Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
Men Without Hats
Some mornings you just need to rock this joint. Also, the eighties were fucking weird.
19/03/2013
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Some mornings you just need to rock this joint. Also, the eighties were fucking weird.
And we start this post with the traditional Morning-of-my-birthday-self-portrait-that-will-cause-my-parents-to-complain-about-the-things-I-put-up-on-the-internet (except I think I kind of broke them of that habit after six years of doing this). This year is going to be pretty low-key, even given the relatively muted standards I use to celebrate my birthday. My plan, such as it is, consists of sleeping, hanging out with the Spokesbear, and collecting mail from my PO Box. At some point, I should go get groceries. And do the post-travel washing, so I don’t spend the rest of the week surrounded a travel-induced fugue.
1. Dreadlocks Adelaide is a city that has a love-affair with dreadlocks. Maybe it’s just that the festival is on. Maybe it’s got something to do with cannabis being decriminalised this far south. I don’t really know for sure, but I’ve been really *aware* of the number of people getting about with dreadlocked hair since we arrived yesterday morning. 2. Day One, Show One: Deanne Smith, Just Do It (Comedy) My mother has pretty amazing tastes when it comes to stand-up comedy. The same woman who is slightly baffled by self-referential and deconstructionist narrative approaches in film and/or television picked Deanne Smith’s Just Do It as our first show of the Fringe, and thus far it’s been the best thing we’ve seen in our two days of shows and exhibitions. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. My mother and I have never really agreed on movies, television shows, or fiction, but she’s always had a truly sophisticated appreciation for comedy. Over the years she’s introduced me to a bunch of comedians (and comedy shows) that I’ve come to love. Deanne Smith definitely gets included on that list; smart, culturally aware humour that manages to be self-referential without becoming tedious. It takes a deft hand to make jokes about feminism and rape statistics that make a point in addition to being hilariously funny. This fucking rocked. I’d definitely be willing to go see DeAnne Smith perform again. 3. Venues The venues for Fringe performances are fucking amazing. Let me put
It’s been about twenty years since I went on holidays with the rest of my family, but it seems we’ll be breaking that streak on Tuesday when all four of us gather and fly down to Adelaide to spend five days at the Fringe Festival. We fly back Sunday night. And on Monday, I turn thirty-six. It wasn’t until tonight, looking at a calendar and planning my work week after I get home, that I realised that last bit. Birthdays are weird. I expect, this year, I’ll be reducing my celebrations down to the absolute minimum: sleeping in, re-reading Murakami’s Birthday Stories anthology, getting on with things. I mean, what little celebratory energy I usually have is going to be burned out by five days of awesomeness as the Fringe, and any reserves are going to be needed to get me through the week that follows at the day-job. In theory, the coming week is a holiday. I want to take it as one, I really do, but I’m already mentally planning out the various things I need to sneak in between time with the family and the shows I really want to see. There are still things that need writing, whether I’m on holidays or no. There are things that need doing for the day-job. I’m proving remarkably bad at putting either away at this point, which largely means Shifty Silas is making the trip to Adelaide with me and I’ve just spent a half-hour figuring out how to
…those who win will have two qualities. One, they’ll be great. Two, they’ll persevere. Getting Lucky, Lefsetz.com On the surface, the daily Lefsetz Letter that arrives in my inbox doesn’t have much to do with writing. Bob Lefsetz writes about music and the music industry, mailing out his thoughts every weekday, and the tagline, first in music analysis, really says it all. And yet, on busy days at work, it remains one of the few things running through my various feeds that I’ll actually take a time-out to sit and read. The Lefsetz Letter may be about music, but the music industry was one of the first to get utterly freakin’ pantsed by the internet. It spent years standing there, shorts around its ankles, wondering what the hell happened and why people with freakin’ computers came along and changed everything. And this is what Lefsetz writes about, day after day. He’s a smart guy who looked at the industry that changed around him and started figuring out why things happened. More importantly, it started out old-school. Lefsetz been sending his letter out for 25 years. He kicked it off with actual paper. Lefsetz isn’t afraid of adaptation and new media. Truthfully, nine days out of ten, those daily letters have everything to do with being a writer in the early stages of the twenty-first century.
