High on Fire w/ Goatwhore @ Slim's

Went for another round of metal with my main damie Mike G! This time we went down to Slim's to see High on Fire. And who opened? Goatwhore. GOAT. WHORE. I really just wish I could have been there when they had the band name discussion:

Dude who made up Goatwhore: Yo, dudes. Thanks for all coming down--

Other Bandmember: Dude, you called a band meeting, course we came down.

Dude who made up Goatwhore: Yeah, well, thanks. I just want to go ahead and thank you all again. I know how difficult it can be to juggle jobs, life, kids, and still be totally committed to this righteous project that we have embarked upon, but have yet to name. 

[Nods and affirmations around the room]

Dude who made up Goatwhore: Which brings me to the next point of order. Now, before you all respond, I just want you to take a minute and let this name work its way through your mind. Let it trickle down. Just think about it, is all I'm saying. Goat... whore. Goatwhore. One word.

[Chins are rubbed. Long hair is flicked back over shoulders. Ponderous looks and a few 'hmms' bounce around the room.]

Some other guy (probably the bassist): Well, like, I don't dislike the name or nothing, but I mean, we're probably going to have to drop most of the free jazz improvisational shit we were doing.

Some other, other guy: Yeah, and all that adult contemporary stuff we were working on, that's just out the window.

Dude who made up Goatwhore: Listen, guys, this is an opportunity for us to focus and hone our sound. I mean: Goatwhore. The name says it all. Who seconds the motion?

And well you can see where it went from there, cause right after that meeting the lead singer went out and bought these bad-ass bracers:

Goatwhore: Bracers, bro!

Also, I love how their Wikipedia entry describes them as a "blackened" death-metal band. Like they was just left in the pan longer than normal metal, what with some black-pepper and spices. Which is apt, cause these dudes are spicy!

Dark Goatwhore

They also had an amp that said "God Has Twelve Dicks", which I didn't know was common knowledge until that show:

You heard it right, God has twelve dicks.

After that, High on Fire graced the stage. They rocked, of course, but the greatest lesson I took away from the High on Fire show was that that this guy showed me that no one should ever feel shy about going around shirtless:

Embarrassment is for mortals. I earned this physique! 

High on Fire @ Slim's

High on Fire: Wailin'!

High on Fire bassplayer is PISSED!

...and evil.

And finally, guitarist Matt Pike showed his Shoggoth nature while executing an epic solo:

A Shoggoth, mid-solo.

Sounds: Liars - The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack

Last song/video I post for 2012. And it's a goodie. A slow builder, for sure, but well worth it. Check out Liars' The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack:

Sounds: Twin Shadow - Castles In The Snow

I like this song.


Artist: Twin Shadow.

Sounds: The Horrors - Sea Within a Sea

I like this song. Especially when the synth comes in. Dude's accent sounds local band fake.

I need a stagecoach - Hipster Thanksgiving

This... is hilarious. And I've been to this Hipster Thanksgiving. Spot. On.



And now I'm off to delete my Facebook account.

Zoochosis' New Series

Man, this looks slick. This is the trailer/teaser for Patrick Scott's new Zoochosis series coming out on Machinima Prime. Drool:

Mist Giant, False Rival - The Interview

It's the end of 2012 and the entire world, so we of Mist Giant thought we'd round out the year by releasing our third album, False Rival. It's up and free over at Bandcamp. Well, it's name-your-own-price, so if you just can't bring yourself to take it for free you can alleviate your conscience with PayPal or a major credit card.

To give a little taste of what's in store for listeners I went ahead and did a little interview with the album. Check it:

Mark Pantoja: Tell me a little about yourself.

False Rival: First, thanks for having me. Often people only talk to band members about albums and their music, completely ignoring us, the actual works of art, so, just, yeah, thanks for having me here.

MP: No problem.

FR: And a personal thanks, too, you know, for taking part in my creation.

MP: It was my pleasure.

FR: Right on. Okay, so yeah, I'm a eight track album, more of a EP really, but I think there's plenty of meat in me for people to really get into. I was recorded and mixed of at Studio SQ this summer and mastered by Bruce Leighton at Datastream. (Thanks guys, for helping to make me the album I am today!)

MP: Tell us about the recording process. Did you come into focus before recording, as a concept, or are you more a document of an organic studio process?

FR: Shit man, getting all wordy on me. Hell, I don't know, man, I'm just an album. You tell me. 

