I get asked about this a lot so I put this list together. It's by no means comprehensive, but it's a good first pass. I can recommend everything here except for Herbie and To The Devil A Daughter. You have to be truly obsessive to sit through those.
Akira
And God Created Woman
Apocalypse Now
Badlands
Bamboo House of Dolls
Barbarella
Bedazzled
Black Sunday
Blue Velvet
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
Cape Fear
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Danger: Diabolik
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Death Rides A Horse
The Devil in Miss Jones
Dracula Has Risen From The Grave
Dust Devil
Earth Girls are Easy
El Topo
Eraserhead
Evil Dead 1 & 2
Fitzcarraoldo
Four of the Apocalypse
The Getaway
The Great Silence
The Haunting (the 1963 version!)
Halloween
Herbie
High Plains Drifter
The Killers
L’Inferno
Le Samourai
Master of the Flying Guillotine
Miyuki-chan in Wonderland
My Darling Clementine
Once Upon A Time In The West
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Race with the Devil
Scarface
Shout at the Devil
Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombie
Suspiria
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
The Third Man
The Thomas Crown Affair
To The Devil A Daughter
Three-Penny Opera
Thunder Road
The Wild Bunch
The Wizard of Oz
Zardoz
Zombie
Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Shut up and Listen
There’s something inherently pleasent in listening to someone tell you a story. I think it’s something hardwired into our brains. It’s a kind of surrender. First, you give up your time because listening to a story will probably take longer than you reading it yourself. Then you give up your mind and imagination to someone else’s voice, trusting that listening will take you someplace different from where you’d be if you’d read the story yourself.
I bet a lot of you were forced to read James Joyce in high school. I staggered through Ulysses, but couldn’t get more than two pages into Finnegan's Wake. It was like reading a deposition by a drunken Irish hare. Then a friend found an ancient LP recording of the book. A couple of minutes into it and everything started to make sense. We cold hear the words as a long monologue, with the Irish accent and all the poetic wordplay intact. The recording didn’t convince either of us to love the book, but what we learned is that sometimes you need to hear a writer to understand what the hell the writer is about. Between that and the basic pleasure of listening to stories I’m hooked on audiobooks.
If you’re a science fiction fan you’ve probably read William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s easy (and almost reflexive) to read the book with the accentless friction-free voice of a modern DJ in your head. Now track down a copy of Gibson reading the book. The Carolina twang in his voice changes the story, rooting it in American soil and turning the nomadic internationalist text into a post-modern Huck Finn story of a young man on a strange and life-changing journey.
There are also the writers whose work reads well on the page but, like Joyce, makes more sense once you’ve heard their voice. Harlan Ellison is a good example. So is Bruce Sterling. You don’t need to hear Neil Gaiman read his work to understand it, but if you listen to him read something like Stardust you’ll find a new appreciation for both the book and Gaiman as a performer.
One of my favorite novels is Nabokov’s Lolita (Keep your damn jokes to yourself, thanks. I’ve heard them all). I can’t think of another English language book where the beauty of the words hits me the way they way they do in this book. Maybe it’s the contrast between the amazing language and the sleaziness of the story. I didn’t think it would ever happen, but there’s a beautiful audiobook of Lolita read by Jeremy Irons. He’s the prefect voice for Humbert who sees himself as a doomed romantic until the end.
There are also authors who are performers as much as they are writers. David Sedaris is a perfect example. He’s a born storyteller and given the choice, I’ll always pick up one of his audiobooks instead the text version. You can hear why is his reading the painful autobiographical tale of playing a department store elf in “Crumpet the Elf” from The Santaland Diaries. You can listen to it here for free. NPR
Sarah Vowell is another great performance author. Here she is reading and except from her quirky historical book, The Wordy Shipmates. Here she is on Youtube.
I started thinking about this after listening to Patton Oswalt’s recent autobiographical book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. Oswalt is one of the best comedians around so there wasn’t any choice between getting the print or audiobook version. Listening to him rattle off the pretentious wine list mid-way into the book is worth the price alone. Here he is reading an excerpt from chapter one.
