theinferior4+1

The Pope has moved to beatify Cardinal John Newman, the 19th century convert to Catholicism whose writings influenced Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, among others, and thus paved the way for Lord Marchmain's deathbed scene in Brideshead Revisited.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/03/world/AP-EU-Vatican-Newman.html

Beatification, as you all know, is one step closer to sainthood, and is attained by being able to work  miracles (this is posthumously, by virtue of the afflicted praying to you for intercession; I suspect we could skip a few steps if the miracles occurred while someone was alive).  The miracles are vetted by the Vatican and voila!  You have the honorific 'Blessed John Newman.'   Or maybe it's 'Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman.'  

Whatever.  You're practically a saint!  In Newman's case, he cured a Boston man named Jack Sullivan who'd been having back problems.  Maybe we should start lobbying for Madonna  (who named her daughter Lourdes), whose intercession might get some of us to visit the gym more often.

More Patagonia to dress up this post...

Got the Jim Burns cover art for my rewrite of Viator and was going to post it, but when I saved it to my desktop, it turned solarized and purplish...So I guess I'll forego posting it. Suffice it to say, it's very cool.

I was blog-hopping he other day and ran across Mike Brotherton's blog wherein he picks the the ten best scenes in science fiction movies.  

http://www.mikebrotherton.com/?p=1244

Mine are so different than his, I thought I'd post mine and see what y'all's were.  So in no particular order, this purely idosyncratic list, a top 11...

Hal's death scene in 2001
Chestbuster scene from Alien
Ultraviolence scene in A Clockwork Orange
Woody Allen getting high in Sleeper
Opening of Bladerunner
Final Chase Scene in The Road Warrior
Renn Turns into a Bloody Flesh VCR from Videodrome
Jurassic Park--T Rex attacks the two park vehicles with kids and etc.
Dark City--Murdoch witness the Strangers remake the city
Soldier--Todd is dumped on Arcadia, the waste planet
Brazil-- Jonathan Pryce escapes the police and monsters
The first attack of the Monster in The Host

By the way, I'd like to congratulate the Academy for the Best Achievement in Film Marketing for deciding to nominate ten films for Best Picture in 2010. Now even more crappy movies can put Oscar Nominated before their title.

I must say that I never saw this Frazetta cover until a few days ago, and a Google search makes it seem generally less-well-known, despite its awesomeness.




[Click to embiggen.]

Posted by Paul DiFi.

Really, this is as uncanny and scary in its own way as the Big Dog robot. Imagine being pursued by a flock of these.



Posted by Paul DiFi.

I don't suppose there's any reader of this blog who's not familiar with the work of marvelous fantasy writer Jonathan Carroll.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Carroll

But did you know that his Dad, Sidney, was a writer also, most famous for scripting THE HUSTLER?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Carroll

As I often do, I was thumbing through an old zine this week--GOOD HOUSEKEEPING for December 1949--when I ran across a story by Sidney Carroll. The name didn't register until Gordon van Gelder reminded me of the connection.

I scanned the story, and here it is for your reading pleasure. Just keep clicking on the scans until they're readable.








Posted by Paul DiFi.

Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/kjg58a

I'm proud to report that after being solicited to write the introduction to this book, I've done so and had the piece accepted.

Besides the wonderful crafts projects herein, this book has great sidebars on steampunk literature, media, fashions, et al.

Posted by Paul DiFi.

As if times weren't bad enough for reviewers, what with print journals folding and book review sections disappearing before our very eyes, now we have to worry about thin-skinned bestselling authors avenging themselves online.  Alice Hoffman (whom I've never reviewed, which I guess is a good thing) took offense at a pan in last Sunday's Boston Globe, and tweeted the reviewer's home phone number and email address so that her legion of fans could express their disapproval.   Guardian coverage of the spat cites camp classic Theater of Blood, in which Vincent Price's hammy actor kills off his critics in imaginatively gruesome fashion.  Maybe next time Hoffman can just rent the flick and settle in with a bottle of wine and get through her angst vicariously.  Works for me.  As Martin Amis once put, a bad review might ruin my breakfast, but not my dinner.

Guardian article:   ttp://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jun/30/deal-with-bad-review

Globe review:  http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2009/06/28/8216story_sister8217_lacks_spark_of_alice_hoffman8217s_earlier_works/?page=full

This was sort of what I intended to post the other day, but then I flopped down on the couch and found out about Michael Jackson and got caught up.

