Monday, 12 May 2008
CULT FUCKTION!
Still stuck on Cult Fiction. I've spent a small fortune on e-bay buying jewellery because of how stuck I am on Cult Fiction. I've read about films and dead babies in boxes and listened to narcissist (I'm finding them everywhere – that's focus for you) Austrians who keep their daughters locked up in basements because "she was enjoying herself too much" and "was not obedient". I could just about grasp that one, but not why he'd then fathered 7 children by her. Perhaps it was a punishment. "I'll show you you can't go out partying, my girl. Have some children – that will smarten your ideas up."
But I digress.
I think it would be fair to say that never in the history of my own writing have I ever had problems like this before.
It's tempting to believe it's just the old pointlessness thing. You know, the negative swamp of 'everybody hates me, think I'll go eat worms'. But, hell, I've experienced that before, time without number. You go into the slump, you mope about, you get grumpy, then angry, then you face up to the fact that no-one owes you anything and you stop feeling sorry for yourself, get the work done and move on.
But this motherfucker. Jesus, it's like drawing teeth, only not as much fun.
What I'm experiencing is an odd combination of having nothing I want to say along with a bad-tempered 'Oh fuck off and die.'
I had a glimpse of insight a couple of weeks back, when we went to see Nicholas Roeg (film director, for those not conversant) talking with his long-time screenwriter.
It wasn't exactly disappointing but, as Max said today, I didn't feel as if I actually learned anything.
Roeg was defensive answering his questions, old friend or no, and we didn't really get much out of him. Paradoxically, he was better with questions from the audience, but there wasn't really enough of them to draw him out. I think maybe if the evening had been allowed to run a while longer we might have hit more pay dirt.
But it did make me wonder what exactly was making him so defensive and eventually I came to the conclusion that he was probably just plain sick of 'justifying' his work.
It's not that his friend was asking him difficult questions, but I think he really didn't want to be boxed in by how people liked to categorise him, and he markedly didn't want to tell people what to think about his work. In short, he made the films and it was up to you what you got from them.
I feel that something similar is happening with me and DANNY.
I'm getting sick of writing clumsy big clues to nudge people in the right direction, and I'm absolutely sick to death of trying to give people a 'handle' on it so they won't be scared away or completely baffled by what they're (not) seeing.
This is the real root of my disgruntlement. Why the fuck am I spending all my time trying to make my work look non-threatening and more 'normal' (read mediocre) when the very last thing I want my work to be is non-threatening and mediocre? I suddenly feel very bolshie about having to explain everything all the time: You don't get it? You can't be bothered taking a risk on something unknown? Fine, then fuck off and buy something from the New Age section.
See? This is not good. This is what is called a conflict of interest. I'm supposed to sit down and write something that every fibre of my being is crying out 'No, no, NO' to.
Which is why I'm getting nowhere. And why I should give this to Max to do. But I despair at the copy he writes for DANNY. He makes fabulous visuals, but when he's writing copy the man can't leave hyperbole alone. He loves to smack 'em between the eyes, and he is positively cruel to adjectives. It always comes out sounding like a trailer for a Joel Silver movie but with more sex. Either that or it's full of punning humour. Christ, it's not a fucking Carry On movie, you know.
I know I'm being beyond difficult here, downright bloody-minded and ungrateful, but I just can't seem to resolve this. I think I'm hanging onto too many things. I want to write the copy, but I don't. I want him to write the copy, but I don't.
Result? No copy.
Won't do. Will not do.
I'm only writing this blog because I'm sitting staring at the computer (forcefully stopped myself from doing anything else) and getting nowhere. I've written loads of stuff – and I don't like any of it. I figured if I wrote this blog it might crystallize something, clear my mind, and I might see a chink of what to do with this.
I'm beginning to think something drastic is called for. Certainly if I don't get something soon DANNY 1's launch in the U.S. is going to go seriously over schedule.
I think maybe I need to stop thinking of how to 'sell' it. It's obviously gone past the point of no return for me. Just done too much of it. If they don't get it by now, they ain't gonna get it and, frankly, I am obviously well beyond caring.
I think it's that that's making me feel like I'm being 'forced' to write yet another school essay on The Subversion of Genre in Chancery Stone's DANNY, or Why DANNY is Not a Sex Novel – You Thick Shit.
I think maybe in order to get me interested I need to give myself something challenging to do with it. It may not be recognisable as "An introduction to The DANNY Quadrilogy" when it's finished but at least it will be finished.
So (sighs heavily), anyone up for the all-new Cult Fucktion – Seven Steps to Screwing Six-year-olds?
