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Literary Laff Riot Set Free

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recommendations-thumb.jpgMark Slutsky is an old friend and longtime collaborator — we’ve written screenplays together and he’s acted in shorts of mine — and his studio, Automatic Vaudeville, has recently released a hilarious comedy under a Creative Commons licence for free download. The Recommendations is a 55 minute mockumentary about the horrible violence bubbling just under the genteel surface of Canadian literature. A showcase for their obvious goofball humour as well as their subtler cultural savvy, it’s my favourite of the Montreal movie studio’s almost fifty productions. To watch a trailer, read a short interview with Mark, and find out how to download it, keep reading.

Download the movie from archive.org.

So with the improv approach to the interviews, what would you say your shooting ratio was? How was the experience with actors vs. non-actors?

Mark Slutsky: We’ve always really liked working with a combination of professional and non-professional actors (I won’t call the latter “non-actors,” but here I’m talking about people who aren’t trained and don’t see acting as their main gig). Movies like The Recommendations really depend on a certain sense of realism that using an entirely professional cast wouldn’t provide; since the film is in a documentary style, you’re not always looking for people who are perfectly comfortable and polished in front of a camera, or, worse, have certain actorly tics that give the game away. Incidentally, it’s also really important for us to involve the actors in the creative process with a film like this. We wrote the story and developed the characters—to a point—but the dialogue was improvised by the cast, with some guidance from us, in response to questions we asked off-camera.

I can’t remember exactly what our shooting ratio was, but we definitely shot a ton of material we were heartbroken not to be able to include in the finished product (we included a bunch of this stuff in the special features included on Your Hi-Class DVD Vol. 2—you can’t download them at this time, though). That’s the thing about taking an improv-based approach; in the best-case scenario you end up generating so much that a lot of the filmmaking takes place in the editing room, even more than usual, I’d guess.

The various books and magazines and even author names are dead-on Canadian lit. Who made them and was there a deliberate decision to keep them slyly satirical rather than some of the broader humour in the featurette?

One of the really fun and exciting things about working on The Recommendations was creating all the supporting material we needed to flesh out this literary sphere where the story takes place. It was really important to us that this stuff look convincing—the book covers, the newspaper articles, the magazines, all of it. Something that had always bothered me was how fake that stuff always looks in movies, even big-budget Hollywood productions with great production values; it’s always obvious when a book jacket is designed for a movie. They always look off.

Of course we wanted these materials to be funny, in their own way, but not a cost to the movie itself. You had to believe that Philip Swan’s book, Susannah’s Wake, could be a bestseller, both in its presentation and in the writing itself. If that wasn’t believable, even if was funny, we’d lose something. We’d lose credibility with the audience and it would diminish the movie.

We all took turns writing the text, the book excerpts you see and hear in the movie. As far as the actual design of the books, magazines and newspaper articles, that was largely done by me, with the exception of the Sandy Anderson book covers, which Seth drew.

The music is such an integral part to nailing the true-crime dramatization sequences. How did you go about scoring this?

It was really, really, really important for us to get the music right. To a certain extent, we realized, this could make or break the movie; it’s so important in setting the deadpan tone. Luckily, we know a lot of very talented musicians here in Montreal, and one in particular, a composer named Chad Jones (who has also performed and released some terrific albums under the name Frankie Sparo), who wrote the music and performed it with the equally awesome Nadia Moss. The idea was basically a little bit Philip Glass (specifically his stuff for Errol Morris), a little bit CBC. It was crucial that the music not be at all “comedy”—anything overtly wacky or jaunty would have completely destroyed the movie and the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

More about Automatic Vaudeville can be found on their official site and this Now cover article.


Expozine Exposes the Antisocial Homosocial

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Expozine 2006 posterartRevolver #2, which consists of an excerpt of Salgood Sam and my upcoming graphic novel Therefore Repent!, has been nominated for the Expozine Alternative Press Award for best comic. It’s an offshoot of the awesome Montreal zine fair, one of the more successfully bilingual events I’ve been to. This is the second time they’ve done the award and, although I have fairly ambiguous feelings about prizes and competitions, I think the attention it draws to underexposed artists is definitely a Good Thing.

