Warren Ellis's Blog, page 82
January 15, 2012
ARGUABLY
Before the poor sod developed cancer, I had nursed a concern that new generations might only know Christopher Hitchens from the likes of his turns on The Daily Show, where he clearly arrived drunk off his arse and would shamble on to the set with a coffee mug brimming with vodka before proceeding to rant and inveigh in a manner befitting less a titan of letters than the hated shitfaced uncle who pins you to a corner at funeral parties with his long and awful narratives about Shakespeare, black people and piles.
There's some of that in here too, to be honest.
There are people who argue forensically, in pursuit of some kind of broader point that might approach Truth, and then there are the people who rail at an audience at their own book launches, glass of red in hand, loudly concluding "…and you all suck." As caught on documentary film, and this book, Hitchens was mostly the latter.
The book's well named. Hitchens would pick an argument with furniture. He'd also use the item as the launching point for a discourse on… well, whatever was up his arse that day, with little regard for its relevance to furniture. Much of this book, then, is a collection of "reviews" framed as lectures on the subject of the day. The man's passion for America, and his immersion in its history, is quite fascinating, even if there was no editor brave enough to iron out the collection of prominent writer's tics he'd acquired over the years. And while I'm hardly one to complain about a writer cowing his editors, the situation seems sometimes to reflect the book quite darkly: he seemed always up for a fight, but only so long as he was assured of winning.
Except for the last fight.
An enjoyable, frustrating, enjoyably frustrating book, a last artful flurry of blows from a great fighter.
January 14, 2012
Bookmarks for 2012-01-14
"On Wednesday, Jan. 18, astronomers, physicists and scientists from related fields will convene in Tucson, Ariz. from across the world to discuss an endeavor that only a few years ago would have been regarded as nothing less than outrageous."
(tags:none)
Project to pour water into volcano to make power
(tags:geo )
India orders crackdown on 'human safaris' in the Andaman Islands | World news | The Observer
"In the footage an off-camera police officer orders partly naked Jarawa women to dance for tourists in return for food."
(tags:crime )
January 13, 2012
Bookmarks for 2012-01-13
"Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease. Although reports call this latest form a "new entity", researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem."
(tags:med )
January 12, 2012
My Week So Far
This is journalist Laurie Penny, who was the other guest of the inaugural Outer Church community broadcast at London Fields Radio. We were interviewed by Joseph Stannard, recent Guest Informant and vicar of the Outer Church parish, on Tuesday afternoon.
By "interviewed," I mean that they gave Laurie and I a steady stream of coffee and we basically talked Joe's ear off for hours. I believe the recording will be made available on London Fields' Radio's Mixcloud page towards the end of the month. So you too can hear Laurie explain how I ruined her life.
In other news, I received the following shot in email from Michael Avon Oeming the other day.
It's very probably got something to do with this and this and this.
And my final issue of SECRET AVENGERS came out. I have no future new* comics work planned at present. Which is weird.
* just finishing off a couple of things.
GUEST INFORMANT: Ian Hodgson's Six Records Of 2011
As I did last year, I asked Ian Hodgson of the mighty Moon Wiring Club to write about his favourite "Most-played and/or Puzzling Records" of the year. Here's his top 6 for 2011:
01 Araabmuzik ~ Electronic Dream
This is an arcade-game hot-house of a record. Brash, hard, colourful, wrong in many ways but exhilarating and joyful. To start off predictably, Electronic Dream takes you… on a journey. So you wearily pack a Thermos and slouch. But wait! After skilfully plotting through a familiar terrain of neck-snapping MPC beats, you find yourself veering off course into the quagmire of Trance at break-beat speed. 'Follow me' say the ghosts of Jam & Spoon ~ you're mere moments away from plummeting down the ravine of Cheese, happily shrugging. Puzzlingly, at the last moment, you're expertly kept on course. Quite often favourite musical moments are made when predictability is taken away, and while it now seems inevitable that Electronic Dream had to exist, the mixture of Euphoric Trance and MPC beats created an excitement missing from the perimeters of safe genres. By several furlongs my most-listened to record of 2011.
02 2NE1 ~ Can't Nobody
If you've always had a love for electronic pop-music, 2011 was the year that repeatedly delivered joyful, daft, sonically inventive, sometimes appalling, often deranged catchy tunes week after week. That a large chunk of the vocal content sloshed around an endless vortex of 'shots', 'the club', and 'partying' put me in mind of being trapped in a pleasure space-liner from a late 1970s sci-fi programme (something like the casino-world of Freedom City from Blake's 7). There was something old-futuristic about this hedonistic maelstrom trapped in a loop of enforced enjoyment, and the sheer amount of it, where stylishly robotic singers became interchangeable, all had my ears in ghastly/delightful rapture/rupture. My pick of the bunch was from the K-pop/hip-hop quartet 2NE1, where the ultra-styled Can't Nobody provided a double-chorus of double-pleasure. If you were in 1979, imagining what pop music of 2011 would sound like, then this would, I fancy, hit the nail on the head and deliver. It's always a party.
