diary

Chart / September

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Who’s ready for Pacific State? Not me!

The advance review copies are out, the book blog tours are booked, and the world is waiting with baited breath to see if the people’s climate fiction champion, Grant Price, can follow up on the non-smash-hit Reality Testing with a deeper, more complex, more mature and more acerbic textual examination of the climate-ravaged corporatocracy. The only way to find out is to BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY. Fell those trees for my books! Fork over your cash to Amazon! Perpetuate the cycle!

A new low this month in Novel Heaven, Short Story Hell: a short story I submitted in April 2022 was returned to me with the note: “Thank you so much for trusting us with your work! As we are revamping our magazine as a poetry chapbook publisher, we have decided to return all submissions to their owners”. I think I paid a $10 fee for that. Strange business, literature.

Book of the month: Shuggie Bain. Heartbreaking, bittersweet and beautiful. Like a Ken Loach film written by Betty Smith, I devoured this novel (way after everyone else jumped on it beacuse of the Booker thing). The writing is deceptively simple, the characters reassuringly complex, and more than once I wanted to reach into the world created by Douglas Stuart and lift poor Shuggie out of it. This is a book that mums and high-falutin’ dudes alike can love in the same and different ways. It also reminded me of one of the best comedy sketches of all time.

Album of the month: If I divide it evenly between The Beggar by Swans and The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan, will I be accused of being so pretentious that I could give Paul Auster a run for his money? I don’t care. I like them both. Swans because it’s maybe Gira’s greatest accomplishment, Roan because why would I ever say no to saccharine-laced-with-fuck-you synthpop.

Film of the month: So I watched The Faculty for the first time since I was 14. What a weird film. Salma Hayek shows up for like two scenes. Robert Patrick plays the T1000. Usher is a shit-talking football star. Josh Hartnett is a 28-year-old high school student with weird hair. There’s a whole ten-minute-long scene that’s an ‘homage’ (rip-off) to The Thing. It doesn’t feel like a Robert Rodriguez movie, not beyond a few superficial flashes of style (sure, why not introduce the main characters with a freeze frame and their names written in graffitti like it’s The Warriors?). It’s still fascinating, though. And short. Just as I was properly settling into it, there was the final boss trying to murder Mr Frodo in the school’s own Olympic-sized swimming pool. Definitely worth watching again.

Profuse music:

1 Jun Fukamachi - Urban Square

2 Tangerine Dream - Rain in the Third House

3 Vril - Manium

4 Ana Roxanne - It’s a Rainy Day on the Cosmic Shore

5 Japan - The Experience of Swimming

6 Steve Hillage - Garden of Paradise

Chart / July

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Here we go. The Pacific State promotional machine is shuddering into life. Ungainly, reluctant, in need of a good spritz of oil if it wants to actually go anywhere. An early five-star appraisal from the world’s worst book review site, Readers Favorites, has the following to say:

“The story is excellently written, and it exceeded my expectations by far. There was never a dull moment with all the twists and turns. The suspense kept me on the edge of my seat.”

Honestly, if you’re a writer: don’t bother submitting it to that website. It’s utter trash. Yes, I’ll still quote it, but I’d be better off asking ChatGPT to give me a review.

And here’s another from Ben Scharf, producer at Andere Filme and director of the short film Darwin’s Fox, which won the 2022 Cannes Shorts Award:

“Price is redefining sci-fi. Gone are the days of cardboard characters, artifice and an overemphasis on technology. What we get instead is a dissection of the human condition in a reality that is twisted just far enough to serve the story. Playful, exhausting and crafty, all at once.”

That’s how you write a critique.

In other news, I have a short story appearing in God’s Cruel Joke magazine (print & online) this month. That’s right, I found a magazine to submit to that didn’t charge me $10-20 AND paid me….it is possible. I’ll post the link when it’s up.

