Matt Maxwell's Blog: Highway 62 on Goodreads, page 20

This week's links - 01/07/19

So in the interests of feeding the Howling Pit some, I'm going to include fun links that I've found in the recent now. Might even say a bit about them. We used to call this linkblogging back in the olden days. Maybe we'll come up with a new word for it now.Quake OSTHere's the ambient soundtrack for QUAKE, from 1995 or so if memory serves. It was composed and performed by Trent Reznor/NIN (don't recall who got the official credit.) It's nice and claustrophobic, downright crawly at times. All of it driven by mid 90s sonic palette and filtering. I'm guessing it was probably done on a Mac as DOWNWARD SPIRAL was legendarily composed on a Mac IIc. Enjoy the trip in the wayback machine.Yeah, this came from the 90s as well. One of the tumblrs I ran across (no, the platform isn't dead) throws up early internet imagery (really 2000s or so, so kind of third generation internet for me, but the explosion of memetic culture online). Made me think of the cover of NIN's YEAR ZERO, only all soft and cuddly.Kraftwerk in 1981Kraftwerk, maybe not at the height of their powers, but certainly one of the phases of their career that I love most, with a bonus warm-up track from Wendy Carlos, which I'm sure set the minds of many future electronic musicians spinning back at the end of the sixties. The set itself is from 1981, though they reach back for "Autobahn" and a few other favorites. I'd pay good money for a technical breakdown of their setups over the years. The machines let the humans make interesting choices when it came time to make sounds.THE BOSTON TEA PARTY - Velvet UndergroundOn the other end of the spectrum is Velvet Underground's infamous BOSTON TEA PARTY set. This is one of the best recordings of a band that was often better served by its live/bootleg recordings than it was on album. Aquarium Drunkard posted this YT link, though I snagged this back in the days of Napster, so a long time ago indeed.http://www.openculture.com/2018/02/1600-occult-books-now-digitized-put-online.htmlI haven't had time to go through this myself, but here's 1600 occult texts thanks to the nice folks at OpenCulture. Plenty of summoning and ensorcelling opportunities await!Egyptian TheatreI don't remember it looking like that the one time I saw a film there in 1991. The film was THE DARK BACKWARDS and I did not like it at all. This from ffactory.tumblr.comI'm going to have to tackle JOHNNY MNEMONIC sometime. It's an odd movie coming out at an odd time for movies. Pre-MATRIX, which reshaped science fiction for a generation or more. It's the only big screen Gibson adaptation we've gotten. NEW ROSE HOTEL was very much an indie affair, eschewing nearly every Gibsonian bit of technology, whereas MNEMONIC runs headlong into the Sprawl.Here's a weird bit of history from oldschoolfrp.tumblr.com -- the appearance of the Rankin-Bass HOBBIT adaptation in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in 1977, with inflatable Smaug overshadowing even Underdog, who must've been long in the tooth by then.Screenshot from the conclusion of the NIGHTBREED interactive game. Not sure what year, but early 90s at a guess. Two of my favorite aesthetics colliding, leaving beautiful debris in its wake.NEMESIS THE WARLOCK -- 2000ADArt by John Hicklenton, who brought a sense of the grotesque to the art, imparting an almost occult significance to the violence of his posings. This is something I should come back for a longer look at, but who knows when I'll have the time.If you wanna see more free content like this, you really gotta hep other folks to it. Mostly on twitter, 'cause I might see it there. Won't likely see it anywhere else.

