Natalie Shau.

The art of Natalie Shau. Rabbits. Ravens. What's not to love here?

The Magicians.

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman, was published this week by Penguin Putnam. I loved this book and it's meta-narrative, dissatisfaction with work and life, anti-quests and amazing, lyrical prose. Go buy it now and check out Lev's excellent blog, Nerd World.

It was my great pleasure to interview Lev at Book Expo this year for Borders Media. The video interview, including too many embarassing shots of yours truly is here.

You can also hear the NPR interview with Lev here, including a guest appearance by the extremely talented Elizabeth Hand.

Thomas Pynchon's Los Angeles.

I've have never spent any time in Los Angeles, and I've only read one Thomas Pynchon book completely - V.

I have started The Crying of Lot 49 twice and made it through 677 pages of Mason and Dixon. I have passed through the L.A. airport three or four times.

It's a city I am certain I would love and revile in equal measure, but really, who cares about my experiences or lack thereof?

Wired magazine did this awesome map to celebrate the release of the new Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice. Check out the user submitted google map at their page as well - great idea!

From what the publisher told me and from talking to friends who've read it - Inherent Vice is certainly more accessible than his last several works.

From the Wired website:

"Little known fact: Thomas Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the information age, is LA's greatest writer. To be sure, Los Angeles—whose aerial view he likened to a printed circuit board—has always been central to the elusive writer's weird weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold War hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture references. But did you know he actually lived there in the '60s and early '70s, while writing Gravity's Rainbow, the Moby-Dick of rocket-science novels? "

Six ways to use your video game skills at the office.

I loved this too, too much. Probably because it rings a bell that's uncomfortably loud. All six skills are dead on PLUS you get the hi-larious Halo helmet on the woman in the peach colored suit. I know her, I swear I do.

#3 So, Your Boss Is an A-hole

Ask anyone who has worked in an office what the worst part is, and most will reply with an obscenity-laden tirade about their boss. Whether it's providing an unreasonable timetable to finish a big project, riding employees over trivial dress-code violations, or holding daily meetings in the conference room that consist of remarkably boring Powerpoint presentations, most bosses are a-holes, plain and simple.

Gamers are accustomed to fighting bosses, which means that no matter how big, tough and disgustingly inhuman an office's head honcho is they will prevail. Even in the face of the menacing mini-boss -- the office brown-noser -- gamers will not falter. And if the daily grind does take its toll, gamers have a perfectly healthy way to deal with the stress: Going home and shooting strangers online while screaming how much of a whore their mothers are in a friendly game of "Call of Duty 4."

Six ways to use your videogame skills at the office.

From a Steampunk Manifesto.

I like this excerpt from Professor Calamity's "Steampunk Manifesto":

"... Steam technology is the difference between the nerd and the mad scientist. Steampunk machines are real, breathing, coughing, struggling and rumbling parts of the world. They are not the airy intellectual fairies of alogorythmic mathematics but the hulking manifestations of muscle and mind. The progedy of sweat, blood, tears and delusions."

Steampunk Robot Zombie Ninja Pirate.

Hell yeah.

Note the ninja shoes. Uh. Well. They're asian, at least. I think.

From the flickr page:

"That title was actually on the placard for the piece. The little bastard is fully articulated and poseable. You can make him fish, fight or just snarl at the world."

How To Kill a Zombie.

How to kill a zombie in four easy steps. From the poster:

"Successfully killing a zombie is a complicated and dangerous undertaking which requires immeasurable courage and copious attention to detail. Every step is important and subtle nuances make the activity more of an art than a survival skill. What sets zombies apart from other undead minions is the complete destruction of the corpse required to prevent their reanimation."

The Fairy Tale Homes of Los Angeles.

There's no question about it. Two posts about the same thing in twenty-four hours means I'm on some kind of kick. In this case, it appears to be a relatively safe, domestic kick - houses. I'm guessing it's an insecurity-in-the-face-of change thing. Blah blah blah psychoanalysis blah blah bah.

Regardless, check this shit out because that's a real Bag End right here in the U. S of A and I want to live there.

The Fairy Tale Homes of Los Angeles, courtesy the Los Angeles Times.

Feral Houses.

James Griffon photographs abandoned, feral houses in Detroit Michigan.

Juxtapose Asks Andy Kehoe 20 Questons.

I'm in love with Andy Kehoe.  And apparently, so is Juxtapoz.   It's not "spin the bottle," butJuxtapoz asks Andy 20 questions here.