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
23:38 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 07 May 2008
Deprestrogen - and How You Cunts Can Cure It
Between Taschen catalogues crammed full of tits & ass – and one book on penises – magazine supplements pointing out how my 'female brain' can't 'understand' men, and various films and TV where my sex gets to strip and scream, sometimes together, I seem to be surrounded – sunk in – just how irrelevant I am.
Then this afternoon I come across this article headlining on IMDB Is There a Real Woman In This Multiplex?
And a very good article it is too. A woman after my own heart.
But, there's no doubt about it, besides me and her, there seems to be precious few of us yelling about the sheer misogyny of who we are 'supposed' to be.
With the exception of getting to fend for ourselves – albeit for less money – women's lives have definitely got worse. The suffragettes could have saved themselves a lot of hunger-striking, and the women's libbers a lot of underwear. They did fuck all in the long run.
Sure, they don't marry us off to old men these days (unless you're a royal or from a fundamentalist religion), but otherwise women's lot is definitely worse than it was in your mother's day – or your grandmother's.
Think about it. We get to work, but we don't get to have a career. Some women try it, and even pull it off up to a point, but they pay a price for it that men never do.
Career women are selfish, unfeminine, ball-breakers. Even other women don't like them. They're hard, unfeminine (can't stress that often enough), cold, mean, heartless, greedy, ambitious, warped, unnatural. They treat their families appallingly, depriving their husbands of masculinity, belittling them by association. (How can a man be a man if his wife earns more, works harder, and commands more respect?) They neglect their children, putting their four-wheel drives and blackberries before everything else. They produce narcissistic, neurotic, driven children and mincing, suicidal homosexuals. Even delinquents. And serial killers.
Career women have broken down the very fabric of society, producing a generation of latch-key kids who don't know how to cook and who smoke crack.
This, of course, is because it is all women's fault. No matter what it is, it's women's fault. No matter what's gone wrong with the world – we done it.
I'd like to believe this was a new thing, part of the general malaise of modern life, because it would make my argument look so very shiny, but actually it's a very old thing; it's just got more comprehensive, that's all.
This is the list of the things that used to be women's fault:-
1. Infidelity. If he did it, it was because he was bored (because she didn't make enough effort), or because she'd 'let herself go' (his beer belly/baldness is never an issue), or she was a shrew (you don't pick fault with men – ever), or bad with money (women's families come first – always), etc, etc, etc.
If she did it, it was because she was a slut. Or because she was a slut. Or maybe even a slut.
2. Bad children. She didn't bring them up properly – end of conversation.
3. Bad husbands. If he hit her she provoked it. If he hit the children she'd brought them up badly and they'd provoked it. If he fucked the children it was for the same reasons as number 1 – see Infidelity.
4. Bad housekeeping. She was a slattern, a lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing who'd rather stand a the street corner yakking than polish her step.
And that was it, pretty much. In other words, anywhere you could go wrong would be domestic. It was up to you to keep the house running sweetly. If the house wasn't sweet it was your fault. Your domain; your fault.
Now look at how that list has grown. Here is a list of the things that are now women's fault:-
First – all of the above. Nothing's changed. Women are still considered guardians of home and hearth and custodian of everybody's feelings – even the cat's. What's more, now it isn't just your relatives or neighbours that are going to judge you – now it's everyone. Complete strangers on TV, the media – 'experts', every one – are all pushing into your home, pointing out all the things you should be doing – from taking care of your husbands 'feminine' side, to making sure your kids get enough vitamins to get them into Mensa.
On top of that we now have to worry about being essentially flawed, something that needs 'fixed'.
Only a couple of days ago I actually read on Yahoo news that women were twice as likely to get depressed as men (nooooo…) and that 'they' (the scientists) didn't know why, but that it was possibly (read probably) hormones.
Jesus Christ, yes. Why hasn't someone told us before? It's the depression hormone. All us women are fitted with a neat little depression gland that secretes Deprestrogen. It's probably behind our tits.
Men don't have hormones, you see. Nope. They have this unique biology that runs on something else, just not hormones. It can't be hormones, you see, because they're a woman thing. Because women have ovaries and wombs and shit like that, and they have these hormones that just gallop into the blood at random moments and suddenly – snap – we're engulfed in Deprestrogen, which makes us cry and rant and eat chocolate. Because men never cry, or rant or eat chocolate, never mind do anything irrational.
Where the hell do these cretins get off with this shit? Although it's been recognised for a long time that negative thought patterns are the most likely factor in depression, and that cognitive therapy is the most successful method for treating it – with no chemicals, hormonal or otherwise, involved – they are still spouting piffle like this.
Why is it that whenever anything a woman says or does is considered unacceptable that the mental illness/chemical imbalance, you're-just-a-mad-bitch crap starts pouring out?