FULL BLEED: ONE MUST IMAGINE SISYPHUS HAPPY

So this is a 2018 wrap-up. Let's take a look, shall we?Work from a project that's still sort of in limbo. Probably spent too much time on it, but wow is it ever pretty.Based on a cartoon done up by a friend. Kind of a fresh, loose thing. Nice to do these from time to time and not freak out about detail levels.Staying on brand once again. Inspired by a project I came up with last year. Maybe I'll even write it this year. Unfortunately, it's best as a comic and those are too expensive to take on lightly.Ah, yes. The huge, multi-stage project, the smallest step of which was creating up a reusable alphabet made of neon tubes. Educational, in terms of dealing with the physical media (which I couldn't) and what you need to do to represent various strokes/line. You'll see more of this below.Logo design for QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS, which mostly went unused. Mixed feelings on this.Ah, there's the type set at work. So, I did two of these for QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS promotion. The above is Cait MacReady, the main character. I'll show Ariella below. The design is based on the neon over the old Carroll Theatre in Los Angeles. I can't draw, but I can copy like a mother. These really should go on t-shirts or something.There was a third one planned in the series, but ultimately, these two were the most important for promotion, etc. Not a lot of demand beyond this.This was probably the most fun I had on a project this year, though I spent far too much time on it for its importance. Oh well. This, as you might've guessed, is a club flyer for a show that takes place during the events of QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS (and even teases the radio show that soundtracks the events of the climax the following night.) A lot went into this. Mostly because, surprise, doing cut up art takes a long time even when you have a computer doing the heavy lifting. But on the plus side, I now have a library of woodcut art to pull from. Some of my own photography in there too, just heavily treated. And yeah, all the logo designs for the band and the club itself. All in all, a satisfying and convincing document of a past that never was.Not much original writing under the bridge this year. Not much to show, that is. A lot of pages generated in the pursuit of further books, though. I plotted out a companion book for QUEEN, though it only has minor character overlap and takes place a few years before. This came out of a story that I wrote for a planned anthology which I have no idea whether will see the light of day or not. But in it is the roots of CINDY SAYS FOLLOW, which has some familiar faces in it, most particularly the city of Los Angeles, which I do love so very dearly.Also plotted out THAT BLACK RADIANCE, which takes place around a year after QUEEN, focusing on Cait and Alondra and even Anton of No Tomorrows. This the more traditional sequel, though I'm not entirely comfortable with the term, simply because it invites all manner of expectation and an invitation to franchise. And let's be sure. I'd love to have the level of success that would require a franchise out of me, just endless content and seeming-story after seeming-story yet nothing ever comes to an end because why kill the golden goose? You kill the golden goose because that's how you get to meaningful story. Otherwise all you're doing is running through an endless middle of the work, never getting to an end. The end and delivered consequence is what gives any story power. It's something we are forever denied in this life, which is why we crave it so mightily in our entertainment. We want things to happen and to have meaning. But we don't want to say goodbye to Captain America, so he's gotta live forever, dig? He can't ever rest.Ah, yes. Started work on the longform SOLARCHY, which will probably go out under the name VOIDMAW unless something better comes along. The story's evolved quite a bit from the short anthology piece that it sprung from. I'm afraid it's rather out of control now and that's the only way you know that you're onto something worth keeping. This story is about Merinna, a court composer for a planetary governor in the outer Sol system and what happens when her path crosses with Althule, who is for lack of a better word, an Inquisitor who's lost his faith. It takes place in a galactic empire in decline, unable to square matters of faith with control and how dead gods are much more convenient than living ones. With some cosmic horror. And a lot of beauty.So yeah, I'm able to show more visual art than actual writing. Hooray.Yes, QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS got published this year (not even a month ago.) That's a big deal, but ultimately not one that I had too much direct control over. Did it make a ripple? Who knows. I certainly won't. The Howling Pit is able to destroy all manner of achievement nearly instantly, so I can't use that as a metric of any use. I'm certainly glad for the effort that Scott Gable over at Broken Eye put into the work, improving my wandering prose with his edits and helping get Gabriel Hardman on the cover.But it's there now and it wasn't before.Oh, right. This year I also made a series of images of Godzooky with quotes from Camus overlaid upon them. I think they're probably the most successful thing I've done this year. Other than the tweet of mine that went viral and got 10k RTs, 40k likes and sold maybe five copies of my book. Five. That's a pretty good percentage for the Howling Pit.Don't give up, kids. Keep on dreaming big.

