Category: Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Comics writer Kieron Gillen sent out his latest newsletter yesterday, which featured a line-up of his top music tracks of 2019. Gillen’s got a background as a DJ, and writes some pretty awesome music-inspired works, and his newsletter has introduced me to a bunch of music I would have overlooked. He introduced The Comet Is Coming thusly: People occasionally ask me about whether there’s going to be a Doctor Aphra show or not (answer: no idea) but no-one’s actually asked what I’d like to see in a Doctor Aphra show. My answer: I would like to see them back a cart of money up to The Comet Is Coming and get them to record the complete score. Listen to this. You want to watch the show this is the theme tune for. This is an explosion, a promise, all propulsion and sex. I walk, it soars, the world is better. Newsletter 144: momentarily Manichean, Kieron Gillen I loved his Doctor

I’m reading Dreamsongs at the moment, George R.R. Martin’s big retrospective collection of short stories, and the introductions where Martin gets salty are among my favourite things. Particularly this one, from Doing the Wild Card Shuffle, where he talks about a failed attempt to get a job at Marvel and how his love of comics led to Wild Cards: I have no doubt that in some alternate universe Marvel Comics did hire me when I applied in 1971, and right now in that world I am sitting at home muttering and gnawing at my wrists as I watch blockbuster movies based on my characters and stories rake in hundreds of millions of dollars while I receive exactly nothing. In this world I was spared that fate. In this world I wrote short stories and novellas and novels instead of funny books, and later on screenplays and teleplays as well. Martin, George R.R.. Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective (p. 229). A useful reminder

We finished watching the third season of Riverdale last night, and my mouth dropped at the sheer and wondrous audacity of a twist in the penultimate episode where a secret was revealed. It was a moment that delivered what I’d loved in Riverdale’s first season–a well-honed twist that changed the direction of a story, and showed you a big, whopping clue that had been there all season and became sinister by the addition of new information. It renewed my love for the franchise in the space of two episodes, and got me interested in really sitting down and investigating the craft of each season. On the other hand, there was a looooong gap between the point where we started the season and the point we ended it. At one point, well into the heart of the season, we simply stopped watching for about twelve months because we didn’t have the energy. After a relatively sublime first season, it’s a show

Yesterday, after uploading all the files for Exile, my partner and I ate fish & chips and settled in to binge watch two seasons of Shrill back-to-back. I loved the entire show, but owe it a particular thanks for ending season two with PJ Harvey’s 50 Ft. Queenie running over the end credits. A very big nostalgia music moment for me, flashing back to 1994 and my final year of high school. Which is appropriate, in a lot of ways, because Exile is very much a novel about nostalgia music. Keith Murphy returns home after sixteen years, somewhat against his wishes. The opening chapter is titled Paradise City and drops multiple Guns’n’Roses references. I wrote the book listening to the Gunners, but also multiple 80s and 90s rock albums like Slippery When Wet from Bon Jovi and Van Halen’s 1984. The first location in the novel is the Hard Rock Cafe Surfers Paradise (albeit a version of the cafe that

The most bewildering comment I’ve ever gotten on social media, from an old family friend: “Who knew you were carrying around so much anger?” To me, the answer seemed obvious: “Anyone who was paying attention.” But it wasn’t the anger that caught them off-guard, it was the decision to do something with it. To use anger as an impetus, not just a feeling. To speak about the anger, and why it existed, rater than staying politely silent. They reacted to the use of anger as a spur to look at the state of the world and say this is not good enough, rather than a flagellum turned against the self to diminish your expectations. Do not diminish the anger. Use it to get shit done.

Well, folks. ‘Tis the season in the lands of the streaming services, and the yearly inundation of dodgy holiday films have landed. Netflix, in particular, seems to have doubled down on the genre. What started with an unexpected hit in The Christmas Prince—a franchise due to get its third film in three years come December—is now bolstered with in-house movies made on the cheap and newly acquired made-for-TV fare all about the Christmas romance My partner and I aren’t the biggest fan of Christmas, but we do love a trashy film and that love isn’t limited to action and sci-fi projects. We’ve made ourself a list of unwatched Christmas trash and checked it twice, then fired up the ol’ Netflix viewer to make our way through the sixteen holiday films on our radar this year. Here’s some quick capsule reviews of the stuff we’ve watched thus far. THE KNIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS The Christmas Prince may be the franchise that started

1. Here is a morning thought for a Friday: the glory of the internet is that there’s always someone who hasn’t seen Rob Cantor’s Shia LaBeouf. And there’s always someone who has forgotten the song and needs to see it again. Being the one to rectify either situation is a gift that keeps on giving. Go forth and be that person. 2. And here’s a challenge for your Friday: what can Rob Cantor’s 3 minute clip offer you as a creative person (regardless of how that creativity manifests). Yesterday I logged a quote from a recent Garth Nix in-conversation I attended: we are all descendants of everything we’ve ever read. This applies to three-minute clips as well as great works of literature and non-fiction. These days I run through a list from Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative designed to help capture creative sparks and insights. ARE THERE ANY PATTERNS YOU’RE EXPERIENCING THAT ARE SIMILAR TO SOMETHING YOU’RE WORKING ON? One project

I picked up a copy of William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2001, a shiny trade paperback find in a second-hand bookstore. The latest in a long line of Gibson books that started with my long-since read-to-death paperback of Burning Chrome that I acquired in high-school after our IT teacher showed us a documentary on cyberpunk. I purchased Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, brand-new in 2005. At the time I was reading Murakami a lot, was just starting to write my own short fiction in earnest, and taught classes in both Murakami and short story writing to university classes. I made a special trip into the city to buy Brandon Sanderson’s Alloy of Law from the inestimable Pulp Fiction Booksellers. I’d never read Sanderson before, but the reviews tempted me with its promise of a traditional European fantasy setting progressed to the point where it effectively contained a Wild West. I made a similar trip to