Ben Peek's Blog, page 24

Snapshot 2012

Here is my Snapshot interview, as done by Kathryn Linge ( kathrynlinge )

Ben Peek is a Sydney-based writer. He has published short stories, poems, a chapbook, and essays. His novels include Black Sheep, a dystopian novel published by Prime Books, and an autobiography, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, published by Wheatland Press. His first short story collection, Dead Americans, is forthcoming from ChiZine Publications. His blog is http://benpeek.livejournal.com and he tweets at https://twitter.com/#!/nosubstance.

1. Congratulations on your 2012 Ditmar nomination for ‘Below’, alongside its companion novella ‘Above’, by Stephanie Campisi. You’ve famously (notoriously?) been critical of awards in the past. Do you derive any satisfaction from the nomination, and does the double nomination reflect how ‘Above/Below’ has been received since publication? Perhaps, most importantly, what happens if you win… ??

Aw, now you and I both know I won't win.

That there is Paul Haines' last nomination on that ballot and, if at the very least for the memory and his contribution to the scene through his work and personality, he should win. If people want to pay their respects professionally to the man, then they should. He was a fine person, but in this context, he was also a fine author, who had grown so much and become so unique over the last handful of years. We should be proud and recognise this and I am sure we will. But, in general, awards...

Man, I always get in trouble with awards. Don't shit on peoples shiny pieces, I guess. In general, I don't have a problem with nominations. At a very base level it means people liked my story and I'd rather have people like my stuff than hate it. Do I think awards are still flawed? Sure. But I guess as I've gotten older I've seen that all awards are flawed, not just the spec fic ones. The Booker had a thing about one of the judges saying books should be 'readable'. The pulitizer awarded no prize this year. Me, all I see is the politics and personalities and lines in the spec fic awards, but these days, I suppose I've mellowed some. I can see how much it means to people--how important it can be to some, how much it rewards them. It's not my thing still, but there's more important things in the world, and if people want to be nice to me in particular, I'd rather have that than the shit I've gotten tossed at me over the years. That's gotten a bit old, that.

As for Above/Below, I really don't know if it does reflect the reception it got. It got a decent reception, but I don't think a lot of people have given it the chance that they should--my feel is everyone has been more interested in what YA book is currently popular than looking around for anything that is a bit different, or plays with a bit of form. It can feel like you're constantly pushing against a wall of pseudo teenage expectations these days when you've got something new in speculative fiction, and this is double when you're coming out of an independent press.

But the book was sweet and Alisa, the publisher, ought to be given credit for that. She found the secret of Amanda Rainey and her covers made the book an object of cool. And Alisa got behind the idea, which is a neat little idea, the split novella, two story thing--and the people who read it, they dug it, and I thank them for nominating both.

2. Your collection, ‘Dead Americans’, forthcoming from ChiZine Publications in 2013, will include stories from both your ‘Dead Americans’, and your ‘Red Sun’ story cycles. These two series are probably your most recognised works, yet are quite different. Do you see the collection as defining your career to-date, or is themed in another way? How is it shaping up?

It's really just a way of pulling together the work so far, I think. I mean, it's been seventeen years since I began...

3. You wrote a thoughtful post recently about the nature of commercial art (http://benpeek.livejournal.com/867333.html), and the balance between artistic desire and mass appeal. Is this shaping what you’re currently working on, and at what point do you give up and write the next ‘Twilight’?

When I get tired of being poor.

Even, y'know, moreso.

But yeah, it is shaping what I'm working on now. For a while it was nice to be told how commericially unviable I was, how difficult I was, how unflinching and uncompromising. You can kind of get off on that shit, if you got the right frame of mind for it, and I do. People even called me a genius, which is flattering, if a bit silly. But after the market crash that became the GFC, those kind of statements usually meant the end of a publishing opportunity for me, and things dried up pretty quick with the same words. One agent even called me a genius. At the time, she was telling me she couldn't represent me anymore, mind you.