Case in point, a nominee in last year’s Expozine competition The Hero Book by Scott Waters.

Scott’s a pal, and the book is great, but he’s a curmudgeon. Not likely to tour, or do readings, or talk to people, he’s not exactly a media magnet. But awards like the Expozine Award give a context in which to talk about him. Or, in this case, interview him.

The Hero Book consists of short pieces of writing and paintings inspired by your three years in the army. Of the many sordid stories you tell, what ones do people find most fascinating? Are they the ones you also find fascinating?

I guess often enough the more excessive stories are so normalized for me that I forget that they have the ability to shock. For example, I know peeing on each other while drunk in the shower, singing along to The Little Mermaid soundtrack, is perhaps sordid, but I mostly think fondly of events like that.

Often I am more drawn to the simpler moments (running across snowy expanses of prairie with a bar of soap rattling in my rucksack) because they have personal resonance. But at the same time the shift back and forth between sordid and simple is important to make rattling soap resonant.

There is a book for me and a book for the reader; shock and debasement for the reader, quiet contemplation and anthropological cataloguing for me. Switching is allowed and encouraged though.

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You like the word homosocial. Why? Is it because it sounds like another word?

You mean “antisocial”?

Oh, the other word. Actually, The use of the word originated because I was researching military and social theory for The Hero Book (originally part of my MFA thesis). When searching on Google, the word “homoerotic” often returned only porn info.

I explained my problem to Toronto visual artist Stephen Andrews and he suggested searching using “homosocial.” It returned a goldmine of info.

Also, though, homosocial suggests a relationship which is not based on sexuality but rather a very close fraternity.

Painter and soldier are hard to reconcile. How much of this project was about projecting an image or conception of yourself into the world that is complete?

Painter and soldier are only hard to reconcile if you are one or the other, or neither. Unfortunately, that is most people.

For myself, I have always envisioned that a (perhaps unachievable) goal of both professions is to contribute to society. Obviously the two groups often use wildly different means to do so but proponents of both professions talk of similar well-meaning possibilities.

I have always taken comfort in both group’s semi-outsider status, that they are often misunderstood and lumped as stereotypes.

The other week I found an illustrated book of a Special Forces unarmed combat techniques in a used bookstore. When the teller rang the purchase through, she asked me if I was a soldier or an artist.

She was joking but at the same time I suppose her thought was, who else would want a book like that?

Conversely, when this question is asked I recognize that one of the ideas I hope the project shows is that you can fundamentally reconstruct yourself given enough time, effort and consideration – that we are all redeemable.

It seems to me that you are less defending the military and more defending your admittedly conflicted fascination with it. True or mostly true?

Part of me is loath to defend the military because it was for me and my friends a pretty demoralizing place. The fool in me, however, still has some pretty antiquated romantic views about the potential role of the military.

That for me is the fulcrum, I hated it – and I mean really hated it – but now, after all these years I feel its pull and still want to believe, even though I know better.

You are, magically, suddenly in charge of the Canadian Armed Forces. The #1 General, or whatever. What do you change, if anything?

Back in the day, on holidays such as Christmas we would have the appropriate meals at the mess. We would go over for dinner and turkey would be on the menu. When we started chewing however, we realized that what we had been served was mock turkey.

The reason was that all of the food came through the Navy base and then was allocated to the infantry. Accordingly, the sailors would get the actual turkey (and all the best desserts) and we would get turkey substitute. That always rankled.

I would say that while there is still a long way to go – the pay is still too low and there is never enough equipment – things are getting better, at least on the Army side of things. Given the emphasis on the Afghan mission (and not on naval patrols) I suspect I know who is now getting the mock turkey.

hero_book_coverbg.gifNow that the book is published and the project has some sort of conclusion, do you worry that you have used up this defining thing you had to say?

I remember reading how Anthony Swofford, after finishing writing Jarhead, started working on military fiction, I thought how sad it was that he needed to cling to the thing that he claimed to revile so much. But that’s the big question… now what? I really worry about being that guy, the sad clinger-on.