"Juxtapoz:  What is your first art-making memory as a kid?

Andy Kehoe:  My brother Ben and I used to sit around for hours and scribble away with crayons. 
We found one of our earliest drawings and it was of one guy screaming 'Poo Poo Poo!' and another guy screaming, 'Pee Pee Pee' and there were shooting each other with it. Maybe some early attempt at allegory... or maybe it's just about poo poo and pee pee."

Grant Morrison: "Under land of no free, am us home cowardly."

Sometimes I really enjoy the stories Grant tells (his work on the Invisibles, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, the Authority).  Sometimes not so much (JLA, Batman, Xmen) and sometimes I'm just totally fucking baffled (Seaguy, Vampirella).

Regardless of my unimportant, underinformed, barely-counts-as-a-fanboy perspective, Grant is a brave, interesting, productive writer.   

Check out his bibliography here and decide for yourself.  Then go and read the Wired interview over here:

" We've deconstructed all our icons. We know politicians are lying assholes, we know soap stars are coke freaks, handsome actors are tranny weirdos and gorgeous supermodels are bulimic, neurotic wretches. We know our favorite comedians will turn out to be alcoholic perverts or suicidal depressives. Our reality shows have held up a scalding mirror to our yapping baboon faces and cheesy, obvious obsessions, our trashy, gossipy love of trivia and dirt.

We know we've fucked up the atmosphere and doomed the lovely polar bears and we can't even summon up the energy to feel guilty anymore. Let the pedophiles have the kids. There's nowhere left to turn and no one left to blame except, paradoxically, those slightly medieval guys without the industrial base. What's left to believe in? The only truly moral, truly goodhearted man left is a made-up comic book character! The only secular role models for a progressive, responsible, scientific-rational Enlightenment culture are … Kal-El of Krypton, aka Superman and his multicolored descendants!

So we chose not to deconstruct the superhero but to take him at face value, as a fiction that was trying to tell us something wonderful about ourselves. Somewhere, in our darkest night, we made up the story of a man who will never let us down and that seemed worth investigating."

In The Blood.

For the last two decades, vampires and the media have had a mutually beneficial relationship.  Think Anne Rice, Buffy, Charlaine Harris, and (shudder) Stephenie Meyer.  Fall 0f 2009 promises to be bigger than ever, spearheaded by the October publication of Dacre Stoker's (the great-grandnephew of Bram) "Dracula the Un-Dead."

Why does anyone care?  

It's a great, enduring question and to my mind, no one has answered it well.  Including this fun and interesting article titled "In the Blood" in the New Yorker.

"Unclean, unclean!” Mina Harker screams, gathering her bloodied nightgown around her. In Chapter 21 of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” Mina’s friend John Seward, a psychiatrist in Purfleet, near London, tells how he and a colleague, warned that Mina might be in danger, broke into her bedroom one night and found her kneeling on the edge of her bed. Bending over her was a tall figure, dressed in black. “His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.” Mina’s husband, Jonathan, hypnotized by the intruder, lay on the bed, unconscious, a few inches from the scene of his wife’s violation."

In Absentia.

In absentia is Latin for "in the absence". In legal use it usually pertains to a defendant's right to be present in court proceedings (wikipedia).

While it might not be the technical definition, per se, I have been absent from this blog, and by definition - absent from doing any writing - for 8 months or more.   There are many reasons for my absence, but the truth is that I bowed in defeat to feelings of failure as a writer.  

Don't be mistaken.  This posting is not a cheerful signpost along a deserted stretch of interstate - "Hey!  All of you who were never listening anyway!  I'm back!  And I have a pile of candy and free money!"  

Only time will tell, but I hope that I'll look back at this post as an early sign of re-invigorated confidence in myself.  Perhaps in March of 2009, along with the warm and welcome sunshine, along with the first tiny green fingers of the daffodils, something is growing again in my mind. 

Ray Ceasar.

Entirely lovely, cephalopodic goodness. Ebbtide, from Ray Caesar.

Idle Hands.

Fuck, I love this. A great song and a cheerful video of youthful destruction and blowing shit up. "Idle Hands" by the Gutter Twins.

Photos From The Road.

I'm a huge Cormac McCarthy fan. Blood Meridian is number one in my book, and despite Oprah's best intentions, I enjoyed The Road quite a bit as well. I got even more excited when initial casting news came out that Viggo Mortensen was starring as the father. Then these first set photos came out and now I'm geeked.