Beneath the Red Sun is probably the most infamous work of that GFC peroid for me. It's the novel I wrote on the prompting of an editor from Tor, which never got read. Then it was waiting on a contract from Angry Robot after a verbal agreement on wanting it before Harper Collins dropped them. It cost me two agents, one of my own doing, the other not. And... it was kind of hard, that time. I won't lie. It's the kind of time that can break you in this business and it came close. My friends and the people who weren't my friends both got deals in this time, got agents, had success, and when you're down and out, that can kind of be hard. It's harder still when you're just eeking by to pay your rent. It takes a lot to be able to front your friends and be happy for them without feeling like you've been done dirty by the world, and it took time. I had to work at that. It's human nature to resent someone their success when you're doing bad, but it's not the kind of human nature I like or value, so I worked hard to get over it and kept a low profile while doing so.

But still, I don't write not to be read. I certainly don't write to be poor and unpublished and so obscure that my girlfriend is the only person whose read my latest work. I write because I love to write, and because it's how I want to live, and when the opportunities leave you, you have to step back and ask yourself about the nature of art and commerical viability. Which is what I did, and that challenge, of finding work that rewards both you as an artist, and you as someone who needs to pay his rent, is I think the big conflict and struggle for me. I can't even honestly say I do it well right now, since I still struggle to pay my rent, and will likely do so for a while until I finish this book and sell it.

And if it doesn't sell, I hear you ask?

There's another book after that, and another still. There's always ideas. There's always art.

Sadly, there's always rent as well.

4. What Australian works have you loved recently?

I read Haines' novella 'Wives' recently, shortly before he died, and that I loved. It was the dark, satirical heat of his body of work, and I recommend it entirely to anyone who hasn't read it.

5. Two years on from Aussiecon 4, what do you think have been the biggest changes to the Australian SpecFic scene?

I didn't even go to that--I have no idea what kind of drama or gossip or bad sex that was video tapped at the time and held for blackmail later.

Don't share with me the last, though.

I have senior porn.

Don't make me use it again.

But, if I had to say the biggest change, it's the usual changes: new people, new technology, new ideas, that sort of thing. It's easier now, I imagine, to record someone's drunken shame than it was two years ago, and in the speculative fiction scene, I bet that has become important.

Snapshot 2012

These every-few-years Snapshots are developing their own grim kind of gravitas in the vein of Michael Apted’s ‘The Up Series’. All the hope and aspirations showcased then savaged by the passage of time. A few years on and suddenly one of us is gone. Look around, folks – who do you reckon will be next? Checking my own last 2010 Snapshot, I note that almost nothing I was talking about back then came true. How many of this year’s hard-worked projects will be disintegrated by forces beyond anybody’s control?

The above quote is from Cat Sparks, who is commenting in Paul Haines' 2012 Snapshot.

The Snapshot was something I began, seven years ago, without any care of interest in continuing it. It was just an idea, something that made me laugh, and so I interviewed forty-three people in a week. But ideas are cheap, you know? You can have a hundred ideas in a day and they all might be completely awesome, but unless you do something with them, they don't really amount to much. All the hard work of the Snapshot in subsequent years has been done by others, by Alisa and Kathryn, Tansy and Alex, and all of those who have contributed for a year here and there and then moved on.

You can start reading them here.

Cat is right, incidentally: there is something grim and compelling--and even moreso--as time goes by. Read this year's, then read the years before, and see how things have changed, because change is part of life, it is.

The Fictional Life of Cabramatta

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Cabramatta, one of Sydney's suburbs more favoured by local media. You can, according to them, find a lot there, from gangs, drugs, illegal immigrants, prostitution, and so on and so forth. It's a border town, an edge of the larger city uncontrolled.

It probably doesn't surprise you to learn that it's nothing like that.

Link.

Happy Tuesday

It happened: the lurking sickness of yesterday arrived, and both the girl and I are muttering and wandering around the house, diseased. No doubt, it's terrible. No doubt, I will be able to bottle it and sell it to my friends and enemies.