Having said that, the current project I am working on is based on my recent participation as an official artist for the military. For the project I was attached to an infantry company as they trained to deploy to Afghanistan.

At first I planned to simply continue investigations into how fraternity is constructed in the infantry. Now, however, what I am really excited about is considering how it was being back with the military – in admittedly limited capacity – after all these years, how I was treated as a civilian but also as an ex-infantry soldier.

All the hate I had for my service years has inevitably faded but I still remember the hate. Keeping that kernel of knowledge alive, I have to admit that it is too easy for me to get wrapped up in the romantic mythologies, in the metal, the explosions and the fraternity.

What this official project allows me to do is address these same issues, this complicated fascination, but from another side.

Instead of a critique which acknowledges lingering desire, I’m considering how the military romantic in me reconciles those fundamentally negative experiences I had as a soldier.

He didn’t win the Expozine prize (Shannon Gerard did) but Scott points out another benefit of the Expozine nomination was that David Widgington from Cumulus Press read his self-published edition and consequently published it more widely. This year’s Expozine prize gala happens this Wed., Mar. 7, in Montreal. UPDATE: The excellent Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki took best English comic this year. Congrats!

How to Become a Famous Writer

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Ariel Gore gets the word out thereI’ve always prided myself on the fact that the DIY publishing articles on this site have a certain lack of, shall we say, bullshit. And normally, a book called How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead would smell a little funky to me. However, Ariel Gore, Hip Mama mag creator and indie culture maven wrote this book, and like all her books (I’m particularly fond of her memoir Atlas of the Human Heart) it is excellent. As well as sharing her own considerable experience, she interviews folks like Ursula K. Le Guin, Dave Eggers, and even me, and manages to pack more wisdom and practical advice than I’ve ever seen in a book of its ilk. (It had an extremely high nods-per-minute ratio.) She even gets the folks she interviews to give “assignments” at the end, making it a writing class unto itself. Plus it’s extremely readable — I intended to skim to find something to excerpt but I found myself sucked in and reading most of it. Below is one of my favourite sections in the book.

Make a Fool of Yourself
I like publishing because it is possible to survive one’s mistakes.
–Michael Joseph

If I stayed home with the curtains drawn until I’d written, rewritten, and polished to perfection each precious line of the next Great American Novel, I wouldn’t be famous enough to get it published. As it is, when I do produce my finest masterpiece, folks will say, “I always knew Ariel Gore had it in her,” and the New York Times will admit that I’m a genius, and I’ll be even more famous than I had to be to get the thing published, and I can die a goddess.

Until then, I’ll publish what I’ve got.

Most lit star’s first publications were straight-up embarrassing. This is as it should be. You live and learn. The humiliation of a bad poem doesn’t truly hit home until your ex-husband has submitted it in family court as evidence of your total mental incapacity.

I will not write such a poem again.

But even the embarrassment is good practice. If you’re going to be famous, you’d better get used to humiliation. There is no dignity in celebrity. When I finally got the L.A. Times–my grandmother’s hometown newspaper–to run a big color picture and proclaim me a lit star, they also mentioned that I’d once slept with a man for money. Thank you.

“The unread story is not a story,” Ursula K. Le Guin says. “It’s little black marks on wood pulp.” So make your little black marks live. Let a reader turn them into a story.

Look around. Great people are always kicking themselves for failing to reach impossible standards of perfection while the mediocre ones run around doing this and that and seeming never to feel the least bit bad about themselves.

So your first published piece won’t be in the New Yorker. So what? Maybe it will be in a small community newspaper published out of someone’s dirty kitchen and the only way you’ll get them to print it is by volunteering to do the dishes. It might be in a niche magazine or a small-circulation nation zine called I (heart) Amy Carter, it might be in a self-published chapbook. It doesn’t matter. Get used to publication. Get used to writing for strangers. Get used to the stupid things those strangers will tell you about your work. Get used to the awesomely heartening things they’ll tell you. Get used to the fact that as a writer, you may never know who read your work and whether or not it had any impact on them at all. Get used to imperfection. Get used to the typos that make it past copyeditors. Get used to publication. Short stories. Articles. Blogs. Columns. Blurbs. Poems. Whatever you’ve got. If you want to write for strangers, get it out there so those strangers can see it.

