Cecilia Tan's Blog, page 13

Sign up to help re-launch #gay #BDSM #fantasy serial The Prince’s Boy by Cecilia Tan

Hello, bloggers, readers, and fellow writers! I’m re-launching my much-lauded BDSM gay high fantasy romance serial THE PRINCE’S BOY shortly, and am looking for folks who would like to be part of the brigade of those posting the cover reveal, excerpts, and so on. Here’s a Google form to fill out if you’re interested in participating in:

Cover reveal on your blog and/or FB group and/or Goodreads group
Cover reveal share on your social media (Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, G+)
Host an author Q&A
Publish an excerpt on your blog
Host some other form of blog tour stop (your choice of topic)
Review on your blog, Amazon, Goodreads, or elsewhere you specify

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THE PRINCE’S BOY tells the story of young lovers Kenet and Jorin and their fight to save their kingdom from evil and their love from destruction. In this world “night magic” is a powerful form of sorcery powered by the lust of male for male. The Prince’s Boy was originally serialized from July 2009-June 2011 on circlet.com and Livejournal and was awarded Honorable Mention in both the Rainbow Awards and the NLA: International Writing Awards for BDSM-positive fiction.

I’ll be revealing new cover(s) in July, a new box set ebook will go on sale in November. (Hopefully with a new bonus story included…? I’m working on that!)

Reminder what the old covers looked like:

Where to find Cecilia Tan at the 2016 RT Booklovers Convention

I’m leaving for RT in a couple of days and realized I never posted my schedule! Here’s where you can find me at the Vegas RT Booklovers Convention!

WEDNESDAY April 13

12:15 – 12:45 pm CLUB RT

I’ll be hanging out a 30 minute slot in Club RT to meet folks and hand out swag. Come say hi!

8pm – 9pm PODCAST

I’ll be joining Linda Mooney’s Other Worlds of Romance podcast live from RT! Well, I’ll be doing it from somewhere quiet, but you can listen on the internet at Blog Talk Radio: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/other_worlds_of_romance/2016/04/14/live-from-rt-cecilia-tan-is-my-guest-author-on-april-13th

THURSDAY April 14

11:15-11:45 pm CLUB RT

My second and final hang-out for a 30-minute slot in Club RT! Come say hi and get a gift from me. :-)

4pm -5pm PANEL: LGBTQ+: Queer Isn’t a Genre: The Intersectionalities of Love

with Amelia Vaughn, Rebekah Weatherspoon, Cecilia Tan, Georgia Beers, Erica Cameron

“This panel will include authors from many different minorities — authors of color, authors with disabilities, queer authors, and authors who write any/all of the above — to discuss the intersectionalities of diversity in fiction.”

FRIDAY April 15

1:30 – 2:30 pm PANEL: Conferences & Conventions: Getting the Most Bang for Your Buck

with Tere Michaels, Jennifer Morris, Rayna Vause, Cecilia Tan

“New to the business or just want to get more out of your convention/conference dollar? This panel will include four experts who will discuss how to choose the right event for you, how to prepare, how to submit a can’t-fail workshop proposal, how to get the most out of the experience and the best follow-up. We’ll talk about everything from swag choices to packing to physical branding on the ground to creating a post-convention bump.”

SATURDAY April 18

Giant Book Fair 10:30 – 2pm

I’ll be signing books at the Giant Book Fair. Look for me under the letter T.

FAN-Tastic-Day Party 6:45-7:30

I’m in the “second shift” of authors at FAN-Tastic Day, so come hang out and meet me and lots of authors. Tends to be a swag-fest, too!

Help Kickstart an omnibus paperback of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles

Here we go! It’s been two whole years since my last Kickstarter, there are over 200 more chapters of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles accrued since then, so it’s time to produce a new omnibus paperback! (And generally have some fun with producing nifty swag. I like T-shirts for fictional rock bands, what can I say…)

Daron’s Guitar Chronicles (in case you’re new around here…) is my long-running web fiction serial about coming out and coming of age in the 1980s. Daron is a guitarist trying to make it big in the music industry while coming to grips with his sexuality (he’s gay) and his complicated relationship to his art, public performance, and by the way his band’s lead singer. Ahem.

The full rundown of rewards and budget is detailed in the Kickstarter campaign of course, here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ceciliatan/darons-guitar-chronicles-third-omnibus

A short version of the link for sharing: http://kck.st/1RFanDN

You can support for as little as a dollar, for which you’ll get thanked in the book and your choice of any of the DGC ebooks. A bargain! And we’ve also got — in addition to the book itself — T-shirts, guitar picks, custom songs written for you, and much more.

More details below the cut!

This is my third Kickstarter, and while they’re always nerve-wracking, they’re fun too, kind of like a month-long party. :-) The purpose is to raise enough money that I can pay the professional proofreaders, layout designers, and artists necessary to making a paperback book look great.

If we raise enough money I’ll also invest in expanding the audiobook offerings, so there are stretch goals.

Here are some images of some of the rewards we’re creating:

I don’t have the cover design yet, but paying for the artwork and the designer are among the things the fundraising is for!

The guitar pick can be had as is or strung as a necklace!

This 30-page 5×7 notebook is perfect for jotting down song lyrics while you’re on the go, no?

A reference to the shirt Daron often wears that has Ziggy’s handprint on it–I’ve made it into an actual shirt. :-)

Temporary tattoos! After Daron and Ziggy went to get their first tattoos in Chapter 652, I figured offering temporary tattoos as a reward tchotchke was a must!

I’m happy to answer any questions either here or hit me up on Gmail (ctan.writer @ gmail.com) or message me on Kickstarter itself!

Fantasy Worldbuilding at #ICFA with Kameron Hurley et. al.

The panel on fantasy worldbuilding at ICFA was packed, every chair taken, people standing in the back, etc. I ended up sitting on the floor at the foot of the panelists’ table. It was well worth it! What I present here is a partial transcript of the conversation and I emphasize PARTIAL because I can only capture maybe half of what is actually said. I assure you if there are non-sequiturs or nonsense in what follows it is my fault in omission/transcription and not in what was said, which was highly intelligent, coherent, and thought-provoking.

Moderator, A.P. Canavan: Welcome to the annual fantasy panel where we try to get academics and writers in polite conversation with each other. Barring that we try for as much bloodshed as possible! (audience laughter)

The panelists:

Sarah Pinborough (BBC, The Dead House, Dog-Faced Gods)

Steven Erikson (Forge of Darkness),

Kameron Hurley (Gods War, Mirror Empire, etc)

Audrey Taylor (academic, Building Worlds- book on Patricia McKillip)



Mod: Our topic today is fantasy setting, worldbuilding and believability. From faerie to whole planets who have alternative ecosystems, etc. How can a world be both fantastic and realistic? What language can we use to describe fantasy settings?

Audrey: I am the academic on the panel, so I might have a radically different take on this than the authors. I am looking at worldbuilding as a holistic thing: it is more than setting, it is how characters interact with their landscape, what bits are going into the story, and how are they all integrated to make a world. So that’s how I’m coming at it, which may be different from an author. I’m trying to stay away from value judgements like “is it realistic.”

Kameron: David Hartwell was one of my writing instructors and he said “Kameron, you write so well you can make people believe utter nonsense and this can get you far!” If you are convincing and people read the book and say this author knows that they are talking about, then the reader will believe you. If your grammar is solid and the voice is compelling they will go with it. A lot of people throw one-off things in without thinking it through and what rabbit hole it might take them down. I will go anywhere with a writer who seems to have the skill to take me there.

Sarah: I think that any fiction is worldbuilding in itself. Even in a contemporary story you are creating that world. I am the least experienced world builder on this panel. But especially with straight fantasy in particular you already have the audience on your side. They are prepared to suspend their disbelief. Bad writing is bad no matter what genre you’re in. It may be that fantasy struggles with so many tropes that have been used so many times they may be bored with them. How do you bring a fresh approach?

Steven: I always think in terms of what you carry over from this world into the world you’re building. That’s the litmus test for me. Quite often a world is transposed. A time in our history like medieval Europe which is then dropped into a setting with magic and dragons. I check on these things because if you’re going to take a historical setting and transpose it you have to think through this because magic is going to change everything. Quite often that doesn’t happen. What you see is the patriarchy, the barbarians in the north, etc without recognizing that magic would change everything. I think it’s more useful to sever the ties with our world completely. What are the assumptions we make about our culture and why should they rise up again in this new iteration?

[image error][image error]Moderator: Sarah, which was you book on the dead children?

Sarah: You mean the dying children. There wouldn’t have been much story if they were dead. The Death House.

Moderator: You do create a fictive world there. It’s all about creating a fictive reality that people will believe.

Sarah: People actually kept saying they wanted to know more about the world and the world building and I didn’t want to say more. Like I didn’t say this is my iPhone, it came from Apple. It’s just part of my world. People can tweet from space using it! I can’t even tweet from London sometimes. (audience laughter) But really I think it’s about getting the characters right and the world is there to support that process.

[image error][image error]Kameron: I believe in that iPhone principle. People want to know about the world in Gods War but it’s very close third person and the character wouldn’t be thinking about the GPS or whatever. If the character reacts to something like it’s normal, the reader knows that’s normal and if they react like something is abnormal, then you know that.

Sarah: That’s exactly it. (Speaking of abnormal) If someone asked me to explain the American political system I’d need tequila and Google and still not understand it. People don’t understand our own world. It’s important that you understand the immediate world of your character without explaining everything beyond that.

Mod: Steven, how did you use magic to create an egalitarian feminist society?