Until then, I am working slowly, a thousand words of rewriting and editing until I reach the halfway mark of the book.

Here's a bit of what I did, because I have nothing else to share today.

There were rotting pews and, to the left, a broken dais.

He could make out only the edges of other items, promises hinted in the dark, shapes that teased the imagination.

Pushing himself forward, Zaifyr dropped to the ground, the momentum to carry him to his knees. His hands pressed deep into cold, slippery mud.
There was glass beneath his feet and he tried to avoid it, but did not succeed. Within two steps, his left foot had two shallow cuts. Ignoring the wounds, he stared ahead, at the dark that, with the faint light of the haunt no longer being blocked by his body, revealing more to him that it had previously done.

“You are not welcome.”

From the dark: guttural, barely understandable.

“You are not welcome.”

He approached the voice, the mud sliding between his toes, the edges of glass threatening to cut him again. He passed the outline of a rotting pew. Before him, a figure began to take shape. He saw a bestial head that could have once belonged to any canine creature, but which was defined by the length of a wolf's nose and the dull, bared teeth of the same animal. It was made from steel, however, a suit of armour cast for a figure much larger than human.

“You are not—”

Zaifyr's hand touch the cold metal mid sentence and the helmet toppled, landing to his left with a clatter. The suit followed, sprawling across the ground. Whoever—whatever—had owned the ancient armour was gone, dead. Perhaps. Perhaps it had fled, leaving once it realised that Ger had no power over it, that the binds that once held it in place as a guardian were broken, that after servitude for millions of years, it was free.

Happy Tuesday and all of that.

The Wolf Knife

Laurel Nakadate's second film, The Wolf Knife, is the examination of two teenage girls and their sexuality, caught between that of an adult, and that of a child.

A video artist and photographer, Nakadate's The Wolf Knife is a film that falls under mumblecore. Shot cheaply on video camera, and featuring to unknown actresses, it has that cheap, DIY ethic that a lot of mumblecore does, and it is both the success and failure of the film. Success because the two actresses, Chrissy (Christina Kolozsvary) and June (Julie Potratz) embody the awakening and confused sexuality that is the centre of the film, and failure because the editing, camera work, and just general style of the film leave a lot to be desired. To be honest, the kindest thing that you could say about it was that it was amateuristic. It's a shame, especially when given that a look around Nakadate's work outside film are interesting and often quite beautiful, in a dirty, voyeuristic fashion.

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As a film, however, it's simply too long, going at least twenty minutes longer than it needs. I do understand why it was done, to provide a sense of closure to Chrissy and June's relationship, but it wasn't necessary in my mind--the film worked on its naturalism, and to provide such a sense of closure, of tying up loose ends, went against the piece to me. The acting, outside the two young girls, is uniformly awful, and the dialogue was just as bad. Silence, such an important thing in the film, was even moreso because it allowed you to escape the weakness of the script, or the improvisation--but unfortunately, for the most part, the silence of the film did not convey much.

I was, at the end of the film, a bit give and take about it. The sexuality of the girls was excellent, but it didn't make a film, and in the end, I had to fall on the side that the film itself wasn't very good. The truth is, it's just poorly made, for all the DIY, cheap auteurism. My opinion of that, after flipping around on Nakadate's site, was reinforced, given how much I liked of the still images she had, and the sexuality that she explored there. It was just a real shame that her skills in film--skills relating to craft--were still in development.

The Director's Cut

In the comments of yesterday's post, I was asked about the director's cut of Aliens. I don't really think it gives all that much more to the original, but it got me thinking about director's cuts, in general.

Once, there was a time when I was young and thought director's cuts were cool and fantastic and new, but now I'm mostly cured of that. Sure, a director's cut can be that, but how many DVDs promise it just for a marketing tool on a shit film to begin with? I mean, there's a director's cut of the Chronicles of Riddick. For a film like that, there has to be a moment where you step back and say, "I apologise for making the film, I'm sorry, here's twenty bucks back for the original movie ticket." And it seems to me that there's a lot of director's cuts out there now, a lot of them lurking under the 'uncut' and 'unrated' tag to try and convince you to buy a version of a film that ought not have been made to begin with.

