Monthly Archives: April 2011

Celluloid, Non-Fiction

Groovy Surrealism in Film, Alternative Films, and the Challenge of Viewer Attention by Matt Dukes Jordan

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A LONG PREFACE

The following exploration of surrealism in film and alternative films began with my desire to write about a weirdly appealing film by Alejandro Jodorowsky called Fando y Lis. That film caused a riot when it was first shown at a film festival in Mexico. Jodorwsky claims that he barely escaped the festival alive. The audience was furious. Enraged. VIOLENT!

I love the film. I feel affection for it, and have no desire to attack Jodorowsky.

I LIKE Jodorowsky, who I watched in interviews and other DVD extras. The extras accompanying one film even showed him leading a weekly human-potential seminar/encounter group that he does in Paris. He’s very appealing and charismatic.

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Non-Fiction

Molotov’s for Humpty Dumpty by Aaron Philip Clark

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Recently I came across a novel by Marc Blatte entitled, Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed. After hearing the author discuss his book on NPR’s (National Public Radio) Weekend Edition radio show a while back, I decided to investigate the novel for myself. A rather catchy title, Blatte’s novel had been categorized as “Hip-Hop Noir.” Yet, what I imagined “Hip-Hop Noir” to be was not quite Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed, instead I found his novel to be a kind of farce, in which the characters were more like amalgamations of every urban stereotype imaginable. They were like crude drawings, stick figures that lacked depth and soul. Blatte used terms like “ghetto thug” and “punk-ass” in descriptions and dialogue in an effort to add authenticity to the fictional landscape, but it only overpowered the rather middling prose.

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Non-Fiction, Writer's Interviews

Writer’s Interview: Allan Guthrie by Paul D Brazill

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 Allan Guthrie’s  novel SLAMMER is one of my favourite books and he’s recently released a couple of cracking eBooks too.

Allan was decent enough to answer some of my daft questions recently so ‘Hey Ho, Lets Go!’ 

PDB: Congratulations on Bye Bye Baby getting into the Kindle Crime Top Ten and Killing Mum getting into the Kindle Thriller Top Twenty. Is this the end of ‘proper’ books for you?

AG: Thanks! Ebooks represent a terrific opportunity for us ‘mid-list’ writers, no question. But I think it’s a mistake to look at it as an either/or proposition. I’d like to be greedy and have both! I’ve been lucky enough to have managed that with both the books you’ve mentioned, KILLING MUM having come out in paperback in June ’09, and BYE BYE BABY due out in 2013.

PDB: Bye Bye Baby is an adaptation of a short story of the same name. How did that work out?

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Fiction

Pony Trip – Equus 2 – Joshua’s Field

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By Richard Godwin

The farm lay untenanted for months that passed with the slow resolution of some grim prophecy.

Winter turned and settled a million leaves deep in the soil that acquired new fecundity from the mulch and insects that bred there.

The earth seemed to be ovulating.

And black clouds scudded across the glass screen of the horizon through which Joshua watchfully peered.

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Fiction

Are You Happy? by Benjamin Imamovic

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So Jimmy told me he wants to marry Alyssa and I know he knows I hate him for bringing it up. Jimmy and Alyssa have been going out for a year. Is going out even a good description of their relationship? It sounds too nice almost, too much like something real couples would do. Jimmy and Alyssa aren’t even an item in my eyes. She is going to leave the bum any day now. It won’t even be her leaving him.

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Fiction

It Wasn’t Slim Ricky by Chris Rhatigan

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I rotated the glass and stared at the whisky. All three fingers stared back. Chewed over what lie I would feed her.

Drinking booze in the morning was shady, even for me. Then again, I never had a case like this. The body was, well, not a body. A bloody stump was more like it. Chunks of brain, organs, skull, plastered to the brick walls.

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Fiction

The Strap by Michael Keenaghan

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The job was a cash ‘n’ carry in Tottenham, big bucks, and originally we were going to bring in Stix and Spida, but they pussied out man, showed their true fucking colours. Not that we were too bothered – I mean, those pricks just weren’t in the same league, and anyway, less cats to share the cream with. We’d do it as a duo and fuck ’em. The job would probably run smoother anyway. Lean and clean. Get in there, get the dough, ride off into the sunset fucking laughing.

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Fiction

The Matchmaker: A Highbrow Comedy Coupling “Brief” and “Straightforward” by KJ Hannah Greenberg

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When the halls of her ivy league school no longer enticed her with prizes and with honors, when her imaginary hedgehogs ceased to bring her bushels of marshmallow fluff, and when her own children stopped caring whether or not she folded the laundry, planted asparagus, or danced uninhibitedly at their school birthday parties, she accepted that it was time to assume a new vocation. To wit, she became a matchmaker.

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Fiction

Twenty-Five Grand by Court Merrigan

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Wanissa doesn’t have an address cabbies will go to. Three of them shake their heads and drive off. The fourth thinks a long while before letting us in. We cross the river and the cabbie tells us he doesn’t often get a fare to this part of the city. People who go there, he says, take chauffeured Benzes. The ones that live there take the bus. This doesn’t strike me as an especially good sign.

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Fiction

Corridors by Martin Garrity

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Such tidy pavement. No cracks and no litter. The gardens here are neat. Too neat, there’s none of the chaos you see in a real garden. There’s something clinical here, something rehearsed. In gardens like these nothing ever gets planted ‘just because.’ The people that own these lawns and these bushes are not the people that tend to them. Also, whoever saw Continue reading Corridors by Martin Garrity →