I wrote an opinion piece for eye last week on arts grants. Feel free to add your comments at the end.
That’s what arts grants are, right? Free money. You know this guy who used his grant as a down payment on an SUV. Heard of this other woman who used hers to make grapefruits talk to each other and someone else who made lesbian porn with public money. Taxpayer money! Your money and my money!
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Ian Daffern contacted me last year about doing a piece on the Perpetual Motion Roadshow for a new TV show he was producing called Scratch. We bandied about different possibilities, such as sending someone along to document it–I thought the people on the tour might be a bit uncomfortable with that & suggested that the crew take along my Hi8 videocamera and tape each other, then pass along the tapes at the end of it.
So the eight minute piece for the “Motion” show was made up of these clips of self-documentation as well as footage the show’s crew shot when they caught up with Jessica, Fred and More or Les in New York. I’ve posted a Quicktime .mov of it as I’m curious to hear comments on the segment from other Roadshow alumni as well as people who’ve attended the show as to whether it reflects their experience.
In a few days the No Media Kings 5th anniversary edition of Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask will be back from the printer.
My first book has been out of print for the last few years. The idea of pumping money into an old project wasn’t nearly as exciting as realizing a new one, so even though I got the rights back from HarperCollins I held off for a while. But fans of the book and booksellers alike kept asking about how they could get a copy–and they almost always wanted one with the Canadian cover, so I couldn’t just tell them to buy the still-in-print US edition.
So thanks to everyone who enthused this book back into print. “It’d make a great movie!” is something people say flatteringly often, and so I got the idea of promoting the re-release with movie-style trailers for the book. Two groups of indie filmmakers were into the idea and they did a great job, producing very different but intriguing adaptations.
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A bunch of people have recently drawn my attention to the product placement
of Ford cars in Carole Matthews’s novel The Sweetest Taboo. My Past Due letters were a response to a similar situation, Faye Weldon getting paid by Bulgari to mention their brand — I proactively invoiced the companies whose brands I mentioned in my novel of a hyper-marketed future, Everyone In Silico.
The cover of The Sweetest Taboo has the tagline, “The best things in life are never free.” I’ve decided to retaliate against this smug sentiment by releasing a free e-book version of Everyone In Silico. I’ve distributed thousands of copies of my previous novels in free e-book form since the 2000 release of Angry Young Spaceman, but not for EIS — I was curious to see if it would impact my sales significantly.
It hasn’t.
I’m kind of sad to leave behind the CD-ROM format for my digital zine, we’ve had some good times together, but with more and more people owning DVD players and burners and media costing less and less, it was a no-brainer. Not to mention that a poll on the site indicated that given a choice between a $5 CD-ROM and a $15 DVD, twice as many people prefered the new format.
The format change’s slowed me down a little, so the new deadline for submissions has been extended to May 1st [UPDATE: Passed.]. Check the submissions page if you have an odd or interesting vid you want to be considered for the new disc. It doesn’t pay anything, but these damn things have a way of getting around — thanks to Astria a bunch of the vids from #2 and #3 are being screened in Germany at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, My Trip to Liberty City among them. According to my stats counter, it’s been viewed 20,000 times so far. Not bad for something I made last minute because it fit in with the Dress Up theme of #3. If you’d like to see it, keep reading… (more…)
I’ve moved them to where they belong — The Cultural Gutter. My new collaborative blog has Guy Leshinski writing about comics, James Schellenberg on science-fiction, and my videogame pieces. Once a week we’ll be featuring a new piece on one of these subjects, and once a month we’ll be having a guest write about another piece of intriguing trash — an artform that’s poo-pooed but nevertheless fascinating.
I’ve got gigs on two different foreign continents over the next week or two, where I’ll be bringing the Past Due letters to Africa and Europe:
CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, Jan. 14, at 19:00: Centre for the Book (62 Queen Victoria St.) Free.
LANCASTER, UK, Jan. 18, at 19:00: The Yorkshire House (Parliament St.) w/Jess Lewin (funky flapjack, poet and songwriter) + PJ Shepherd (politically charged acoustic punk straight out of Switzerland) Free.
BIRMINGHAM, UK, Jan 19, at 19.00: Moseley CDT (153 Alcester Rd.) w/singer songwriter Tamsyn Widdon. Free.
BERLIN, GERMANY, Jan 20, at 20.30: Holz & Farbe (Prinzenallee 58) w/Daphne Owers from New Zealand. ?2.50.
This little picture is of the Centre for the Book, easily the most stately place I’ve ever performed at. Click it for a better look!
UPDATE: We’re back! For tour pics of unexpected animals, my BBC interview, seven-seated bicycles, and eminent scientists keep reading…
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On the weekend me and my wife Susan went to the launch of Geeks, Misfits, and Outlaws, an anthology of short fiction edited by Zoe Whittall. We stuck around after the readings and such and they played Le Tigre and my current pop obsession, “Hey Ya” by OutKast. Nothing like that spine-crawl of bliss brought on by dancing…
My contribution to the anthology was one of the sincere science fiction stories that laid the groundwork for Everyone In Silico and originally appeared in Adbusters. Click below to read it.
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Yesterday, there was a story on No Media Kings aired on Italian national public radio. The show was called Dispenser, and though I understood not a word I was impressed by how lively it seemed: there was dance music backbeat and, at one or two points, a baby’s voice.
UPDATE: Filippo Angeli graciously did a translation of the article, click to continue reading. Thanks Filippo!
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This short story just appeared in Number One Fan, Kris Rothstein & Sam Macklin’s collection of smart essays and fictional forays on the theme of fandom. The book not only walks the tricky line between analysis and enthusiasm, but it’s also a beautiful object: each one is a hand-made, one-of-a-kind hardcover that the pictures don’t do justice to. (Scanners don’t pick up iridescent fabric very well.)
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I did a seminar at Canzine, a zine fair in Toronto. It focused on the paradoxical notion that if you want to live without bosses, you have to be self-disciplined. I attribute my productivity to being well organized and hopefully I passed on a few pointers to fellow anti-authoritarian types, complete with absurd graphs and diagrams.
I’m happy to do it again, so get in touch if you’re having an event that you think it might be useful for. I’ve put my notes and images online — feel free to add your own tips and problems in the comments.
UPDATE: Marc Ngui and I made a comic book with these general ideas and his amazing artwork. It’s free on archive.org.
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This article has been on my site in a different form for a while, but it recently was published in Mix Magazine accompanied by Marc Ngui’s hilarious and brilliant microbial analysis of the sellout dynamic. Especially now that I’m writing a videogame column for the Torstar media conglomerate-owned eye weekly, it addresses issues I deal with on a daily basis. I invite you to read and comment on the piece.
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