Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Where I talk about books, movies, television, art, pro-wrestling and other forms of culture and pop-culture

#FollowFriday: Go Start Reading the Too Many DVDs Blog

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I used to be the vocal part of the #TrashyTuesdayMovie experiment over on twitter, but a lot of the logistical and planning behind the series of films we watched was done by my former flatmate, Adam. He took a kind of evil joy in finding terrible-but-interesting films and grouping them into themes, then sat there and took pleasure in the nervous breakdowns I suffered via twitter as we sat through shit like Zombie Lake and House of the Dead. He’s also the guy who started putting together the wiki recording each week’s set of tweets, which is half the reason I can remember some of the stuff we watched and how I felt about it at the time.

Sometimes, after a while, the trauma just makes you numb.

The thing to keep in mind about Adam is this: he already owned a large number of these films. Not because they were bad – despite what people thought, we weren’t interested in films without redeeming qualities – but because he’s interested in film as a medium and willing to engage with flawed-but-interesting works.

Which is why, now that we’ve stopped doing Trashy movies on Tuesday nights, he started the Too Many DVDs blog where he makes his way through all the unwatched DVDs in his house and reviews them

The definition of “Unwatched DVD” is pretty flexible: if he bought the DVD and he’s only ever watched the movie in the cinema, he’ll rematch it and review as part of the backlog of films. Given Adam’s exclectic – but often trashy – taste, this means he rewatches Oscar winners like American Beauty, then the next day he’ll follow up with a review of Cherry 2000, then launches into something he’s never seen before that no-one else has ever heard of; films he backed on Kickstarter ’cause they sounded kinda interesting, or the kind of stuff you find in boxed sets with titles like “50 Drive-In Classics” that you can buy for eight bucks a box’cause the owners of the original films in the set are busy trying to forget those films were ever made.

There results are often off-kilter, occasionally surprising, and comes with the added bonus, for me, of having Adam watching something extraordinarily awful while I’m not there be sucked in by the gravity of the couch and TV.

Now when I recommended following Grant Watson’s film review blog as part of Follow Friday a few weeks back, it was based on the depth of his engagement. It’s as much a learning experience as it is an evaluation of the film in question. Adam’s Too Many DVDs blog comes at thing from the opposite end. There’s a brevity to his reviews, ’cause he focuses on a few key issues: is this a film he’d recommend to people, and if so, why? What were the aspects of the film he found interesting.

This can be dangerous – and, in truth, I have watched some truly bad films based on Adam’s recommendations (“you should watch Ice Planet, it’s horrible”), but most of the time he’s sane enough to know that while he may have geeked out like no-ones business when watching Prisoners of a Lost Universe (aka Hawk the Slayer 2), it’s not sufficient to recommend the experience to someone who didn’t grow up with the first Hawk film.

Usually, though, his hit rate is pretty good. When he says a film has interesting qualities, it almost always has something going for it that makes me capable of understanding the appeal. And, truthfully, Adam is far, far snarkier with bad films than I am, so it’s worth sticking around just for the reviews where he really, really disliked something.

He’s currently heading towards 300 reivews, and at his current pace Adam probably has enough unwatched DVDs to keep hi blogging for another couple of years.This, of course, assumes he can avoid walking past a $5 and less DVD sale without making new purchases…and somehow I kinda doubt it.

I’m wearing my bias on my sleeve, but I’d urge you to go follow his work at blogger or keep an eye out for the twitter notifications that he’s posted @CrowroadAW. Make the pain of all those bad movies he’s suffered through worthwhile.

sworthwhile.