Steve: I thought if you’re bringing magic into this universe, what are the effects on a society or a culture. Well, how does the magic manifest? The decision was to create a system based on discipline so it’s accessible to anyone. If you allow magic for anyone through discipline, then you cannot impose a gender-based hierarchy of power, because anyone can get power. And if the healing is efficacious then the medieval necessity of women to produce ten children to have two survive, then the pressure is off in the parenting roles that people take. Also you can have an implicit threat in any person, not only men. That opens up women to have any role in that society.

Audrey: So, one of the things you were talking about in terms of making it realistic was about making normal things weird and weird things normal. Starting with Tolkien, he talked about everything is fresh, you enjoy them anew through fantasy. Things that are normal become strange and the strange becomes normal. You’ve got an iPhone and you’re totally used to it, but then in a story maybe you think isn’t it weird I have this pocket computer that is more powerful than what they took to the moon? You don’t have to know the WHOLE real world to know it’s there. Like I know Indonesia exists, you have to know it’s out there but you don’t have to know every piece. You can leave gaps on purpose, there can be gaps that the reader fills in, but even in our reality we have those gaps.

Kameron: Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to leave in. You figure out what people can fill in sometimes. Like if it’s medieval fantasy but there’s matriarchal polyamory they’re like WHAT? And there are five genders! WHAT?! If you bring people into something so different from what they expect, sometimes you have to give them getting used to seeing things gradually. Like I introduce the concept of a third gender in one book, in the next book we get the pronoun, and the next one we get some characters who are that third gender, et cetera.

Sarah: Often I know far more about the world than will ever get onto the page. When I did Dog-Faced Gods, the opening of that book was a COBRA meeting right after some bombings and I put bang-bang-bang all these quick conversations about it where I didn’t expect the reader to keep up. I had done tons or research I wanted to put it all in, I had like ten pages about it. But then I ended up taking a lot out.

Steven Everyone here has a worldview that doesn’t necessarily mesh with everyone else’s. One sees a deer and wants to paint it and anther wants to shoot it. There is a hollowness in worldbuilding. Your character’s point of view can be false. You create a world that everything apparently lives in, but there is nothing at the center.

Audrey: Different authors start in different places. Tolkien famously started with languages. Some start with an alien world. As an academic I try to avoid that because I can’t go to every writer and ask, so what order did you go in…

Mod: If only we had a conference where you could ask them! (audience laughter)

Audrey: But I know people can’t always verbalize their internal processes! But a good starting point is that people differ and their descriptions would differ as well. Then about tropes, discarding or following tropes or having a surprise, readers go into a fantasy book with a dragon on the front and they expect it to be a dragon but maybe it’s actually a person or a construct or…

Kamoeron: Or they just put it on the cover to sell books! (audience laughter)

Audrey: But yes, there’s a moment of surprise or fun or horror—different versions of “that’s not what I was expecting!”

Sarah: I read Railhead and was chairing a panel with the author so I thought I should read it. And I thought there is too much world here. I had to put it down and then pick it up later. Maybe it’s better for kids who are so curious about the world but for me it was too much world in the beginning.

Kameron: We call that “the gauntlet.” If you can get through the gauntlet you’ll be fine. But there are hardcore fantasy readers who love going through that gauntlet. But there are those who don’t want to wade through the gauntlet.

Mod: How important is the style of narration in creating a believable world? You’ve all talked about the subjective knowledge of the character but is subjective narration the way to do it?

Sarah: Depends on the story you’re telling…?

Kameron: Omniscient narration isn’t done as much. We’re not liking it as readers. Even first person present is being used a lot now because it’s immersive. I’m not seeing as much omniscient narration as there used to be. I did a short story recently and it was really hard! Trying to go back to doing omniscient that framing for me was very different.

Sarah: I think with multiple viewpoint books you get more third person. But you can get a better sense of the world that way. But it makes a difference what story you’re telling. Multiple narrators third person is good if you want different angles on the world.

Audrey: From a critical perspective, not just the narrator but how you’re presented to the world is important and frames things differently. So if you’re coming in (referencing Farah Mendelsohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy) and if you’re going WITH someone into the fantasy world from there then they can explain it. But if you’re on the shoulder of someone going into a fantasy world they’re unfamiliar with, that makes a difference in how you’re framing it and how the reader approaches the story.

Steven: It’s one of the main reasons why a lot of fantasy novels started with a child is because you’re pulled into that world through their eyes.

Mod: Steven, a lot of your characters are lowborn people in world that have princes and kings and so on. Daredevil and Jessica Jones were superheroes but they had more the everyday lives of characters than you have in Superman who is godlike. It’s a style of narration.

[image error][image error]Steven: These people have a limited world. That’s a nice connection with the average reader who feels limited in their ability to produce effects on a grand scale. With that limited point of view is one mechanic for establishing sympathy. But because it’s a limited world, it’s a manageable one where you don’t have to explain massive history because the character doesn’t know it. They maybe have some stories they tell but you don’t find out how the stories piece together until later.

Sarah: And then you don’t write yourself into a corner in book five. (audience laughter)

Mod: Not like you changed the gender of a character in your second book, Steven.

Steven: Oh shut up. (more laughter)

Audrey: So I have to be careful when I talk about worldbuilding to separate the story from the story world. The world makes the story possible but isn’t the story itself. ALL these pieces of story and setting and character link into each other, and how well those links are forged might be what makes a difference. How those links are made could add depth. If this character acts this way because their land has a particular history, that impacts the character even if the character doesn’t consciously think about it every day. I don’t want to make a value judgment about the realism, but let’s say the depth of the story.

Sarah: It would be a really bad book if it didn’t. I will make a value judgment: if the character acts like they’re from Orlando but they’re from Mars it’s a bad book.

Audrey: I sort of have Twilight in my head and you think there’s no shades there: it’s not oh this person trips and they’re from Arizona and so people from Arizona trip. But that’s not true.

Steven: That’s how we live in our world: we build the world around us. I’ve never trusted worldbuilding through my entire series. That kind of objective “history” that “everyone” believes doesn’t exist.

Audrey: Right. There’s a different between the past and history. We can’t ever really know the fact of the past.

Kameron: There’s the theory that consciousness is storytelling and the moment we start to form memories is our ability to form stories. I like that idea of the hollow world: we create this shared story reality that is different to different people. That dress is not the same color to all people. [Referencing the white/gold or blue dress that broke the Internet.] We’re all constructing the story of the world around us and all of those come together into a kind of shared reality.

Audrey: It’s weird to me that worldbuilding hasn’t been talked about so much critically before since it’s happening in ALL fiction not just fantasy. I love blowing my students’ minds with notions like what if my color red and your color red isn’t the same. They have their own narratives about their lives but what if it’s false? What if you think your this sort of person but you’re actually this other way? How are people constructing their lives and what are they focused on?

Kameron: American politics is like that. I say “Dad you know Obama is really a moderate” and his head explodes “What!? That socialist!” etc. We are literally living in different worlds.

Mod: I actually want to know from the writers, though, how did you start? Did you start with character or setting or what?

Audrey: Wait, can I say something in my defense? Can I live it down? If an author feels like discussing their process of world building with me I would like to hear about it! But as a critic it’s not my primary goal.

Mod: All right. Sarah?

Sarah: I can’t remember. I honestly can’t remember.

Mod: Not any of them?

Sarah: It’s really like once a book’s done, it’s gone from my mind.

Mod: Well, do you scribble down notes?

Sarah: I tend to grab things from news articles and write down questions. But the first idea from the book is so far removed from the book you end up writing. Even the main concept will send up completely different. I’ll think I want to write about a serial killer, and then be like oh, they have this quirk–and then in the end it will be about a person with that quirk who isn’t a serial killer at all. I’m fascinated by damaged people and how we’re all lying to ourselves all the time. I’m really curious about our lack of honesty, and what we hide, and our childhoods shaping us.

Steven: What I want to talk about is the curious origins of the worldbuilding. What archeology is is a reconstruction of the past based on very, very few physical remains. So that’s worldbuiding. You can be on prairies or on lakes and peel back the landscape try to imagine, where was the river, post-ice age, etc. You are constantly building the world in your imagination, and you think where would I have wanted to live? And you go and stick a shovel in the ground in that spot, and invariably you find a site.

Kameron: Someone recently asked me this on Twitter. People assume I make the world first, but I don’t. I build it as I go along. I wrote the first sentence of Gods War (the one about the protagonist selling her womb between point A and point B) and thought, whoa! who is this character and how would that happen! I write a quick first draft and then I layer each draft more and more as I go. I start with the people and then a society and what sort of a world would create these people? That’s where I start.

From there, Audrey mentioned Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home which is described as an “archaeology of the future” and then we went into audience questions and I couldn’t keep up typing anymore, but there were tons of great, interesting, meaty insights about everything from maps to nations at war.

#ICFA Panel: Remix Culture, SF/F and Books in Conversation

I moderated a panel at ICFA (which I had proposed) entitled: Remix Culture: SF, Fantasy, and Books in Conversation and I would like to write a coherent blog post about it, but that’s difficult because while moderating I didn’t get to take good notes and also because the smart, deep-thinking panelists had so many great things to say I can’t recreate more than the tiniest fraction of it.

It being the age of remix culture and postmodernism, however, perhaps a collage of intriguing thoughts and questions from the discussion is apropos.

My opening salvo: “A hallmark of literary fiction is that it contains references and allusions to books that came before from the Bible to Shakespeare to the canon. In science fiction and fantasy we engage with genre tropes (sf: space travel, first contact, artificial intelligence, etc/fantasy: prophecy, kingship, elfland, etc) that pretty much require any book in a subgenre or using a trope to be in conversation with books that share that trope.”

The fantastic panelists:

[image error][image error]Max Gladstone: author of fantasy novels known as the Craft Sequence, described as “tales of wizards in pinstriped suits and gods with shareholders’ committees.” Also a copyfighter.