It’s been a while since I talked about up-coming projects on the blog. Partially this is because there weren’t many upcoming projects over the last two years. Partially this is because I’ve become more reclusive in my old age, unwilling to throw things out there until they’re more-or-less done. I write slow, you see, and occasionally it struck me as faintly absurd that I’d mention writing a short story and it’d be another two years before I finished it. Longer, in the case of some projects, since we do not talk about the novel (or, for that matter, the third Aster novella, or at least one story that people occasionally ask me about that I still haven’t got ’round to finishing). It’s not that these things go away – I still have all of them in my active projects folder. I’m just, you know, slow. Today, at write club, I did some work on a story I started in 2007. Two of them, actually, and one is dangerously close to being finished. On one hand, that’s kinda crazy. On the other, it gives me the kind of boost that only really comes from knowing that shit gets done eventually, so I’m going to tempt fate a little and throw out some details about the shape of my writing to-do list. Here’s the first thing I should point out: somewhere along the line, shit got busy again. Stories at the SIT DOWN AND WRITE THE FINAL DRAFT, GODDAMMIT Stage Cracks (Working
Staying up late on Sunday nights is one of the true pleasures in life. I missed the hell out of it last year, when Mondays were a day-job day, but then, I missed a great many things in 2012 that I seem to have gotten back this year. It’s eleven o’clock and I’m listening to Antony and the Johnsons while I kick around the internet, gearing up for the few hours of writing that’ll kick off once I finish this post. Brisbane is in the grip of early Autumn already, hammering us with the kind of cold and relentless rain that has always made this one of my favourite times of year in a strange, melancholy kind of way. And, as I often do when I sit down to write a post, I find myself thinking of you guys. Back in the days when I taught writing a lot, I used to tell students that writing is an ongoing conversation you’re having with the writers who came before you (and, sometimes, the writers who came after). I mean, William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels are a conversation he’s having with the hard-boiled authors of the 50s, who in turn were having a conversation with the writers of cosy detective novel that preceded them. I always liked “conversation” rather than “influence” as the explanation ’cause it’s not a one-sided thing. Seeing Gibson experiment with the genre-structure of the detective novel changes the way you read his predecessors in subtle ways. There’s a give-and-take
Cool Thing the First: I recently discovered that the StoneSkin Press webstore is live, which means you should now be able to pick up copies of The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables if you live in places like the US or Australia or, hell, I’m assuming you’re pretty much anywhere the internet reaches. There’s only a handful of times I’ve been really excited to work with an editor and, as I noted quite effusively last year, this project was one of them. Robin Laws is one of those writer/editor/creative types whose work effectively crosses many areas of interest, and I was a long-time fan of his frighteningly smart observations about RPG gaming as a younger lad. Cool Thing the Second: The Buzzcocks are Touring Australia in April. I’m not sure I can truly explain why this makes me happy, beyond pointing out that Have You Ever Fallen In Love with Someone (You Shouldn’t Have Fallen In Love With) was one of those songs that I listened to obsessively for about a decade. It still leaves me all a-tingle when it comes on the radio when I’m not really expecting it, and it still makes me smile whenever I track down the CD and put on the stereo. It’s one of those songs that stayed with me for a long time. I’ll exercise some self-restraint and not span the rest of this post with other Buzzcocks songs I’ve loved. Or even the cover versions of Buzzcocks songs I’ve loved (although Kiley Gaffney’s cover of Orgasm