But, that said, there are still a lot of films that suffered from studio involvement that I'd like to watch a director's cut of. There's a lot of Orson Welles films that were sadly butchered, though the chances of seeing them returned are pretty slim. Tony Kaye, the director of American History X, was infamous in his insistence to get his name taken off the film after his original version was cut and put out--and you know, I liked that version, but I'd really like to see Kaye's original cut of the film. There are a number of other examples, as well, with studio interference being a long and terrible influence on film over the years.

And then there are the versions that didn't need a director's cut, but got one anyhow--I liked, for example, Apocalypse Now Redux, which I believe adds a nice new layer to a film that, to be honest, I was always happy with before.

But mostly, it's true, a director's cut doesn't do much for me anymore.

Alien Resurrection, Years Later

Though it is hated by many, I love Alien: Resurrection.

It's not a perfect film, I know that. Whoever agreed to hire Jean-Pierre Jeunet to direct it must have ate a whole bag of coke before coming up with that idea. But I love it because he did, because it shows you what happens when a truly creative person is let into a franchise.

A franchise has a set of rules, unwritten or written, and the success of the franchise film or book depends on how well that the artist or artists involved can play to those rules. The Alien franchise, a science fiction horror film, works best when the aliens themselves are the threat, when they are dark and fast and terrifying. As much as I have disliked other James Cameron films, he understood that perfectly and Aliens presented an opening act that served to introduce a cast who would be dramatically and violently cut down in the centre of the film to cement the aliens as an apex threat. That lesson was laid out by Ridley Scott in Alien with the violent birth of the creature from John Hurt's chest, but Cameron really did bring that moment out in what I consider a superb way. David Fincher's Alien 3 didn't deliver on that--an alien birthed in a dog was never going to cut it, and the film is a low note, right until the end when Ripley falls into the furnace, clutching the baby alien mother.

But in Alien: Resurrection, Jeunet doesn't really give a shit about the aliens. The Joss Whedon script offers the moment wherein the mercenary crew bring in the sleeping bodies that they have stolen, but before that, in the opening scenes of the film, Jeunet has established that he is more concerned with Sigourney Weaver's recreated Ripley, a hybrid of alien and human clone work, the monster birthed out of the military's Frankensteins. In every scene, Weaver is in control, sure and violent, and wonderful to watch, but she's all the alien that Jeunet needs, and ignoring the rules of the franchise, he follows that, letting his quite considerable skill out on it. Whedon's script, which is pure franchise work, is broken--though it was always going to be, since the film never got the budget for a lot of the scenes--and it is worth taking a moment to compare the mercenary crew that appears there as a prototype for what would later become Firefly. Darker, ironic, both more ruthless and more self serving, the crew has none of the heroism that is baked into Firefly, but oh, in a different world, Michael Wincott and Dominique Pinon and Ron Perlman and Gary Dourdan and, in a role that no doubt led to River, Sigourney Weaver...

Perhaps it'll just be me who thinks that.

There is a moment in Alien Resurrection when it just goes straight into weird, where the alien mother is revealed to have a reproductive system, where the Newborn and Ripley are in tender moments, where a macabre sense of humour settles into the final deaths of the doctor, where the rules of the Alien franchise are lost, broken. You're not meant to laugh. You're not meant to find it strange, to marvel at the oddness of it--that's not how an Alien film works, that's not how the rules of the franchise, brought back in Aliens Vs Predator, are meant to exist.

But yet, I love it so.

The Racism of Pauline Hanson and Today Tonight

I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40% of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin.

--Paul Hanson.

Last night, I happened across a piece on channel Seven's flimsy excuse for a current affairs program, Today Tonight, wherein Pauline Hanson ran around in Thailand, accusing everyone and anyone who was Asian, of identity theft.