FULL BLEED: FAITH AIN'T MECHANICAL

I'd really meant to get more done over the holidays, but like all pure and good intentions, it was about as meaningful as a sugarcube in a downpour. So I've been doing pre-writing on the thing that's currently called VOIDMAW. I'm sure a better, more compelling title will come to me while I'm writing it. But then I said that about QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS, and all that happened with that was the omission of a THE at the beginning.By the by, QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS is available now, both as an ebook and real world physical book. You can order it here. As always, if you order direct from the publisher, you pay a touch more, but all the money goes to them (as opposed to however much going to Amazon.) But if you're motivated to and you've read the book, feel free to leave an Amazon review else it'll never get absorbed into their algorithms and may as well actually not even exist. I'm not exaggerating that, either.But one of the things that I'd been thinking about while working on VOIDMAW worked around matters of faith in cosmic horror/SF. I mean, Lovecraft called all these things ancient gods with cults arrayed around them. Veneration and worship are suggested if not demanded with this terminology. And yet, HPL's work, in particular, is spiritually barren. So's the bit of Derleth's work that I've read. They hint at sort of an apocalyptic wonder, but only dance around it.HPL's spiritualism is nonexistent. He was a materialist. Maybe even a pure rationalist, or pretended to be such. I'd seen this issue come up in online discussion of early cosmic horror, and in particular how there was a kind of desperate flight from anything resembling worship much less spirituality in his work. Magic was technology. Our shrinking away into insanity in the face of the elder gods? It wasn't magical or extra-rational, rather it was a *pure* rational reaction to the kind of gibbering insanity embodied by these beings. Yes, he called them gods, and suggested that they were worshipped. But it was always by debased creatures and humans who'd plunged to that level. Or they were primitive, savage. All loaded terms.And if there were civilized humans who worshipped these creatures? Well, that was all purely transactional, in the pursuit of power that would be granted them by the Great Old Ones. Or at least indifference as Cthulhu gobbled up anyone besides the individuals who'd summoned him up from dread R'lyeh. Granted, I'm moving past HPL here. A lot of this stuff is second/third generation mythos sorts of activity. Of course, as he wrote more and more and the mythos progressed, HPL introduced races that if not human, were at least thinking creatures, not merely avatars of chaos. The Mi-Go, Old Ones and Great Race of Yith all created star-spanning civilizations, harnessed intellect and technology and in many regards were twenty-first century men wearing different skins. Yeah, we can talk about fiction as allegory sure. But let's stay on this track. Rationalist, transactionalist. Not spiritual. There's nothing that we associate with worship other than perhaps surrender of the self and the attendant obliteration (without enlightenment to show for it – some bargain, right?) Probably because, as a materialist, there is nothing beyond this world for HPL. Of course, that's death to spiritualism, right? This is where I get down to the opinion that HPL was writing science fiction, not fantasy (at least when he stumbled onto the mythos). His gods are ancient star-beings, not avatars of qualities or deities in any traditional sense. Hell, if you worship them, you're likely just to get their attention and have nothing to show for it but being consumed. Obliteration. Yeah. There is only the horror of dissolution, of life ending because that's it, man. Cockroaches are gonna inherit the whole show (but they'll be really smart cockroaches being driven around by bodiless egos from another planet.)See, spiritualism is more than just materialist facts ("The ancient gods have ruled the universe forever – don't look at them or you'll go insane" etc etc). It's about how the world is created, right? Faith is information, but more than that, it's bone-deep *belief* that these things are true and this is the way things are. Back to the land of Is. But faith is shattered in the face of materialism. Note how there's no characters who attempt to reconcile say, Jesus and Yaweh/Jehovah with the existence of Yog-Sothot and Shub Niggurath. My guess is because HPL was all "That's because Christianity is stupid and wrong and facts obliterate it" so he wasn't really capable of imagining such a confrontation much less playing it out with his characters. The closest we get to that sort of thing is MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS where the joke of human creation is revealed. Absurdism reigns.I suppose this ties back to some earlier thoughts of mine, where I talk about "Carcosa but not horrible." For HPL to talk about genuine human spirituality instead of abject terror just wasn't something he was interested in. For instance, I'm reading the VALIS trilogy by PKD, and in the first couple chapters of that, there's more spirituality (and by extension humanity) than in HPL's entire oeuvre. This isn't necessarily a slam, but an observation. You can only write about what you can write about, dig? HPL didn't view religion as a positive thing. I'm a little more nuanced on it, but I'm not a fool. I've read enough history to see how religion has excused all manner of excesses and horrors.Anwyays, this is a long way around to talk about one of the many mini-revelations-of-the-obvious I've come across on this stupid and meandering pathway I'm on currently. But it struck me as weird, this sort of failure of imagination that HPL (and frankly, most other cosmic horror writers) fell into. Yeah, I know. Lots of writers are just trying to imitate the same kinds of feelings that reading this stuff hit them with when they were impressionable. I'm not any better, I guess. But hopefully I come across a couple different facets of humanity along the way.Working on a year-end wrap post that I hope to get to in not too long. As I haven't really accomplished all that much visibly this year, well, it should be a short piece.