 I spent much of the past two weeks in Patagonia, most of that in and around the Torres De Paines National Park in the region of Patagonia.  This all came out of the blue, as I was expecting to be working, and should have been working, but ta Chilean businessman called and offered me to pay my air fare and a fee if I would come to Chile and write a piece on the region for a coffee table book.  He had a number of writers lined up, but one had fallen out and I was recommended as a replacement. I couldn't turn him down, though I needed to work on some other projects and it would be basically a whirlwind tour in the midst of winter (the average temperature was around 30 and felt much lower because of the wind).  

 Patagonia has always been a magical name for me, one of those I used to conjure over during my childhood, putting myself in imaginary adventures there, and I had never before visited it—I couldn’t turn the opportunity down. I don't intend to bore everyone with travelogue or get into my feelings upon at last seeing the place—I want to save those for the piece I intend to write--but I will say that in my unqualified opinion Patagonia is the most dramatically beautiful area of the planet I've yet seen.   It's amazing that Hollywood hasn't set a major fantasy or science fiction picture here, especially within the boundaries of the national park. 

Just a dim, dismal Patagonian town like Punta Arenas was good enough for me.  To say the wind blows constantly there is not an exaggeration--being so near the tip of the continent and the exchange of oceans, morning, noon, and night there is always the sound of a stiff wind.  It's a prominent character in people lives, like the sun and the moon.  Sitting in my hotel, looking out across the Straits of Magellan, an unearthly dark blue, almost but not quite a phalocyanine blue...Wow.  I was a happy man. There's a bronze statue of an Indian nearby that if you kiss its toe, it’s said you’ll come back.  You bet I kissed it.

 Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, the world's southernmost town, set along the  Vance-ian named Beagle (referring to Darwin) Canal with the equally Vance-ian Martial Mounts in the background...When I was teenager, growing up in Florida, I used to take these drunken, semi-criminal overnight trips with friends to Key West, about seven hours south of Daytona, and there I'd find the southernmost point in the USA, commemorated with a sign at the end of a pier off Duval Street, I believe, and there we would take the southernmost leak in the States.  Sort of marking a territory I hoped to explore.  Ushuaia, though it didn't present a chance to reprise my Key West experiences, was delightfully bleak and home to the Jail At The End of The World, a place built by convicts that used to house the worst of the worst, plus assorted political prisoners--the prison and the merchandise fabricated within it once comprised the entire industry of the town, but now it serves as a museum and the town makes a good portion of its living off ecotourism, a more banal but equally noxious form of punishment for the region.  

I had little time for night life, but a friend of the guy (Senor Abarca) who brought me down, to Chile took us out in Punta Arenas for drinks. First we went to a hotel to meet the friend, who had his two teenage nieces with him--we had  a drink and then we all went to a strip club.  I found this strange, but the girls seemed at home there and waved at friends who were the same age sitting in other groups.  It was decorous for a strip club, with carpeted floors and curtained windows, but the strippers were pretty scary-looking.  This was also the night when I did not eat sea cucumbers, the grossest-looking food I've ever laid eyes on.  Snot with booger sauce.  I couldn't get past the visual, though people said they were great.

As for the National Park, it's one of the few places I've been that made me wish I carried a camera.  I saw glaciers, penguins, forests, albatrosses...it was fantastic. The scenery reminded me of that artist who won all those Hugos in a row last century....was it Michael something?  Whelan, that’s it.  His landscapes had a similar dramatic appeal.  It was the closest I'll get to spending a week on a planet orbiting Antares or Betelguese.  I'll  probably write more about it once i finish the piece.

 One last word on Michael Jackson :

 “Michael Jackson in Disneyland
don’t have to share it with nobody else
Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
and lead me through the World of Self…”

 “Splendid Isolation” by Warren Zevon

Torres de Paines.  Pretty incredible, no?  Christ, looking at this photo off someones flicker page makes me want to go back right now.

Read my review of Brian Evenson's new story collection, FUGUE STATE, here:

http://tinyurl.com/mflknh

Posted by Paul DiFi.

2009 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of NEUROMANCER. Wow. That quarter-century sure went fast!

Sometime after the 1986 publication of MIRRORSHADES, I created a two-page broadside that I xeroxed at Kinko's and mailed off to a number of pals. It postulated the humorous fates of the MIRRORSHADES contributors in the far-off year of 2011. Well, none of us might be here in 2011, so I'm going to reproduce the original art now. (Each large page is in two separate files here, being too long for my scanner bed.) The text was typed on my Commodore-128 and printed out on a daisy-wheel printer, then cut and pasted with appropriate found art.