#FollowFriday: Anna Cowan, Untamed, and The Reasons You Should Start Following Her Career

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Untamed_AnnaCowanAustralian romance readers don’t really need me to tell them about Anna Cowan. Her first novel, Untamed, picked up the Favourite Historical Romance award at the 2013 Australian Romance Readers Awards and earned Cowan the Favourite New Author gong as a follow-up. Untamed has also picked up a litany of reviews on the vast majority of the romance review sites I follow, where it earns descriptions like polarizing, ambitious,  and divisive, but still earns some pretty impressive critical ratings (check out the reviews from BookThingo, Dear Author, and Radish Reviews for a representative sample),

Romance Readers don’t need me to tell them about Anna Cowan. This #FollowFriday is for everyone else.

So, here’s my advice:  go read Untamed. Start following Anna Cowan’s blog. Be very, very excited by the whatever is coming next, ’cause on the basis of the first book and the blog, I’d put money on her second effort being something phenomenal.

When you read Cowan’s blog you get a taste of the thinking behind her first novel. You get the feeling of a very savvy, ultra-aware reader of romance genre who genuinely likes genre and yet wants to take it in new directions.

The actual experience of reading Untamed is rather like encountering China Mieville for the first time as a fantasy reader – all the familiar tropes are there, but they’ve been arranged in a new and slightly unfamiliar way that makes you look at them anew. But where Mieville re-arranges fantasy tropes to examine their political underpinnings, Cowan re-arranges the tropes of regency romance in order to take a closer look at gender and sexuality.

On the surface the plot is going to be familiar to anyone who reads regency-era works: Katherine Sutherland is the pragmatic, blunt daughter of a minor lord who crosses paths with a flamboyant, manipulative Duke and attracts his interest. When she retreats from London to her country home, the Duke follows and manipulates his way into staying with the family, playing games and throwing her family’s lives into chaos.

And on the surface it’d be easy to believe that the narrative hook is the thing carrying the weight of the book’s themes of gender and gender rolles, given that the cross-dressing Duke of Darlington arrives on Katherine’s farm masquerading as a woman, and inserts himself into her world with no-one but Katherine aware of his gender.

Instead, the hook is perhaps the least-interesting aspect, although it does lend itself to some particularly awesome writing when Katherine and the Duke finally start getting intimate. What’s far more interesting is the way Cowan inverts and explores the gender roles of Katherine and her family, and the way gendered notions of social power is wielded throughout the book. What seem like characters inhabiting familiar archetypes develop surprising depth, particularly among the secondary characters such as Catherine’s sister and brother-in-law.

Untamed is one of those books I keep wanting to foist upon specific, SF-reading friends and acquaintances who are interested in books exploring gender, simply ’cause I’d be interested in talking to them about what’ going on in the text, but unfortunately I picked my copy up in ebook which, for all the merits of the format, isn’t well-known for its foistability.

Since I can’t physically hand over copies with enthusiastic raving, I have to share links and rave enthusiastically here, hoping it does the job.

#FollowFriday: Here’s Why You Should Follow the Tiny Owl Workshop

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towWe don’t often think in terms of following publishers. Writers, yes, ’cause it’s their names on the cover and we’re trained to follow the individual rather than the company that produced their work. Writers get branded; publishers…well, with the exception of Harlequin, the Penguin classics line, and some of the work being done by Angry Robot, there are very few larger publishers that have a clear, design-led brand that gives all their books a consistent look and easy recognition.

This breaks down a little once you start looking at small press, but, basically, you’ve got to be pretty nerdy to be a fan of publishers rather than the people they publish. Fortunately, I’m a nerdy kind of guy.

Tiny Owl Workshop haven’t been around for very long, but they’ve put together a series of interesting projects over their short life-span and they’re one of those publishers I keep watching with real interest.

NAPKIN STORIES

Tiny Owl first came to my attention when they published my friend Megan as part of their Napkin Stories project – a series of micro-fiction that were printed on serviettes, then distributed to a bunch of local cafes over Valentines Day, 2013.

The Napkin Stories had some great fiction and the gimmick definitely attracted attention on the local level, but I remember being somewhat dubious about it. Quirky will get you attention, after all, but from a writer’s point of view, there are always questions when you watch a small press emerging and establishing their reputation. What are they going to do next? How are they building a readership? How can they set up sustainable projects and income that’ll allow them to pay the writers they work with?