REALITY IS THE TOOTHBRUSH IN THE GLASS AT HOME

So, a special addition to the QONT influence map, the one influence behind all others, yet the one whose name could not be spoken. Why ruin the illusion after all?F FOR FAKE (though titled ON FAKES within the film itself) is not strictly a narrative fiction film nor is it a documentary. It's a long filmic essay on fakery, art, markets, biography. Mortality. It's one of my favorite films, one I didn't see until I'd actually started work on QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS. I wanted to see what I could pick up about forgeries and the art world to work into the book itself. If you didn't know already, QUEEN centers around the story of a forger of books who moves from copying to making originals, just to see if she could, and if she could fool anyone into believing that they were true works. The reality is that the forgery is real and that there are forces who will do anything to hold the book. Which is a forgery. Scribblings on a page. Not real.Not the most original macguffin, perhaps, but this is what happens when you let English majors off the leash. Of course, the book is much more than that.Now, if you've seen F FOR FAKE, you already know that in terms of detail on forgery, it's very thin. Because it's not a documentary, but a meditation. Though it is fiction, and spins some whoppers, particularly at the end. Yet, the film is filled with facts, as it clearly states right there at the beginning. You could drown in the facts, and might even have a hard time keeping up with them, offered in rapid-fire but gleefully in conflict with one another. This is what happens when you set up a conversation with forgers, liars and raconteurs, of which Welles himself is the grand master. Not only that, but magic, as the film goes out of its way early on to establish Welles as a stage magician. Hmm. Magic. Where have we heard that talked about? I wonder.And who else does Welles line up in this hall of mirrors? Elmyr, who may or may not be a Hungarian art forger who can scratch out Picassos and Modiglianis before lunch. Clifford Irving, who may or may not be a world-class con-man who made more money by telling everyone how he ran his cons. Welles himself, who lied his way onto the stage and who made a big splash by telling a lie so big that people had to believe it was true, causing a national panic. Starting at the top and working his way down ever since, indeed.But then there's more. We have appearances by Grandpa Picasso, who may or may not have been fooled by the oldest trick in the book, if only the story were true. And Oja Kodar, who may or may not be nothing more than an ingénue or might be the granddaughter of the greatest art forger of the twentieth century (greater even than Elmyr). Howard Hughes, who only existed then as a disembodied voice shuffling around the penthouse of the Desert In wearing Kleenex boxes for shoes and shaggy as a yeti. Was he even real then? Of course, the other artists copied, bitten: Matisse, Modigliani, Degas, Picasso of course. Even the last vestiges of La Dolce Vita, the sweetest living when Europe was the cultural capital of the world, even those fading ghosts are forgers and forgeries. Los Angeles and Vegas, capitals of fakery, just waiting in the wings to take over. Men from Mars lurk at the edges, peering over the parapets of the Chartres Cathedral.Lies everywhere. What then, can you believe?Well, which are the good lies? "The important question is not whether a painting is real or not, but whether it is a good or bad fake." This is a paraphrase and I'm far too lazy to go back and check for the exact wording. This is not academia. I'm not being paid, not even in clicks. The Howling Pit is keeping those for itself. So the paraphrase will have to do.Of course, when they're talking about art in F FOR FAKE, I'm mapping it onto fiction. Fiction isn't real, though people will happily act as if it is. They'll wage war for it. They'll go into battle for not only their interpretations, but the meta-interpretations and forced realities that clearly must be true. Sigh. I suppose this is inevitable when we live in a world where authenticity is manufactured, where the only genuine notion of an artwork is not the artwork itself, but the reaction or emotion that it provokes. One hand clapping or a tree falling in a forest, take your pick. Yet here we are. On some level, sure, the fakes that Elmyr sketches out for the camera only to then ceremoniously burn as if to absolve himself of the crime, those fakes are not real. Yet, you put them in front of an audience and you'd get oohs and aahs, the genuine feeling that you were in the presence of Real Art. Oh, and people would probably stand to make a lot of money. Yeah, taking the piss out of the art market as a construct is one of the more invaluable services that F FOR FAKE renders for its viewers. Granted, this is a world that most of us will only experience from the outside and don't have to live with the vicissitudes of. For those others, it's probably not so funny. But setting torch to not only the notion of Dictated Taste, but Expertise and Authenticity itself, always a good use of an hour and a half.The film itself is a perfect example of baffling with bullshit, but it does dazzle with brilliance at times. It also takes the piss out of itself and Welles own mythology (just watch him mouth the world "pretentious" during one of the rapid-fire montages.) It stays real as it lies, because Welles himself knows that there are certain hard facts that you can't just sneak your way past, immortality or not. He'd be cursing out hapless sound men for giving him terrible copy to read in ten years, shopping with Bodganovich and staying in a guest room after diminished fortunes for the preceding decades. Does any of that matter? Does any of that take away from what is said about authorship itself being tossed into the air and the only works that really stand now are those unsigned such as Chartres (which you can argue about the nature of its making or his hagiography, but it is a towering achievement.)So I can't say that the film gave me much of use for QUEEN, other than the affirmation of a bunch of liars and fakers telling me that "just because it's forged doesn't mean its fake." Granted, nobody in the film says that. I came up with it all on my lonesome. The art only exists in the viewer's head and heart. The piece itself is only instructions for assembly. What happens on the other end makes it real, yeah?Yeah.I'll have some other thoughts later today, given the auspiciousness of the date. See, I'm an actual published writer as of this day. A novel, even. The apex. The pinnacle. The top.Yeah.