03 Laurel Halo ~ Hour Logic
Sometimes a record arrives bringing with it a satchel-full of 'Lost' posters. Hallo? Has anyone seen Beaumont Hannant? Reload remixed by The Black Dog ~ where are you? My Yellow Wise Rug ~ re-rolled back into the attic? Listening to Hour Logic brings back the thought of many wonderfully distinctive electronic records, but it isn't a pastiche, more like a clean Knife in a world reasonably obsessed with filleting an ever-decreasing stockpile of 1980s pop. It'll be interesting to see where Laurel Halo goes next, as this is too good a record not to invest in further.
04 James Ferraro ~ Far Side Virtual
Listening to this record, always in the background is the sound of soft laughter. Whether it's coming from an old PC in the attic, or leaking from a cracked laser-disc of Freejack is unclear, but if you've ever found yourself wanting to hear what the Lawnmower Man's 'hold' music sounds like ~ now's your chance. More than anything else this record reminded me of exploration computer games, such as the Aquanaut's Holiday, not just as music, but it captures the very motion of gameplay, with the constant chiming-in of gentle pseudo-exotic piano invoking menu-select options or inventory screens, while the plastic-orchestral synth-washes indicate you've failed to photograph a giant squid. It also captured the mood of the Brian Eno records that nobody talks about, such as the deeply superb The Drop. Listening to Far Side Virtual on clear vinyl is a throughly enjoyable confusing amusing experience. Now excuse me while I check my inbox.
05 Woebot ~ Chunks
This is a very odd chicken-in-a-basket record that I consistently failed to get my head around all year, and wonderfully so. It has a weird mood of despondent Madlib/Dilla, with a forlorn grasping of breakbeats and grunting chiseled from a stockpile of 1970s mouldy rock records. It's probably the most accurately named record of last year, and fills the mind with an image of musical pineapple/dog-food chunks, slopped out of a tin and sequencing into each other with a DIY MPC flex. It's also worth noting that Woebot has recently released a tasty ebook on the subject of lost-rock. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006TV1HKQ
06 Charli XCX ~ Nuclear Seasons
With post-80s quirk-murky-vocals and dark melodics now 10-a-penny, Nuclear Seasons took a little while to stand out a mile, but once it clicked it soon became an obsessional looping, mainly as it's actually a pop song, with an emotive chorus, distinctive vocals, memorable melody, and completely killer Oo-Oo-Whop-Ahh! hook. It could easily sneak onto CD2 of Now 81 without anyone batting an over-loaded eyelash. Oo-Oo-Whop-Ahh! I'm I looking forward to a full-length Charli XCX album in 2012? Oo-Oo-Whop-Ahh!
There were many other splendid musical moments during 2011, from Funkystepz' John Wayne to Julianna Barwick, and It would be amiss not to mention splendid turns from perennial favourites Jon Brooks, Pye Corner Audio, Tri Angle records, & Blackest Ever Black. And the Autechre EPs 1991-2002 box-set was most certainly the most enjoyable artifact of the year.
Making predictions of 2012 in 2012, isn't a wonderfully advanced skill, but it'll be interesting to see where the influence of 80/90s Industrial & Goth goes to, as something like the 1994 Laibach Satanic Techno offshoot Peter Paracelsus still has untapped potential, and it would be also lovely for someone to re-evaluate ISDN-era FSOL. I'm additionally poised in anticipation for five forthcoming records from: Grimes (now signed to 4AD because 'Goth is sick') Volume Three of Pye Corner Audio's Black Mills tapes , Symmetry's Themes For an Imaginary Film, Black Rain ~ Now I'm Just A Number: Soundtracks 1994-1995, and the hopefully triumphant return of Dead Can Dance…
The new Moon Wiring Club longplayer, CLUTCH IT LIKE A GONK, is out now.
January 11, 2012
How William Gibson Writes A Book
I already knew this – he told me, a few years back – but it still baffles and fascinates me. From a long and interesting interview with The Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER
How do you begin a novel?
GIBSON
I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
INTERVIEWER
You won't have planned beyond that one sentence?
