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