MAPS AND LEGENDS - Final

Here it is, wrapping up the influence map I'd set up for QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS.Remember, Tuesday is the big day. But you can still pre-order to make sure you don't forget in the holiday rush.XIf there's a single band that sounds like LA to me, it's X. Granted, this is an artifact of me being as old as I am, but really it's about the soul of the band. Combining punk speed and rockabilly flourishes, gritty lowlife lyrics and soaring vocals to deliver these tales of rejection and woe and attempts to pull one's self out of the gutter, or of at least watching the fire of the old world burn out and picking something out of the ashes. Their first four albums are untouchable and sound like the city breathing. And if you count the Flesheaters (who went on to form half of X), they're probably the band I've seen most, counting all the way back from 1985. Hell, I saw 'em open for Oingo Boingo at the California State Fair in either 87 or 88 (Wall of Voodoo minus Stan Ridgway was supposed to open if you wanna know how crazy things were then.)MULLHOLLAND DRIVE/LynchDavid Lynch's works are very much the Weird put to film. The dread, the compelling beauty, the strangeness that is right there in the small towns or even the dirty space in the vacant lot behind the Bob's Big Boy. I only picked MULLHOLLAND DRIVE given the setting (though I could have chosen LOST HIGHWAY). And Lynch's Los Angeles doesn't look like any other. Sure, it's the same on the surface, but you don't have to dig down very far to find murky strangeness, unnamable and unknowable beings and forces in whose hands we can hope to at best unnoticed, at worst a plaything for. The everyday turned into something Other, but recognizable.Los Angeles Theatre/BroadwayThe sun setting behind the Los Angeles Theatre on Broadway, buildings reduced to sharp silhouettes, disembodied language glowing brighter than the dusk. Yeah, that's the stuff. My photo, taken back in 2015.THE BLUE DAHLIA title cardIt's just beautiful is all. It's alien and strange, cut down to a multiplicative minimum, recursion and the graceful curves of the type. The movie itself is an interesting curiosity, and a great collection of signifiers for American noir film, written by Raymond Chandler. Though I'll note that the studio censors demanded a big change to things that is completely jarring when it comes to the end. Something about the portrayal of US servicemen in anything but a glowing light. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake work well together, and the rainy city is mean and stark as demanded, but that's contrasted with the easy life of the wealthy in postwar America. Tom Waits – RAIN DOGSWaits is certainly one of my writing inspirations, though I don't know how much of it comes across in the final piece. His off-kilter language and fragile, broken scenes of broken people living in a world we can only recognize as a smoky reflection of our own, these are the things that I love about his work. And RAIN DOGS saw him at the peak of his powers (having a superlative backing band didn't hurt either.) Though ostensibly the middle of a trilogy (part 1 being SWORDFISHTROMBONES, which marked his departure from sentimental beat poet and part 3 being FRANK'S WILD YEARS, a postmodern evocation of a lost America through the eyes of a failed Vaudeville singer), RAIN DOGS stands on its own as a singular work. I supposed if it came out today, it's be called "Americana" or somesuch, but there was no conception of that sort of thing in 1985, other than 'roots music' which certainly doesn't apply here. The songs are drunken fairytales or harrowing escapes or dreamlike wanderings through half-recognized townships and cityscapes. A perfect record.Stick around next week for the secret reveal, the piece of work that I didn't put anywhere on the map but had a huge impact on the workings of the book. It's probably not what you think, which is fine. It's good to have some surprises.

MAPS AND LEGENDS - 7

Another week, another look behind the messy works of QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS. It's out in six days. Get your masks, kids! It's almost time!Pre-order QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS right here. Or wait for Amazon.Here's the first of this week's slices. Yeah, one tomorrow or Friday. Special entry on the day the book ships. Watch for it!PRINCE OF DARKNESSI love John Carpenter's films. Not a shock, I'm sure, given my age. I was too young to watch HALLOWEEN and ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 when they first hit (and didn't see the former until cable and the latter until a VHS copy showed up at a local video store and my friends and I were in awe of this legendary object we'd gotten our hands on.) His work in the eighties makes up some of my most treasured films. And I particularly love PRINCE OF DARKNESS for the simple fact that it dared to do something that hadn't really been done before in horror film. It was largely derided at the time it came out, and I didn't think much about it until I saw it again on cable in the late 90s and then again via Netflix. At that point, I became obsessed with it and its concepts of non-linear time and asynchronous transactions. Even if the whole is strange and disjointed at times, the climax in the mirror and the conclusion are absolutely chilling pieces of filmed despair. I thought about this one a lot when working on QONT, from the setting to the atmosphere to the dread and sense of growing and utter wrongness of the film's events. I doubt I came anywhere close to it, but I'm sure you can sense the echoes reverberating.Raymond ChandlerI'd probably love Chandler even if I didn't love his subject matter. He's a wonderful writer (though even I am not a huge fan of PLAYBACK) and found wonderful ways of describing Los Angeles, which was a place so antithetical to how he presented himself as a person. It's strange that he could become its unofficial creator, but what he had to say about the city, even if derisive and flat-out wrong, came to be a way of seeing the place that infected a lot of minds. Yeah, on lots of subjects, particularly of race and sexual relations, he was of his time and let's leave it at that. But when it came to describing the city and its inhabitants, he was a perfect and judgmental poet.Albertus typefacec.f. the entry on PRINCE OF DARKNESS. I made a typographic joke, one that only one other person has gotten so far. Maybe you'll be the second.STREETS OF FIREYou're gonna wonder what this movie is doing here, right? It has nothing to do with LA (again, Chicago is the city in question here, at least I think so). But has a lot to do with texture, with the sense that this is a fictional real place we're seeing. It's not real, but it is amazing. Yes, it's mannered (it's basically a musical, more accurately a longform music video), but it evokes a sense of legend amongst all the cinderblocks and girders. Generative disorder Another example of simulating disintegration through mechanical reproduction. The symbol in this case is a sigil associated with No Tomorrows in the book. I was aiming to make it look like the sort of grotty and sketchy flyer you might find stuck under your windshield wiper, suggestive symbol on one side and long, cramped screed about how the black helicopters were circling even now, that the forgotten gods of the old times are back and looking for new recruits.