A lot of glossy magazines won’t even read your stuff if you don’t have a resume. But here’s the good news: You can publish the first issue of your zine for $50. If you’ve got access to the internet, you can start a blog for free. Once you’re publishing stuff yourself, you’re not just a writer, you’re a writer-publisher. If you publish other people’s stuff, too, you’re a writer-editor-publisher. You can join the club. And the listserve. You can go to potlucks with other writer-editor-publishers. You can offer to review books and write fillers for their zines and journals and websites. And voila! You’ve got a resume.

How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re DeadWhen it comes to writing a book, just write it. If the book is nonfiction, you might be able to write a proposal for it and get a contract before you write the whole thing. More likely, if it’s your first book, you’ll just have to write it. And what when it’s done? Try to get an agent. An agent can try to sell the book to a big press and get you a little money. And what if you can’t get an agent or don’t want one? So what? I know a few people who’ve spent years-coming-on-decades trying to find an agent who’ll sell their book to a huge press. They won’t even consider going for a medium or small press. This is madness. I don’t understand it. Maybe they’re hoping to impress their parents. But I can tell you that if you’re parents are not proud of you as an unpublished writer, they will not be proud of you as a published writer. If they are picky, critical people, they will find fault with your book regardless.

Maybe these developing writers want to make a lot of money. If so, they ought to learn a trade. Big presses are great, but they’re not the only game in town. Start with a humble book at a humble press. Start with your own press. Make 300 copies. Call a local bookstore and set up an author event. Invite all your friends. Make flyers about it. Send press releases and review copies to relevant media. Sell your 300 copies. And use the money to print more. Now you’re a published author. Onward!

Your first published pieces will be incomplete and imperfect. Who cares? It’s better to make a fool of yourself in front of a small audience than it is to steal from the world the light of your coming brilliance.

Write for Strangers

Like most writers, I started out writing for myself. I kept messy, irregular, emotional diaries. I meditated, pen in hand, across pages lined and blank. I free-associated and rambled on. But eventually, journaling to become a writer started to feel like playing with buckets of saltwater to become a surfer. Sure, had to get used to the elements I wanted to work with, but freewriting can only take a writer so far. So I started penning letters to friends, writing poems and posting them on telephone poles, and then, finally, writing short articles and profiles for Sonoma County Women’s Voices, a small community newspaper where the editors were kind enough to give me an internship.

Occasionally when I’m stuck on in a story or a chapter now, I’ll open a notebook and scrawl stream of consciousness to empty my mind and let the universe fill the vacuum, but when I’m stuck it’s usually more helpful to take a walk, have sex, paint a portrait, lift weights, go out for a drink. Freewriting helped me recover from too many years of formal education, but it’s no longer a super-effective tool when it comes to waking my creative brain.

If you want to write just for yourself, that’s fine. Get a good journal. Archival quality. But if you want to write for strangers, too, you’ll have to publish. I’ve had teachers who warned writers not to publish until they’re “ready.” This is silly. What’s ready? I started publishing my work long before I was ready. Start publishing. Start right away. And don’t be afraid to start small. Set yourself up with a public diary at livejournal.com. Print poetry on stickers and post them around town and in train bathrooms. Print short short stories on well-designed bookmarks and convince local booksellers to display the freebies on their counters. Print your words on anything you can think of — paper, walls, or the pages of cyberspace — and distribute freely.

Start Small

As Marc Acito says, it’s not who you know in this business, it’s who knows you–or rather, who knows your writing. So don’t be afraid to start small.

I might need a famous author to blurb a new book. I might find that author’s website and send them an email introducing myself and asking if they wouldn’t mind taking a look at my manuscript and consider endorsing it. And that famous author might write back saying, “Sure, I know you. You wrote that weird short story in Fly By Night magazine six years ago . . .” This is exactly three trillion times better than trying to get that same famous author to remember that we shook hands once. No agent, editor, publisher, or writer has ever said to me: “Sure, I know you, we met at such and such literati cocktail party . . .”