MP: Well, most of the material we had written and performed live for the last year, part of a third or fourth wave of live songs we put together. The first lead track, track two, Catch & Release, was written early summer, so it's actually the newest song on the album and kinda represents a new direction of open/organic song writing. That song more or less coalesced during the studio process.

FR: So, didn't have a concept for this album? For me?

MP: No, nothing as formal as that, other than our releases have tended to be the strongest songs we have at the time of recording, so they're, more or less, a snapshot of our musical maturity at that moment. So, what I'm saying is that you are so 2012. 

FR: Cool.

MP: Yeah. Okay, well, thanks for coming down.

FR: Thanks for having me.

Waylines Magazine: Going (Semi-)Pro

Listen, we're all getting pretty saturated with the online tipjar that is Kickstarter. But that doesn't mean that there aren't good projects out there nor does it mean that you shouldn't check out some of the better ones.

One of the things I took away from my Kickstarter campaign was a sense of community. Not only was Kickstarter a project in a global marketplace (I had support from all over the US, Singapore, Canada, and Australia), where family members and random strangers could throw me their support because, but it was also an opportunity for me and project campaigners to give back to our backers and the greater community. I released my project as a copyleft Creative Commons for anyone to download, distribute, and remix/mess-with (as is this entire blog). And so I tend to be drawn to projects that try to instill a sense of community and openess in their final product. Which is why I'm a backer of Waylines Magazine's Kickstarter Campaign.

Waylines Magazine is a new magazine from a good friend of mine and fellow Clarion West 2011 and editor over at Ideomancer David Rees-Thomas and some dude I've never met but seems like a very talented filmmaker and graphic designer (he did the Waylines Layout) Darryl Knickrehm. Besides being an online magazine, they're going to pay to put out videos and short films as well. And the best part of their Kickstarter is that the more they raise the more they give back. Many Kickstarter campaigns just pocket anything extra they make, which is fine if that's how you run your campaign and get people to support. But the great thing about Waylines is that for each tiered goal they make they are going to reward authors, filmmakers, and Waylines contributors. They've already reached the goal of going from token payment to semi-pro and now with 52 hours left at the time of this post, they are trying to raise another $500 to go pro, paying all contributors pro rates! 

Hey, even if you don't want to support at least swing by their campaign or website to check what they're all about. Here's their campaign video:

Sounds: Zach Hill - Memo to the Man

This song is quirky, but cool. Zach Hill (Legs on Earth, Hella, Death Grips). Listen:

In Norway Kids Are Freezing

Interesting take on international aid from the prospective of those who feel exploited by images of starving children. From their website:

Imagine if every person in Africa saw the “Africa for Norway”-video, and this was the only information they ever got about Norway. What would they think about Norway?

So they made a parody video:



Best comment on YouTube from fellaciousderp:

the radiators will just be stolen and fuel their viking tribal warfare.  They'll have a population explosion and then they'll just need more radiators. By interfering, you're just going to increase the misery. Let them freeze, that's their way of life.

You Are Warrior Dreams. Wait, That Doesn't Make Any Sense

This is just kinda AWESOME.

"A Darker Cycle" in Nihilist Sci Fi, Issue 1

Hey! Sold my Week 5 Clarion West short story to the lovely folk(s?) over at Nihilist Sci Fi in their first issue, for five dollars used American currency!

I'm just happy it's found a home, cause this has been one of my most problematic stories. (When I saw the market, Nihilist Sci Fi, come up, I immediately thought of this story. This story is nihilist as shit!) Two professional novelists have torn it asunder. And yet, it's still one of my favorites. It's from an old conversation I had with a friend, oh, say, 7 years ago. Would a peaceful society make war on itself in order to test whether or not peace is superior to war?

My background is in anthropology, the Franz De Waal branch, which recognizes peacemaking and reconciliation are more common than aggression, and that cooperative peaceful societies (species) tend to out-produce war-like ones (mind you, this doesn't mean the war-like ones won't destroy the peaceful ones, thus in the end out-producing the otherwise more productive society). But what if we did have total war? Always? What if that was our laudable goal? What if we were Klingons? Personally, I don't think Klingons would make it into space. And yes, we are really having a Star Trek conversation right now. 

Civilization is, at least in part, built on cooperation, with slavery being forced 'cooperation'. We might be able to slave ourselves into space, but could we war ourselves into space? If you had paradise and perhaps even a means to rebuild your civilization if it turns out that war leads to ultimate destruction (because you're in a posthuman post-scarcity god-like civilization) might you be seduced into war just to make sure peace was the right choice all along? Add to that a bit of historical amnesia and a dash of boredom, and voila!