Borrowed with appreciation from I09.com:

"Just how bleak is the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road, which just finished filming? So grim that the crew would film on overcast, foggy days, and they removed every hint of greenery from the movie's locations.

The Road is set in a burned America, ruined after an unknown disaster. A father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) embark on a long journey to the coast. In addition to coping with the wrecked countryside, the pair are also stalked by a gang of cannibals. In a new piece, the New York Times describes the movie's look as monotone and bleak, The sky is gray, the rivers are black, and color is just a memory. The landscape is covered in ash, with soot falling perpetually from the air. The cities are blasted and abandoned. The roads are littered with corpses either charred or melted, their dreams."

Chip Kidd was in town a couple months ago, talking about designing the cover to "The Road." It was a good story, full of wry humor and details you'd never begin to guess at. I can't find a summary of the speech online, but here's an Esquire interview where he sums it up (in a much more charitable fashion):

"I went through several rounds with McCarthy before it was something he liked. You just never know. All authors are different with how they want this stuff to go.

My original idea was a totally burnt-out car, or one just on the roadside in black and white. The car was either on fire or it was a smoking hulk. I thought that was the best metaphor.

McCarthy wanted something much more austere. He didn't even want his name on the front. We had to gently persuade him that that was not a good idea. So the cover just became this black hole. His name is not all that legible, but it is there. It was kind of a compromise -- 'Okay, your name does have to be there, but it's not going to be screaming.' And it works -- the only colors he describes in the book are various shades of gray, black, and ash with a dash of blood.

The font is one of the oldest tricks in the book. You typeset text in a regular font, I think this was Rotis, and then you blow it up really big on a Xerox machine and then you shrink it down really small. The trick is to see just how much you can distress it and keep it readable. It's gotten harder to do because Xerox machines are so much better, but if you've got a wonderfully shitty machine it will look all corroded and gummy and yucky. It takes a bit of playing around, but it's really not that hard.

It was interesting to see The Road in bookstores amongst all the other stuff -- it called attention to itself by not calling attention to itself. I don't think we took unnecessary chances with it. The text has to be strong for that kind of cover to work for a less established writer, but you could say that about anything. "

Halo 3, Brendan Canning, Indiana Jones and more.

Not writing. Not a word. I know I should be, but I'm not.

Instead I'm dorking around, trying to stay relaxed and enjoy the spring. That means time in the garden, movies, video games, music and copious amounts of junk food.

I bought an Xbox 360 recently and have been playing Halo 3 with a friend. Not that any of this is news, but the gameplay is swell and the art direction is nothing short of stunning. Fabulous concept art here, here and here. It's even older news, but I'll definitely be picking up "The Art of Halo" book as well.

At the top of my play list this week is: the single from the new Brendan Canning release, the new Tokyo Police Club disc, and "Hold On To Yourself" from the new Nick Cave disc.

Went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Friday and was sadly disappointed. Strike that. My expectations weren't very high - I was never the fan that these guys, these guys, this guy, or the fan fiction folks are - but the movie still managed to let me down with it's snore inducing combination of nostalgia, sentimentality, boring chase scenes and WTF plot. Thank god we still have The Dark Knight, Hulk, the Fall, and Hellboy 2 to look forward to.

Caia Koopman.

Caia Koopman "Epostle2". Caia is showing as part of the "Uncommon Gardens" exhibition at Thinkspace. More great stuff at her webpage, including this head-spinningly fabulous street deck (which is the most amazing thing ever and I must own).

Chris Ware Illustrates an Episode of "This American Life".

Extremely cool.

Chris Ware illustrates/animates an episode of "This American Life". I've loved Chris's work since I first stumbled on a copy of "Acme Novelty Library" back at Chicago Comics.

"

Fuco Veda.

Inspiration.

Running low on energy and inspiration this week. Still, there were some good things in the mix:

Iron Man. Gene Wolfe's upcoming novel An Evil Guest. The new Hulk and Batman trailers. Wandering around NYC. Talking to David Hartwell, Patrick Neilsen Hayden and Tom Dohrety about Science Fiction and Fantasy. Free Comic Book Day. Iphone 3G gossip. New music from Portishead, Mirah, Jason Faulkner, Fleet Foxes, Tokyo Police Club, Foals, and Clinic.

Not writing a ton. Not out there running or playing a ton of guitar or drawing or doing anything creative, really. I got a new job that's great and terrible and is sucking a ton of energy out of me right now (more on that later).