Therese Anne Fowler: author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and currently working on a novel about the Vanderbilts

Sam J. Miller: whose short stories have been in a lot of magazines lately (and shortlisted for some awards, I believe?) and who is working on a novel for HarperCollins right now called The Art of Starving, about a gay boy whose eating disorder gives him superpowers

Julia Rios: a former editor of Strange Horizons, now editing for Uncanny Magazine, also a writer and whom I also know as an incisive fantasy and sf cultural commentator from her work on the podcast Skiffy and Fanty and other panels she’s been on

And me (Cecilia). [image error][image error]

I opened the panel by mentioning that I can’t seem to write anything without it being a reference to something else an that I know I’m not the only one. But that the sea change I feel is that now we just use what our influences are in our marketing copy (i.e. Magic U. is Harry Potter goes to college to study sex magic) as opposed to before when they were supposed to be hidden literary Easter Eggs. And that you don’t always realize what you’re remixing. In The Siren and the Sword I thought I was riffing on Harry Potter, but one of my beta readers pointed out it’s actually Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Whoa.

Max: What we now call remixing was once just called storytelling. Milton was the last person who might have conceivably read everything that there was Published at the time and wrote something reacting to Everything. It was a given that what you wrote referenced all that came before. The canon. As a copyfighter I believe in drawing on works of others and having my work drawn upon. (Max said many long and cogent, deep things that I did not come close to writing down, but at one point partway through the panel I told him he must write a blog about.)

[image error][image error]Therese: I write historical fiction with historical figures in it. People tell me that now means I write “RPF.” (The fanfic term for “Real Person Fiction.”) I’m working on a book about the Vanderbilts and I wanted to use actual correspondence in it. The family denied the permission so I had to recreate the voices of those letters but in entirely my own creations.

Sam: I am constantly drawing on Avatar: The Last Airbender to the point where in my novel the hero in the climax scene puts his hands out in that really badass way and levitates off the ground (like the hero in Avatar) but I don’t know if people will notice the parallel.

Cecilia: What’s interesting about that is that Avatar: TLA didn’t invent the Elements, or the martial arts, or levitation, so even if you use them it could all be plausible. (J.K. Rowling didn’t invent wands or spells or flying brooms, either.)

Julia: Sometimes there’ll be a science fiction idea, though, that’s introduced as the creation of one writer, and everyone will adopt it as a trope instantly, and even call it by the same name. The example I gave last night was the ansible, the device that can instantly communicate across light years. Many writers have used it and even called it the ansible. I gave an Elizabeth Bear book to my mom to read and she said “I didn’t really like this book because you can tell the writer didn’t make it up herself.” I asked her why she knew that and she told me “She got the idea of the ansible from Elizabeth Moon.” And I had to explain, no, it came from Ursula K. LeGuin.

Cecilia: Sometimes the conversations are intentional (famously Delany’s Triton and LeGuin’s The Dispossessed were written in reaction to Joanna Russ’s The Female Man) other times reacting through the gestalt (supposedly Joe Haldeman had not read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers when he wrote The Forever War, and then you have Scalzi’s Old Man’s War).

Julia brought up Hamilton as an example of something that presents an old story (US history) in a completely new way and new context because it’s a Broadway show that has elements of hip hop and rap music and a cast that is almost entirely People of Color. Which I thought had a fascinating tie in to Therese’s use of historical figures and their letters and the facts of their lives. Remixing not just “story” but “history.”

Sam brought up that remixing has traditionally been a way that marginalized voices can make themselves heard — that if the original is only representative of the dominant culture or paradigm its ripe to be redone from the marginalized point of view.

Hamilton would be a good example of that. Another one I thought of during the panel but forgot to mention is retellings like the book The Wind Done Gone, which is a rewrite of Gone With The Wind from a black maid’s point of view, or there’s a book that is a retelling of Frankenstein from a female secondary character’s view. (And we didn’t even get into the way fanfic is often about creating space for queer characters who are “traditionally” *ahem* invisible in mainstream canon literature, though Julia did speak about the non-commercial nature of fanfiction and fanworks.)

Julia also brought up questions of cultural appropriation and the fact that if you are going to borrow/steal/use you have to have awareness of where it comes from. I said you have to be like Robin Hood, steal from above, not from below. Max talked about nerdcore rap being very white and unaware (at first?) of how much was being appropriated from black culture.

A question came up from the audience: what are the limits? What line can’t be crossed? Are there things that should not be remixed?

Another audience member added that in questions of cultural appropriation it’s important to know the difference between secular and sacred things and to treat them appropriately. Julia emphasized awareness and talking to or collaborating with members of the culture you’re writing about.

None of us would agree to drawing a firm line around anything, though. The more revered a thing is, the higher up the food chain, the more ripe it is to be remixed–in fact perhaps the more inevitable that it will inspire others and need to be remixed.

I asked the panelists if the thought the breeding of old tropes with new aesthetics gave rise to new subgenres a la steampunk. Max pointed out that steampunk has a unique place in remix culture because it is the last genre to be able to use public domain material and characters (Captain Nemo, Sherlock Holmes, etc). With everything else getting extended and extended we’ll never had Philip Marlowe to add to our pastiches–it has to be at one step remove: Milip Farlowe.

We interrogated a bit the idea of the genre “interloper,” i.e. when Margaret Atwood or Kazuo Ishiguro or Colson Whitehead swoops in and writer a fantasy novel or a zombie novel we from within the genre see them as outsiders.

I asked what works the panelists wished they could remix and couldn’t and Therese said she would really love to do Lolita. Oh yes, if ever there was a book that a reboot would engender fantastic discussion (as the original did, as well) and which I would love to see reframed with a modern political consciousness, that would be a great one.

I pointed out that in a way Harry Potter, which has inspired so many remixes, including Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (magic school), Avatar: TLA (magical kid part of a trio of peers), my own Magic University, Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl (riffing off Harry/Draco fanfiction), etc etc is itself a kind of giant remix of genres: it’s Cinderella (Harry lives in a broom closet and is forced to cook and clean for his step-family), it’s a traditional boarding school novel, it’s a magic school book, etc etc… so many tropes glomming together, and now it’s a kind of Ur-story itself. I asked what other works are Ur-stories in that way and not surprisingly we came up with some that also incorportate the stories that came before it:

Therese: Shakespeare

Sam: The Old Testament

Max: Star Wars (and we didn’t even get into how George Lucas not only lifted from many great filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa but was roommates with Joseph Campbell and wrote Luke’s journey to specifically follow Campbell’s hero’s journey trope)

Max also schooled us about how Wagner himself was the one who reinvented the experience of going to the opera so that people would have to experience his operas the way he wanted them to. The recessed orchestra, all the chairs facing the stage and close together so you can’t get up and leave in the middle, the darkened lights, etc were all because before that it was more casual and people chatted and ate and drank all the way through.

Julia mentioned that she has gone to Bollywood films where the mostly Indian audience would take the 10 minute long singing and dancing numbers as their opportunity to chat, get up and walk around, etc. This idea we have to sit in the dark and just face the stage or screen comes from Wagner and in places that aren’t as influenced this may not be the norm.

Many many books & stories were recommended throughout the panel. Here are a few that I noted:

Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl & Cynthia Ward — if you’re worried about cultural appropriation and how to avoid it, while still presenting a diverse cast of characters.

Clockwork Canada — a steampunk anthology that addresses imperialism and Canadian diversity

Two recent rebuttals/remixes to the racism inherent in H.P. Lovecraft are

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

The Litany of Earth by Ruthanna Emrys

Some works that are “post-portal-fantasy” i.e. what happens after you come back from the portal fantasy all messed up?

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

and a work of Jo Walton I didn’t get the title of, but perhaps it’s Restlessly Mundane a short story that can be read free on Strange Horizons

And this basically just scratched the surface of the many thinky thoughts that came up during the panel. We could have easily talked for another hour on the subject. Thank you so much to the fantastic panelists for being so smart and well-read and articulate!

The #ICFA Interview with Holly Black

I’m at ICFA (Int’l Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts) which is a unique academic conference where they not only talk about sf/fantasy/horror literature but invite lots of authors and editors to come be guests at the conference (including me). One of this year’s guests of honor is Holly Black, who wrote one of my favorite novels ever (Tithe) and is an all-around awesome writer I’ve known for years.

[image error][image error]I moderated a panel I’ll blog about later and then had booksigning, so I missed the first half of Jedediah Berry interviewing Holly Black, but I at least did catch the latter half, and here’s a much much edited partial transcript of the conversation:

They were in the middle of talking about Coldest Girl in Coldtown when I came in:

Holly Black: I ask myself: Would I watch a reality show set in a walled city where there were vampires and sometimes they killed someone? I am the target market for that show! How would we react to vampires in our world? Look at how things are treated: if someone was biting someone in the back there I would probably whip out my phone. Would I put it on Instagram? Probably. I came out of that understanding that I may be a sociopath! (audience laughter) And that’s a lot of where Coldtown came from.

Jed: So back after there had been a huge wave of vampire fiction, some of it very sparkly, after the vampire wave had crested…

[image error][image error]Holly Black: …I wrote mine. Worst possible time.

Jed: But what was that moment in the genre? It felt that you were examining the genre after the explosion and how it had crested, looking at that post-Twilight world.

Holly: Well, yeah, I think it’s not hard to figure out why we might be attracted to something that might kill us. It’s not hard to figure out why we might want eternal life or eternal beauty.

Jed: Would a younger you have been one of those people who wanted to move to a coldtown?

Holly: The me who wrote Tithe would have. Heck, while I was in the middle of writing that book. The only way I was going to get the time to finish that book was move to a vampire town. Now I’m too old to go to a coldtown. Well, both too old and too young. Maybe I would go later.

Jed: I’ve heard you say the drafting process is a painful one for you, but revision is ok?