In 1999, I revised this idea for an instance of my F&SF humor column. Here is that iteration:

http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/1999/pdf9902.htm

So we have at least four layers of history here: 1986, 1987, 1999 and 2009.

Life is weird and deep.

Click once, twice or even three times on these images for readability.












Posted by Paul DiFi.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.  Rick Bowes, a marvelous writer whose fiction captures NYC's  downtown scene like a WeeGee photo, shares his account of that time here, c/o The Mumpsimus:

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2009/06/rick-bowes-on-stonewall-at-40.html

Earlier this week the NY Times had a feature on police reports from the riots:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/police-records-document-the-stonewall-uprising/?scp=3&sq=stonewall&st=cse

And today Frank Rich dissects the Obama administration's stance on gay rights 40 year on:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28rich.html?scp=2&sq=stonewall&st=cse

I bet you'all don't have a sneaker named after YOU!



[Click to enlarge.]

Posted by Paul DiFi.

Late to the game on this and totally out of synch with my blogmates, but...

I’ve been away for some days and, as always, even after such a brief trip, I’m floored by culture shock—the celebrity thing is in full bloat, what with everyone saying Oh it’s so terrible about Farrah and how it’s tragic about Michael Jackson, he was such a brilliant artist, and there’s this tremendous outpouring of love and mourning that’s based, really, on nothing.  If you say anything contrary to that flow, you risk being called a cynic. 

 What’s the cut-off point where you’re allowed to speak ill of the dead?  I haven’t heard about anyone taking shit for badmouthing Hitler or Idi Amin or Jeffrey Daumer.  So serial killer-cannibal-genocide perpetrator must be it (though I know Adolph has his supporters).  How else explain all the love for the world’s most famous pedophile, likely its most celebrated child molester, and a creator of jingles that, if a DJ played them on the radio, most people I know would switch stations, even some of the people who’re now saying how great he was. 

 Some of it is nostalgia, for sure, everyone remembering their junior high days when Thriller came out and so on.  A lot of it falls under the umbrella of garbage celebrity worship, and I would imagine another chunk is just people digging the sound of their own voice; but quite a bit of it is due, I believe, to the individual human being’s basic indifference to the suffering of others.  I mean people have to be that way—scarcely anyone has room in their hearts and minds for all the tragedy in the world, all the genocides and famines and disasters; and those who practice caring on anything approaching a global level burn out quickly. 

Most people weep for friends and family, but when they shed tears (metaphorical or real) over Michael Jackson, they’re crying for themselves, for the smallness of their hearts, for their incapacity to care enough to do anything salient about Rwanda, Eritrea, Katrina, et al.  They’re making a token gift, a symbolic show of grief in memory of their feelings, and directing it toward giant balloon-like creatures like Michael Jackson.  There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that—it’s human nature.  I just don’t think Jackson is an appropriate surrogate.

 My reaction to Jackson’s death is, hey, put on your party hat, because I don’t ever think it’s bad news when a pedophile bites the dust, especially one whom I believe was a child molester.  I don’t care if he was sad or confused.   Fuck that. The media trots out that bullshit line every time some Holllywood trainwreck dies before his or her time, and people can’t wait to echo it.  I don’t care if his mommy and daddy were mean to him—plenty of people are fucked up by their parents, plenty suffer abuse and grow up cursed with self-hatred and work their way out of it and don’t end up as pathetic deviants and drug addicts surrounded by a coterie of users. 

I don’t put any credence in the idea that our consensual adulation helped doom this beautiful young mutant, at least no more so than it ruins the average run of spoiled, self-involved asshole rock stars.  Jackson stands out for me in that his death trip was the most grotesque and the most reeking-of-corruption of any to which I’ve been witness.  He was a pharaoh-like figure, flaunting his eerie perversity behind a screen of wealth and the trappings of his estate…yet without the bucks, he would have been just another chicken hawk.  He succeeded in avoiding accountability for his sins in life by paying out tens of millions of dollars, but he certainly should be held accountable in death.  Iconic?  Sure, but an icon of dissolution and decay, his life a weird riff on Dorian Gray that carried a taint of putrefaction.  His legacy to pop culture?  He invented the moonwalk and helped to popularize the music video?  Stop it!  I mean, seriously.