Originally, this story was of two posthumans in a trench, reciting poems to each other, who the capture an enemy they don't really know what to do with. Halfway through I remembered just how bad I am at poetry.

I workshopped this with Charles Stross. Charlie is a bit of an idol of mine, I'm not ashamed to say. I loved Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise and was blown away by his short story collection Wireless. He ripped my story a new one. Everything he said was absolutely on point. What remained after his public flogging I swept up and pieced together. Later, I workshopped this with another group and got accused of being a closet torturer. That also wasn't the most pleasant experience. "A Darker Cycle" has an opening that makes people bounce. But if you write provocative things you best be prepared for what you provoke.

Neurosis w/ Voivod @ The Fox

Metal!

Went with Mike G. to see Neurosis rock the Fox. They were good. And there was a lot of black clothing present. Surprising, right? Taking pics was hard, though. Live shows aren't usually well lit, but this was ridiculous. It was like taking pics inside a movie theater, which is why they're so blurry/low quality. The light show was a dark as their souls, man! Still, it was a good show: 

Neurosis - Creepy!

Neurosis - Scary!

Actually, the film show was pretty good. Lot's of explosions and cow skulls. What more could you want?

Oh, and Voivod opened. 

Voivod!

Voivod! 

Their best song was a cover of Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine".

Metal Forever! (This guy had his hand up the entire show.)

Birds from Tree of Life

You seen the Tree of Life? It was good. Very good. Though the last twenty minutes kinda blew. Sean Penn walks through the set of what looks like an 80's music video. Doesn't ruin the film, but sorta drops the ball, because before that point, galaxies, fatherhood, dinosaurs, water effects, the birth of the universe (man that sequence was beautiful/amazing), it was pretty awesome. One thing I really liked is that for all the grandeur the movie is really made up of  small, quiet (sometimes loud), intimate moments. Like this sequence of birds flying.

The Tree of Life - Birds Sequence from Hugo Hollmann 

My favorite moment is when they're mostly obscured behind the building, and yet, I can still feel them moving, flowing. If this is special effects then it's brilliant. If it's real and just a moment captured on film, it's magnificent. 

Jack's Record Cellar

Ever seen that double door little shop right at the corner of Page and Scott?

The one that says "Records" over the entrance, but never seems to be open?

Open!

Well, my main damie Mike G. has been living around the corner from this place for over a year now and never seen it open. Not until this last past Saturday. Jack's Record Cellar. It's actually not in a cellar, so I guess you could say they are effing liars. Originally located over on Haight Street, they've been in operation since 1951. Some dude named Jack started it, but his buddy, a longshoreman, bought him out for a buck. Both of those guys are gone and this place is currently run by Wade, a generally friendly dude who doesn't feel the need to post hours or abide by any kind of schedule. ("Generally open on Saturdays for a few hours between two and seven," he told me.)

Records. Many, many, many records. Too many? Don't be stupid.

They got a metric shit-ton of records and memorabilia, including a holographic poodle mounted above the register area that stares at you wherever you go. They had some Edison Disc/Diamond Discs, but I really don't know rare those are, so perhaps that's not worth mentioning. 

The aisles are exactly one record wide.

From their stock it looks like they stopped buying records in the late 70's, but they have a knockout selection of local San Francisco based Jazz music. Something of a specialty, it appeared.

Mikey G. browsing through the Sleazy Listening section.

Anyhow, this place has loads of character and if you've even been keen to see what's up inside then free up some time between two and seven on a Saturday. They might be open. 

Sounds: Gayngs - The Gaudy Side of Town

I'm not one to usually to go for music that is so derivative, that's so just riffing on a single musical time/era. If I wanted to hear music from that time/era, why wouldn't I just go and listen to it direct? That being said, these guys just fucking kill it. Gayngs.

When All Is Said And Done, It Makes Good Toast

Hrm. Perhaps this sheds some light on why Florida is so fucked up. Satanic Toast.



Satan Lives!

Thanks to Gen for bringing this into my life.

Sounds: British Sea Power - A Trip Out

Rock n' Roll!

Sounds: Tristeza - Golden Hill

What's to say? One of the local post-rock bands I listened to while in high-school and college, along with Tarentel and From Monument to Masses, that left a lasting impression on me and my music. (What happened to the Bay Area post-rock scene?) They toured hard for years, incessantly, up and down the coast and around the world. I never got over you guys!