If you like audiobooks and have suggestions on other titles leave them in the Comments section.
I bet a lot of you were forced to read James Joyce in high school. I staggered through Ulysses, but couldn’t get more than two pages into Finnegan's Wake. It was like reading a deposition by a drunken Irish hare. Then a friend found an ancient LP recording of the book. A couple of minutes into it and everything started to make sense. We cold hear the words as a long monologue, with the Irish accent and all the poetic wordplay intact. The recording didn’t convince either of us to love the book, but what we learned is that sometimes you need to hear a writer to understand what the hell the writer is about. Between that and the basic pleasure of listening to stories I’m hooked on audiobooks.
If you’re a science fiction fan you’ve probably read William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s easy (and almost reflexive) to read the book with the accentless friction-free voice of a modern DJ in your head. Now track down a copy of Gibson reading the book. The Carolina twang in his voice changes the story, rooting it in American soil and turning the nomadic internationalist text into a post-modern Huck Finn story of a young man on a strange and life-changing journey.
There are also the writers whose work reads well on the page but, like Joyce, makes more sense once you’ve heard their voice. Harlan Ellison is a good example. So is Bruce Sterling. You don’t need to hear Neil Gaiman read his work to understand it, but if you listen to him read something like Stardust you’ll find a new appreciation for both the book and Gaiman as a performer.
One of my favorite novels is Nabokov’s Lolita (Keep your damn jokes to yourself, thanks. I’ve heard them all). I can’t think of another English language book where the beauty of the words hits me the way they way they do in this book. Maybe it’s the contrast between the amazing language and the sleaziness of the story. I didn’t think it would ever happen, but there’s a beautiful audiobook of Lolita read by Jeremy Irons. He’s the prefect voice for Humbert who sees himself as a doomed romantic until the end.
There are also authors who are performers as much as they are writers. David Sedaris is a perfect example. He’s a born storyteller and given the choice, I’ll always pick up one of his audiobooks instead the text version. You can hear why is his reading the painful autobiographical tale of playing a department store elf in “Crumpet the Elf” from The Santaland Diaries. You can listen to it here for free. NPR
Sarah Vowell is another great performance author. Here she is reading and except from her quirky historical book, The Wordy Shipmates. Here she is on Youtube.
I started thinking about this after listening to Patton Oswalt’s recent autobiographical book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. Oswalt is one of the best comedians around so there wasn’t any choice between getting the print or audiobook version. Listening to him rattle off the pretentious wine list mid-way into the book is worth the price alone. Here he is reading an excerpt from chapter one.
If you like audiobooks and have suggestions on other titles leave them in the Comments section.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Sampling vs Synthesizing
It’s funny sometimes how what you do is often reflected in everything else you do. Back when I played in bands I didn’t care much about synthesizers. I like samplers. I liked taking existing sounds and twisting them around into something new and weird and interesting. I realized a few years ago that I do the same thing with my photos.
I gave up on natural skin tones years ago and only shoot them when models need them for their portfolio. But on my own I’ll always do something to skew the shot. Screw with the lights, the color temperature or the cropping. I don’t have any interest in naturalistic or pretty pictures. I like interesting pictures and they often come from experiments, destruction and happy accidents.
My writing is a lot like that. I like genre fiction. It gives you an armature from which you can hang anything. If you’re running a mystery or a thriller or a Gothic romance you know the rules and so do your readers. You know how to keep the engine running And as long as the motor is purring and you’re pointed in the right direction you can do anything you want. Twist the story. Subvert it. Tweak your readers’ expectations.
I knew that I was going to write at least three Sandman Slim novels because that’s what my contract said. When I started the series I wanted each book to be a little different so I wrote the first one as a crime novel while Kill The Dead is more of a mystery. Aloha From Hell will be a bent kind of fantasy quest. I know the rules and so do you. It all comes down to what you can do with them. What I can do with them. And like my photos a lot of that comes from experiments, destruction and happy accidents.