Holly: I feel like I can’t make it worse, right?

Jed: I’ve seen you working through other people’s novels, too. What was the thing with the eyeball on the back of your hand…?

Holly: It was an attempt to get Joshua Lewis to finish his book. To make him feel like The Eye is watching you? But that effort failed.

Jed: Have you found other writers readings of your work to be valuable?

Holly: Oh yes. My first critique partner and later Steve Berman were very important. In the early part of my career I didn’t keep to a schedule. At one point I had hand written someting and Steve was like I won’t read that. You need to type it. He made me get serious about what I was doing. At that time we would go to lunch and walk and talk about the books we wanted to write. And he spurred me to stick to a schedule and finish something. Having someone to be accountable to was really important. Having a critique partner made me serious and able to finish a book.

Jed: Now with Cassandra Clare you’re writing five book series, and you worked with an artist on Spiderwick, did those experiences with critique partners prepare you, has that fed into collaboration?

Holly: I think so, because when you are stuck… Steve and I both had similar problems, we both care about a sentence and a paragraph and have trouble getting to many paragraphs as a result. One time Kelly Link said to me “what is a paragraph?” And I said no! We can’t have this conversation or we’ll never get any writing done! But having crit partners helped me to learn to be collaborative.

[image error][image error]Jed: And did it help you learn to plot?

Holly: I think you feel when it’s off and you get a feeling something should be happening here. But that doesn’t mean you know what. I had the weirdest experience with writing Darkest Part of the Forest. I knew Hazel had a secret and I didn’t know what it was. I don’t like it when people talk about their “muses,” how their characters run away with the plot. I was like my characters are lazy and would never do anything. And I hated people talking about it because it never happened to me. But writing that book, all I knew was she had a secret and I didn’t know what it was. I had to take a long time to figure it out, 75% of the way through the book I thought I figured it out, and I turned the book three different times. First it had with a different villain, then a different secret, and then a different secret and a different villain. Three different times. I was so sleep-deprived I don’t even know what’s in that book. I’d just had a newborn baby and I know how the book starts…? And that’s it.

Jed: In Tithe it takes until halfway through the book we find out about the changeling whereas in Darkest Part of the Forest it’s right in chapter one. Did you clear the way for yourself by writing Tithe first?

Holly: I love changelings. Changelings are rich in metaphor, so useful structurally, but I think when you come back and want to work with the same stuff again you have to approach it a different way. You have to make something different of it.

Jed: I wanted to ask you about comics. You’re doing the Lucifer comics, now. Are you having to think more on your feet because you have to meet a monthly deadline?

Holly: You have to make pretty detailed outlines beforehand, and they gave me enough time ahead that I pre-wrote several issues, but not we’re getting caught up. We have to revisit the thing several times, though. You see it pencilled, and they sketch in where the dialogue goes and inevitably you rewrite it. You try to write with a specific voice but then you realize it doesn’t all fit or it doesn’t make sense with the art. Then you see it again after it’s colored and you can rewrite it again, and by then you have written more of the story so you get to make more changes to match what you’ve done.

Jed: How did the Lucifer gig come about?

Holly: I signed 5000 tip in sheets for the magisterium books and Siobhan called me to say do you remember that proposal you sent us that we rejected, do you want to write it now? And I was like no, I’m way too busy…and then she says or you could write Lucifer. I said yes. Yes yes. Then I went back to reread it in preparation and the series had closed off the ending, tied up every thread, and I had to figure out how to unpick those threads.

Q from audience: You talked about the multiple drafting process, do you have a typical number?

Holly: I don’t have a specific number of drafts. What will happen is usually I will go back. I write chapter one, and then it’s while writing chapter two where I realize I need to rewrite chapter one and then go back to that. And then you write chapter three and you realize you have to go back to rewrite chapter one and chapter two. And on it goes where every time I get stuck I go back and rework the preceding chapters…and the result is you have this manuscript that descends into chaos. I gave a book to a critique partner recently and I said “but the end is really bad.” And they read it and were like, wow, you were right, the end is really bad!

I have figured out how to draft slightly faster. If your process is to make a mess when you draft and then go back and fix it, the idea is to draft faster. I’ve started using (software program) Freedom to turn off the Internet and what I thought I would do is make myself not go on the Internet, but the value of it is that I only have to write for 20 minutes. You can do anything painful for a set period of time. I can draft much faster knowing that it is only for a set period of time.

Q from audience: So The Spiderwick Chronicles. How do you do a book that is about a book? A story about a story?

[image error][image error]Holly: Tony wanted to do a book that was a bestiary of fairies. I told him “I’ll write the little one paragraph things for you.” We shared an editor at that time. I had just finished Tithe. Our editor said how about you write some stories about this guy? I said I don’t really want to do that, let me write about these kids who find the book. I remember being a kid and my mother did something for St. Patrick’s Day, where you followed notes from the fairies around the yard and at the end we got some stale golden coins, some gelt, but I was so excited, it seemed real, it seemed true. It wasn’t about the chocolate coins. Part of me knew it was this fake thing but part of me was convinced I had found the evidence that fairies existed. So I wanted to capture that feeling. Within the game, within the book, it all has to feel true.

Q: So do you write at a certain time of day or night? exercise first, or what?

Holly: Because I end up doing an enormous amount of work on the road I try not to have a ritual. Teresa Niesen Hayden said whatever you do don’t drink or smoke when you write because later you won’t be able to stop. So it became a larger thing for me that was don’t have any particular place or way to write. I do have playlists. They are helpful for getting you back into the space of that novel. And a great way to waste some time. I will go sit in coffee shops with friends to write.

Q: You mentioned the numinous (in the GOH opening session), how do you create that in language?

Holly: Cristina (Bacchilega, the scholar GOH) was talking about how the numinous has to have fear in it. I think that’s true. You have to evoke awe and discomfort. There’s that juxtaposition and looking at the moments where you’ve felt that way, that the world is bigger and stranger than your experience of it and what made you feel that. The things that I really find evoke it is strangeness where you don’t expect it. I was writing Valiant in New York, and I decided to walk it and research everywhere the book would go. I went under the Manhattan Bridge and there is a tree stump! It’s actually there! Why is it there? Finding that, seeing that, I had that feeling of dislocation from time or space. Like thinking about this glass coffin with this prince in the forest with the kids going out and partying around him and beer cans all around it. It’s like the giant chair or the giant wheel of cheese that people go and see it and take their pictures with it. That’s how we react to these artifacts. They are everywhere in America. A really big axe! A giant pistachio! They’re all over the place! Who pays for these things?

Jed: Did you spend time in Springfield, Massachusetts, when you were writing Coldtown?

Holly: It was going to be Holyoke actually, but I couldn’t get around the water access issue. So I changed it to Springfield.

Jed: You’re writing on a new trilogy that returns to fairy stuff now, right?

Holly: I’m reading from it tonight. I was interested in trying high fantasy; I’d never written high fantasy. So I decided to set the entire book inside Faerie, and people can go to the mortal world which is now, but most people don’t. So how do you have a constantly numinous setting? Numinous money, numinous transport, it’s a weird experience. It’s a story of this girl growing up in our world, she’s seven-ish, she has a twin sister and an older sister with weird cat eyes that people talk about. One day a guy comes to the door, an odd-looking guy, he has an argument with her mother that she overhears…(the rest redacted for spoilers).

(I’ll blog more from the rest of the conference when I get a chance! Saw some great papers on goth subculture, fashion, and music, on recurring Victorian attitudes in Harry Potter, and more!)

Okay, I’m trying it: Spanish Nights: gay erotic novella, on sale for 48 hours

I’m trying it! A “Kindle Countdown” deal for Spanish Nights started at 9am (Eastern) on Monday March 7th (today) dropping the price from $2.99 to 99 cents! On Wednesday at 11am it will jump to $1.99, and then on Friday at 5pm it will return to the regular $2.99.

What’s Spanish Nights? It’s an 80-page novella chronicling the torrid affair of Daron on a nearly yearlong jaunt to Spain and his lover Orlando and their adventures in the street music world of Seville. Daron’s the main character of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles but this novella can be read as a stand-alone.

Official description:

Two men, a chance meeting, a torrid affair.

One an internationally known rock star, the other from the streets of Spain: they meet in an erotic tale as hot as a summer night in Seville, as seductive as red wine and song.

Daron Marks didn’t expect to find a lover that day at the airport. He didn’t expect to suddenly change his plans and fly to Spain instead of Boston. But sometimes opportunity knocks and you have to grab Fate by the lapels and kiss until you’re breathless. Daron’s career, and his acceptance of his sexuality, are about to take a sudden, unexpected turn.

Orlando is as mysterious as he is beautiful, doe-eyed and nimble-fingered. To Daron, his presence seems to beckon something from deep within. When the two guitarists meet, they play duets and jam together to pass the time, but music sparks a deeper desire to connect, to touch, to love. But when Daron arrives in Spain he finds Orlando entangled in something more than simply sweaty sheets…

The Spanish Nights ebook also contains the complete erotic story “Home Sweet Home” as a bonus.

If you’re in Kindle Unlimited, you can read the book for free as part of the KU program, as well!

Adam Lambert & The Authenticity of Queer Identity (Concert Review)

So I wanted to write a review of the Adam Lambert concert tonight at the House of Blues in Boston, but it being me, I can’t merely write about Adam Lambert without writing about American culture, identity, the music industry, David Bowie, subcultures, queerness, and capitalism. Because I couldn’t talk about the songs or the performance without writing about the context in which they’re being presented, and I had to try to answer the question of why such a fantastic concert is being seen by so few people in the United States.