Because we're flawed, that's why.
That's what the modern woman has attained that her mother and her grandmother and all the others before her never had – the 'proof' that you are a fundamentally flawed, genetically irreversible disaster area.
See, before we had the cure-all of the 'Women's Movement', women were still considered inferior – actually, physically, like blacks having longer arms and a sense of rhythm.
When we got the vote, and the 'right' to work our asses off for less pay and no real promotion, it became politically incorrect to consider a woman as inferior. They could be smart enough, they'd proved it by fitting all those little wires on the circuit boards for half of men's wages. The scientists had to stop talking about their inferior biology and their smaller brains.
But the horrible fact was the inferiority theory didn't go away. It's like all those people who think taking Sambo and gollies out of children's books stops racism.
Newsflash – it doesn't, it just diverts it somewhere else.
And our 'somewhere else' is our flawedness.
And now all you cheery chappies, male and female, who think feminists are angry lesbians, are sitting shaking your heads, sneering at what mysterious 'flaws' these might be. Like the blacks, the women get it too easy. Everybody bends over backwards for women these days – they get all the best jobs, and they get to wear skirts (oh, the envy).
Okay, let's just look at some of these silly, irrelevant, too-much-fuss-over-nothing-typical-women flaws we've acquired along with our 'rights' and votes. Here's a short list, roughly in order of fear and loathing.
1. Fat. Women are fat, fat, fat. Unless you are a size 0, you are FAT. Nowadays a size 10 or 12 (that's a 6 or an 8 in the U.S.) is likely to be referred to as 'round' or 'curvy'.
On what planet?
The average British woman is a size 16. Ms Average is even bigger in the U.S., and yet a size 12 is 'curvy'? By what standard? Why, by the standard of how in error women essentially are. It's nothing you can fix, you're just wrong.
Women have a genetic predisposition to fat. For a start we have an extra layer of it. Nature thought it would be useful for us. Nature was WRONG.
Not only that, but we put it on easily. Pregnancy, menstrual fluctuations – hey, those good old hormones that make us depressed. Wouldn't you just know it? Wrong, wrong, wrong.
2. Hair. Unless it's on your head, it's wrong. Body hair on a woman is just wrong. It grows there? That's our point: you're flawed. 'Real' women (i.e. sexy, desirable women; the only real value women have) have smooth legs, arms, faces – skin in general. Flawed, wrong women have hair in their underarms, on their legs, their faces – hell, even round their nipples. Goddamn freaks.
And don't even start us on hairy snatches. To quote the internet, ewwwwwwwwwwwwww….
See? Even the internet in the immensity of its wisdom, knows hairy snatches are just wrong.
3. Smell. Everything about women smells. Especially their crotches. Women's crotches not only smell but their smell varies throughout the month, getting more or less pungent according to how moist it is. Which also varies. Smelly and moist? Dear God, does it get any wronger?
4. Wrinkles. Women wrinkle, age, go grey. It's a disgusting lapse of taste. Real women (i.e. sexy, blah, blah, blah….) are smooth, pre-pubescent, scentless, hairless, and forever chestnut/flaxen-haired. If you're not – you're wrong.
And that lot's just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even touched on tit size, bleeding (that's beyond wrong, that's repulsive), emotional instability, showing off, dressing 'badly', frigidity, sluttishness, eating disorders, excessive shopping, drinking and shoes, relationship problems, failure to raise child geniuses, male emasculation… The list is endless.
The simple fact is your mother and grandmother just didn't have these problems. Mothers were expected to get fat, go grey and adopt the 'peenie' (that's an apron to you, not a sex organ) as soon as they popped their first brat.
A pre-consumerism mother aspired to a weekly perm and a pot of cold cream as her beauty care. She shaved her legs, and anything else that sprouted, with her husband's razor, and her muff was her own. Only sluts meddled with their pubic hair and no-one saw your big sensible, comfortable, sane cotton pants anyway. The only things they waxed were floors and furniture and they didn't have thrush every two minutes from tight nylon underwear and vaginal deodorants.
Yes, we women, we've never had it so good. Now we have so many products to choose from, so many solutions to fix ourselves.
Roll on the next great new Celebrity Beach Nettle and Rhubarb Soup Diet. I need to be perfect. And I need it now.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
22:20 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
Brigitte Bardot - One Suicide-Bombing, Motherfucking Racist Bitch
I'm reading tonight that Brigitte Bardot is up for the fifth time – yes, you read that correctly, fifth – for "inciting racial hatred", said "racial hatred" being, apparently, a dislike of Muslims and, specifically, the influx of Muslims into France.