Trizteza.

But The Lemonade Means Sex, Mostly

Picked up from GhettoGenius.com

Sounds: Royksopp - So Easy

I actually love this song solely for the ending. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the rest of the song, but it trods along pretty harmlessly, a pretty forgettable if groovy track. Until the end exchange:

"Four-hundred."

"Four-hundred?"

"Yeah."

"I'm coming over."

"Do that."

It's like it own little mini-story.

What You Should Do This Saturday

I don't know what you're doing this Saturday, October 13th, but there is some shit going down:

First, you should come watch me read as part of Lit Crawl. Owl Magazine and Lit Crawl: MUSIC+BEATS. It's all writers who are musicians reading from their works. It'll be short, I promise. I'm ready for less than 8 minutes. And I'm reading with Blag Dahlia/Ripper/Jesus of the Dwarves.

It's at some place call Creativity Explored which I've never heard of, but is apparently up the street from 16th and Mission:

For the line up and more info check here.

For the FB event, if that's how you roll, check here.

The location is pretty convenient because right after that you can pop over a few blocks and see my band, Al Lover & The Haters, play the Moon Block Party show at the Brick & Mortar.

Set it going to be killer. Come and check it out!

And, as if that wasn't enough, if you can't make either one of those this Saturday, I also did sound design and collage for the talented Jessica Noodle/Rabbit for her immersive/interactive theater performance piece over at the Isle of the Noises.

I did some Metaphonic recordings. It's pretty dope. Come out and see her performance and listen to my sound design! There will be corsets involved! Corsets! As in more than one! Tickets here.

HOLY SHIT!!! I know, that's a lot of stuff. You best show your face at one of these events. There's no reason you can't make it out to one of these. You can even be home before 9 in the p and still have seen me.

Book Report: Near+Far by Cat Rambo (Part II): Far

Part I is here.

Part II is here:

Whoa. This collection, Far, brings the guns just like Near did. This time around, though, we are in the future. And if anything, things seem to have gotten worse, even if they are brighter and better lit by to the overhead halogen lights of your cubicle-home.

Cat Rambo's exploration of advertising, products, commercialism, and consumerism are only exacerbated in stories like "Surrogates", "Seeking Nothing", "Amid the Words of War", and "Zeppelin Follies", the last of which Rambo claims was her attempt at slapstick comedy. It's not that it wasn't funny, it's just that standing back, looking at the world of commercialism she created, where writers write by managing software that spits out endless variations of the same story for every conceivable market niche and everyone wears malleable Bodies that keep the actual world at arms length, well, it's pretty frightening from my standpoint because it's a dystopia where the depicted society isn't all that unhappy, like in Brave New World. Often cited as the model dystopia, Brave New World is really a social satire or even utopian satire (Huxley called it a "negative utopia": the drugged out disconnected world is, by and large, "happy"). It is implied in "Surrogates" and "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain" that the rich are happy because they've built a world of consumerism based on picking the fruits of lower caste's labors, which implies that the rest of the world could indeed be a dystopia. How is this different from our current world? Blood diamonds and oil shales anyone? In Rambo's "Zeppelin Follies" everyone seems pretty content with their hyperconsumerism, which to me is just an extrapolation of where we are headed. Both "Surrogates" and "Zeppelin Follies" reminded me of David Mitchell's Nea So Corpocracy in the "An Orison of Sonmi~451" chapter of Cloud Atlas, a fantastic book.

If the last collection touched from time to time on the themes of relationships and intimacy, then this collection   is the inverse. We're still talking about relationships, but Far is about the inability to find connections and how far we will go to connect. I mean, the protag of "Angry Rose's Lament", a drug addict trying to find some kind of connection to replace his drug craving, contemplates letting an intelligent wasp eat his brain so he can join an immortal group-mind. Yeah, that's what it's about.

After that we have "Seeking Nothing" which is a fucking HAUNTING tale about a young man who is desperate to connect with anyone, absolutely anyone. He's a social outcast managing clones working on a distant planet, who cannot seem to connect with the few non-clone coworkers or his past. It is a frightening tale of utter loneliness. This was by far one of my favorite stories in this collection. The protag's loneliness still lingers in my mind.