First the review in a nutshell: Adam Lambert is extremely entertaining. The show is a visual wow that matches the vocal fireworks, and musically it is a hip, complex treatment of pop. The show–like Adam himself?–is slick as hell. A+++ would see again–in fact I’m going to see him again in a few weeks while visiting my parents in Clearwater, Florida.

You guys @adamlambert ! #theoriginalhightour #tohustour

A video posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Feb 24, 2016 at 6:16pm PST

However. Although the show was technically stunning and Adam is simply great…I was never transported by it, possibly because I found myself interrogating every aspect of it, which I think says far more about me than about the show, though ultimately I do think the show is packed with messages, and in this essay I will attempt to unpack some of them. I did not have one of those transcendent moments of communion with the music or performers or crowd that marks a truly great show. These moments don’t always happen, even with great artists like Peter Gabriel (saw him at the Worcester Centrum in the early 90s, nice but meh, or even The Cure in ’89 when I was at my deepest fanaticism for them, at Great Woods, a show I found out 20 years later that Robert Smith considered one of their worst ever so perhaps it wasn’t just me). So I can hardly give any band or singer points off for not transporting me to a place where I forget myself.

But it was notable to me that the dance floor where I was crammed in with an eclectic mix of concert-goers was the very same dance floor where I’d become a born-again Goth in 1991, while seeing Sisters of Mercy. You can laugh about it now, but in 1991 goth was considered “dead,” a fad that had run its course and was going to end with my generation. (Hah, not so much: Hot Topic came along shortly after and shopping mall commodification is the ultimate legitimization of any subculture in a capitalist society. But anyway.) At that show in 1991, even despite Sisters of Mercy declaring themselves anti-goth (“we’re just a rock and roll band,” Andrew Eldritch supposedly said) and goth supposedly being a dead fad, a Boston subculture coalesced. I wrote and published an essay about being born-again through the ecstatic ritual that the mosh pit at that show became. (I can’t remember which goth subculture magazine published it. Blue Blood? or Propaganda?) It was one of the top five concert experiences of my life, so it’s unfair to compare.

(Aside: I also saw Nine Inch Nails at that same club, and Peter Murphy, back in the day. I’ll be seeing Peter Murphy in two months on his acoustic retrospective tour after not having seen him at all in the intervening 20 years. I wonder what that will be like. Probably nothing like seeing Adam Lambert.)

Adam Lambert, House of Blues Boston, Feb 24 2016, Photo by Cecilia Tan

All this gothiness is relevant to this discussion of Adam Lambert of course not merely because of my personal history of seeing goth acts at this venue, which is now the “House of Blues Boston” but used to be a disco/night club called Avalon and before that The Citi Club and before that Metro–I should note that in the Citi days, this was the dance club where every Sunday night a few thousand gay men (plus some assorted lesbians and bisexuals like me) came out regularly for gay dance night, and so it was one of my regular haunts for that reason, too. The discussion of goth is relevant for two other reasons, one because I’m about to raise some questions about subculture and “cultural authenticity” and two because Adam himself, when he first hit the scene via American Idol, was the closest thing to a goth American Idol had ever seen. I wouldn’t have labeled him goth exactly, but maybe “21st century emo-glam.” Remember, goth was a direct outgrowth of glam, and emo was a direct outgrowth of goth. Where goth and glam seem to diverge most in the popular imagination, though, is that glam held a high level of theatrical artifice (we’ll get to David Bowie in a moment) while goth was supposedly the “authentic” baring of your dark, nihilistic soul.

We have a strange relationship with the thing called “authenticity” in this country. Being authentic is seen as a core American value. But I had to put “authenticity” in quotes because what we often respond to as “authentic” in American culture is actually versimilitude and not reality. An Asian-looking guy with no formal training at all standing behind a sushi counter is more “authentic” to us than, say, a white-looking guy who trained in Japan the traditional way. All too often when we go in search of the “authentic” food–or cultural experience of whatever kind–what actually satisfies people is the thing which meets our US-centric stereotyped expectations.

Among the questions I was trying to answer for myself about Adam Lambert and the show included: who are these people who are here to see him? Why are they here? And why aren’t there more of them? What exactly is the context of this concert? Unlike a goth show where the audience is a gathering of a subculture, what’s the cultural experience or identity that is authenticated by seeing Adam Lambert? Is going to see Adam Lambert a culturally or subculturally validating experience for any group or only for certain individuals?

The venue capacities for The Original High tour in the U.S. As of today (Feb 25) most of the dates were not sold out but were over 90% sold.

There was a wonderfully dizzying cross section of people at this concert. I heard people speaking at least five different languages while waiting in line to get in (English, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, and something I couldn’t identify but might have been German or Dutch?). Beside me in the crowd were a Japanese couple and behind me some girls speaking either Portuguese or Russian–I couldn’t quite hear. There were people in their sixties and fifties and forties and thirties and twenties and some people had brought their teens and children. There were queer hipster boys in flannel and hornrimmed glasses holding hands. There were middle-aged Glamberts in glitter. There were black twenty-somethings, both male and female. There were a surprisingly (to me) large number of what appeared to be white heterosexual suburban couples. I was surprised by the sheer number of men there, unlike the show I went to in Worcester during the warm-up phase of the tour (a radio station promo show where Adam and band did only ten songs) which was easily 90 percent female in attendance. (My entire section of the Worcester balcony had not a single man in it.) In Boston there appeared to be plenty of guys both gay and straight. Excellent.

(Adam almost seemed confused by who was there and why, too, as evidenced in this mid-show patter where he asked “Are you here because of Ghost Town?” expecting a cheer and got people shouting “No!”…)

It was wonderful to see such a diverse cross-section. But it made for a kind of strange cultural experience in that no one knew what the rules were. It was like people weren’t sure if they were supposed to dance or sing or scream or what. My impression was that although everyone had a good time, the crowd never fully came to life. I was fortunate to squish myself fairly close to the stage (about four or five people back) among some young women who were happy to dance and sing, but we were partly behind a tall guy (with his girlfriend) who stood there like a lump the entire concert. He finally bopped his head during the encore (during the Queen “Another One Bites the Dust” part of the medley). I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and tell him, dude, it’s okay to actually move.

Maybe he was afraid people would think he was queer if he did. I don’t know.

Which brings me to queerness as a subject. I was watching the career of Adam Lambert for years before I heard any of his music. I don’t have a television, so the only time I saw him on American Idol was while visiting my parents in Florida. (They were big Idol fans.) It wasn’t until a little later that the whole “is he gay or isn’t he?” rumor mill exploded and I sat up and took notice of him. Having been an activist for LGBT and queer rights and visibility since the 1980s myself, I was of course keenly interested to find out if we were really going to have our first “out right from the start of his career” American pop star or not.

Venue capacities in Asia/Australia were much higher than the US shows, and in Australia were reportedly 100% sold out.

The thing is, even if Adam Lambert had turned out not to be gay, the fact that the media went into such hysterics about the possibility was notable in and of itself to visibility activists. And of course it turned out Adam WAS gay and wasn’t even in the closet really, except for the fact that heterosexuality is assumed for everyone. Sigh. (The American Idol media blackout didn’t help–contestants aren’t allowed to speak to the media while it’s going on–which gave people the impression there was something to hide or that they were being coy about it. And how about the fact that various Idol alums came out later, including Clay Aiken.)

We had a supposedly out pop star once before–though not American, British–in David Bowie. You can read my other essays about Bowie (like this one), but my quick summary of Bowie’s sexuality and his career is this: although Bowie was a bisexual role model for me and many many other people, he “recanted” his declarations of queerness in his mid-30s. Ultimately I think what Bowie identified most with was with being an Artist with a capital A, and the necessity of being an outsider to creating such Art. Queerness was a form of outsider status he might have adopted, co-opted, or mistook for his kindred, OR maybe he really was queer and when he “recanted” was because instead of the label conferring artistic freedom as it did initially, by later in his career it was instead boxing him in. In interviews he later said that especially in America he was pigeonholed as “bisexual David Bowie” and if he’d known the label was going to become an albatross around his neck he never would have said it.

Adam Lambert knows this well. It’s unusual to see an article about him that doesn’t call him “openly gay Adam Lambert” as if it’s part of his name. I’ve seen interviews with Adam where he shows that it grates on him sometimes, as if being gay is the definition of being him, which it’s not. But Adam also realizes that he has arrived at a particular moment in the history of gay rights in America. (Though he was a bit reluctant to carry the torch at first, more recently he has embraced his role as standard-bearer and queer role model.) Obama was the first president to talk about “gay Americans” in a State of the Union address. Gay marriage (and bitter fights against it) have swept the nation. Like the first man to set foot on the moon, Adam Lambert gets to be the first one out of the closet, and he’ll always be remembered better than those who follow after him because of it. There have been a bunch of other coming outs (comings out?) of gay male pop singers since (Frank Ocean, Sam Smith, two country stars whose names I’ve forgotten but was able to Google: Ty Herndon and Billy Gilman) and I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few because now they’re in the wake of Adam Lambert.

But does being a historic pioneer for gay visibility sell records or put fannies in the seats?

Venue capacities for places Adam Lambert will be playing in Europe in 2016. Worth noting when comparing to the US list, some of these look small but are listed as "largest venue" in their given city.

The thing that grated on Bowie and perhaps Adam, too, is that being queer has nothing to do with whether your music is good. It doesn’t even really let you predict that type of music or genre it is (more on that in a bit.) So although there are the dedicated Glamberts out there, we come back to that question of who goes to see Adam Lambert? And if it’s a little bit of everybody in America, is that why America seems to have no urgency to go see him? He’s playing venues with a capacity of 2,000 on this tour of the U.S. That’s a far cry from the stadiums he filled with Queen in other parts of the world or even the mid-sized arenas that Q+AL played in the US. The show I’m seeing next month at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater (capacity 2,100) isn’t sold out yet. I heard people in line tonight say that tonight’s show wasn’t sold out and the venue sold off half-price tickets this afternoon (not sure it was true or not). If all Adam Lambert is, musically, is a really entertaining show and not an experience of communion with “your people” (whoever they may be) then is he worth leaving the house for? Is the problem of why Adam Lambert doesn’t draw in the USA essentially an image problem? Do people go to concerts because they just want to be entertained or because they expect to validate their own identities somehow by attending? My guess is that you need a core group of the latter in order to interest the former.