Even if no one who’ll be specifically helpful to you ever reads your weird short story in Fly By Night or your column in the PTA newsletter, you’re taking your craft and your genius into the world now. You’re getting used to seeing your words in print. If you have an editor, you are learning how to be edited–how to revise when asked, how to let the little changes go, how to fight for your original words when they’re truly important to you. When you read your first articles in print, you may notice that they seem to have a different rhythm and tone to them once set in type. A story on a magazine page has a different feel to it than a story on the computer. That’s because written words and stories are living things. You can’t always control the editing or the subtle transmutation that takes place when a piece is printed, but you can get used to the process and begin to work with it. If my first published work had been a book I’d spent years working on, I probably would have had a nervous breakdown. As it was, my first published article happened to be a 600-word story about a local First Nation farm struggling for survival. It took me a week to write. The subject matter was important to me, but not deeply personal. And so I began to learn to publish and be published not with a huge splash, but with a small offering, by lending my still-shy voice to an unseen community treasure that needed every voice it could get.

~~~

Check out more excerpts at Ariel Gore’s website or buy it online.

How to Enjoy Conventions

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cons-thumb.jpgJust coming down from the high of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival where we not only found an excited audience for our new graphic novel (we sold 90 copies in two days!) but I got to sit beside my favourite comic maker at the convention, Carla Speed McNeil — who, incidentally, I first heard about through the first TCAF when we were on a self-publishing panel together. I did a quick 20 minute interview with her and we talked about why she creates anachronistic science fiction societies, how she gets around the fact that her work is complex and hard to promote, and the development of her sin-eating aboriginal bad-boy.

Download the MP3 here.

Keep reading to hear about the other amazing cons I went to this summer, as well as some tips for enjoying them!

con-web.jpgThink GalactiCon is a brand new radical left science fiction conference started by people inspired by Wiscon, a feminist SF con I wrote about a while back. It was held in a grand old university building in downtown Chicago, and the panels were small and less about listening-to-experts and more focused discussion groups, which makes sense given the con’s anarchist leanings. We got to talk about a lot of race/ class/ sex issues but all through the filter of fabulist fiction, which defuses the potential grim seriousness. This heavy/light mix is my idea of fun! Plus it was nice that I was a special guest and people made me feel important.

As a good reality check, at Defcon I was pretty much a nobody. It’s a hacker convention in Las Vegas that attracted 7000 people interested in computer security — both corporate people running defence and those on offence. Craig and I had been invited to present Infest Wisely for movie night, essentially entertainment after the important stuff, but it was awesome to be able to dip into the subculture. It’s a pretty diverse scene, with lockpicking contests, parties you had to solve cryptographic clues to get into, and talks on how to social engineer by overflowing the brain’s buffer.

If you haven’t already tried ‘em, conventions are fun. They’re great places to make friends with like-minded people from all over and spend a focused couple of days really getting into what you’re into: call it a thinktank, call it geeking out, whatever you prefer. Here’s some things I’ve figured out since Wiscon got me hooked on going to cons 5 or 6 years ago.

1. The more specific the better. Bigger is not better: I generally find generic cons to be pretty boring. Sure, you should be able to find lots of folks on the same wavelength at a bigger con, but it’s harder to find them.

2. Look at old programs. Panels descriptions from last year’s con is a better reflection of the kind of discussion that goes on than, say, the content on the website. Many great cons have crappy websites, probably because they’re focused on making the real life experience happen.

3. Go with or without friends. Don’t make it the deciding factor of whether you’ll go. Sure, it’s fun to have some folks you know — it can get kind of lonely without them. But the flipside is that you’ll be more approachable and more likely to chat with strangers when you’re alone.

4. Unless your body/mind is saying NO, say YES. It’s easy to feel ambivalent about a trip out of the hotel or an invitation to play a game, but unless you’re exhausted or totally burnt out, just go with the flow — you can be a homebody at home. Things happen that you don’t expect.