"A Querulous Flute of Bone" was also about seeking out a relationship: romantic love. I could see the plot coming a mile away, which was fine, because the story was really an exercise in beautiful world-building. What I loved so much from the first story in the Near collection, "Mermaids Singing Each to Each", and about the near-future exploration of commercialism of "RealFur", "Vocobox(TM)", and "Therapy Buddha", was the effortless world-building Cat dropped into those stories. And here we see even more of that. "A Querulous Flute of Bone" is like world-building idea after another, though never overwhelming. It left me hungry for more. In the afternotes, Cat says that this story is part of a shared world project started by Philip Athans, so perhaps there's more.

"Surrogates" seemed a bit like the Far version of "Not Waving, but Drowning", 'cept in a far future society. The protag has an Insanity Chip in her head, which allows her to edit the world she senses. It's a touch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but from a great angle. And her descriptions of the edits the protag sees are immersive.

I'd say that, for me, hands down, the best story in both collections was "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain". Most stories about falling in love turn me off immediately. It's been done so much. But this story was intimate, beautiful, tragic, and told as smoothly as the character's porcelain skin. I'm pretty shocked it was original to this collection. Original stories tend to be stinkers or just perfectly fine stories, never having gone through the vetting processes of editor crits (I'm sure Hydra House had the story edited, but I mean in the marketplace). Whatever the case, this is my favorite story of the collection. 

There are afternotes for the stories in both collections, which is one of my favorite parts to read. It's like the context of the context.

On its own, Far is a strong collection of stories. Together in one book, both collections, Near+Far, represent a selection of Cat Rambo's work over the last five years and show that she is a writer able to capture the human perspective on life and relationships in the most imaginative environments.

Sounds: Tarentel - For Carl Sagan

This song is a fucking dream. A long dream, but a gorgeous one. I grew up watching these guys around the Bay Area and this place isn't the same without them. They've gone on to do some pretty awesome stuff (Root Strata, Grouper), but now I just want them to come back. Come back, Tarentel!

Hyperlapse

Though I think the term is a bit off, the technique is not. Hyperlapse basically is moving the camera while taking hi-definition stills at regular intervals, what we call normals call "timelapse". Not sure where the hyper- comes in, as not all of these shots done by video artist Ben Wiggins involve movement and not all of them are of large intervals either. In some hours go by in two seconds (the sunsets), while in others only scores of seconds go by in seconds (people walking on the street; might actually be minutes, but to me it looks like ~30 seconds). None of this detracts from the fact that this piece is hyper-fucking-good. And the music by DeVotchKa doesn't hurt.

Watch:

Very Little Stars from Timelapse, Inc. on Vimeo.

Originally spotted over at the Atlantic.

Book Report: Near+Far, Cat Rambo (Part I)

I don't actually remember the first time I heard or read about Cat Rambo or one of her stories. I do remember the first time I saw her name and I was like: "Cat Rambo? Who the hell goes by 'Cat Rambo'?" Well, Cat does. 

Cat Rambo's name has floated across books and anthologies and zines I've read for the last five years or so. Editor of Fantasy Magazine, fiction in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Hyperpulp, Asimov's, and a shitload of anthologies. Her name is synonymous with speculative short fiction over the past decade and seems to have exploded in the last couple of years. She had nineteen short stories come out in 2011. NINETEEN! 

I got to meet her up at Clarion West in 2011. She lectured on online presence and industry stuffs, giving her time in and out of the classroom. She's a great supporter and resource, one of the many writers up in Seattle who make moving up there a temptation. 

A few months back she asked me to review her upcoming short story collection Near+Far (2012, Hydra House), which is what you're reading now. There're so many stories in this collection I'm going to break this review into two parts, the Near and Far collections, which follows the book's layout. Both collections have their own table of contents and restart the page numbering. I read my version as a PDF, but apparently the printed copy is bound in a style called tête-bêche, like how the old Ace Doubles used to do it. But you know, done classy. I think it not only works, but it's just the sort of thing print publishers need to do if they want people to go out and buy the print copies of their books. It worked on me and I've already read the book. The covers were done by Sean Counley and the interior artwork was done by Mark Tripp.

Cat also did a line of jewelry based on the book's artwork:

Near+Far jewelry

Nancy Kress sporting snazzy Near+Far jewelry 

This book is great opportunity to examine Rambo's work in detail. It's a retrospective with stories that go back to 2007, so you can see what she's been doing over the years. As I said before, I was familiar with her and her fiction, but I'd never read her stories back to back and wasn't able to see just what she was doing with her work. 