Obviously I think he *IS* worth leaving the house for or I wouldn’t be seeing him twice. But like I said, I spent all of tonight’s concert trying to figure out why the heck is it that Adam Lambert doesn’t fill bigger venues in the USA. I thought about a few other factors that could be at work. Is it that the American public is still kinda homophobic? It was widely believed in the late 70s and 80s that the reason Queen never drew well in concert here despite selling out giant stadiums everywhere else in the world was because Americans avoided anything too Queer. And let’s face it, the gay coding on a band called QUEEN is not actually all that subtle. But that was then. Is it different now?

(Here’s a 10-minute compilation of some of the highlight moments of the show that I filmed from my spot on the dance floor.)

Another thought: it looks to me like traditional radio and the traditional music industry have given a lukewarm reception to the past two albums. Why?

I’ll confess: I gave the current album (The Original High) a lukewarm reception myself (and I didn’t love Trespassing either). I think there are two or three outstanding tracks on it (Ghost Town, The Original High, and The Light), and the rest is pop filler. Am I reflective of the American consumer, here, or is it actually my music elitism showing? I can’t tell. I’m an old school alternative radio pioneer. I don’t like my music watered down or over-produced–I confess I’m an authenticity fan, too. However I do appreciate the artistry of a great performer and personality. For example, I think Madonna is fantastic and I’d be happy to see her in concert if the tickets weren’t outrageously expensive, but I don’t own any of her albums. Having worked in radio and being an alternative type, my tastes rarely line up with the American public. So me feeling like a lot of the latest Adam Lambert album is pop filler that Max Martin (the producer and main songwriter) could have just as easily foisted onto Britney Spears or Taylor Swift (to name only two of the many artists Max Martin has produced No. 1 hits for) is NOT probably what most of America thinks. Right?

Truth is Adam is a much more electrifying singer live than recorded. There’s a reason he blew everyone off the stage at American Idol. So the fact that the album struck me as meh was not going to stop me from seeing him live. In fact it won’t surprise you at all to know that one of my beefs with the three Adam Lambert studio albums is I really feel they don’t hang together. They’re too different from one another and each one seems to be searching for an identity and never quite finding it. But in concert tonight Adam seamlessly melded elements from all three albums AND his Idol days into an excellently coherent whole.

One highlight of the concert for me will surprise no one given my lifelong obsession with David Bowie: he did “Let’s Dance.” As I mentioned before, Bowie and Adam are going to be forever linked as queer pop singer icons, so it made sense that in the wake of Bowie’s passing that glam-standard bearer Adam would cover him. What some people might forget (but posthumous articles have reminded me) is that David Bowie’s career had plateau’d after the glam era ended and he was looked on (briefly) as something of an artistic genius but a commercial has-been. Bowie then set out to make a “hit record,” and he tapped Nile Rodgers of Chic to do it. Rodgers talks about how in the early 1980s his own musical career was pretty much dead because of the whole “disco is dead” attitude, but along comes Bowie, they collaborated, and the result was Bowie’s most successful commercial record ever. “Let’s Dance,” “Modern Love,” and “China Girl” were all Top 40 hits off the Let’s Dance album. Rodgers’ career was revived as a result and he has remained in demand as a producer and musical collaborator for three decades since.

So when it came time to make Adam’s sophomore record, Trespassing, RCA Records thought they would have a winning formula playing the Nile Rodgers card (Rodgers himself tweeted from the recording studio working with Adam “I really wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true-Working w Adam Lambert was one of the most organically perfect jams I’ve had since Bowie.”) and also bringing in Pharrell Williams to produce after Pharrell had been the magic touch for several other white pop artists. What you’ll read most places is that Trespassing debuted at number one on the Billboard album chart. What you won’t read is that sales fell off abruptly after that, American radio didn’t much care for it, and overall interest was so low in the USA that Adam did not tour the USA in support of Trespassing.

That’s right, the artist that everyone agrees is even better live than on recording, whose Glam Nation Live album and video charted, Did. Not. Tour. (Except Asia and Europe.) Personally I think part of why Trespassing didn’t hit was bad timing: a year later Daft Punk did a funky pop album with Nile Rodgers and had the biggest hit of the year (“Get Lucky”) and in particular radio was weak and streaming services had not yet filled the gap. So I think some of Trespassing’s disappointing results for RCA had more to do with the state of the industry than the actual album itself.

I also think the perceived change of genre from theatrical slightly gothy rock-pop to funk-pop hurt more than anyone on Team Adam thought it would. Here’s why:

In the 1980s there was a flat-out divide in the music industry between black and white. Actual race did not always matter whether an artist was classified as black or white. Madonna was classified as black when her first hits were on the radio. It wasn’t until after her videos were in heavy rotation and the news coverage of her “slutty” image (showing her bra strap! fishnets! gasp…) became ubiquitous that radio stations like WPLJ in New York were essentially forced to reclassified her from black to white. I was in the program director’s office when the decision was made to reclassify her. It was a big deal. A Top 40 station like WPLJ had this divide so that they would never play too many “black” songs in a row or in an hour, for fear they might alienate white listeners. You might also recall Michael Jackson calling out MTV around this same time (1984-1985) for failing to play videos by black artists (himself excepted). Radio and TV stations of course responded to criticisms of the practice of limit “black” (and even black-seeming) songs that they were in business to make money. They knew their audience, they would say, and this form of institutional segregation was necessary for them to chase the money.

In other words, they claimed the audience was racist, so they had to be racist to keep everyone happy. Hm.

Now it’s 2016 and times have supposedly changed, but looking around at the entrenched structural racism in many other American institutions being exposed by current events (policing, health care, etc) what are the chances that the structural racism in the music industry has changed? And even if the industry has changed, is there a still a perception (trained by this industry!) among the listening public that a line between black and white isn’t supposed to be crossed? (Never mind the fact that white artists have been co-opting and appropriating the sounds and talents of black artists since the music industry was invented–that’s a given and very troubling, but the vast majority of record buyers and music listeners out there aren’t about to start caring about cultural appropriation. Sadly.)

Adam’s American Idol image was very white. Emo-gothboy wonder. His first album, For Your Entertainment, changed his image from boy to man (more on that in a minute) but it stayed in the white lane. The pop-rock lane.

Was the problem that the funk/R&B-heavy Trespassing was such a Pharrell and Nile Rodgers production that it felt like a swerve from the white to black lane? And did people in radio and/or record buyers react negatively because of that?

I definitely don’t think it was a change that hardcore Glamberts wanted. If anything I saw persistent rumors representative of fan hopes that the next album was going to be more “alt rock”–i.e. more authentic (to something, what exactly who knows) and less slick and produced. Is the shift in lane what Adam wanted? Maybe. Is it what RCA Records wanted? Did they miscalculate how strongly people might have bought into Adam’s image and this was too much of a change in whatever direction?

(I love how old-school this video is, right through the Pat Benatar-esque dance-number that will save the world.)

It isn’t that white guys can’t be massively successful pop-soul or R&B singers–look at Justin Timberlake or Robin Thicke, speaking of Pharrell collaborators. But going from a rock flavor to a funk flavor felt like it left behind part of what many fans identified with about Adam. I think it’s notable that the two singles from the album, “Better Than I Know Myself” and “Never Close Our Eyes” are the “whitest” sounding songs on the whole record–both failed to make much of an impact on the charts, though. If you take those two off the album, the entire rest of the album sounds like a coherent R&B album. I do think most die-hard fans came to like Trespassing, but I think some folks basically got off the Adam Lambert bandwagon when it didn’t seem like the ride they signed up for.

Then RCA refused to let him make a third album unless he would do an album of 80s cover songs, which is about the whitest thing I can think of. Presumably this strategy was trying to cash in on the fact that people were still, years later, talking about Adam’s cover of Tears for Fears “Mad World” that was the turning point of American Idol, the song he even reprised during the Idol finals. Him *not* doing it during the Glam Nation tour was pretty much the only complaint I saw concert reviewers have. In other words, RCA was desperate to grasp whatever straw they could — meanwhile Adam was desperate to move on with his actual career. 24 hours after announcing he was leaving RCA, Adam had been picked up by Warner Brothers.

A little bit of @adamlambert doing Mad World by Tears for Fears #tohustour #theoriginalhightour

A video posted by Cecilia Tan (@ctan_writer) on Feb 24, 2016 at 8:50pm PST

So. Getting back to tonight’s concert. “Let’s Dance” was already in Adam’s repertoire before Bowie’s death because he had played it with Nile Rodgers at a few promo shows they did around New York and such when a Trespassing tour was still a viable possibility. So yes, that made perfect sense in tonight’s show, and it also fit beautifully in a set that managed to meld all three (or four) different “Adams” into a coherent whole.

Adam is a showman, a crowd pleaser. What’s not to like? He’s beautiful to look at and has one of the best voices of a generation. So why aren’t more Americans clamoring to see him? The show opens with the stage dark and a heavy electronica dance remix of “Better Than I Know Myself” playing over the PA. Anticipation builds, then sparkly lights twinkle from the four projection screens at the back of the stage, then WHAM the lights come up on the full band playing a live intro while the letters A-D-A-M appear one at a time. It’s dramatic and visual and tremendous. And Adam himself isn’t even on the stage yet!