5. Read about it. Especially if you’re into anime, check out Svetlana Chmakova‘s Dramacon, which is a manga series based in an anime convention: it does a good job of re-casting conventions in a more nuanced light than the Trekkie cliches.

6. Participate. If you’re creative, you don’t have to be a featured guest to express yourself. Make something to give to people, a minicomic or a zine or whatever is an extension of your self. You will meet people who will nurture and support you.

7. Be conscious of the opportunities away from the con, but don’t feel obliged. I didn’t really care enough to visit Caesar’s Palace, for instance, when we were in Vegas, but the chance of firing machine guns was too good to pass up. I chose an uzi, picked the Canadian guy target, and posed shame-facedly with it afterwards.
Post-automatic-weapon shame.

 

 

It was quite nerve-wracking. Even with the sound cancelling headphones the noise still made me jump, and the recoil was significant (though not nearly as bad as Craig’s AK-47). How did those Columbian drug lords do it? They must have made them quieter back in the ’80s.

8. If you enjoyed yourself, go again. It feels a bit like the first day of school after the summer, except you only have to go to the classes you want and crazy parties are part of the curriculum.

Our New Twenty Year Collaborative Project

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sid-thumb.jpgAlthough we’ve been prepping for it for the better part of a year, Susan and I began the project in earnest a week ago today: her name is Sidney Amelia Bustos Munroe, and she weighed in at 7 pounds, 14 ounces.

It’s been going great, it’s a totally engrossing and fascinating process. Susan and I have made a bunch of things together, but Sid’s by far the best. Imagine a human being, but an implausibly adorable one, and you’ll have an idea of what she’s like. And if you’ve having trouble picturing that, check out the pictures interspersed with some of my early observations.

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    Susan made an iron-on with Sid’s ultrasound so when she was pregnant it gave the impression you were looking directly into her belly. Freaky!
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    Susan rode her bike up ’til the day Sid showed up. Baby On Board!
    sidneys-birthday-008.jpg
    Sid, one minute old, still on the delivery table. Having a kid is like going to Paris — everyone says you’ll love it, and usually they’re right. Some things just have a cross-the-board appeal. But like Paris, you can still make the basically magical experience your own: choosing whether you go as a backpacker or a champagne socialite, travel alone or with a crowd, visit the subways or the cathedrals.
    sidneys-birthday-014.jpg
    We had Sid at Women’s College Hospital, where the staff were amazing and supportive.
    I’ve never felt really strongly that I wanted to have a kid, or didn’t want to — I’ve always felt fairly neutral about it, and same with Susan. In fact, a friend reminded me of my off the cuff comment that “kids are the most conservatizing force on earth” — which I still believe. Most political decisions you make have to do with how you value freedom and security, and when you have a kid you naturally tilt towards security. But change is exciting, and the same way I like working with constraints with art, I’m interested in seeing how having a kid will change/funnel my work and life.
    bathday.jpg
    Sid didn’t like her first bath, ducky towel or no ducky towel. It was harrowing at the time, but I do find this picture hilarious.
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    I have become one of those dads with the weird alien growth of my spawn emerging from my chest. Our first walk, to the doctor’s office when Sid was four days old. It was a beautiful day and she slept through most of it.

Free Artsy Games Released

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Rosemary Mosco's AlbacrossThe second round of the Artsy Games Incubator went terrific: all five of us ended up with videogames you can download and play: check out Mouse Police, Bungee Fisher, Cupcake Challenge, Albacross, and my own Baby Runs This Mofo.

It’s a good excuse to interview one of the founding sponsors of the AGI project, Jon Mak, a Toronto game designer who Newsweek dubbed a “wunderkind”. His abstract videogame Everyday Shooter came out for the PS3 and now it’s available on the PC — if you’d like a chance at winning a free copy, leave a comment in response to the MP3 interview I did with him below. In it Jon explains why Guitar Hero is fun despite being a sucky game, that he learns best through failing, how he made ES while working part-time for money thanks to context switch, & how the work gets better the more you take away.