I gave up on natural skin tones years ago and only shoot them when models need them for their portfolio. But on my own I’ll always do something to skew the shot. Screw with the lights, the color temperature or the cropping. I don’t have any interest in naturalistic or pretty pictures. I like interesting pictures and they often come from experiments, destruction and happy accidents.
My writing is a lot like that. I like genre fiction. It gives you an armature from which you can hang anything. If you’re running a mystery or a thriller or a Gothic romance you know the rules and so do your readers. You know how to keep the engine running And as long as the motor is purring and you’re pointed in the right direction you can do anything you want. Twist the story. Subvert it. Tweak your readers’ expectations.
I knew that I was going to write at least three Sandman Slim novels because that’s what my contract said. When I started the series I wanted each book to be a little different so I wrote the first one as a crime novel while Kill The Dead is more of a mystery. Aloha From Hell will be a bent kind of fantasy quest. I know the rules and so do you. It all comes down to what you can do with them. What I can do with them. And like my photos a lot of that comes from experiments, destruction and happy accidents.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Wasteland Turistas
Monsters is an unexpected little SF movie that deserves more attention than it’s received. However, there’s one aspect of it that might explain why some people have a problem with it. I’ll get to that shortly.
Monsters (That title alone probably doomed the movie, with its generic sound and symbolic weight) has been described as a low budget District 9. This isn’t entirely wrong, but it misses the point. Monsters is a road picture, a Heart of Darkness journey staring a clueless American tourist, Samantha, and a ne'er-do-well photojournalist, Andrew.
The premise of Monsters is simple. A probe sent out to look for organic life in the solar system came back crashed in Mexico some time before the movie begins. The American border is closed and half of Mexico is a virtual no man’s land as alien organisms take over the landscape in a slow, strange Ballardian transformation. Samantha is the daughter of a media magnate who twists Andrew’s arm to see his daughter to one of the entry points still open along the border. Of course things go wrong and they never make it, so they have to go overland through the infected zone.
Here is where the movie breaks down for some people. The journey is simply that. A long journey over unknown land and dangerous waters and the utter displacement you can feel along the way. There’s not much resembling a plot here. It’s Antonioni science fiction. Instead of hard SF what we see are glimpses of moments in the characters lives and relationships and their interactions with the locals they meet along the way. If you’re looking for action-packed James Cameron battle scenes you’ll be extremely disappointed.
Writer/director Gareth Edwards mostly keeps his aliens in the background. You hear them bellowing across the rainforest. You catch glimpses of them behind billboards and buildings when they wander into a town and are attacked by an occupation army. When the aliens do appear the encounters are brief, shifting between wonder and fast and utter brutality. In one scene we watch as down the river tentacles emerge and drag the wreckage of a jet fighter underwater. It’s a quiet sequence like something out of a Victorian ghost story. However, when a nighttime convoy encounters one the enormous cephalopod creatures it’s pure horror movie carnage—exactly the kind of thing I’m sure most audiences wanted but seldom received.
The real problem people seem to have with the movie is the shape of the overland journey. We watch Samantha and Andrew pay off local smugglers to take them north. Along the way they’re passed from smuggler to another. Neither of our protagonists has any clue who these people are or where they’re going as they move farther and farther away from civilization with locals who probably don’t give a damn about a couple of, to them, rich gringo assholes. Samantha and Andrew are utterly lost, at mercy of strangers and vicious aliens. Many people seem to find this part of the journey unbelievable. Why would Samantha and Andrew follow grungy strangers down a river to meet other more mysterious and heavily armed strangers? As someone who’s traveled in Central America and other countries in the developing world I can tell you that when you get onto the back roads trusting strangers and following them into towns that aren’t on any maps, full of locals who stare at you they whole time you’re there is exactly what you do. The alternative is to stand around forever at a dusty crossroad waiting for Godot in the form of a phantom American-friendly air-conditioned bus that will never come.