MAPS AND LEGENDS - 6

Yeah, I'm a week behind, but between the world being on fire and Thanksgiving vacation, nobody's reading that premium free content.So let's jump into section 6 of the influence map for QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS. (And don't forget, it's available on 12/11/18.) Razorwire NeonThis is kind of the atmosphere of QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS in a single image: the razorwire imposed over the neon, sharp materiality over a glowing and dreamlike series of images. This is a close-up shot taken at the Rialto Theatre marquee on Broadway a few years ago. It's one of the images that's stuck with me (indeed, it's the header on smoketowncomics.tumblr.com, which was the research tumblr that I set up when these stories were going to be a linked series of graphic novels. As to why that didn't happen? The simple answer is money. Unless you can draw your own pages, comics are very very expensive propositions. But maybe someday.)Abandoned factory on San Fernando/Ave 19Los Angeles is a city in a state of constant destruction and renewal, where abandonment and lying fallow sometimes leads to rebirth. For instance, the whole of the Theatre District in downtown. During the time of QONT, a lot of that area was a lot less civilized than it's become now. Oh sure, people still went there, but not as many, and none of them were ever tourists (which I often am.) I don't know that any such resurrection awaits this huge complex along San Fernando (really Ave 19 where it crosses…uh, some landmark). Still, it's an imposing structure, though a little sad as it's fallen to hollowing-out and broken windows and spraypaint.Hyperion ViaductJust a shot I love, taken while walking alongside Riverside Drive in the Elysian Valley/Frogtown section of Los Angeles, which is tucked alongside the LA River and bounded by the 5 north. Right now, the place is going through rapid gentrification as offices move into warehouses. When the LA River flooded in 1938, this place was all but washed out, at least the street level. Astonishing stuff. Anyways, just liked the sense of remote and monumental from this shot. Make the familiar strange and all.RE/Search Magazine aestheticsI should probably do a longer piece on this, but I'll cover the basics here. RE/Search Publications was started by V. Vale of San Francisco (who'd previously run or been involved with SEARCH AND DESTROY, a tabloid size magazine of the punk era in SF, though it made it up and down the coast.) As a kid from the 'burbs, I never really saw this stuff except in glances in DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (and that was just SLASH magazine.) But in the mid-80s, a bookstore called Amok Books opened up on Sunset, and they stocked all manner of insanity, always featuring the latest from RE/Search, and eventually spawning Feral House. RE/Search put together great-looking, minimally-designed publications that nonetheless had a very strong sense of graphic and information identity. Reading them now is a great look back into a cluster of what the underground looked like back before the internet, even before what we regard as the 'zine revolution of the 90s. That sort of solid, no-nonsense design was something I've always reached towards in my own work, at least graphics-wise.Cormac McCarthyI don't have much to say here. BLOOD MERIDIAN is one of my favorite novels, and to my eye is the quintessential American novel, laying bare the myth of noble westward expansion and showing it as a nightmarish and bloody enterprise, where often insane men didn't tame the land so much as survived it so that others might hope to civilize it, for there is no real civilization to be found in these pages. His prose is beautiful and spare and his vision uncompromising. One of the few novels I come back to and re-read on its own (this and Chandler, but we'll get to him.) And I'll confess, there's a few places in QONT where I was actively trying to do McCarthy. I won't tell you where, because they're probably too obvious and I'll only regret that later.