No Flash? Get the MP3 here.

Roundsdoctors and Hexslingers

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Two recent book trades that I felt I got the better deal of — A Dream on Two Wheels and A Book of Tongues.

Wheels is a smart and whimsical cyclist alternate reality written by Sarah A. Chrisman, who not only handmakes her books but also a selection of hats you can wear while reading them. Lovely!

Tongues is a baroque masterpiece. The worldbuilding is as dense and rich as China Miéville’s, and the cowboy sex smells of Jean Genet’s forbidden machismo. The fact that this outlaw confabulation has come from a debut novelist from Toronto and a Toronto publisher of excellent weird spec-fiction just makes me extra-excited.

David Malki ! and Ryan North Interview

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I’ve recently been inspired by the amazing long-form interview WTF podcast to revive the Inspiring Creators Series here on No Media Kings. The thing I love about Mark Maron’s style is that he is the opposite of the objective reporter — he’s a confessional, personal, self-obsessed egomaniac, and you end up loving him for it. I think when ever I was doing these interviews in the past I felt like the noble thing to do was to make it all about the person I was interviewing, when really I was most interested in having a open discussion with my peers and fellow cultural workers.

But anyway: Machine of Death. A smart and funny crowdsourced science fiction anthology self-published by a bunch of webcomic creators becomes a #1 best seller on Amazon, is publicly denounced by right wing pundit Glenn Beck and generally flies in the face of every scrap of received wisdom about publishing. Rethinking publishing is something I know a thing or two about, and what’s even better is I know these guys, so I thought it’d be a good way to try out this whole conversational approach. David was in town for TCAF and he and Ryan nicely made their way out to my place overlooking the railway in the Junction. We chatted for about an hour and a half and I cut thirty minutes out.

Machine of Death is available as a free e-book and in a print edition, and if you like it you should consider submitting a story (July 15th deadline!).

No Flash? Download the MP3 here or here.

If you dig this, you might want to subscribe to the Inspiring Creators podcast (RSS2 or itunes) or check out my other (older, more stilted) interviews with videogame maker Jon Mak, comics artist Carla Speed McNeil, or Wholphin DVD editor Brent Hoff.


The Lo-fi Sci-fi Salons

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I’m involved with the new Lo-fi Sci-fi 48 Hour Film Challenge that’s happening at the end of August. In my role as Creative Director I’ve programmed four Lo-fi Sci-fi Salons in the run-up to the Challenge.

Each Salon will be hosted by a different local filmmaker who will be showing some inspiring fantastical shorts and then sharing some tips from their experience making science fiction movies. There’ll be lots of time before and after to meet & drink with other lo-fi sci-fi enthusiasts.

  • July 30: I will be chatting with Louis Savy, Programmer for SCI-FI-LONDON, over Skype. S-F-L is a big inspiration, and we’ll be watching some of the best shorts from its long-running 48 hr Film Challenge.
  • Aug. 6: Matthew Nayman (“Blind Spot“) will be talking quick and dirty visual effects
  • Aug. 13: David Fernandes (“Re-Wire“) will be sharing tips on props and sets on the cheap
  • Aug. 20: the folks behind the upcoming feature A Brand New You

They’re happening Mondays at 7pm at the Monarch (12 Clinton St., Toronto). They’re free and open to the public — you don’t have to be signed up for the Challenge.

But you totally should! It’s a great way to collaborate with new people, try something too weird and experimental for a feature, and get something small and achievable in the can. Hot tip: if you check out the first Salon you’ll get a sense of what it’s about and still have time to get the Early Bird rate ($50/team til Aug 1st).

Kirby is a Remix

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Back when I knew him in Toronto, Kirby Ferguson was making dirty comedy shorts and directing a segment of my sci-fi flick Infest Wisely. Five years later, he’s doing Ted talks and raising 50K+ for his next video thinkpiece series. His Everything is a Remix series is to blame for his ascension from the gutter — it’s a terrific, much needed piece of populist cultural theory. Watch it for free here! Earlier today we sat down to talk reinvention, being of service, and the benefits of obscurity.

You can download the newest episode in the No Media Kings Inspiring Creators podcast over here, subscribe to it via RSS2 or iTunes, or just click play below. Feedback welcome! I just got a new microphone, so hopefully it’s loud enough to listen to while you do the dishes.

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