She starts off the Near collection with a strong story, "The Mermaids Singing, Each to Each". It's a beautiful, lyrical story of a formerly female protagonist who's gone and had its gender removed after years of sexual abuse by its now deceased uncle. But that's all back story. The real story is of it and two others navigating waters filled with man-eating mermaids (done with a nice bit of worldbuilding) while the trio prowl the seas looking for garbage, the modern booty. But the real-real story is whether or not the protag can forgive the semi-autonomous boat it inherited from its uncle which it holds partially responsible for its abuse. "Mermaids" encapsulates what Cat Rambo is really writing about: relationships.

Her stories are quiet meditations on relationships. Now, "quiet" in a review is usually code for boring or nothing happens. This is not the case. There's murderous mermaids, superheroes, asphyxiations, dark shamans, quasi-animal burnings. There's plenty of action and things ahappenin'. No, what I mean by quiet is that many of her stories are about, at their core, relationships, usually between two people, they just don't say so up front. 

This is not an easy thing to do, to have these subtle but effective explorations of relationships (brother-sister, victim-perpetrator, husband-wife, rival friends, boyfriend-girlfriend) all while the world is ending, cybernetic cats are prowling, supervillians are attacking, and immortality is at your fingertips in some crazy fruit. Usually there's some new element that's introduced which causes the relationships to stress and/or react. In many of her stories the element is a new-fangled product with spec-like qualities, such as with "Vocobox(TM)" (a voicebox for cats) and "RealFur" (living clothing) and "Therapy Buddha" (a talking buddhist psychology doll; actually the product isn't very spec-ish, it's the worldbuidling in this one.). The new element doesn't cause discord in the relationships, it just pulls the lid back, exposing them. For example, "Close Your Eyes" is a haunting tale of a sister who cares for her dying brother. She drives him around, supports him financially, lives with him. She's put her entire life on hold while he withers away. And for all her sacrifice she is rewarded with bitter resentment and passive-aggressive sarcasm on page one, a relationship that I think is all too real and common. The new element is the brother's interest in shamanism, which he explores in classes at the hospital he goes to for treatments of his undisclosed illness, but the discord was there years before the story started.

The emphasis on relationships lends the Near collection an intimacy and immediacy that feels contemporaneous. For the most part, these are people who are living modern lives right around the corner from us. Besides the cybernetic superheroes. 

One of the things that I wasn't so thrilled about at first were the stories' endings. That's because many of them end on natural notes, meaning that while plots are not resolved the character's arcs were. Such is the case with "Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars", where the story just ends. What about the bad guys? Will the protag survive? You can't just end a story right there like that!?!? But she did. And once I reread it I found that it ended there because the protag's story had concluded. This is a strong collection because even if there are pieces that don't work for you (wasn't a big fan of "10 New Metaphors for Cyberspace", a borderline poetry piece that went over my head) there're many others that will. It's a collection filled with a variety of stories that are able to get at and portray the human experience in wondrous environments.

(That was Part I of the review. Part II is here.)

Sounds: Glasser - Apply

Glasser, the stage name of Cameron Mesirow, is a solo experimental project. And it's pretty effing gorgeous. Listen:

Fucked Up w/ Ceremony @ Slim's, 9/5/2012

Mike G. reviews Fucked Up with Ceremony @ Slim's on 9/5/2012 over at the Bay Bridged. Check out the photos I took:

Ceremony

Ceremony

Ceremony. This little dude thinks he's totally badass. The fact that he rocked Slim's on 9/5 doesn't  help

Ceremony getting the crowd to sing some

Ceremony

Ceremony

This dude was going around during and between sets offering people some of his tired-ass nachos

Lead singer of Fucked Up, Damian, singing from the crowd

"Houses" on Miette's Bedtime Stories Podcast

Whoa! Patrick Scott, talented filmmaker/animal wrestler/early morning skateboarder, lends his sexy, sultry voice for my 2011 short story "Houses" published over at Lightspeed Magazine (Issue 18, November 2011)  and now in audio form at Miette's Bedtime Stories. Yum! Take a listen.

And thanks to Miette for hosting my story and Patrick for recording/performing! You guys ROCK!

Refused and Sleigh Bells @ the Fox

My main damie, Mike G., writes about tunes over at the Bay Bridged and I've been accompanying him as his pics-taker. I get into some awesome shows and get to take some cool photographs. Anyhow, here's the latest one we went to, Refused with Sleigh Bells at the Fox, August 31, 2012:

Sleigh Bells opened. They were Sleigh Bell-ish. Minimalistic overkill. But that's they're sound.