MAPS AND LEGENDS - 5

Back again for another installment. Just passed the halfway point (though I reserve the right to do one more with a subject that *isn't* on the map, but certainly informed QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS.And as a gentle reminder, the book goes on sale in less than a month. Pre order here.Christian Death flyerSure, Christian Death are just about the right time and place, but they don't show up in QONT. Though they would have been right at home at the Last Prayer club in its pages. I snagged this image as an expression of the cut-up and Xerox off approach of underground flyers at the time. And sure, I try and replicate that in photoshop now. Unfortunately, you can't just do that at your local Kinko's any more. The copies just come out too clean now. But there was a time that the art was transformed and re-rendered with xerography, and the machine would spit them out hot and you had in your hands the ability to get the word out to everyone. Gutenberg was a piker, when you got down to it.Goth makeupAs with the above, there's no explicit goths of any gender in the pages of QONT. There's a pair of twins working the door at the Last Prayer that might fit the bill, though. All that said, it's a great cultural touchstone to work with. Honestly, I underplayed this in the book, and if it ever makes it into comic pages or onto a screen, it'll be something I work with a little more deeply. But there's a lot to be said about choosing your own face to show the world. Oh yeah, this was originally a look I was going to have Ariela, the Queen, wearing, but decided it was too severe a thing to have as her primary image. That and I wasn't in a hurry to bog down the reader with detail. Again, if this story ever makes it into a visual presentation, this the sort of touch that I'll definitely use more of.Cocteau Twins – TREASURE/flyerAt turns ethereally beautiful or grindingly harsh, the Cocteau Twins were a band who made a pretty huge impact on me as their albums started to filter over to the US in the middle eighties. TREASURE was the one I ended up listening to the most, having paid full import price for it in 1988, which I think would be the equivalent of almost forty bucks now (never mind my earning power back then which was basically nonexistent.) If you want to reach for the sound of Dreamless, who play live and do a radio set in the pages of QONT, imagine the harsher side of Cocteau Twins, more "Musette and Drums" and the like. And don't get me started on the design sense of Vaughan Oliver, who did the design for the Cocteaus' label, 4AD records. Just a huge influence and one of my favorite albums of all time. Of all time.Eastern Columbia Building againThis spooky version of the Eastern Columbia came from a shot I took earlier in 2018, just before dawn as I wandered up and down Broadway. It's a pretty perfect photograph, with the dreamlike tower transformed into something much more ominous and vast, where the top touches sunlight but the ground floor is forever in shadow. Watching the light change across the planes of buildings along streets and boulevards is one of the great pleasures of cities, one that I don't really get enough of.Rose neonIf memory serves, this was originally hung on a florist along Olive Ave in Burbank (the florist is still there, as is some of the original neon.) This piece hangs in the Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, which is, quite unsurprisingly, one of my favorite places to visit. If you've ever visited my tumblr or regular blogging, you've seen a bit of this already. As for deeper meaning, there's not much, though I am conscious of the skill it takes to render objects down in the abstraction of neon and still have them be memorable and stick. As with vector-graphics games, it's all about the lines bounding space and the suggestion of form and detail which leads to success, not the rendering of every single detail.