When he does hit the stage, it begins a 45-minute-long block of music that has no break, no between-song patter, it just slams right through song after song after song. The set is very cannily arranged, both in terms of which songs are mashed up or medleyed and what songs are chosen in the first place. The first song is “Evil in the Night” from the new album, but it segues directly into a song that should be delirium-inducing for the post-Idol-era fans, “For Your Entertainment.”

This song, the title track from Adam’s first album post-Idol, was notably absent from the Glam Nation tour (as was the aforementioned “Mad World” though I hear he did crack it out during encores once in a while). “For Your Entertainment” was of course the song at the center of the “controversy” that resulted from his American Music Awards performance. Talk about canny: I thought the whole performance at the AMAs was absolutely brilliant meta-commentary on the state of pop music in the USA and especially the whole mess Adam had just been through regarding the intense scrutiny of his possible sexual orientation. Think about what the lyrics of the song are. The song equates being a great lover in bed with being an entertainer — “I’m here for your entertainment.”

A few of the lyrics (and my interpretations):

Oh, do you know what you got into? (hey national TV broadcast!)

Can you handle what I’m ’bout to do? (I’m about to kiss a man!)

‘Cause it’s about to get rough for you (And people are going to freak out!)

I’m here for your entertainment



Oh, I bet you thought I was soft and sweet (Because American Idol enforced media silence)

‘Ya thought an angel swept you off ya feet (I get to be myself now that I’m not on Idol)

But I’m about to turn up the heat (because now my sexuality can be displayed at last)

I’m here for your entertainment

(Honestly to me the most shocking thing about the AMA performance is that Adam is notably flat three different times (!) something I’ve never seen since!)

Adam claims that actually kissing Tommy Joe Ratliff during the AMA TV performance of FYE was a spur of the moment thing, but the rest of the performance, with dancers on leashes and such, was calculatedly over-the-top sexual. And even if that first kiss was spur of the moment, Adam then doubled down on the male kiss as a statement of artistic freedom and visibility by turning into the most infamous piece of fanservice on the Glam Nation tour. Every night during the song “Fever” Adam would kiss Tommy Joe. Dozens of fan videos would appear nightly and there are many many many video compilations of Adam/Tommy liplocks and onstage moments.

There was no onstage kiss tonight during The Original High tour, although there is some lovely hot dancing between Adam and his two sidekicks who do double duty as backup singers and dancers: Terence Spencer, who danced on Glam Nation and is seen in the Ghost Town video, and Holly Hyman, who appeared in a production of WICKED with Adam in 2008 prior to his American Idol days. (Great Instagram picture of them from those days which she posted: https://www.instagram.com/p/BBGnU8hQL3S/)

Taking it allllll the way back…2008 #fbf #happybirthdayAdam #ourwickedways #mybossbad #mywickedwoe #myaquarianally #mygorgeousgenius

Happy Valentine’s Day! New gay erotic novella by Cecilia Tan just went live!

SPANISH NIGHTS is a new novella based on material that originally appeared in my web serial, but with new elements added, additional sex scenes, and made to stand alone. It’s the story of a torrid affair between two men whose common languages are music and sex. It’s also my first experiment with Kindle Unlimited, so this particular ebook is only available right now on Amazon for $2.99 (or free if you’re a KU member)!

It’s got lots of what I do best–sex scenes–and lots of what I do almost as well, which is writing about art and music. :-)

For those who haven’t read Daron’s Guitar Chronicles–YOU DON’T HAVE TO! You can jump in and read this novella without needing to read any of the rest of DGC. If you’re a fan of m/m or my erotic slash fiction or my books like The Prince’s Boy, please give this one a try, and tell your friends!

If you’re in KU, I will receive a small royalty from Amazon for every page a KU member looks at. So please do page through it if you’re a KU member!

I’ll post a hot excerpt tomorrow. I’m on the road today at a convention and need to pick something suitably hot out!

Official description:

Two men, a chance meeting, a torrid affair.

One an internationally known rock star, the other from the streets of Spain: they meet in an erotic tale as hot as a summer night in Seville, as seductive as red wine and song.

Daron didn’t expect to find a lover that day at the airport. He didn’t expect to suddenly change his plans and fly to Spain instead of Boston. But sometimes opportunity knocks and you have to grab Fate by the lapels and kiss until you’re breathless. Daron’s career, and his acceptance of his sexuality, are about to take a sudden, unexpected turn.

Orlando is as mysterious as he is beautiful, doe-eyed and nimble-fingered. To Daron, his presence seems to beckon something from deep within. When the two guitarists meet, they play duets and jam together to pass the time, but music sparks a deeper desire to connect, to touch, to love. But when Daron arrives in Spain he finds Orlando entangled in something more than simply sweaty sheets…

This Spanish Nights ebook also contains the complete erotic story “Home Sweet Home” as a bonus.

The key that unlocks the meaning behind all of David Bowie

Oh my god. I just figured out what the central overarching meaning of the entirety of David Bowie’s life’s work is. All of it. It all fits. And I can’t figure out why I never saw this before.

My god. It all makes sense.

No, I’m not on drugs. No, I wasn’t even trying to figure it out. But since Blackstar came out I’ve been pondering the meaning of the video and lyrics, and especially since Bowie’s death I’ve been re-pondering it over and over, and listening to The Next Day, and other Bowie albums and songs, as well as listening to a radio documentary about him (narrated by Tim Minchin), and Amanda Palmer & Jherek Bischoff’s string quartet tribute, and other things as comfort in the wake of grief, using the music to try to fill up the inexplicable hole that was left in my psyche.*

Tonight I was watching the DVD “Best of Bowie,” which I’ve had for years (got as a fantastic Christmas present) and I usually watch piecemeal. Tonight I tried to watch it chronologically, starting at the beginning, but now I’ve paused to start this essay because the video for “Space Oddity” is the key to the entire thing.

Here it is. Here’s the secret that’s been in front of our eyes all this time:

In all of Bowie’s work, outer space is a metaphor for fame itself.

Maybe a million semiotics and pop culture theses have already been written on this subject: I don’t know. All I know is I never realized it before now, and now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it. And the more songs I analyze the more I realize it fits.

Let’s start at the beginning, or pretty close to it. I’ve long thought that the metaphor of being from outer space in Bowie’s work merely represented being outside the strictures of society, which Bowie took as impingements on his creativity and artistic freedom. In particular at the start he placed his artistic personas outside those strictures by avoiding cisgender heteronormativity. Ziggy Stardust and the period from 1969 through 1974 cemented him as a queer icon in every sense of the word “queer.” Not like the others. Weird. Strange. Gay. Genderbent. Yes, no, and everything in between.

“But was he bisexual?” I hear you asking. I’ve written before many times (like here) about how I took him myself as a bisexual role model because he seemed to be the only one, and about how bisexuality itself was a marker of futurism in early sci-fi (here). But was he? The interview canon is clear on only one point: that Bowie declared his sexual identity to be different things at different times. He married Angela in 1970 but in a 1972 interview with Melody Maker stated “I am gay.” (But by the word “gay” seemed perhaps to mean what we now mean by “queer” — a catch-all term for everything that is not a zero on the Kinsey scale — and the same article says “He supposes he’s what people call bisexual.”) Two years later came the September 1976 Playboy interview (with Cameron Crowe!) in which he says “It’s true—I am bisexual.” But skip forward to a 1983 Rolling Stone interview (with Kurt Loder!) and you’ll find him saying that declaring himself bisexual was the biggest mistake he ever made, and from there on many many later interviews “recanting” or stating he wasn’t a “real” bisexual, or that he was so promiscuous that he was physical with men but he didn’t really like it (which I suppose is the pop star version of “I smoked pot but I didn’t inhale”). Just Google and you’ll find them.

The hero of my novel Slow Surrender is based on circa 1984 Bowie and the chapter titles are all drawn from his songs.

These varying statements actually all make sense if you look at them within the context of art itself, though, and the fact that Bowie’s priority was always artistic freedom. Bowie’s “bisexual phase” came at a time when being bi was the quickest way to place himself outside of the realm of the expected. His later recantations often make explicit that the reason he came to hate being “labeled” bisexual was BECAUSE IT CREATED STRICTURES AND EXPECTATIONS. In particular he had not realized that in the United States he would be forever after referred to, as if it were part of his name, “bisexual pop star David Bowie,” and so it is no wonder he did everything possible to sever what had once been a liberating force but had become a ball and chain.

He never would succeed in laying the question to rest, though, because interviewers well into this decade were still asking him about it. Not to mention that for a full four decades Angie Bowie was still doing the talk show circuit telling the same story about finding David and Mick Jagger in bed together. I’ve always wondered why no one actually seems to care whether Mick Jagger is bi and far as I can tell it’s because regardless of what he may do in bed, Jagger long ago became a conformist, an unchanging classic rock icon, whereas Bowie’s persistent “consistent” mode of expression was NEVER to conform to expectations. And in our culture, nonconformists will always be challenged while conformists will be given a pass.

Ultimately the “queerness” of Bowie’s image was not sexuality per se, but an ARTISTIC queerness that required constant change to stay out of the center. None of that is news. Bowie became the patron saint of misfits by his constant movement to whatever thing gave him “outsider” status because outside perspective was his muse. He seemed to be saying “never play it safe, always reach for the stars.” Don’t just sit around with your feet in the mud like boring, regular humans: go for launch, even if it’s dangerous. No: Because it’s dangerous.

And this brings us to why outer space is a metaphor for fame itself in Bowie’s work, not just in the Ziggy Stardust era but right through to his most recent two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar.