Book of the month: Absolutely Boys in Zinc by Svetlana Alexievich. Utterly harrowing and heartbreaking, Alexievich gathers testimonies of soldiers, nurses and civilian contractors who took part in the Russian war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, as well as accounts from mothers and wives of the dead. The stories of the mothers are the saddest. What I find astounding is that these accounts sound similar to those emerging from the current conflict in Ukraine: duping conscripts into travelling to a warzone, leaving soldiers underequipped and starving, bludgeoning the population wholesale with cheap propaganda. Obviously I’m not saying “they should’ve given these boys more of a fighting chance!”; it’s just amazing that the Russian high command evidently didn’t learn anything in the intervening 44 years (more power to Ukraine). It has taken me a good couple of months to read, because a few pages is enough to send me into a misery spiral.

Film of the month: TETSUO: THE IRON MAN. Good God, what a film. It is the most insane hour of celluloid I’ve ever seen. I’d been planning to watch it ever since I was 16, but after reading so many accounts online about how low budget and nonsensical it was, I wasn’t willing to part with cold, hard cash for a copy. Fortunately, Criterion had the film up for a little while, and I feasted on it. Body horror, ingenious camera angles, no-holds-barred sex, an exacavator drill and a giant mecha battle. It’s amazing.

Album of the month: Grian Chatten - Chaos for the Fly. The Fontaines D.C. singer delivers a punchy collection of chamber pop in his signature drawl. I like.

A moveable feast:

1 Kettenkarussell - Maybe

2 Fejká - Hiraeth

3 Route 8 - This Raw Feeling

4 Out Of Place Artefacts - PROCYON

5 Lxury - Oblivion

Chart / February

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Classic February doing its Irish goodbye and prompting me to frantically write a roundup six hours before the month is over.

Here’s what I want to talk about: I travelled outside Europe for the first time in more than four years, which necessitated my flying on a long-haul aircraft. Now, quite aside from the indirect environmental damage I’ve wrought on our wonderful planet (another topic for another day), I’m concerned by the fact that the entertainment rigs on these planes now only seem to show Netflix-friendly movies from the past four or five years. If you’re into superhero movies, Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds or the Fast & Furious franchise, then you’re all set. But dear Christ, when is this dumbing down of mainstream art going to stop for the rest of Western society? I’m beginning to think there’s an insidious plot afoot to delete all movies prior to the year 2000 from our collective memories - perhaps so they can be remade without incurring the inevitable backlash. I remember (oh good, I’m that guy) sitting on a plane to Australia a decade ago and being pleasantly surprised that I could watch stuff like Double Indemnity, The Wild Bunch, The Poseidon Adventure and Full Metal Jacket. Now your choices are Black Adam, Jurassic World: Dominion and Bullet Train. I know that in the grand scheme of things, this gripe may come across as entitled (oh no, you could kill time watching big budget movies while jetting off on holiday, the humanity), but I mean only to point out that this diet of empty-calorie cinema seems like one of those steps en route to us becoming the mindless blob people from Wall-E.

In related news: Old man yells at cloud.

Book of the month: Berlin Game by Len Deighton. A spy novel that is sexist, old-fashioned, glacially paced and obsessed with quotidian details like picking kids up from school after work….and I loved it. This is a book that would never be published if it was written today, and that makes it all the easier to enjoy. Of course, it isn’t without its highlights: Deighton’s encyclopaedic knowledge of 1980s Berlin is guaranteed to excite a long-term fawning resident of the city such as myself, while his prose is unvarnished without being workmanlike. Metal fact: Deighton also wrote the novel that served as the inspiration for Mötörhead’s Bomber. Awesome.

Album of the month: Heavy Heavy by Young Fathers. Those three chaps definitely know what they’re doing when it comes to single-handedly evolving abstract hip hop. They’re the Massive Attack of their day.

Movie of the month: Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi, almost exclusively because it stars Zoe Kravitz, who has the magical power of being able to turn a lame script and soporific direction into a watchable thriller. Seriously, if she wasn’t in it, Kimi would be nothing more than a bad, too-long episode of Black Mirror. But no one can repel charisma of that magnitude. You know who else had that power? Mickey Rourke in the 1980s (with the exception of Year of the Dragon - even he couldn’t save that piece of trash).

