Christopher East

Many months ago, when my writing stalled, I was halfway through chapter nine of Subnetworks.  Opening that file was like staring at a brick wall.  “I’m still there?  WTF?”

At long last, I have escaped.  This week I managed to write 2,500 words — a little each day, usually in tiny little fifteen-minute increments — and I’ve finally gotten out of that bloody chapter.  I even wrote the first paragraph of chapter ten.

A little discipline, and I’ll get this damn thing moving in earnest…

Last time I mentioned the new kitten, we were still half-calling him “Arthur,” and he and Cairo weren’t on speaking terms.  But things have changed in the last couple of weeks!

The new guy’s name is now Oslo, in keeping with our city theme — we also call him Oz, Ozzie, and (on special occasions) Ozymandias.  (sp?)  Another name that was in contention was “Deke,” and really, we could easily call him that for how often he fakes us out with his unpredictable moves.

Ozzie is still small enough to fit in the palm of my hand:

And after some initial reluctance, it definitely looks like Cairo has accepted his “little brother” into the family!  For those of you who missed Jenn’s great post (complete with combat video!), here are some more pictures of our two dudes hanging out together.

Dinner Time

Wary napping

Sharing a beverage

Douglas Lain started publishing regularly right around the time I started reviewing for Tangent, and I remember his stories clicking with me right out of the gates.  His first collection, Last Week’s Apocalypse (2006) — is that a great title, or what? — is probably not for everyone’s tastes, but I found it a pretty remarkable book, its stories consistently funny, unsettling, inventive, and full of surprises.  I’m not sure I always got the stories, but it never seemed to matter, and ultimately I wasn’t always convinced they were supposed to be gotten — they evoke and provoke, regardless.  The prose is effortlessly read, often laugh-at-loud funny, with a singularly quirky tone.  Even when the trees obscured the forest, I found myself simply enjoying the trees — its recurring themes and ideas, which include frequent musings on war, drug use, the nature of reality, mental illness, pop culture, marketing, politics, and consumerism, to name a few.

Lain’s most consistent mode straddles the line between a kind of Twilight Zone-ish soft SF and slippery, interstitial contemporary fantasy.  Some standouts for me, in this vein, were “The ‘84 Regress,” in which a present-day couple goes off its meds, only to find that the drugs had been projecting them into the future from a perfectly recaptured 1984; “The Headline Trick,” a highly pessimistic but darkly comic tale of a man who’s developed a mundanely magical way of gaming the system, only to find he may be contributing to its downfall; and “Shopping at the Edge of the World,” about a magical shredder that seems to only work on advertising copy, but turns out to be more powerful than expected.  The latter two in particular are masterfully done literalized metaphor stories, funny and bleak.  Indeed, even the more traditional-looking SF — such as “How to Stop Selling Jesus” (a less-than-devout salesman peddles holographic Jesus aps door-to-door) and “Identity is a Construct” (simulated humans journey to Alpha Centauri on a diplomatic mission) are less interested in their superficial skiffy trappings than in their thoughtful, internal subtexts about identity, belief, parenthood, reality, language, and more.

Even the collection’s less immediately successful outings are worthy and interesting.  The short, sharp “On a Scale of One to Three,” for example, is perhaps too didactic, but no less chilling for it.  The ballsy, metafictional “The Suburbs of the Citadel of Thought” is a somewhat scattered , self-aware story that’s perhaps a bit indulgent, but bravely so, and “I Read the News Today,” which is similarly disjointed, somehow manages to cohere in a dark, disturbingly funny way.

A very thought-provoking collection.  Taken collectively, the stories have a real undercurrent of melancholy and even anger to them, but individually they’re breezy and quirky and amusing.  I kind of like work that pulls me in different directions like that, so Last Week’s Apocalypse really pushed my buttons.

Oh, and by the way:  if this review interests you in Lain’s work at all, I encourage you to click over to his wonderful story “Resurfacing Billy,” which Paul and I had the pleasure of publishing at Futurismic last year.  The poor story went up on election day and was simply buried in political news…an unjust fate for a great story.

