music
The top albums of 2022. There are - my God - seventeen in total and not a single worthy metal release among them. Crossing my fingers for a New Wave Of British Heavy Metal revival in 2023. Let’s dive in.
Read MoreNovember. Time to take stock of things. Sequel to Reality Testing aiming to be delivered to the publisher in February. Movie about a giant robot potentially in the works. TV series doing my head in…pitch meeting next week.
Yes, yes, I’m exhausted.
But there’s another cool development: My publisher, Black Rose, is getting in on the Kindle Vella action. Kindle Vella, for those not in the know, is:
“a platform that authors can use to share their stories with readers in an episodic style. The big feature of Kindle Vella is its serialized format—authors publish content in 'episodes,' and readers consume that content one episode at a time”
I am absolutely on board with this. Finally, someone has found a way to make books combat-ready for the Inattentive Age. All they had to do was go back to the 1830s for the idea. Thanks, man who originally decided to serialise The Pickwick Papers. Anyway, what it means is that I now finally have a place for my wild tales set in the Sundown universe. No longer will I have to trawl Submittable looking for any calls for submissions even remotely resembling sci fi. Instead, I can compete against titles such as The Elven Lord’s Concubine, Shadowglen: Witches & Wolves, Filthy Rich Vampires and - perhaps my favourite - Sold as the Alpha King’s Breeder.
Movie of the month: I think it has to be the smouldering 1963 dudefest Hud, which has some of the greatest dialogue I’ve ever heard. A smattering:
“You don't look out for yourself, the only helping hand you'll ever get is when they lower the box.”
“Get all the good you can out of seventeen 'cause it sure wears out in one hell of a hurry.”
“Happens to everybody. Horses, dogs, men. Nobody gets out of life alive.”
That last one is just so butch and ridiculous and awesome.
A note on Paul Newman’s portrayal of Hud: He could absolutely be one of the biggest dickheads put to celluloid. There are antiheroes and then there’s whatever Newman is doing here, and it’s both amazing and infuriating at the same time.
Album of the month: I’m just going to go ahead and list the upcoming Metallica album here, every month, until it comes out in April. Because it’s gonna be the album of the damn century. Hear this? Hear that sub-Motorhead, single-riff, chuggy bollocks genius? How about that solo that sounds like someone had their hands chopped off and did their best to play with the stumps? HOW ABOUT THEM LYRICS? Full speed or nuthin’, baby. Hopefully in the next track they’ll reference Ronnie.
(Note: The actual album of the month is a three-way tie between Ultra Truth by Daniel Avery, Changes by KGLW, and Almanac Behind by Daniel Bachman).
Book of the month: I’m already tearing up as I write The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. Why didn’t we read this in school? If I’d been handed this at the right time instead of 20 years too late, it would have been seismic for me. As it is, I can safely say it is much, much better than the film, which I watched many years ago and is the reason I never got around to reading the novel. Wonderful.
November sunset:
1. Kedr Livanskiy - Ivan Kupala
2. SAULT - Don’t Waste My Time
semaphore.
Did I realise that I didn’t write a chart post for July? Nope. Is that because I’m frantically working through the sequel to Reality Testing? Yes, indeed it is. Good guess.
It’s a funny time, revising a novel. Everything else goes out the window. The short story/essay mill grinds to a halt. The promotion for other books dries up. The vague idea of writing something for the website that isn’t a chart evaporates. The writing day becomes a battle of desire vs exhaustion, i.e. getting a passable draft down before becoming so sick of the novel’s world and the characters who populate it that I go off the boil well before the end, leading me to write such timeless sentences as “He looked through his eyes at the man who was looking at him” or “She had been trained to do it and it alone, like a train that is on rails and can’t go anywhere else because it is a train”. That kind of gold. One third still to go, and then I’ll start crafting something beautifully elegiac to submit to The Paris Review come wintertime.
News: Oh, I’m also working on a sci fi TV project. But it’s confidential so that’s all I can say. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? It most certainly is.
