Unarius dove release

Well, I wasn’t going to post again before I went away, but sometimes you find things that the world really needs to see. And today is one of those days.

I like doves. I like UFOs. I like white suits. I like Aaron Copland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’. But I never thought I’d see them brought together - never, that is, until now, and never with such nutty ceremonial aplomb.

So, thanks to the Fortean Times, some essential footage from the Unarius people, as they continue their ongoing quest to bring peace and understanding to the cosmos by releasing a flight of doves from a model UFO. Go - BEHOLD! - and stand in awe…

Do not adjust your sets

Well, many apologies - it’s been a very hectic week, and so I’ve gone quiet for a bit. And I’m going to be quiet for a little longer; I’m off to America with H this weekend, moving between Seattle, New York and Saratoga. We’ll be visiting friends, chilling in the woods, and hitting the World Fantasy Convention, so it should be a great couple of weeks.

And once I’m back, a new chapter in life begins! So I suspect that there’ll be some changes on the blog. I think I’m going to pull back to posting two or three times a week, both because of general busy-ness and a sense that there’s a limit to how many daily posts I can do and still keep fresh and energised.

But for now, farewell for a couple of weeks - and I’m going to end with a couple of plugs. First of all, it’s the RETURN OF THE STELLAS tomorrow night! I might have mentioned this before. We shall be onstage as our new incarnation of three keyboard / electronics folk, a free jazz / Moroccan sax / drummer, one or possibly two guitarists, of course me on bass, and whoever else shows up. The drone odyssey begins again!

Secondly, after (literally) years of anticipation, groovy fiction magazine Black Static’s out, and (thanks to the joys of the British postal service) a copy has just arrived. More on it once I’m back from the States and have digested it properly, but first impressions are - great design, very enjoyable features, and some very intriguing fiction indeed. But don’t take my word for it - go get yourself a copy here.

So for now - farewell!

Go Go Stella Friday!

Return of the Stellas

A slow day on the blog, but it does at least give me space to blurb THE RETURN OF THE STELLAS! Yup, London’s leading ambientkrautdoomraga purveyors (with me on bass) will be playing up North London way a week today.

More details here, plus images and sounds of our past triumphs. Come drone with us a week today!

Eyes wide shut

Been going back through the notebooks, wondering what to say today, and I lighted on an entry from a while back. The papers had been full of descriptions of Blair and Bush’s relationship in the run up to the Iraq War. Determined to be involved, Blair kept close to Bush and took his assurances about post war planning, etc, as truth.

This led to a confidence in the efficacy of the invasion and conquest of Iraq as a means to establish democracy that was, in retrospect, misplaced. ‘Poor old Jacques, he just doesn’t get it, does he?’ commented Blair after a meeting with Jacques Chirac. But in fact Chirac did get it.

‘[Blair] discovered too late that Bush was only nominally the Commander-in-Chief of the Iraq enterprise. A stark picture emerges of Bush making promises and giving assurances to Blair, which were not delivered because Iraq was being run by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, neither of whom were very interested in their junior British ally.’

Quite apart from the way that this exposes two key Western leaders as wilfully out-of-touch fantasists, it’s interesting because of what it says about the relationship between knowledge and the particular kind of fantasising that they indulged in.

Unlike early Middle Eastern warrior T. E. Lawrence, who saw himself as a ‘dreamer of the day’, one of a group of ‘dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible’, Blair and Bush were dreamers of the night. They dreamed with their eyes closed, privileging inner certainty over external truth.

So, they dismissed those with external knowledge as being at best pessimists, at worst misguided. ‘He just doesn’t get it, does he?’. And that’s one of the great ways of exposing this kind of fantasy.

Poke it with the stick of subjectivity, of hard rational truth; if its defence is either just to dismiss the stick, or hit back with an argument built on an entirely internalised logic structure that takes no account of the external world, then you know you’re talking to people busy dreaming with their eyes shut – and that someone else is probably doing the real work, somewhere else entirely.  

Serial killing

A note today that’s not so much about horror as about thriller. I’m halfway through ‘The Lonely Dead’, the second book in Michael Marshall’s (better known to genre fans as Michael Marshall Smith) Straw Men series. It’s compulsive reading. Having finished the first one, ‘The Straw Men’, I went straight out and bought two and three, and now I’m binging.

Over and above the plot driven unputdownability, what’s really fascinating about Marshall’s work is the subtext. The books so far have been obsessed with aging and decay, with coming to a maturity that has at its core a deep, disenchanted awareness of the transience of life and its pleasures.

Marshall doesn’t make Hannibalised anti-heroes of his serial killers. Rather, he keeps them at the margins of his story. They remain unglamourised, anonymous. He’s concerned with the effects of their actions, rather than the actions themselves.

That anonymity allows them to perform an important thematic function. In narrative terms, they’re barely privileged beyond other in-narrative killers – lung cancer, for example. As such, they form part of a complex rhetorical web, coming to symbolise the random, shattering, inevitable action of death itself.

I started by saying that these books are thrillers, but having written the above I’m now not sure about that. In some ways, they’re deepest horror, obsessing about the one inevitability that we all share; that that implacable serial killer death waits for every one of us, leaving only empty space and the effects of our passing as traces of our lives.

Spontaneously effusing

Well, a lovely weekend in Paris – visiting friends, hanging out in the 6^e, and once again failing to get to the Sainte Chapelle, one of the finest pieces of Late Gothic architecture in Europe. Hey ho, one day I’ll get there, tho’ I’ll be cursing Dan Brown as I do so. He mentions it in the Da Vinci Code, so there are now permanent queues to get in. Hmmph.