Sleigh Bell Spookiness!

Sleigh Bells.

Badass Banner!

They talked a lot. About Pussy Riot. And staying curious.

  

Crowd level.

Refused from the crowd.

Refused. They killed it.

Man the Fox is a gorgeous theater. Check out Mike's review.

Flight of the Conchords: "Gotta stop blowing all the money on couches"

I mean, this is just just pure genius. Flight of the Conchords' charity song.



"We all just want to be bubbles."

Sounds: Local Natives - Wide Eyes

Local Natives Web Site

What I Did Last Sunday

A few weeks back I was introduced by a friend of mine (Genevieve Brennan) to a gorgeous camping spot in the Marin Headlands right across (right across) the Golden Gate Bridge: Kirby Cove.

En route to Kirby Cove

She organized and cooked up a outdoors dinner, on the beach, under redwoods and cypress trees, with raccoons. She served vegetable tarts, lentils, fresh grilled asparagus, some kind of quinoa deal. It was delicious and magical. Take a look at the spread:

Like out of a magazine, right?

You can read more about it from her post here.

Anyhow, on the way to the cove I came across an old abandoned battery, them forts they built to take pot shots at ships coming into the San Francisco bay. It's between Battery Spencer and Battery Kirby (nee Gravelly Beach Battery). Various links online say this was Battery Wagner, but I couldn't confirm that with the GGNRA/Marin Headlands maps, and it appears from one source that Battery Wagner is closer to Battery Wagner road deep in the Headlands (whoduh thunk?). At any rate, this cool old battery has been repurposed as an outdoor mural space by a bunch of graffiti artists.

View of Battery Wagner (?) from above.

This Guy Lives Behind My House

Technically, I think it's a gal. But whatever the case, this badass spider has found a prime piece of real estate right above the pit of decay that is my compost bin. Many flies frequent this eatery.

Damn

I think it's some kind of orb-weaver spider (Orbiculariae, baby!), but I'm not certain. If anyone knows for sure, please come and school me.

It's been out back for about a month now. I discovered it by walking into its huge web during the day. Ever since then I've been always careful to check things out when I'm out there, make sure the unthinkable doesn't happen: walking into its web and the sucker hitching a ride. A few weeks back that's exactly what happened. Mike G. was there. I walked outside at night and screamed. Mike thought there was a little girl in trouble out back. I'd walked right into the web (she rebuilds it periodically, always in a different spot) and my little-huge friend ended up crawling across my face. Luckily no one died. And we got the spider to safety, back up near its tattered web.

Oh my!

Sounds: Crocodiles - Mirrors

Crocodiles' Blog.

If You Want To Know About The Future, Ask A Fifth Grader

Work, shop, research, play, talk, chat, watch. Yeah, those sounds like obvious/safe guesses of what the internet would be in ten years from the island of 1995, at least looking back from here. But do you even remember what the internet was like back then? Or rather, do you remember what society was like in regards to the internet in 1995? 56K Dial-Up anyone? IRC Chats? Bulletin Board Systems? Pictures took minutes to download. And videos? Forget it, just pixelated messes on a any consumer machine. Speaking of which: desktops. And AOL (oh jeez!). Oh, and the elite video gaming system, which was unveiled in November of 95 but didn't even go on sale until 96, was the Nintendo Ultra 64, which became the Nintendo 64. Anyhow, check out these fifth-graders in this time-capsule PSA from 1995 (recorded on VHS, I'm sure):

Perhaps 5th graders are in a perfect spot developmentally, still filled with imagination but with sophisticated analytical skills they can extrapolate future trends, and haven't yet been fenced in by hormones, high school, and social distractions, and still young enough they haven't become jaded by years of watching the Man crush hopes and dreams. Or maybe they got William Gibson to write their copy.

And cat food cupcakes? Are those for cats or for people? Oh right, it's 2012:

(Slate's got some more coverage and PSAs)

360 Degree View From the Red Planet!

This interactive panorama, stitched together by Andrew Bordov over at 360cities.net (original post here) from photographs beamed back from NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover. It's pretty awesome. Check it:

 
(Source: The Verge)

We Put A Car On Mars!

You know, it just catches my breath whenever I think about how we just LANDED A FRIKKIN CAR ON MARS!!! (Well, it's a car-sized rover.) Just look at the size of that thing:

Notice the full-sized grown ass dude/tte in the backgroud? That thing is huge!