Monsters isn’t a perfect film. There are moments where the dialog about how the wall America has thrown up along the border has imprisoned itself feels a little stilted and obvious. But the good moments outweigh the bad and the final encounter with the aliens is both as frightening and strangely beautiful as any scene of its type in any movie I can remember.
Monsters represents a kind of movie making where the SF elements are at the service of a simple human story. But the SF isn’t tacked onto the film. It’s at the heart of, another part of the strange journey Samantha and Andrew have to make to find their way home.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Parallel Dimensions and A Flying Psycho with an Umbrella
I always get sick at the end of the year, which makes the time between Christmas and New Years a bittersweet thing.
2010 was an interesting year. I finished Kill The Dead, the second Sandman Slim book and my first sequel. At the time it was the hardest book I’d ever written. I thought Sandman Slim three, Aloha From Hell, would be a breeze in comparison. Ha. It’s turned into it own kind of Jersey Devil. However, since I’ve already survived one sequel I’m not as panicky about this one. It’s just a process of working through the problems. Figuring out what works and what doesn’t and fixing it or at least scrawling Banksy wall art on top so no one will notice.
I also did my first book tour. I’d never done anything like it before. It was both odd and fun. It two weeks on the road by myself. See, I rated a tour promoting Kill The Dead, but I’m still a very small fish in an incredibly large pond, so I didn’t rate a handler. This means I was on my own 99% of the time (some kind locals helped me out from time to time when I truly lost). I get the feeling this being thrown into the touring fire is a common sort of publishing dues paying/hazing ritual. Can we send you out on your own and can you survive without getting arrest, killed, mauled or breaking any book reps legs by demonstrating the figure-four leg lock you saw on WrestleMania at your hotel?
One aspect of the tour that I hadn’t counted on was how easy it was to become displayed in the world and feel like you’re traveling in a parallel dimension. After four days on the road (I was gone for two weeks) I lost all sense of time and place. I didn’t know what day of the week it was or what time it should be in any given time zone. The weirdest part was going days not knowing what city I was in. I had both a paper schedule and digital itineraries on my phone and iPad. I lived by those times and addresses. It didn’t mater if I was in Minneapolis or Portland, Oregon, all I knew was that I had to catch a certain plane at a certain time, land and find the rental car, go to the hotel, check in and then hit bookstores or distributors. All that mattered were the times and locations on the list. I know I saw friends at the comic con in New York. I know I talked to a bookstore rep about Aqua Teen Hunger Force somewhere in the Midwest. I know some nice models gave me their zombie pin-up calendar and I know it was raining in Portland. I know that sometimes telling the car’s GPS system to show me the shortest route could lead me down back roads that reminded me way too much of Deliverance. On the other hand, on one of those random rural excursions, the nav system took me through a forest blazing in fall colors. I don’t know where that was, but it was a great drive. When I flew home from San Diego (I remember SD because it was my last stop) I remember thinking that I now understand why bands go insane and do outrageous things on the road. I felt utterly removed from normal daily life and I was only gone for two weeks. Going on the road for a year? You’d be a Martian by the time you were done.
In 2011 I want to get better at everything I do. Writing, taking pictures, everything. I want to travel more. Not in the disembodied way you travel on tour, but like an actual human being. I want to make it to Trinity site and the Creation Museum. I haven’t traveled abroad in years, so I’d like to get out of the country, even if it’s just a short trip to somewhere easy. The UK or Mexico. I hope I get to tour the south more when the next book comes out. I’d like to at least hit Houston. I don’t have many fond memories of the place and consider it the dullest big town I’ve ever spent time in, but I also have a strange connection to it that I can’t put into words. Each time I go back I hope that the connection becomes clearer, but that hasn’t happened yet.
2010 was full of learning experiences and I hate learning experiences. They’re just pains in the ass dressed up in Mary Poppins drag. Right, and fuck Mary Poppins too. She’s like a Freudian fever dream, the after effects of an opium and Vin Mariani binge. Chase the dragon, Mary. Right out the window and keep going.