Anyway, I’m whizzing around at high speed today, so it’s a very quick post. I’ve just been listening to a Neil Gaiman / Susanna Clarke interview courtesy of The Guardian, in which he defines a certain kind of short story as ‘miserable people having small epiphanies of misery’.

That’s a great comment, at once a definition and criticism of a certain kind of Modernist / more generally literary writing. When it’s well done (Katherine Mansfield!) it’s fantastic; when not, it’s turgid, depressing and futile. Minute, miserable subject matter becomes an end in itself – questions of quality of writing (‘how well is this done?’) are ignored.

Which raises a very interesting question. Why is subject matter rather than quality of writing so often seen as the only value needed in defining a book’s literary worth? For me, it’s because of a lack of understanding of the craft of writing.

And I’m not sure where that lack of understanding comes from. Perhaps one explanation is that, for all the talk of Modernism and Post Modernism, our approaches to judging writing remain trapped by the great Romantic pose of the spontaneous effusion.

By definition, spontaneous effusing (what an ugly word!) privileges content over form. ‘I was so moved that I had to write this…’ – so content is all and form is ignored, at best a neutral quality, at worst something profoundly restrictive. What matters is the quality of experience that drives the piece, not the quality of the piece itself.

Which throws critical negativity onto anything that’s not directly realist. Whether detective fiction, fantasy, romance or whatever else, such fiction comes not from direct observation of reality but rather from a much more mediated process of working out – of crafting. And, if you believe in spontaneous effusion, you mistrust crafting.

So, much as the Romantic pose is very attractive (‘bring me my opium, my catamite, my quill – I must compose!’) perhaps it’s time to step beyond it and acknowledge that direct observation and subsequent effusion is an aesthetic choice only, and has nothing to do with the qualitative.

Which, come to think of it, once you’ve been to a couple of poetry readings built around dodgy confessional poets is something you really don’t need to be told.

A bientot!

Allumination has gone to Paris for the weekend - to eat fine food, drink fine wine, and explore in general, accompagne (of course) par la H.

There’s much to see - the Sainte Chapelle, the Arcades, the various art museums (this weekend’s particular target the Moreau Museum, I think), the place I used to live back in 1990 (how time flies!) - and of course, in pursuit of the weird, we might well be obliged to wander here…

Bon weekend a tous!

Life with the Vaders

Well, a busy day at Allumination Central, so for your delectation – and following on from yesterday’s Star Wars referencing post – here’s the first of the magnificent online saga that is ‘Chad Vader – Day Shift Manager’.

It’s about Darth Vader’s somewhat less adequate little brother, and his daily battles as he manages a 24 hour convenience store somewhere in the States. Quite apart from being very funny, it’s entirely justified by the acoustic guitar version of the Imperial Theme that plays over the opening titles.

The rest of the episodes are here.

So – enjoy!

Aliens and the family unit

Well, according to Grim Reviews and Papers Falling from an Attic Window (hi guys!) I’ve become involved in the online Derleth / Lovecraft debate. To be honest, I didn’t know there was one, but it touches on some very serious issues – the integrity of an artist’s worldview, the limits of universe sharing, and so on.

Some of the genre debates are less serious (tho’, come to think of it, not necessarily to those taking part in them). My favourite such was one I found a couple of years back – a very involved conversation about who would win in a battle between the USS Enterprise and a Star Destroyer from Star Wars.

The debate scrolled on for pages, and got very technical. I gave up reading it when both participants started referencing blueprints, competing technologies, etc. In fact, I couldn’t help feeling that the answer was very easy – the USS Enterprise, every time, because they’re the good guys, and both the Star Trek and Star Wars narrative models would demand their victory.

That throws interesting light on good guy / bad guy spaceships. For me, the basic function of bad guy spaceships is to look utterly threatening and apparently terrifyingly all-powerful (‘This station is now the ultimate power in the universe’, etc), but in fact be a bit crap; the basic function of good guy spaceships is to look ramshackle, or at the very least fallible (‘the engines canna take it, captain!’, etc), but really be indestructible and all-defeating.

That’s a result of the narrative structure that these stories are built on. Without all powerful but ultimately frangible villains, and apparently weak but in fact all-powerful good guys, you don’t get high stakes, fear of failure, final victory and thus the dramatic tension and resolution that keeps people both watching and satisfied.

I’ve also been wondering if there’s a visual semantics of starships. What’s noticeable is the extent to which good guy spaceships are rounded and cuddly, and bad guy spaceships are spiky and alienating. Good guy spaceships are implicitly a home; bad guy spaceships are a threat to that home, tearing into it and breaking it up.

One condition of much of the alien / opponent activity we’re shown is a lack of emotional bonds, contrasting strongly with the close relationships between on-board good guys. Even Star Trek – most hierarchical of SF shows, making heroes of an entire military command structure – is predicated on close emotional rather than organisational ties between its leading characters.

And in Star Trek, antagonist space ship crews are notable for their lack of that emotionalism. From the Borg to the Klingons, the Ferengi to the Romulans, anyone who fires on the Enterprise is really a non-family unit firing on a family unit. One more narrative trick to ensure we empathise with the good guys…

So where does all this lead to? Well, what’s really interesting is what it exposes about popular science fiction’s envisioning and dramatisation of the alien. It’s not really alien at all; it exists to provide a fallible opposite to human good, an opposite that’s portrayed in terms that – by definition – we can’t empathise or engage with, except as an evil, disposable antagonist.