only way to get between madison and baraboo, unless you count the merrimac ferry.

i take back everything i said about the wikipedia being a relevant cultural phenomenon.

why would anyone spend time compiling a list of fictional US vice-presidents?

although it looks fake, the documentary surrounding this ukranian child raised by dogs is too long not to be true.

it’s actually much like the movie ‘easy wheels’, a sam raimi/bruce campbell produced movie about the leader of an all-girl biker gang who was raised by wolves until evil male hunters killed her adopted lupine parents, inspiring her to create a super-race of women by stealing girl babies and leaving them in the wilderness with wolves until such time as they can return and wreak revenge on all male-kind.

essentially they’re the same story.

as a writer, what i think makes me most uncomfortable is the realization that people might actually be reading what i write. when i was writing features for the madison ‘isthmus’ it always surprised me to meet people who had read my work; despite the 80,000 issue run, the front cover graphic advertising my articles, and the readily available free stack of ‘isthmuses’ in every restaurant and cafe in town.

as a sci-fi short fiction writer that sort of thing never happens. i mean, how many people in america have actually read andromeda spaceways inflight magazine, let alone remember any particular story?

which is why i’ve been disconcerted to discover that people i don’t know have been looking at the website i wrote for Saint Ingvar’s Center for Norwegian Healing Mysteries. you’ve heard of chinese traditional medicine? norwegian traditional medicine is a hell of a lot less wussy.

a friend told me that she caught her roommate looking at the saint ingvar site, so i went and checked the stats, something i haven’t really done in over a year. apparently it’s pulling down 60 visits a week, and it’s cross-linked with a bunch of other domains i haven’t had dealings with. i spent twenty minutes trying to find how i was getting referrals from cellardoorpublishing.com.

but still, st-ingvar.com after about three years in operation is only getting about a tenth the traffic of this blog. so the point of this entry is, i want to thank everyone for not leaving any comments. that would probably just upset me.

ann richards is dead. and i can only assume that it has something to do with what a great day i had yesterday. because this sort of thing always balances out.

first off, i had a couple of chorizo and egg breakfast tacos at austin’s tamale house. the tacos cost a mere 85cents each (and conspicuously there is no tip jar at this establishment) and they had the tacos out to me before i even got my change. it was a cool morning and i ate them out on the porch.

then i holed up at a coffeeshop and spent seven straight hours writing. sure, there was a bit of emailing and online chess in there, but all in all i did over 4000 words. if only i could do that every day. if only my body could stand that much coffee.

then i rounded off the evening at the nueva onda movie nights, this week featuring a series of short films under the headline of ‘ancient alien android action’.

for those of you who are not hip to nueva onda movie nights, it’s run (in part at least) by my space squid co-conspirator david chang. what you get is patio seating at a mexican restaurant, where you can eat nachos and drink shiner, and watch short films. for the most part the short films are of fairly high caliber. of late dave’s been acquiring a lot of shorts from the vancouver film school, which tend to have all the loving attention one would expect of desperate grad students trying to make a name for themselves.

this week was particularly amazing. 8 shorts and not a single dog.

south african filmmaker neill blomkamp had three shorts in the program and i can’t stop thinking about. in ‘tempbot’, a temporary office worker/robot meets corporate malaise and wonderwoman linda carter. in tetra vaal we see apparently the same robot from tempbot (and this is some jaw-dropping special effects, CGI seemlessly integrated into jittery documentary footage) who is now a gun-toting police enforcer among the slums of south africa.

but most amazing, is ‘live from joburg’ (and you absolutely must stream it from here or maybe here). after describing it to my co-worker johnny motard he summarized it as "’alien nation’ in south africa’". it had all the imagery and rhetoric which has become a familiar part of the public perception of south africa: poverty, militarized police brutality, the collapse of civic infrastructure, and the disgruntled reluctance to provide any public resources to the under-class, including the very space they take up. only they’re talking about aliens. aliens with battle suits.

the only thing that tarnished the day (other than the death of ann richards, the governor of my heart) was all the boogers stuck to the walls of the nueva onda restroom.