You can find my Top 10 Books Read in 2010. They’re not all new books, just good ones I enjoyed.
http://www.omnivoracious.com/2010/12/kill-the-dead-richard-kadreys-top-10-books-read-in-2010.html
Here’s a list of my Top 10 SF and fantasy films. Some were produced in 2009, but not readily available until 2010. In no particular order:
Inception
Monsters (I think it helps to have traveled in the 3rd world to really appreciate this one.)
Human Centipede
Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl
Cinematic Titanic: Danger on Tiki Island
Metropolis Restored
Night Mayor (A Guy Maddin short. You can see it online
http://www.nfb.ca/film/night_mayor
[REC] 2
Scott Pilgrim vs The World
World on a Wire (Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 pre-VR take on reality morphing, unavailable until now.)
2010 was an interesting year. I finished Kill The Dead, the second Sandman Slim book and my first sequel. At the time it was the hardest book I’d ever written. I thought Sandman Slim three, Aloha From Hell, would be a breeze in comparison. Ha. It’s turned into it own kind of Jersey Devil. However, since I’ve already survived one sequel I’m not as panicky about this one. It’s just a process of working through the problems. Figuring out what works and what doesn’t and fixing it or at least scrawling Banksy wall art on top so no one will notice.
I also did my first book tour. I’d never done anything like it before. It was both odd and fun. It two weeks on the road by myself. See, I rated a tour promoting Kill The Dead, but I’m still a very small fish in an incredibly large pond, so I didn’t rate a handler. This means I was on my own 99% of the time (some kind locals helped me out from time to time when I truly lost). I get the feeling this being thrown into the touring fire is a common sort of publishing dues paying/hazing ritual. Can we send you out on your own and can you survive without getting arrest, killed, mauled or breaking any book reps legs by demonstrating the figure-four leg lock you saw on WrestleMania at your hotel?
One aspect of the tour that I hadn’t counted on was how easy it was to become displayed in the world and feel like you’re traveling in a parallel dimension. After four days on the road (I was gone for two weeks) I lost all sense of time and place. I didn’t know what day of the week it was or what time it should be in any given time zone. The weirdest part was going days not knowing what city I was in. I had both a paper schedule and digital itineraries on my phone and iPad. I lived by those times and addresses. It didn’t mater if I was in Minneapolis or Portland, Oregon, all I knew was that I had to catch a certain plane at a certain time, land and find the rental car, go to the hotel, check in and then hit bookstores or distributors. All that mattered were the times and locations on the list. I know I saw friends at the comic con in New York. I know I talked to a bookstore rep about Aqua Teen Hunger Force somewhere in the Midwest. I know some nice models gave me their zombie pin-up calendar and I know it was raining in Portland. I know that sometimes telling the car’s GPS system to show me the shortest route could lead me down back roads that reminded me way too much of Deliverance. On the other hand, on one of those random rural excursions, the nav system took me through a forest blazing in fall colors. I don’t know where that was, but it was a great drive. When I flew home from San Diego (I remember SD because it was my last stop) I remember thinking that I now understand why bands go insane and do outrageous things on the road. I felt utterly removed from normal daily life and I was only gone for two weeks. Going on the road for a year? You’d be a Martian by the time you were done.
In 2011 I want to get better at everything I do. Writing, taking pictures, everything. I want to travel more. Not in the disembodied way you travel on tour, but like an actual human being. I want to make it to Trinity site and the Creation Museum. I haven’t traveled abroad in years, so I’d like to get out of the country, even if it’s just a short trip to somewhere easy. The UK or Mexico. I hope I get to tour the south more when the next book comes out. I’d like to at least hit Houston. I don’t have many fond memories of the place and consider it the dullest big town I’ve ever spent time in, but I also have a strange connection to it that I can’t put into words. Each time I go back I hope that the connection becomes clearer, but that hasn’t happened yet.
2010 was full of learning experiences and I hate learning experiences. They’re just pains in the ass dressed up in Mary Poppins drag. Right, and fuck Mary Poppins too. She’s like a Freudian fever dream, the after effects of an opium and Vin Mariani binge. Chase the dragon, Mary. Right out the window and keep going.