Film of the month: Forbidden Planet. We had a comic store called Forbidden Planet in Plymouth. Of the five or so years I spent there total, going into FP was the coolest thing to do with my time on a Saturday. Robocop dolls, Judge Dredd collections, mogwai-sized mogwai, the smell of weed and dust in the air. The eponymous film naturally has none of that, though there would likely be no Murphy without Robby the Robot. And who needs weed when you have Leslie Nielson playing a straight man? I came away from this 1956 extraplanetary extravaganza with one question on my mind: Who would win in a fight between the girder-carrying, bench-pressing Robby and the psychopathic, glamtastic Box from Logan’s Run? Both could take ED-209 in an instant, I reckon.
Book of the month: I have been reading the same book for the past six weeks and that book is American Gods by everyone’s favourite Gaiman. I like it and also I do not like it. The story is serpentine, but doesn’t seem to make much sense, and the writing veers from smart to clunky as hell within the space of a paragraph. By accident, I bought Gaiman’s “preferred” version, which contains 12,000 extra words his editor wisely cut out. That puts the word count at around 200,000, which seems excessive for “the adventures of a guy named Shadow and all the driving he did that time through snowy Americana”. I would really like to get it finished, because I have a bunch of other books waiting, but - like Shadow’s coin tricks - it never seems to end.
Album of the month: In a nice coincidence, it is a dead heat between punky upstarts The Chats with their sophomore effort GET FUCKED and post-hardcore heroes Chat Pile, who conjure up a series of nihilistic mechanical soundscapes in GOD’S COUNTRY. A very chatty month.
Music to mark a catastrophic rise in sea levels:
And so it is June, and the thermometer spends all day edging 35 degrees like a porn addict. I’d say this has been rather a sorry month for humanity, what with the overturning of Roe vs Wade, the fourth month of unabated war crimes in Ukraine, the cancellation of Pride celebrations in Norway because of some mentalist, the famine in Sudan and the lack of support from Europe, the earthquake in Afghanistan and the lack of support from Europe, and the ongoing slow death of nature. If this thing of ours truly is an experiment instigated by higher beings to determine whether compassion and righteousness win out against greed and hate, let me just say that they’re shaking their five-dimensional heads right now and wondering what the fuck we’re up to. Perhaps July will be better. Perhaps 2023 will be better. Perhaps the next decade will be better.
News? None. I don’t know if it’s the after-effects of the pandemic or what, but people in the literary world are slower than ever to respond to 1. queries and 2. short story submissions. A couple of weeks ago I received a response to a story that I submitted back in August 2020. That’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 22 months. It was a rejection.
Book of the month: Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption and Hollywood by Danny Trejo. This was quite a read. I’ve liked Danny Trejo ever since I saw him at the tender age of 10 as the mute knife-throwing assassin in Desperado, and to get a few insights into the life of a certified badass was a welcome change of pace from the highfalutin crap I usually read. The man was mean, and he spent a long time in prison because of it, and somehow, despite the solitary confinements and aggression and riots, he emerged from it with (some kind of) god on his side and a desire to do good things in his heart. That’s pretty cool. Also interesting is the Latino community in LA, which I knew next to nothing about (aside from watching Training Day eight times), and the fact that Trejo was one of the OGs down at Muscle Beach. What a life that dude has had.
Album of the month: Hmm, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky by Porridge Radio, I guess. More indie rock, more post-punk, more simple riffs and simpler lyrics. I’m getting predictable.
Film of the month: One film I saw this month which was truly strange was Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull: A History Lesson. Directed by Robert Altman and starring Paul Newman, Harvey Keitel, Burt Lancaster and Shelley Duval, the thing plays out like someone’s half-remembered dream. I’m not sure who it was made for. It’s barely entertaining, Newman does little except brood and drink whiskey from a chalice, there’s no real narrative structure, and there are at least four scenes of women singing opera for no reason. If it was by Pasolini and featured a cast of youthful no-name actors speaking rapid-fire Italian then I would understand, but this was released by United Artists in theatres throughout the US. I love the subversive nature of M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye, California Split, McCabe & Ms Miller and The Player, but Buffalo Bill is a step too far for me. And so in conclusion I’ll award ‘film of the month’ to the brilliant Black Belt Jones starring Jim Kelly, if only for the foam-filled finale in a car wash.
Lights, camera, music:
3 High Desert Queen - Heads Will Roll
