Michael Curtis Hilde's Blog, page 2

Arthurdesh music festival program guide booklet: page one

Arthurdesh music festival program guide booklet: page one

Arthurdesh music festival program booklet, pages 1 & 2

Arthurdesh music festival program booklet, pages 1 & 2

Arthurdesh music festival program, pages 3 & 4

Arthurdesh music festival program, pages 3 & 4

Arthurdesh music festival program booklet, page 5 and daily...

Arthurdesh music festival program booklet, page 5 and daily planner section

Arthurdesh music festival program booklet, back cover

Arthurdesh music festival program booklet, back cover

meditation sesh 4am

meditation sesh 4am

What's Freefantasy?

Freefantasy (a.k.a. Phantasy, Psychfantasy) is a new genre of literature which appears with the release of The Whisplins Trilogy. It’s a genre of fantasy that borrows from the tradition of fantasy fiction just as heavily as from cinema, music, comics, as well as other genres entirely. It belongs to the New Wave of Geekery, Nerdism and Cosplayers just as much as it’s for a wider audience of literature and music fans elsewhere. It borrows from philosophy, the counterculture, surrealism, and adopts the “post-whatever” view on media. It’s a new genre which doesn’t necessarily follow all the dogmatic rules of prior fantasy fiction; it’ll often bend or break the rules entirely, or step out of the world of fantasy for a moment within its own pages to get perspective. It’s influenced by the movies, psychedelia, science-fiction— bringing it all into a mossy phantasmal dreamland.

Some of the films which influenced the creation of the genre were Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, The Princess Bride as well as the more cerebral writing of Alan Moore, the gore and darkness of Grimmtales, and the fantasy landscapes of music like Led Zepplin and the entire psych-folk scene— all much moreso than populist films like The Lord of the Rings influenced it, for example. Though I liked the first one a lot.

Freefantasy is also less rigid in its use of language: it doesn’t necessarily try to speak in simple tiny words so that everyone understands. Like your favorite college professor, it teaches to the top of the classroom, but keeps you with it, talking to readers in a sort of heteroglossia— a mixing of languages. The Freefantasy voice might be written in a long streaming torrent of Harry Potterish Britishisms one moment, then entirely switch gear into parental advisory explicit lyrics-mode next up. Some might think it’s a poetic form.

William Faulkner once chastised Ernest Hemingway for not being daring enough in his use of language. Freefantasy fully embraces that daringness of spirit that Faulkner demaded, and matches it with its equally daring content which might be by turns anarchistic, and at others sublime and illuminating as the action unfolds.

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Note:

The Whisplins Trilogy is available for free download on 11/23/12-11/24/12 right here http://tinyurl.com/bdzhgxz

Fantasy Flashback: Favorite Independent Fantasy Bookstores

There's an unassuming small used bookstore in Fremont, California hidden amidst the big box outdoor mall sprall which is just beastly to behold. The bookstore is called something like Half-Price Books, Records and Magazines, and within it's clearly a reliquary.

From the warehouse ceiling hang 80s-era section signs dotted in offset-printed confetti and playful broad turquoise brushstrokes behind the lettering, like something out of Jazzercise. I liked it there a lot when I first found it. One of the many sections they had to offer was a prodigious Fantasy section-- as impressive as the Fantasy section at BookBuyers on Lighthouse Ave in Monterey, where the entire Sci-Fi/Fantasy section is crammed into a weird narrow room that seems to be tunneled out of the wall and to hook behind it, has a low entry, and all the walls inside are teetering with Fantasy paperack spines packed tight enough to burst. One almost feels as if she were entering unto some actual Fantasy Realm at Bookbuyers. The word-choice "sidereal" seems perfect for the tiny space's numinous sideways entry.

In Fremont, the former section matches the latter in Monterey based on sheer volume of books alone. Like a reliquary box containing boneshards of saints and pieces of the true cross, this long aisle-- which runs down the middle of the store-- seems to possess nearly every fantasy series since the sixties on up to the present. And the cover-art on every book is just right on.

However, I've always found myself at a loss for what to choose, where to begin in these powerfully enchanting aisles. I suppose we've all been sufficiently influenced by now by The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. And most if not all of the population has been exposed to the recent big budget Fantasy film worlds these books produced. The cumulative effect is that we sort of exist in a Post-Fantasy milieu: a world in which the genre has been so thoroughly explored that we're more interested in bending the rules rather that following them. Which are our tastes more influenced by, Fantasy literature, or Fantasy films?

Writing in the Redwoods

In my little treehouselike cabin in the woods, it can be either really hard or really easy to write. It's hard when there are a lot of things to think about other than writing; it's easy when the spirit seizes me, and the mist is pouring over the ridge of redwoods opposite my writing desk. I carved this desk from two barndoors I salvaged from the Feed n' Fuel. That was the old cowboy bar that used to be down the street from where I grew up. It got closed down a few years ago, sold to developers. But I took these two plywood barn doors from the wreckage site, and my Dad and I made a desk out of them. They're painted the drunkest pale blue mooncolor. Cowboys used to stagger through my desk with rattlesnake taxidermy on their big black hats, wearing sunglasses at night. My ex-girlfriend and I used to slowdance to Neil Young on the jukebox at the Feed 'n Fuel. After I made this desk, I later carved a picture of a whale into it, using the relief cut techniques I'd been reading about in Elmer John Tangerman books.

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