Jonathan Clements's Blog, page 33

Radio Days

In answer to a special request from Anna over at Chocolate Keyboard, a reprint of an article from PiQ magazine, originally published in July 2008, and subsequently collected in the anthology Schoolgirl Milky Crisis.

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The girl who met me in reception had a badge that said Emma. She didn't actually tell me who she was, but sulkily informed me that she was here to take me upstairs. She didn't show an iota of enthusiasm until the elevator reached the designated floor, at which point she...

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

It has come to my attention* that someone on You Tube has uploaded the BBC documentary Godzilla: King of the Monsters (1998) in four parts. This is an excellent piece of work from producer Nick Freand Jones — not that you'd know that, because the You Tube version cavalierly disregards the ending credits. So you don't get to see my name there as the staff translator, either, despite my four manic days spent with 24 tapes of interview footage, a laptop and a well-thumbed Nelson kanji...

Award Nomination?

Schoolgirl Milky Crisis is on the longlist for the Bookseller magazine's annual Diagram Prize for the daftest book title. It faces heavy competition from Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich and The Origin of Faeces, among others, so who knows if it will make it to the shortlist on 19th February. Still, nice to be noticed…

Award Nomination!

Schoolgirl Milky Crisis is on the longlist for the Bookseller magazine's annual Diagram Prize for the daftest book title. It faces heavy competition from Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich and The Origin of Faeces, among others, so who knows if it will make it to the shortlist on 19th February. Still, nice to be noticed…

Pure of Heart

Sachiko (Ryoko Shinohara) has a problem child. Her son Hikaru (Ryusei Saito) never seems to pay attention. Whereas his kindergarten classmates can't stop talking, he sits in silence. He develops strange obsessions with drawers and closets, and delights in creating a mess. If she tries to stop him, he throws a tantrum, and when she scolds him, he stares idly into the distance, not even acknowledging her presence. Sachiko simply doesn't know where to turn…

NTV's Wednesday-night drama In the...

Fighting the Phonies 1919-2010

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddamn stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life."

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex makes recurring references to the work of legendary American...

Cameron's Artifice

I have been having a good giggle this week at the redesigned election posters at www.mydavidcameron.com. for readers outside the UK, this is a site that lampoons the opposition election campaign by inviting the public to creatively vandalise one of their posters. The example illustrated, by one Ian Yates, is particularly nice, although I am baffled by the UK public's supposed indignation about one element of the campaign.

There are plenty of things to argue about in British politics — real...

Death March on Wulai

For reasons not worth going into right now, I once had to climb a mountain with a group of Taiwanese special forces. I was assured that I would be in perfectly safe hands, as I was accompanied by some of the toughest men in the world, whose final examination supposedly comprised being dumped naked into the Taipei sewers and forced to subsist for three days on whatever came to hand. They were the ultimate survivalists, able to stay alive with hardly anything. It was only later I realised that...

The Treacherous Fox

In 2007, I did a long interview with the Dutch magazine BOEK, about my book on the Tang dynasty Empress Wu, which was published in the Netherlands soon afterwards.

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BOEK magazine: In the book you tell that the idea to write a book about a woman, instead of pirates or kings, came from Sutton Publishing. How did you come up with the idea to write it about Wu?

Jonathan Clements: Actually my editor said that the subject of Wu kept coming up with educational establishments who wanted to...

Hissy Diva Fit

On 14th June 2002, I reported at Universal in London for a promotional photoshoot. I was one of three presenters on a new TV show to be called Saiko Exciting. The channel was called Sci Fi, which everyone in SF fandom thought was a daft decision. If only they knew what they'd change it to! We should have just called it Schoolgirl Milky Crisis.

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Two make-up artists are crouched over Sarah and Emily like surgeons, slapping in Wound Filler, Botox and whatever else it is that make-up artists...