It’s looking like the original, theatrical edit of Donnie Darko was a happy fluke for writer-director Richard Kelly.  I found that film unique and riveting, and enjoyed it so much that I bought the extended director’s cut — which, as it turned out, felt like an entirely different, and considerably worse, film, which over-explained or stepped on the original cut’s every intrigue.

And now there’s Kelly’s follow-up film, Southland Tales (2006), which I attempted to watch yesterday morning (and yes, “attempted” is the operative word).  A mish-mash of near-futurish SF concepts, the film is purportedly an unsettling look at a post-9/11 dystopian political quagmire, but aside from an effectively chilling opening scene, the movie quickly devolves into an incoherent mess.  The story is disjointed, the pacing sluggish, the atmosphere an incompetent faux-Lynchian attempt at disquiet that is mostly just painfully dull.  The film is shamelessly stunt-cast with familiar film and TV icons from the past twenty years, none of whom are able to breathe any life into the proceedings.

This is a profoundly awful film, and worse, it’s not even interestingly awful.  I was bored after fifteen minutes, and gave up completely after forty.  I heard it was bad, but I thought at least it would be interesting.  It’s not — view at your peril.

After a couple of challenging science fiction novels, I was ready for something brisk and intriguing.  Charles Cumming’s A Spy By Nature (2001) totally fit that bill, a quick-moving and thoroughly enjoyable contemporary espionage tale.  In my constant search for new spy novelists to get hooked on, Cumming looks to have jumped up the queue, to a spot just behind John LeCarre’ and Alan Furst.

A Spy By Nature is the story of Alec Milius, a young, ambitious man in London who is looking for more out of life than his dead-end job can provide.  His fortunes look to change, though, when a chance acquaintance lines him up with an interview to work for the British Secret Intelligence Service.  Milius’ recruitment into the intelligence world takes up the first section of the book, and it’s a stirring, nicely built opening with a real ring of authenticity to it.  Milius, a pathological liar, makes for a thoroughly engaging untrustworthy narrator, and his journey through the SIS recruitment process is a satisfying story in itself, but it’s only the beginning.  The later sections involve Milius’ participation in an elaborate sting operation against two American oil industry representatives, and these sections are just as entertaining, full of unexpected twists and first-rate espionage paranoia.

Cumming’s writing is transparent, assured, and fast-paced, with an enviable knack for strong characterization.  There are no throwaway roles here; everyone who crosses the page is immediately distinctive and memorable.  He somehow manages to make Milius sympathetic enough to care about, even as his deplorable behavior mounts, reminding us what the intelligence world is really all about.  The build-up of the story is, I think, stronger than the resolution, but the messy wrap-up of the third section is clearly deliberate and on-point, so I found it hard to take issue with.  I highly recommend this one to fans of dark, intelligent spy fiction.

This weekend I caught up with Topkapi (1964) on DVR.  Based on an Eric Ambler novel, the film is a heist movie about a group of international criminals who plot the theft of an emerald-encrusted dagger from a museum in Istanbul.  Motivated by an avaricious bombshell (the engagingly odd Melina Mercouri) and steered by a slick mastermind (Maximilian Schell, perfectly cast), the team sees their meticulous plan morph into something else entirely, thanks largely to the comical involvement of a low-rent con man roped into the situation (Peter Ustinov, in a brilliantly funny, Academy Award-winning performance).

I saw Topkapi years ago and remember liking it a lot at the time, particularly for its elaborate heist sequence, its intricate visual story-telling, and its unique international feel and look.  The film was a primary inspiration for the original Mission: Impossible (indeed, Mission’s first two episodes in particular borrow liberally from Topkapi), and there are certainly obvious parallels — the team has a planning mastermind, a sultry actress, a strong man, and an engineering genius, archetypes clearly lifted by Bruce Geller for his iconic TV spy series.