So I have KPIs at the day-job this year, a neat little grid of goals that serve as the line between “doing my job well” and “not quite meeting expectations.” This is something of a first for me – for most of my life I’ve done contract work or found my way into jobs that were…well, lets say insufficiently defined for the purposes of generating things like key performance indicators. I’ve spent most of my life listening to friends talk about their office jobs and KPIs were part of that arcane language that floated around, reminding me of how little my work-life resembled theirs. I used to envy that KPI talk. Lots of my friends weren’t fond of the meetings, or found them a waste of time, but for someone who is, at their core, a moderately competitive person, they mean something important. They mean the day-job can be won. There is a line to reach and once I have moved past it I can look back at what I have done and declare victory. I find this enormously comforting. Daunting, but comforting. And I find myself thinking back to a conversation I had on twitter late last year, after Catherine Caine posted about metrics for small businesses on her blog, Cash and Joy. The initial point she made in her post – only pay attention to metrics that create decisions – fascinated me from a writing perspective, ’cause a lot of writers track all sorts of information without really
So, news: my latest story, On the Arrival of the Paddle-Steamer on the Docks of V–, is now free to read on Eclipse Online with a particularly lovely Kathleen Jennings illustration accompanying it (I’m not saying I submitted to Eclipse just ’cause they had Kathleen illustrating all the stories, but it didn’t hurt. Kathleen is kinda awesome). So I’m psyched. I mean, I’m really psyched. It’s been a long while since I had a story out there people could read without buying a book. Or, for that matter, a story out there at all. I’m going to be spending the rest of the day being all writing things FTW!, but for now I’ll just offer up this free taste-test of what’s on the far side of the link: Our tiny hotel room is boiling, even now, but heat doesn’t bother Patrick and he sleeps, shirtless, with the thin sheet coiled round him like a loving serpent. It’s a trick for him, nodding off. He cultivates a talent for sleep, adores the act of dozing off like it’s a second lover. He says it keeps him young, and perhaps it does, for people are always surprised to learn Patrick’s real age. I’ve started smoking again, since it no longer matters. Patrick copes with things through slumber, while I survey the world, my exhalations accompanied by the splash of river meeting dock. The river is the life-blood of V—, they tell you that in all the flyers. Words. I do stuff with them sometimes.
I’ve been back on public transport this week, regularly catching trains into work for the first time in about nine months. Usually I’m pretty fond of trains. The buses and me, we’re never going to see eye to eye, but there’s something remarkably civilized about rail transport. Especially Brisbane rail transport, which recently embraced the idea of giving people free wi-fi while they’re in transit (which, is apparently, the future once the car-loving baby boomers no longer have control of government). On the other hand, the train can also be a remarkably frustrating way to travel. I read an article a couple of years back that pointed out the inhibitor for most people when it comes to public transport isn’t the duration of the journey, but how often the services leave. Apparently we’re eager to be in motion when we’re trying to get somewhere and we’re grumpy as hell when we’re left to sit around on the platform. I spend a lot of time waiting on platforms when I head home in the afternoons. The trains that get me to work in a quick and efficient manner in the mornings go wonky as hell when I commute home. Like, this trip will take twice as long as the trip here kind of wonky. I’m always amazed by the number of writers that seem to love being in motion. There’s a bunch of famous writers who are closely connected to running – Haruki Murakami and Joyce Carol Oates have both written
One of the most disorienting places I’ve ever been was this hotel in Adelaide I visited last year. It’s one of those places that had the kind of endless sameness you get in movies when they point a camera at a hotel corridor and make it seem like a subtly alien kind of place. I stepped out of the lift and looked down the hall and said whoa all Bill-and-Ted-like. Then I hit my room and my room was huge (I got upgraded) and my plans for the evening rapidly became lie around this here room and marvel at the craziness of it, cause you’ll never be in a hotel room this huge and weird again. And that’s what I did. I ducked out to grab some fast-food, ’cause eating fast-food in a room like that seemed like the kind of sacrilegious that needed to be performed, just as I may have busted out a whole bunch of punk songs just to see how out-of-place they were when played in a venue like that. Turns out the acoustics in the room where kind of great, which made up for the somewhat dodgy speakers on Shifty Silas the Laptop. I spent a lot of time in hotel rooms last year, ’cause I spent a lot of time on the road for work and personal reasons. It seems crazy that I’m doing even more of it this year, but it seems that’s the case. There’s exactly three months this year where I’m not going to be boarding a flight to somewhere, and I
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