I have been long disturbed by Hanson's return to mainstream Australia, especially on Seven. If you aren't familiar with Pauline Hanson from the mid-nineties, she is Australia's most prominent white supremacist politician, a woman who stands against multiculturalism, who believes Asians are going to swamp us, Africans are all infected with AIDS, and that Aboriginal people get it too easy in this country, considering that they were once a cannibalistic society who ate their babies (and hey, may still do so, right?). She often says that she knows her views will get her accused of racism and this is good, because she is racist, pure and simple. We don't use the term often, but her racism is akin to that of white supremacy groups, and if Hanson herself was not removed from these groups that she starts, one could accuse her of heading an organisation. Because she cannot be linked to large organisations, we must refer to her only in the singular, but it is important to remember that she is representative of a minority of people in the country.

One might question, then, why a white supremacist is being promoted and supported on a mainstream network, a fact that has been consistently occuring since 2004, when she appeared on Dancing with the Stars. There has, from this point, been a slow and systematic reconstruction of Hanson's image. Apart from regular gigs on Today Tonight, Hanson has also appeared on Celebrity Apprentice for channel Nine, and fuck knows where else, all the while rebuilding what remains of her shattered career as a politician that deals in race.

You would be wrong in thinking that she has given that up, as well.

Last night's piece--I cannot call it news reportage, or an article--was all about giving credibility to Hanson's racist points of view. Set in Thailand, the white crew of Today Tonight, led not by Hanson, but by some sock puppet for the program who did all the questioning and leading, wandered around the streets of Bangkok, pointing out how Australian identities are stolen by these street vendors and then sold to anyone from organised crime who would want a new identity. Nothing, and I repeat, nothing, in the episode even related to identity theft. The interview with a man who had had his driver's license stolen didn't even relate to Thailand--and the idea that someone here, in Australia, stole his card and then shipped it over to a dirty street vendor in Bangkok so they could sell it for fifty dollars to someone on the street not only strained reality, but burst apart the more that you thought about it.

My girlfriend, a fine and upstanding American, said that it was worthy of Fox News.

But credit to Today Tonight, they didn't let evidence stop them. They toured the small vendors selling fake IDs and presented them as a part of a huge network of men and women working to defraud the Australian public out of six million dollars...

...And at the end, Pauline Hanson said, "What we need is an Australian Card."

The Australian Card is not new, and if you are not from Australia, you will know it under a different name, no doubt. Regardless, it is a card that allows authorities to stop you on the street if you aren't white and ask you to present your identity card, to see if you are legally allowed to stay in the country. Calling it the Australian Card is really the wrong title, honest: we should refer to it as what it is, the White Supremacist Safety Card. WSSC for short. See, it's a card that makes supremacists like Hanson feel safe, because they can look at the Chinese woman across the street and call the cops, or hey, even demand to see it themselves. For why not? They are the white people, the right people, the people who have the god honest right to demand who enters and who stays in their country. If only the Aboriginal people had got together and organised that over two hundred years ago, really.

Today Tonight's article is, without a doubt, a piece that works to present and support the racist ideologies of Pauline Hanson. It is nothing short than racism, a horrible act of manipulation, and one that seeks to validate a politician and her extreme, minority driven views.

The piece is here, if you want to watch it.

You do.

Because racism cannot be allowed to exist unchallenged.

The Mournful Quiet of Luna Park

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Luna Park is one of two amusement parks in the world that is protected by government legislation. I don't know what the second is but, located on the edge of Sydney Harbour, I know that several of the park's buildings are heritage listed.

In 1979, six children and an adult were killed in a fire in the ghost train ride, a fire caused by age and neglect, and the park has suffered in stutters and moments of life since. It has spent years closed and years open. It has been the subject of legal battles from those who live in the area and don't want the noise from the rides, nor the noise from construction. It is now, operational, but with limited hours, and when you pass, it's mostly quiet, but lit up. Around you it's bright, bright, but the darkness from the mouth stretches back, into the rides, into the steel barriers, a stillness that lingers.

Link.

Lol