GENRECON 2013

The second time I heard Tiny Owl’s name was when we released the details for GenreCon 2013 onto the internet, which coincided with the first fifty tickets going on-sale at a massively discounted early bird rate. People were pretty excited about the conference’s second outing – we sold out of early bird tickets in twenty-six hours – but there were also a handful of people who were pretty bummed out. Mostly these were young, emerging writer-types who didn’t have the kind of discretionary cash to spend on a conference costing a couple of hundred bucks. A conversation broke out on twitter and blog posts right about the point where I was dragging my tired body to bed (launch dates for the con are exhausting)…

…and when I started processing the ticket sales, the following day, Tiny Owl had bought a small handful of tickets to be used explicitly to support developing writers who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend the con. They’d donated one to one of the young writers who was most disappointed about being unable to make the con, and asked QWC to help them find people who’d be a good fit for the rest.

It was a classy move for a young, emerging press (or, as Tiny Owl refers to itself, a Publisher in Training). And it earned them a lot of fans around the offices at work.

PILLOW FIGHT

Pillow StoryTiny Owl followed up their Napkin stories with the Pillow Fight project, run in conjunction with Brisbane Writer’s festival. The concept was simple: six genre-based flash fictions and six literary flash-fictions get printed on the pillows that got scattered around the BWF festival club. The per-word rate for the selected flash fictions was one of the best I’ve ever seen attached for a fiction open call.

I subbed to Pillow Fight. I got picked to be one of the stories for the Genre fiction kind of things. It remains one of the oddest ways my fiction has ever been published, and it doesn’t really fit on my brag shelf, but my pillow has earned pride of place on my couch.

MOVING INTO PRINT – UNFETTERED, LANE OF UNUSUAL TRADERS, AND BEYOND

A second round of Halloween-themed Napkin Stories followed the first to round out Tiny Owl’s first year, expanding their reach into Toronto as well as Brisbane. Then they started announcing projects that would see them moving into print, while still keeping the sense of whoa, that’s interesting that marked their initial publishing forays.

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click the image for Lane of Unusual Traders details

Unfettered invited a bunch of writers to interpret a number of pieces by of professional illustrator Terry Whidborne. It played right into Tiny Owl’s strength – visually intriguing, quirky, and immediately enticing to a number of emerging writers. Their next project, The Lane of Unusual Traders, is a shared-world anthology that is once again based in a strong, visual set of queues (and there are hints, in Tiny Owls discussion around the place, that there are plans for the world to be an annual thing).

Both these projects offer big hooks to writers – Unfettered was the first time in about six years that every member of my writing group submitted somewhere – and I’ve got no doubt that the final projects will be visually spectacular and packed with interesting fiction. They’re the kind of projects that suggest there is someone smart, invested, and with a particularly strong vision at the helm of the press, even if they are a publisher in training.

Couple that with print books compiling the napkin stories and a handful of other projects that quietly get mentioned from time to time, and you’ve got a press moving into its third year with some pretty interesting stuff on the horizon.

All in all, Tiny Owl achieves something that’s hard to do for a small press – they make me perpetually interested in what’s they’re going to do next. Not their authors, not their artists, but the press itself.

If you’re a writer, go check out their current list of projects. If you’re a reader, follow ’em on twitter and wait for their projects to go live. I promise you, you won’t be disappointed by the results.The way their projects combine art, story, and…well, the capacity for both darkness and whimsy…reminds me a lot of discovering the early work of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, with their greatest strength lying in their capacity to surprise you.

Basically, the Tiny Owl folks are smart, classy, and have a really strong idea of what they’re trying to achieve. Start following ’em now, if only so you can be insufferably smug about being there from the beginning when everyone else starts to notice ’em in a few years time.

Check out their website or their twitter feed @TinyOwlWorkshop, both of which are fairly active.