GIBSON
No. I don't begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It's like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn't a violin. That's what I do when I'm writing a novel, except somehow I'm simultaneously generating the wood as I'm carving it.
E. M. Forster's idea has always stuck with me—that a writer who's fully in control of the characters hasn't even started to do the work. I've never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I'm working optimally I'm in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds up as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I don't trust, as a reader, smell of homework.
Partly, it fascinates because it's alien to how I've worked for the last fifteen or twenty years. In comics, we're working in serial form and very rarely have the luxury of finishing the entire manuscript before it begins publication. So one has to have a structure before the writing begins, because we can't go back and tweak something in chapter 1 due to having had some story-changing bright idea in chapter 10, because chapter 1 probably saw print seven months ago and you're still wanting the thing to hang together as a coherent whole in a collection. Which is a terrible thing, really, but endemic to the commercial form. Even FREAKANGELS, which I began with no real long-term plan at all, had a structure roughed out for the first 144 pages or so. But even the bunch of notes and lists I had for FREAKANGELS at the start turns out to be more than Bill has when he sits down to write a novel. When he began SPOOK COUNTRY, he had nothing more than a single interesting image in his head.
It's a horrifying, intimidating way to work, and I want to try it one day.
FAQ 11jan12
The FAQchive is here.
MoriMori asks: whatever happened to CASTLEVANIA: DRACULA'S CURSE?
This was an animated film project that I wrote the screenplay for. I believe, but am not certain, that the funding partner dropped out of the project, and that was pretty much that.
Mike DuBose asks: do you still consider yourself a comics writer first? Are you now mostly a novelist? Or any kind of writer depending on your mood/the offers?
I've always thought of myself as "just a writer." I was doing work in other media all the way through my comics career.
Chris Ford asks: Will you do anything else with the Freak Angels story, or something new within that universe?
I consider FREAKANGELS to be as finished as it's going to be. I mean, never say never, but right now I see no point or motive in going back to that world.
You can email queries to warrenellis@gmail.com and I'll get to them when possible.
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January 10, 2012
Gabbing Away With Laurie Penny Here
Nearly done. Utter chaos. Great fun.
Londonbound
Doing an Internet radio thing with a couple of friends in the smoke today. On the train, rolling in…
January 9, 2012
The Dead Kindle And What I Learned About Amazon Customer Service
If you own a Kindle, you will be aware that the screensaver image isn't supposed to look like this.
This is how I found my Kindle 3 (or, as we're supposed to call it these days, Kindle Keyboard), late last night. A frozen mass of e-ink visual glitch. It's actually kind of interesting-looking. Unless you want to read a book. And I was looking forward to a long last attack on Iain Sinclair's GHOST MILK. Flicking the power slider did nothing. Holding the power slider for five seconds did nothing. Holding it for twenty did nothing. A full minute. You get the idea. I put the thing on charge, just in case, and came back to it this morning. It was, as you see, quite buggered, and utterly unresponsive. Dead. An ex-Kindle.
What you do, at this point, is go to Amazon (or, in my case, Amazon.co.uk) and go through their help structure. And do all the things again. And then press the button that says Contact Amazon.
At this point, I did not have high hopes, and assumed I'd be buying a new Kindle Keyboard at full price. The device had been out of warranty for well over a year. I pressed the button, and gave them permission to call me to (eventually, hours or days after I'd pressed said happy button) discuss what I assumed would be another hundred-odd quid out of my pocket.
I was surprised at the instant callback. Less surprised at the customer services person who had to ensure I wasn't an idiot by making me do All The Things again, and then had me describe what you see above. And then she transferred me to another department. Where someone else had me do All The Things again again.
And then said, "Okay, well, you're out of warranty, so we'll send you a new one tomorrow and charge you [a fraction of the price] for it."
I made her repeat the price again, because I swore I'd misheard it. I hadn't. The new Kindle is dispatched, being tracked, and will arrive in the morning. The whole process took less than five minutes from pressing the button on amazon.co.uk.
Isn't it strange, to be so shocked by actual efficient, friendly and delightful customer service? To have a global electronics company say, "well, hell, we're sorry about this, how about we sort this out quickly and cheaply for you instead of humping you right in the eyesockets and stealing your wallet?"
In other news:
* commencing the short revision on GUN MACHINE this week.
* receiving interesting emails from Mike Avon Oeming – looks like our schedules are syncing again.
* in the distance, tongues of fire emerge from the siege engines of the remote Whedon compound. Also, a weak coughing sound.
* and Templesmith took this, which presumably means he's not yet dead. Unless it means he's about to be summoned into the realms of the Outer Gods:
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