It's feats like these that sustain my optimism for humanity's future (it's things like the mass pollution and denial of responsibility that's crushed the lives of people in Ecuador or Bhopal or you know the Holocaust and the Holodomor that sour that optimism. But, we've managed not to kill ourselves so far. Fingers crossed!) Still, come on, pretty effing cool! Here is a just a partial list of things they did to land that $2.5 billion roving precision science lab and state-of-the-art robot: launch it into space; develop heat-shield to enter Martian atmosphere; deploy parachute that can take 65K lbs of force to slow it down from 1000s of MPH to 200 MPH; use a ROCKET PACK to slow it down further; use a "sky-crane" to set it down on the ground; and because of time delay to Mars (14 minutes) all this had to be done automatically. It landed itself. Or rather they (all those systems) landed it on their own.

All this to answer some fundamental questions about our existence in the universe, namely one of the mission goals is to determine if life is or ever was present on Mars. I am of the camp that hopes they find life or its footprint. Kim Stanley Robinson is of the camp that hopes they don't (JK: just something he said in regards to his Mars trilogy at a reading one time).

Anywho, here's the trailer for the Movie that just happened on Mars:

Gulp!

Verdadera Realidad: Pizza Hutt es un 20% más grosera en español

Pizza El Hutt de Spaceballs is 20% grosser in Español.

Or 20% more gross.

Watch Closely

Holy shit:

[Reddit]

Mist Giant on a Video Soundtrack

Okay, so the Youtube Channel is called American Hipster, which is kinda nauseating (I do not own any skinny jeans... but yes I do ride a fixie. And have a tattoo by Grime. And have a beard. I digress), but hey, we're in the Soundtrack. Check out the video and the sweet Mist Giant tunes off the Glass Walls release at 4:25 seconds. And stop judging me.

Sounds: M83 - Outro, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

Whoa:


M83 - Outro from dudikaz on Vimeo.

Video: Peyote Spirit Quest, Al Lover & The Haters

Some limey bastard made a video for my band, Al Lover & The Haters, and it effin' rules!

I guess we were vibing on the right wavelength, cause a lot of the imagery, especially the early spaghetti western images, were exactly what we were going for. Or at least what I was going for. Take a gander:

Short Story Sale: "The End" at Tales of the Zombie War

Hey, hey, hey! I sold my Clarion West Week 2 short story, "The End", to Tales of the Zombie War! And it's free! Take a read and leave a comment here, especially if you hated it. Let's get all that shit out in the open. 

This was my Second Week story last year up at Clarion West. I workshopped this with my cohort and Nancy Kress, Queen of Hard Sci-Fi. Thanks, Nancy!

On Her Iron Throne

And thanks to my Clarion West cohort, as well as my first readers/editors: Mike G., Kristina Gelardi, Dan Billo and Patrick Scott, for all the feedback and support. And finally, to Caleb Mhorkh (pronounced 'Moore') for helping me gestate this idea. (Zombie Gestation. Sounds like a death metal album.) We were at the Buckshot watching Dead Snow and throwing ideas back and forth about using Zombies as a viable form of renewable/sustainable/green energy, and one thing led to another thing that's best left unsaid. And this story was all that remained.

Thanks, all!

Behold: Blade Runner Sketchbook

The 1982 Blade Runner Sketchbook, edited by David Scroggy, which records the production design and drawings from Syd Mead and Ridley Scott. Need I say more? Wipe your drool up before you leave.

Open publication - Free publishing - More blade runner

Book Report: Blindsight, by Peter Watts

4 of 5 stars

This was a hard book to review. There's a significant amount of buzz about this book (Charlie Stross, Elizabeth Bear, Jeremy Lassen, Starlog, Interzone, ∞), and I would say, by and large, it's mostly deserved. Mostly.

Blindsight is the story of a small four man crew (with a few back up popsicles in cryosleep) who go out to meet up with an alien ship that's entering our solar system. It's a scientific exploration of philosophy dressed up as a First Contact story.

The term I heard the most in reviews is "tour de force". And it was. Blindsight was a tour de force of everything Peter Watts. Or, at least, it certainly felt like it (especially in reading the end notes where the personality and "voice" of the author carried across from the fiction). It's a flashy book with slick prose and ideas flying around like fists in a bar brawl (I hate it when reviewers get figurative). And it was a problematic read.