As I mentioned at the top of the essay, watching a video for “Space Oddity” made it obvious to me. The Mick Rock-directed video on the “Best of Bowie” two DVD set is dated 1972, but the song comes from 1969 and was re-released again in ’73. The budget being low and special effects being non-existent at the time, the video features Bowie lip-synching solo with a guitar intercut with various “sci-fi” and “space age”-seeming visuals of giant control boards full of switches and wave forms on an LCD. But wait, those control boards are the mixing board in the recording studio. And that green wave form is SOUND…

Maybe these elements are used just because they looked cool, were on hand, and there wasn’t a budget for anything else.

Or maybe they’re saying that the recording studio itself is “mission control.” Our Starman is being launched from right there inside the music studio, not into outer space but into the stratosphere of fame.

The constant equating of beings from–or in–outer space as superior to conformist humans continues throughout Bowie’s work, not just in Ziggy Stardust. So he sings in 1971’s Hunky Dory: “Oh! You Pretty Things.”

This song tells the story of aliens come to Earth and equates them with the teenagers busting out of the strictures of the older generation, declaring among other things, that “Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use” and “You gotta make way for the Homo Superior.”

Look at your children

See their faces in golden rays

Don’t kid yourself they belong to you

They’re the start of a coming race

Also from Hunky Dory is “Life on Mars.” With a title like that you think it’s going to be about, well, Mars. No, it’s about the ENTERTAINMENT BUSINESS. Mars is Planet Hollywood. The song references Mickey Mouse, “Lennon on sale,” the film industry, and maybe even presages reality TV and our addictions to Fox News/CNN:

And she’s hooked to the silver screen

But the film is a saddening bore

For she’s lived it ten times or more

…

Take a look at the Lawman

Beating up the wrong guy

Oh man! Wonder if he’ll ever know

He’s in the best selling show

Is there life on Mars?

(By the way…is there any chance this 1973 video didn’t influence the production design of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which came out in 1975 but was based on a London stage show from 1973? Which way did the influence run, I wonder, given that Frank N Furter is a transvestite alien from outer space?)

In the complicated chronology of Bowie’s early career, Ziggy then got re-released, and the song “Starman” became the next big hit. A fantastic re-telling of the science fiction rock opera plot of Ziggy Stardust is found in a 1974 Rolling Stone interview, in which Bowie and William S. Burroughs interview each other. Bowie explains that Ziggy is a rock star who becomes a prophet for the Infinites (who are personified black holes) and who is ultimately destroyed in service to these beings from space: they literally take parts of his body to give themselves bodies to inhabit.

But the lyrics we all know are:

“When the kids had killed the man, I had to break up the band.”

So in Ziggy Stardust, not only does outer space=fame, it can kill you.

On the subject of fame itself being a central theme, how about 1970’s (pre-Ziggy-re-release) album “The Man Who Sold The World.” Title self-explanatory. This is the album where an androgynous long-haired Bowie wears a dress on the cover. Or for that matter the song “Fame,” from 1975, when Bowie was out of the Ziggy Stardust phase and into his Thin White Duke phase.

By 1980, of course we have the “sequel” to “Space Oddity,” in the song “Ashes to Ashes,” which is fairly universally interpreted as using the “Major Tom” character as a biographical stand-in for Bowie to sing about his own drug addiction–one of the prices of fame. In the video we even see an attack of “the shakes” brought on by a camera flash. We also see here something I haven’t brought up before but which also shows up as a motif regarding fame and adulation, which is religious figures: see previous ideas about Ziggy Stardust as a prophet, etc.

But what if we posit not only “Ashes to Ashes” but that the original Major Tom in “Space Oddity” was always meant to be a biographical stand-in for Bowie, musing on what would happen if his career “took off” and propelled him into being “a star”? “The papers want to know whose shirts you wear.”

Think about it. If looking in from outside was Bowie’s muse, then all of Bowie’s art is meta-art, too, because it looks at itself from inside and outside. Bowie was nothing if not aware of what he was doing at all times.

I’d also like to bring in the short film “Jazzin’ for Blue Jean” which seems to be largely forgotten these days. Bowie worked with director Julien Temple (later of Absolute Beginners) and tapped him to introduce the persona of Screaming Lord Byron. It was 1984 and the heyday of MTV, which debuted the 20-minute film much the way it had the long version of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. In the film Bowie plays both the helpless rock star who is propped up by his entourage, fed endless drugs, and who suffers intense paranoia and agoraphobia except while performing, and also the hapless nobody who hopes that pretending to be friends with the rock star will impress a woman. It doesn’t get much more blatant than that as an indictment of the rock star mythos and dangers of fame while at the same time being yet another work representing Bowie’s chameleonic nature.

Fast forward to 1996 and let’s talk about “Hallo Spaceboy,” the next most obvious reference to Major Tom. In remixes with The Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant, Tennant sings lyrics from “Space Oddity” as if they had gone through the William S. Burroughs “cut up” technique. But even before that, the song exists as an encapsulation of Bowie’s own experience of fame, one in which interviewers asked him, incessantly, throughout his entire life, whether he was bisexual, when all he wanted was to be free to create more art:

And I want to be free

Don’t you want to be free

Do you like girls or boys

It’s confusing these days

But Moondust will cover you

The chorus he repeats again and again is “This chaos is killing me. Bye bye love.” Do I even have to explain this one any further than that? Spaceboy=Major Tom=Bowie both suffering from and thriving on fame. It’s confusing these days, but moondust will cover you.

(I love this live version with Nine Inch Nails…)

We can even make a stop in 2003, when Bowie’s album was called Reality, and the single was “New Killer Star.”

Oh, my nuclear baby

Oh, my idiot trance

All my idiot questions

Let’s face the music and dance

Yep. (And there are many other songs I could bring in but this essay is getting really long as it is.)

And that brings us to The Next Day, Bowie’s “surprise” album of 2013. Most of us assumed that after a massive heart attack in 2004–suffered backstage while on tour in Germany–that he had retired. He had only appeared live once, for a single song at a benefit concert, after the attack, and was not seen in the public eye much, either, for nearly a decade. But then, voila, out came a fully formed album of guitar-driven rock, packed with references to his early career–even the cover of the album is the cover of Heroes merely pasted over with the words THE NEXT DAY in simple text. As I said before, all Bowie art is meta-art, and that made The Next Day meta-meta-art.

Several videos were released to promote the album, one of them (above) an extended short film co-starring Tilda Swinton, a British actress who was so often fancifully called the “female David Bowie” in her career (specifically for projecting a Bowie-esque otherworldly androgyny) that it seemed fated that they should eventually work together. That song is “The Stars are Out Tonight” and the film literally brings the fictionalized version of retiree Bowie and wife (Swinton) face to face with young, urgent, genderbent tabloid-press versions of themselves. The lyrics seem another indictment of celebrity:

They watch us from behind their shades

Brigitte, Jack and Kate and Brad

…

We will never be rid of these stars

But I hope they live forever

How could I have missed it before? Of course. THE STARS. ARE. THE STARS.

Which brings us, of course, to Blackstar, which is both the name of the album Bowie knew would be his farewell, and the major single from it, pre-released with a video that seems to tell us that Major Tom’s ultimate fate was for his skull to become the worship object of a cult. (Is the compulsive ecstatic dancing a reference to “Let’s Dance”–“put on your red shoes and dance the blues”–where the red shoes could be a reference to the fairy tale of compulsive dancing?)

“Blackstar” is a rangy and ambitious song that covers a lot of ground, but it serves perfectly as the encapsulation of this idea that outer space and fame are one and the same in Bowie’s work. Major Tom went into outer space and now he is the object of adulation. Being a star is literally being a star. I’ve seen analyses of the song’s lyrics that state there is no unifying story to the lyrics. But when I look at them they ALL point to this same central theme of the Star as Star: being from space, object of adulation, celebrity.

You’re a flash in the pan (I’m not a marvel star)

I’m the Great I Am (I’m a blackstar)

​

I’m a blackstar, way up on money, I’ve got game

I see right, so wide, so open-hearted pain

I want eagles in my daydreams, diamonds in my eyes

(I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar)

​

Something happened on the day he died

Spirit rose a metre then stepped aside

Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried

(I’m a blackstar, I’m a star’s star, I’m a blackstar)

Ultimately, then, I see this theme of outer space=fame to have a progression in which Bowie has used it throughout his entire career to express his own fear that fame would destroy him, until at the very end he came to realize it would not.



Ziggy Stardust is torn to pieces by “the kids” and/or the black holes, Major Tom is lost in space, or maybe is lost to drugs and addiction and self-delusion (“Time and time I tell myself, I’ll stay clean tonight… but the planet it glowing.”), Screaming Lord Byron belongs in an asylum except he’s the Golden Goose, and Spaceboy is so torn apart by the constant questioning that the “chaos is killing me.” But then in the face of mortality, post-heart-attack, a kind of reluctant acceptance sets in: “We will never be rid of these stars, but I hope they live forever.” And ultimately Bowie knew with Blackstar as a parting gift, a sendoff, that the message was that he WILL live forever. Because all the kids who took parts of him into themselves assured it. Those of us who knew him through his music will continue to know him through it and the man himself can pass on in peace. And someone–perhaps everyone–who absorbed the moondust will rise up next.

Goodnight, spaceboy.

—

*When I say hole, I should probably say ravaged tatters, because Bowie was so inextricably woven throughout all my own creative work for my entire life so much I didn’t even realize the extent. He was so much a part of the artistic air I breathe that I took him for granted, I think. But think about it: the hero of my multiple award-winning romance novel Slow Surrender is based on him. The most important character after Daron in my magnum opus Daron’s Guitar Chronicles is named Ziggy. Being a misfit bisexual who defies easy labeling and doesn’t stick to a single genre has been my creative and artistic role my entire life, making Bowie a role model on multiple levels. My previous elegy “It’s like a guardian angel is gone” is here http://blog.ceciliatan.com/archives/2690