I’d forgotten, however, what a delightfully weird movie Topkapi is…like a bastard cousin of early James Bond mutated by trippy sixties sensibilities, with fourth-wall violations and thick accents, technicolor visuals and unexpected plot turns, a sweeping international scope and a unique sense of humor.  The characters here are not the humorless automatons of Mission: Impossible:  Ustinov is a joy to watch as the hapless, bumbling Arthur Simpson….Mercouri is at once electric and creepy as the unapologetic nymphomaniac, Elizabeth Lipp…Robert Morley, as the quirky British egghead Cedric Page, is an amusing and unlikely criminal.  The interactions of this not-very-Hollywood cast of characters are clever, riveting, and at times hilarious.

It’s a wonderful clash of comedy and intrigue, perhaps a bit slow at times (by modern standards), but ultimately one of those one-of-a-kind movies worth going out of your way to see.

Had I read it when it was released, I’d probably now be classifying Damien Broderick’s Transcension (2002) as “proto-Futurismic SF” — which to say, I think its approach and attitude would have contributed nicely to the then-nascent vision I had for our website’s fiction section.  Even now it holds up well as a solid work of speculative SF, although its edge may have been dulled a bit by later SF it may well have inspired.  The future on display here, though, is still a detailed and interesting one.  I found aspects of the novel difficult, but on the whole I found it a worthwhile, thought-provoking read.

The surface plot follows the intertwined trajectories of three main characters:  Amanda Kolby-McAllister, a bright musician and daredevil nearing the end of an artificially extended adolescence; Matthewmark Fisher, a simple but good-hearted young man living a sequestered life in a Luddite religious colony; and Dr. Karim Abdel-Malik, a brilliant scientist whose work has directly resulted in the birth of a god-like artificial intelligence.  Their stories run individually and frequently intersect, but the surface  details of their stories seem a bit incidental to the Big Idea running beneath the surface:  the concept of the singularity, here an imminent, universe-transforming event brought about by exponentially accelerating technological change.

The book paints a fascinating picture of a fractured, unsettlingly clinical future world, ruled by systems and technology and magistrates, and the main thrust of its narrative — involving a reckless stunt Amanda undertakes, which leads her to infiltrate Matthewmark’s religious colony — clips along engagingly, although the pace is hindered slightly by the clipped, stilted “pender” slang Amanda uses, which never feels entirely natural.

In the end, a couple of distracting issues kept me from enjoying the book whole-heartedly.  One was a general wood-for-trees problem:  like many singularity-centered novels, there is plenty of speculation and detail vying for your attention, which for all its richness sometimes makes the narrative feel unfocused.  The individual character arcs, at times, overshadow the novel’s more intriguing world-building and concepts, and occasionally they don’t feel all that connected to them.  The rapidly approaching “Spike” (singularity), such a major focus of the book’s latter stages, seems a little too under-the-surface.

The other issue is the novel’s somewhat one-dimensional depiction of religion, as depicted through Matthewmark’s isolated enclave, the Valley of the God of One’s Choice.  As someone firmly in the secular/scientific mindset, even I had a difficult time buying into the rustic, backwards culture of the Valley, more a product of the past than the future, and its largely ignorant people.  It’s a bit too crassly unsympathetic to the issue, I think to the novel’s detriment.

Reservations aside, there’s still a lot to like in the novel — its detailed future world and thoughtfully extrapolated speculative concepts, and its impressive Big Ideas.  Although I had some problems with it, I think it’s definitely a worthy entry in the subgenre of singularity-inspired SF.

Secret Chiefs 3 has been my favorite band probably since the release of their third album, Book M.  Headed by former Mr. Bungle and Faith No More guitarist/composer Trey Spruance, SC3 started as what felt like a Bungle side project, but has evolved into something much bigger and better — a running, kitchen sync musical project combining everything from surf music to death metal to techno to ambient noise to new wave, much of it with a distinct Middle Eastern feel.  To date, they’re the only band I’ve ever liked whose music hasn’t at some point fallen off – if anything, they’ve gotten consistently better with each album.  No shark-jumping from these guys — and if this new release is any indication, there’s nary a shark in sight.

Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini is the first (and long, long awaited) post-Book of Horizons release to feature one of the seven “satellite bands” introduced in that release.  (Since then, there’s been Book of Angels 9 – Xaphan, but it’s kind of a separate project — a brilliant performance of all John Zorn compositions, still awesome SC3, but not really an extension of the Book of Horizons concepts.)

I have to admit, I wasn’t that big on the idea of “sub-bands” that focused on aspects of SC3’s oeuvre — part of my love of the band comes from the sheer inclusiveness of influences and styles, and breaking that down into more simplified components seems contrary to the spirit of the enterprise.  But so far I’m onboard, for this first “Traditionalists” release is still very true to the feel and spirit of all things Secret Chiefs.  The concept is a brilliant goof:  it’s a theme album of imaginary soundtrack music to a 1970s Italian horror movie that doesn’t exist*.   It probably says something about the breadth of my film geekery that I can totally picture this movie:  slightly cheesy, low-budget, badly dubbed, featuring attractive women in dangerous, creepy situations, all kind of fuzzily plotted and vaguely weird, unsettling in a darkly comic kind of way.  Imagine Lalo Schifrin scoring a David Lynch film, if Lynch had been making films in Romania in 1975 — with a dash of Bernard Herrman here, a sprinkle of Rosemary’s Baby there, with the occasional burst of overseas soft porn soundtrack…yes, this is the “Traditionalists” sub-band, but don’t let the name fool you.  There’s a whole diversity of music on display, mostly dark to be sure, but some of it beautiful and eery, much of it unsettling, and a great deal of it funny and surprising.

My favorite tracks, after several listens at any rate, are  the outrageous Final Fantasy VII-ish creep-funk of “Agenda 21″; “RFID Slavedriver,” a disco-electronica track veering into Rocky Horror shlock science fiction atmosphere; and “Zombievision,” an infectious, low key beat.  I suspect I took to these tracks because they’re among the more immediately accesible and catchy; ultimately, though, I don’t think it’s that “excerptable” an album.  It’s best listened to as the concept album it is, a full rock-orchestral piece, so that its conceptual continuity — themes appearing, then re-appearing in new ways — can be appreciated.

The verdict:  this is another awesome Secret Chiefs 3 album, definitely its own beast, another twanked gene in their evolution.  I hope it doesn’t take another two or three years waiting for the next one!

* Interestingly, my imaginary cousin “Anelie East” is one of the stars, according to the mock movie poster!

An eventful and enjoyable Sunday!

I spent most of the day down in West Hollywood reminiscing with old high school friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen for twenty years!  Not too long ago, in my hometown of Fredonia, a class reunion was held but many of us on the west coast couldn’t make it.  We did our best to make up for it yesterday and I had a lot of fun catching up and sharing stories of our western New York roots.  It still amazes me, years later, how lucky I was to grow up in a town full of so many creative, interesting, fun people — I so took it for granted back then.  Heya folks:  let’s do that again sometime soon!

From old friends to new:  Jenn and I adopted a new kitten!  So far we haven’t officially named him, but for now he’s “Arthur” (the name his foster mom gave him):

“Arthur” is a friendly and curious fellow who will purr at the drop of a hat.  He’s adapting quickly and nicely to his new home.  Sadly, the same can’t be said for our four-year-old cat Cairo, who isn’t terribly happy about having to share his house with a new stepbrother.  We’re hoping in time the two dudes will start hanging out, but for now, we’ve got them in separate rooms and are hoping to integrate them gradually into each other’s lives.  It will take time, but I think it will work out eventually!

So this weekend, after many weeks of neglect, I finally dusted off the “novel-in-progress” (I’m using the term loosely) and re-read the first nine chapters to see if it’s worth continuing to work on.

I think it is.  I have no idea if it’s structurally coherent — I suspect it’s kind of a mess in that regard, actually — but I enjoyed reading it and was a little miffed there was no ending.

So I’m going to finish it.  Eventually.  I even managed to write up the next eight chapters’ worth of plot, in skeleton form, anyway.  I’m trying not to think about whether it’s publishable.  I just want to be able, someday, to dig it out of my trunk and read it through and not have it stop in the middle on me.