I feel about Jackson exactly as I did when he was alive and I’m not inclined to mince words about him now that he’s dead.  He was a pedophile who had the wherewithal to build Neverland, an in-plain-view honey trap he used to screen potential victims.  He was such a hound for publicity he once thrust his infant son Blanket (there’s a name to conjure with) out of a hotel window for the paparazzi to shoot and for his fans to cheer.  He transformed himself into a gargoyle-quality freak through multiple plastic surgeries.  He was a pretty good dancer but so fucking what--I couldn’t have sat through one of his glittery, crotch-grabbing performances because his music sucked ass.  He hurt kids.  If you don’t buy that, wait and see how Blanket turns out.  And if all you care to remember are his “innocent” years and where you were when you first heard “Billie Jean,” might I suggest you make a contribution to NAMBLA in Michael’s name.

It’s amazing to me that out of all the media about Jackson I’ve read and watched, I have yet to hear the word “pedophile.”  I’ve heard a bunch about his “late-life struggles” and all the enablers with which he’d surrounded himself and his (sniff, sniff) awful childhood, but not one “pervert.”  What amazes me even more is the American public’s continuing sympathy for the rich, the majority of whom have absolutely no sympathy for or interest in them.

Putting aside Jackson’s sexual peccadilloes and his fetishistic attraction to plastic surgery, Jackson lived like royalty despite his rumored debt.  When he died he did so in a palatial house to which you and I might gain admittance only by carrying a rake or wearing a maid’s costume, a choice that would not necessarily be gender-driven.  He bought a Ferris wheel and a roller coaster, and if he had wanted to fix himself, he could have bought that as well.  Therapy costs less than a circus.  Ultimately his life and death were the result of choices he made, choices that he had the resources and opportunity to change, yet did not. 

To hell with him. 

 

A beautiful portfolio of cyanotypes by photographer Josh Lehrer, portraits of homeless transgendered teenagers:

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/showcase-12/?scp=1&sq=cyanotype&st=cse

I was fascinated because I'm writing about the production of this kind of monotype (one-of-a-kind photographs) in Available Dark.  Not cyanotypes, though, a 19th c. form which has a very long processing time and produces an eerie blue effect.

Gotta love punk polka.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polkacide



Posted by Paul DiFi.

I have to say that Michael Jackson the musician and entertainer always left me pretty much unmoved, though the tragic circumstances of his life and death do not escape me. But I've always thought that his real mark on our culture will prove to be his embrace of radical means to physically reflect the mutations and permutations of his self. I don't for a minute believe that, like David Bowie, Jackson was the master of his changing looks and styles; whatever was going on seemed driven more by aspects of his unconscious than by the conscious striving toward some final, predetermined goal.  But whether he was in control of his changes or helplessly swept along by whatever compelled them is irrelevant.  The example is what counts.  If his pursuit of his own furtive self exposed him to ridicule and to physical harm, and perhaps resulted in his own death, what trailblazing pioneer has not risked, and even embraced, the same?  I feel sure that the day will come when everyone thoughtlessly enjoys what Jackson sought for himself:  the ability to change one's body as easily and often as one's clothes.  Because of that, Jackson always reminded me of Bron Helstrom, the confused, sad, ridiculous, unpleasant, but somehow also inspiring hero of Delany's Trouble on Triton. 

Goodbye, Gloved One!

Klik hier om het video filmpje te bekijken

Posted by Paul DiFi.

They're dropping like flies: for anyone who's been at the bottom of a coal mine without a cellphone for the last six hours,  Michael Jackson is dead at 50, of an apparent heart attack.  I was never a Jackson fan — when it comes to 1980s pop icons, I 'm with the Purple One  — but it's still a sad thing.  Everything about his life seemed sad and, in later years, pathetic, and I always hoped maybe he'd pull off one last hit, or at least do something that wouldn't end up on the cover of the Enquirer.  When I worked at NASM in the 1980s, he got a private tour one night, after the museum was closed.  And there he was, wearing his costume and one white glove.  He never seemed to take a day off fom being Michael Jackson, and that seemed sadder than anything.

I just learned that Sky Saxon of the Seeds died this morning -- he'd been hospitalized earlier this week.  My brother is promoting a reunion tour of several legendary 1960s psychedelic bands, and Sky was among them as a solo act.  A sad thing.  Condolences to all his family and many friends in Austin.

http://blogs.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/news/la-garage-rock-icon-sky-sunlig/

This song sounds even better with full orchestration on Crenshaw's new CD.

Amazon listing: http://tinyurl.com/klreyj



Posted by Paul DiFi.