I don’t know what it is about this song, but it seems to inspire the greatest living sardonicists to greater achievements in sheer over-the-topitude than have ever been seen this side of Kadath Through The Looking-Glass.
Now, there is dascottjr‘s Literal Version. Post-Post-Postmodern and deeply Eighties, it takes you behind the scenes, behind the hair gel and makeup, behind the blank expressions of the born-to-sing-not-act star and shows you the true meaning of this, perhaps the most iconic of all music videos.
Since from day to day it looks like I will/won’t be in town for the Shebeen Club meeting on June the 15th, I’ve asked Ian Alexander Martin to take over in my stead. Naturally, should I be in town on the evening in question, I’ll expect him to give up the scepter of leadership but retain all obligations to inform and/or entertain people.
Atomic Fez
What: Launching an Independent Publishing House: Fab or Folly?
Ian Alexander Martin is expected to discuss his reasoning behind beginning a Small Press Publishing house in these days of financial turmoil which have seen several international houses drastically scale back their structures, frequently closing sub-imprints and selling off their intellectual assets like so much scrap iron. Likewise, when even local publisher Raincoast Books scales downsize their operation following the completion of the ‘Harry Potter…’ series, is there any point in trying to enter the market?
Additional topics will include:
why be a small-press publisher if you’re not also a writer?
what sort of books does Atomic Fez select?
the answer to the question “dead tree books or electronic books” is “YES!”
whither the future of independent bookshop?
why can’t people buy any small-press books at Chapters or Smith’s
why shouldn’t authors just self-publish and go straight to the readers and their money?
just how insane are you?
Come and hear a 20-minute talk about what Mr. Martin’s approaches are, and what he thinks the state of publishing is today. A question and answer session with follow the presentation after a short break.
Ian Alexander Martin
ABOUT THE NAÏVE PROPRIETOR
For three years Ian Alexander Martin was a Director in Humdrumming, Limited—a very tiny publishing company registered in England & Wales—during the last ten months of which was acting as President and C.E.O., Managing and Editorial Director, plus also being responsible for the contracting, editing, typesetting, publishing, and marketing of twenty different titles. Meanwhile, Humdrumming continually earned the respect and admiration of writers and readers alike, as well as seven ‘short-list’ nominations from the prestigious British Fantasy Society’s annual awards (and more to come in a few months).
In addition to the above, Mr. Martin has previously been an arts journalist; editor; professional photographer; photo-finishing store owner; web-site designer and consultant; theatre actor and director, as well as being the Founding Editor and Publisher of the theatre web-zine The Boards. If you had told him at the turn of the millennium that he would have accomplished these things, he would have laughed so hard he would have been physically ill at your feet.
He lives in Burnaby with his wife and two cats, all three of whom frequently succeed in dragging him kicking and screaming from the computer keyboard.
Encouraging hints are emerging, leading those who’ve enjoyed his fine words even as we’ve missed his fine mind for, say, the last seven or eight years, to hope that the message might yet match the medium in terms of quality. And we are all about the terms of quality, yo. One of the earliest expressions of senility in retreat came in the form of this remarkable video and article:
Christopher Hitchens Gets Waterboarded
From http://www.vf.com. How does it feel to be “aggressively interrogated”? Christopher Hitchens found out for himself, submitting to a brutal waterboarding session in an effort to understand the human cost of America’s use of harsh tactics at Guantánamo and elsewhere. VF.com has the footage. Related: “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” from the August 2008 issue
Interview conducted by David Rose and filmed by Arya Surowidjojo.
Note the opening remarks: I don’t know what Hitchens did to piss Graydon Carter off, but Toby Young is lucky he got out of there when he did, from the looks of things.
So, why did getting waterboarded so suddenly turn Hitch‘s mind from self-centered, cranky mush, to something closer to a source of intellectual insight? It’s complicated, but I have an idea.
Actually, that generally goes without saying, doesn’t it? Both parts of that sentence.
So, the idea is this: as we all know, Hitchens is infamously immoderate of appetite(s). Since pre-puberty his brain has been stewed in a tepid chemical bath of scotch, tar, nicotine, preservatives, unmentionables, Red Dye #’s 1 through 642, and whatever it is that middle-class dealers cut their drugs with. Naturally, as time went on the effects got worse, culminating in the interminable Route 66 piece aforementioned, not to mention the neaderthal reactionarianism and spittle-flecked defensiveness that have marked/marred his work ever since.
Through the (admittedly rather drastic, but hey, we’ve got to be realists in this world today, amIrite?) use of the latest in waterboarding technology, thanks to one short session, the patient’s brain is already showing signs of improvement. We at the ol’ raincoaster blog believe this to be the result of nothing less than the cleansing flushing action of a pure water near-drowning, a remarkably successful (and inexpensive) way to restore the brain itself to youth and beauty.
Waterboarding. The Cranial Neti Pot of the Future.
Were we making the terrorists smarter and younger all this time? I see a future for battle-scarred veterans; no longer dependent on a sadly-depleted GI Bill or consigned to a gloomy and inadequate Veteran’s Hospital, nor shunted to the streets, they can now use the skills they developed across the oceans in the millions of American day spas. Spa visits will never be the same.
You know God. He has those mysterious ways. He speaks really, really loudly, sometimes using languages he’s made up and hasn’t even told anyone yet, just for kicks, and sometimes he writes everything down very carefully on tablets designed to last eons and hands them to the clumsiest dude in all of the Middle East.
He’s like that.
But now he’s pissed, and he’s blogging.
BEHOLD, stolen from IAmYourGod who is, of course, on WordPress:
Everyone’s heard of the fashion police (they were even handing out tickets here in Vancouver a couple of years back, but they must have stopped since nobody’s tried to arrest me recently) but what about art cops? And I’m not talking about the Bureaucratocracy that runs the galleries; I’m talking about actual men and women of action, prowling around, making sure that art is paid the respect which is its due, whether that’s busting the kneecaps of some thug who tries to stash his gum underneath the Louise Nevelson or this:
raincoaster 