You can find my Top 10 Books Read in 2010. They’re not all new books, just good ones I enjoyed.
http://www.omnivoracious.com/2010/12/kill-the-dead-richard-kadreys-top-10-books-read-in-2010.html
Here’s a list of my Top 10 SF and fantasy films. Some were produced in 2009, but not readily available until 2010. In no particular order:
Inception
Monsters (I think it helps to have traveled in the 3rd world to really appreciate this one.)
Human Centipede
Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl
Cinematic Titanic: Danger on Tiki Island
Metropolis Restored
Night Mayor (A Guy Maddin short. You can see it online
http://www.nfb.ca/film/night_mayor
[REC] 2
Scott Pilgrim vs The World
World on a Wire (Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 pre-VR take on reality morphing, unavailable until now.)
Friday, December 24, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
Happy Holidays, aka One Step Closer To The End Times
It’s Christmas and I’m feverishly editing Sandman Slim 3, Aloha From Hell. By editing I mean I’m beating the first act to death with a claw hammer. Trust me, it deserves it. Funny, but I thought this would be the least painful book in the series to write. Turns out it’s the hardest because it has to encompass both of the previous books and twist them around in new ways.
I have some book projects brewing for the new year. Nothing solid yet because these things take a while to work their way through the system. The good news is that the book biz is a lot faster than movies. If it wasn’t we’d still waiting for the first printing of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. I’m also working on an original screenplay, another project that has to be swallowed, digested and shit out by the beast so it can decide if it was tasty enough.
Between bouts of writing I’ve been taking photos. I’m shooting a lot of film these days, something I haven’t done in years. Mostly I’m working with Fuji instant because I’m using some odd shooting techniques and I like getting immediate feedback on whether the process is working. Plus, this line of Fuji instant gives me a negative. About half the time I’ll toss the photo and use the negative for scanning. For any camera geeks out there for digital I’m working with a Nikon D700, for film I’m using an ancient Holgaroid (A Holga body with a Polaroid back held in the place with big rubber bands) and an old instant camera mainly used by photojournalists in the 80s, a Polaroid Propack.
I promise to update here more often in the coming year. It’s so easy to get bogged down in other projects and feel your brain vaporlock when it comes to talking about simple work and life issues in a forum like this. I have to remind myself that writing these entries is, in fact, a good way to auger out the inside of my skull.
On that note, happy holidays to everyone. And remember, when you're on Santa’s lap at the mall that’s not whiskey on his breath. It’s Santa’s special medicine that keeps from getting a boner every time a stranger sits on him and begs for treats.
I have some book projects brewing for the new year. Nothing solid yet because these things take a while to work their way through the system. The good news is that the book biz is a lot faster than movies. If it wasn’t we’d still waiting for the first printing of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. I’m also working on an original screenplay, another project that has to be swallowed, digested and shit out by the beast so it can decide if it was tasty enough.
Between bouts of writing I’ve been taking photos. I’m shooting a lot of film these days, something I haven’t done in years. Mostly I’m working with Fuji instant because I’m using some odd shooting techniques and I like getting immediate feedback on whether the process is working. Plus, this line of Fuji instant gives me a negative. About half the time I’ll toss the photo and use the negative for scanning. For any camera geeks out there for digital I’m working with a Nikon D700, for film I’m using an ancient Holgaroid (A Holga body with a Polaroid back held in the place with big rubber bands) and an old instant camera mainly used by photojournalists in the 80s, a Polaroid Propack.
I promise to update here more often in the coming year. It’s so easy to get bogged down in other projects and feel your brain vaporlock when it comes to talking about simple work and life issues in a forum like this. I have to remind myself that writing these entries is, in fact, a good way to auger out the inside of my skull.
On that note, happy holidays to everyone. And remember, when you're on Santa’s lap at the mall that’s not whiskey on his breath. It’s Santa’s special medicine that keeps from getting a boner every time a stranger sits on him and begs for treats.
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