FULL BLEED: SHADOW ON THE SUN

Yeah, been a little while since you've gotten a fresh post. Just that canned content lately. But it's fresh to you, so just eat around the stale parts.We're well into the silly season for me. Starts at Halloween and really doesn't let up until Christmas. So of course I have a book coming out in the middle of it (December 11, to be precise). Maybe you've heard of it?THE QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS - pre-order link hereI'd love to say that most of my time has been spent in promotion for that. But honestly, I've done what I could. Threw out a lot of lines to podcasters and reviewers and don't have a hell of a lot to show for it. Hell, I had a tweet go Actual Viral and get something like 41k likes, and 10.5k retweets before it died down. That got me a handful of follows and I think five book orders. Which really is about par for the course in the Howling Pit.Oh, while I'm here. Do me and yourselves a favor and torch your Facebook accounts. Seriously. They're bad. There's a whole internet outside them. Get a blog. Put family pictures there. Do some email. You can live without it. I have for most of the last year.But don't ask me what to do in place of that for promoting your book. I sure don't know.What I have been working on, aside from the craziness, is my next book. I might've used an old title before (which is why you shouldn't trust any title I throw out here until you see it on a book cover or maybe in a press release.) Right now, it's under the title VOIDMAW. It wasn't what I was expecting to work on around now, but if you've been reading my blog since the HPL Film Festival, I've teased out why. Hint: because I'll be paid.It's a weird move for me, simply because it's the opposite of what I've been writing towards. This is a big thing in a big, sprawling space-opera setting. That's a lot of work. At least it is when you're just trying to get the matte paintings right so you can suggest there's a bigger universe beyond the page and the plot you're reading right then. I mean, STAR WARS (to use a loaded example) does a pretty good job suggesting a much vaster galaxy, though you really only see a couple different locations in the first film. And what I'm doing in VOIDMAW is a little more complicated than that, hopefully not too much though.So the danger is overwhelming the reader with history and blah blah blah. See? You're already bored. That's different in a big galactic setting than it is in, say, 1980s Los Angeles. I can shorthand a lot of that (having actually lived it) and what I've embellished isn't all that much. Not quite so with a decaying human empire in a future some three thousand years or so off."Oh, you're optimistic," you say. "Having humans in three thousand years."Hey, I never said there'd be a recognizable civilization, but there's humans. Distressingly little of what you see around you now survives. Spoiler.Populating that world believably, and having at least some sense of what makes things run the empire, not to mention aesthetics and anything with any level of granular detail? That's simply a lot of typing, even if you have the details laid out. Basically like writing an RPG sourcebook for this world. Which I might've done if I were younger and had more actual time. I don't. And oh yeah, I spent a chunk of my younger years reading RPG supplements and guides, which has infected my brain so that this is how I approach things now. But that's just a project that there isn't time for. It's going to be a matter of trying to set up the major players and the organizations behind them and some idea of the world, the vibe and then letting things go after that, just taking notes of what needs to be fleshed out as I go. This isn't a thing I've really done before, so yay for reinventing the wheel on this part of the process.Right.Now, let's see what else I've been up to.Oh, yeah. Promotional appearances for me and QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS:The Rising Shadow (interview)https://www.risingshadow.net/articles/interviews/888-an-interview-with-matt-maxwellThe Means at Hand (essay on crime and magic and the overlay between the two)https://themeansathand.com/2018/11/13/inadmissable-by-matt-maxwell/Beyond the Trope podcast (interview where I don't talk about the book much – whoops!)http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/3/b/9/3b93ddb13f1c66e7/Episode_213_Interview_with_Matt_Maxwell.m4a?c_id=24876329&cs_id=24876329&expiration=1542122932&hwt=b3e95e28a474d52a8941e2894e46a2afOkay, just about time to get dinner on the table. More later.

MAPS AND LEGENDS - 04

Another week, another entry on the QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS influence map.Review the whole thing here.Don't forget to pre-order the book. Just over a month away!2nd Street Mea culpa: I always mess up the Second Street and Third Street tunnels. The easy way to remember is that Second Street is the more glamorous one, with the rippling and highly specular tile work. You've seen it in BLADE RUNNER and THE TERMINATOR and a million other movies and car commercials. It's a visually arresting place, sure, but walking it is a daunting prospect. The car noise has nowhere to go but to echo along the walls, and while it's not deafening, it's harsh and abrasive. The smell isn't great either. Pretty sure that walking it is about like smoking a fistful of cigarettes. At any rate, it's a central LA location, and with good reason. Gene VincentRockabilly was once a thing, not only in LA, but all over the place. Though only the Stray Cats really rode that wave to anything nationwide. The Blasters (from scenic Downey) should have caught the same kind of heat, and I guess they did locally, but not nationally. Anyways, without Gene Vincent, none of this happens. Full stop. Sure, there's a lot of other cats who need a nod in this direction (Link Wray, Jerry Lee Lewis and a host of others.) But Gene is the one who's the favorite of underground cabbie Link who pushes his classic beater through the streets of LA, getting folks where they need to be and never once paying for a medallion.Katy JuradoI've only seen her in HIGH NOON, but Ms. Jurado was a Mexican film actress, born as María Cristina Estela Marcela Jurado García. She worked in the Mexican film industry starting in the early forties through the sixties, but did a fair amount of work up here in the US as well. Hell, she worked with Luis Buñuel. If you want to imagine her playing any single role in the book, it'd be that of Alondra, in title a sister to the Queen.Stan Ridgway – THE BIG HEATAt one point, Stan was the lead singer of Wall of Voodoo, who you likely know from "Mexican Radio" in either '82 or '83. There was, of course, a lot more to the band than that, but that track was the one that made the big splash in the early days of MTV. Not long after the success of that album, he left the band and struck out on his own solo career. On his debut album, every song is a little story, as are most of his songs, honestly. THE BIG HEAT, as you might've guessed from the title, mines the seedier side of life, though not Los Angeles in particular, but very much in vibe. If you haven't heard any of it, head straight for the title track, "Can't Stop the Show" and "Drive She Said." Purple hair and colorNot much to say about this except an admission: hair color was not as easy back then as it is today. Nor was it as accepted. Once was a time that blue hair would have gotten you sent home from school. Of course, the blue wouldn't have been as vibrant or electric as we see today, and it wouldn't be done in just an afternoon either. I played pretty fast and loose with that. Never let the facts get in the way of the legend, right? All that said, this hair is a little lighter than what Cait ended up with in the course of the book. And yes, I wasn't above hand-selling the book to various purple-haired convention attendees. It even worked sometimes.