Feel-good February:

1 Betty Davis - Muskwarp Mountain

2 Kedr Livanskiy - Night

3 yunè pinku - DC Rot

4 Logic1000 - What You Like

5 Elkka - Music To Heal To

6 Pretty Girl - Arc

7 Bonobo - Heartbreak (Kerry Chandler Mix)

Chart / January

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A new year! A new year with new cheer!

Except there’s nothing new about it, really, is there? Check out the media: Non-white people being murdered in their vehicles and on the streets, mass shootings, recession rumblings, a devastating ongoing war, an unavoidable 1.5-degree temperature rise, and a cultural landscape that’s falling apart at the seams. We learn nothing and we change nothing and yet we expect things to become better when a number increases by one. We’re so…enervating.

But let’s be more Hans Rösling about things. It ain’t all bad. For example: there’s a formation on Mars that looks like a grizzly bear. What more do you want? He’s our new god now. We shall all pray to Ursus arctos horribilis, or, as I like to call him, Bearyl Streep. I trust he will be a merciful bear god.

I haven’t written a new chart post since November, which is primarily because I was busy delivering the sequel to Reality Testing to my publisher. “That’s done and dusted,” he screamed, clapping his hands together to rid them of imaginary grit. Kind of backed myself into a hole with this series though, haven’t I? On the one hand, it’s all set in the #Sundownuniverse. Nice and neat, just as I like it. On the other hand, each book is a standalone story. Try making the average Amazon user realise this in the augenblick they give your title while browsing the science fiction Library of Alexandria. Just try it.

Other news: Yesterday I started writing a new novel. As daunting as ever, but 1,000 words is better than zero, I suppose. Let’s see what happens with it.

Album of the month: Surprise releases from bands who haven’t recorded anything for 15 years aside, January is always something of a void when it comes to fresh music. Either that or we’re too busy scouring the karaoke and ABBA residue from our minds to properly engage with the latest red-hot microtonal classical drone EP. Speaking of legends dropping new albums from nowhere, this month is all about 12 by Ryuichi Sakamoto. The composer was diagnosed with cancer for the second time in 2021 - this time stage four - and by all Internet accounts he’s pretty fragile. If this is to be his last release, it’s a desperately sad one. Whispered piano, sparse phrases, cold winter landscapes. It’s like he has already seen across to the other side and is showing us what awaits. It’s the transition stage from life to death and the terrifying realisation that - as prolific and creative and clean-eating and hardworking as you have endeavoured to be all your life - your time is now over, and all you can do is take a bow and fade out.

Book of the month: As I’ve only read one full book in January, this honour goes to I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, which I didn’t really enjoy because there’s only so much I can take of a man angrily drinking glasses of whiskey while pushing over vampires. If we’re including books that have taken me months to read, then Understanding a Photograph by John Berger wears the crown. Crackerjack, it was, even the self-indulgent parts where he just reproduces letter exchanges with his mates about how happiness is a series of moments surrounded - and called into creation - by a perpetual state of unhappiness. Full of quotes to put as the epigraph of an overreaching novel.

Movie of the month: Intimidation from 1960, directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara. Criterion sums it up neatly by calling it a “pocket-size noir”. It manages to do a lot in its 65-minute runtime, not least make me sympathise a little with a sweating bank manager who has to rob his own institution to pay off a comically inept blackmailer. It’s not ground-breaking, but there are several beautiful shots in it - as well as a stunning desk clock that I’ve so far failed to find online.

Last: RIP Tom Verlaine and Jeff Beck. Two unique players in the same month. C’est très triste.

Jolly sing-a-long songs:

1 Death and Vanilla - Nothing is Real

2 Bicep, Clara La San - Water

3 Nia Archives - Baianá

4 Floating Points - Problems

5 Tommy Genesis, Charlie XCX - 100 Bad

6 Damu the Fudgemunk - Blizzard

7 Forss - In Paradisum