As an animal rights activist she doesn't like their habit of slaughtering sheep for religious festivals, but I am also 'reliably' informed by the same news bulletin that she "published a book attacking gays, immigrants and the unemployed, in which she also lamented the "Islamisation of France"."
Waaaaaaay! Go long, Brigitte, go long! You've got to admire that. Not just the Muslims but throwing in the gays and the unemployed too. I like someone dedicated to their dislike, irrational or otherwise.
There seems to me to be something deeply ironic in the fact that she keeps finding her ass in court (the prosecutor is quoted as being "a little tired of prosecuting Mrs Bardot") when the internet is wall to wall – or ether to ether perhaps – hatred of just about every kind, colour and depth you can imagine, but nobody seems to be doing very much to stop any of that.
Could it be (say not so) that it's easy to target Ms Bardot whose fat, rich ass is up there for all to see – and line their pockets with. I mean, on the inciting racial hatred front, a mad Frenchwoman (and let's fact it – that's what we think of her, isn't it?) who lives reclusively with her cats, wittering on about animal rights, isn't exactly going to whip up a feeding frenzy of Nazis, is she?
Can you see Brigitte storming through her retirement community on her Zimmer frame, yelling for the partisans to take to the streets and lynch them a few towel-heads?
So I think it's alright for Brigitte to whip up racial hatred?
I don't know – do you think it's alright for the National Enquirer to whip up Britney hatred? Or the world and his dog to whip up fat hatred? How about Eddie Murphy's hatred? I think Norbit pretty much whips up fat and women hatred. How about taking Norbit to court?
Oh, that doesn't count, that's entertainment. Well, for all you know Brigitte laughs her guts out when she's writing bad shit about Islam – is she not allowed to be entertained?
I'm only asking because I wonder why she isn't allowed to vent her spleen on a group's blood-thirsty religious practices when it's okay for everyone on the web to hate an individual for markedly bloodless brolly-bashing. I know if I was standing before God I'd rather take my chances on justifying whipping up hatred against slaughtering sheep than hitting cars with brollies.
Unless, of course, it was the old testament God. In which case I'd recommend telling him you rounded up every whoring little slut from here to Memphis and the hell with a few sheep. I'd say the old testament God is more in line with the Muslims any day, and it surprises me he hasn't struck Brigitte down before now – the fat slut (two strikes right there).
Am I the only person in the world that finds it odd that Brigitte indulging in a little reactionary (or heartfelt) disgust for the ways of Islam is prosecutable, but that Islam strutting around, often in someone else's country, screaming the odds about our behaviour (those slutty women again) and inciting just about anybody to take up arms against the infidel, doesn't seem to find itself in court?
Oh sure, if they build a few bombs, get a gathering of local dentists (why do they always seem to be innocuous dentists? Is it a sadism gene?) to talk about the next suicide mission, we whip their asses into court, but talking, or even writing about it? I don't think so. We have to respect their religion, you see. Doesn't do to offend someone's religion.
Well, I don't know about you, but I've never seen an offended religion. I've seen some damn antsy papists in my time, and some downright vicious protestants, but an offended religion? Not in my lifetime.
What I can't stand about this is the rampant double standard.
Let me give you a very specific personal right-on-your-doorstep example.
About a year after I came to Aberdeen I was in a thrift store. It didn't belong to a high street charity; it was just entitled Charity Shop on the sign. It was a big, clean shop with lots of donated goodies (it still is – it's still there, thriving away). Behind the counter was an 'Asian' man of indeterminate origin, but he looked Middle Eastern, not Indian or Pakistani. I paid no particular attention to him, being drawn, as usual, to the jewellery cabinet. I asked to see a couple of pieces and he stood talking to me, perfectly affably and politely friendly.
He went into the back shop after a while and I realised I could hear an odd tape playing in there – odd because it was part in Arabic and then in English.
After a while of eavesdropping it became apparent that what I was listening to was a translation, rather like a French lesson – écouter et répetér (listen and repeat for those of you who hated French). I, being me, and always caught on oddity, started concentrating on what was being said and discovered a whole new world I wasn't sure I had ever really believed in until that moment – me being a good woolly liberal and all.
This was a 'sermon' by a religious leader. He was extolling young men to be careful in their 'ministry', when trying to follow the ways of Allah, that they were not seduced by the women of their 'enemies'. He actually used the word enemies. He wrote a whole imaginary scenario for his keen young disciples, visualising them finding these poor women wandering the streets, 'orphaned' by combat and suggesting that they might take them in out the goodness of their hearts – but that they shouldn't. They should beware of this "temptation", because their 'enemies' had sent these dangerous women in amongst them, to lead them into sin and vice, so that they would stray from Allah.
Now, putting this into a real world context, what he was actually saying was, "In our 'holy war' you will find women, destitute, traumatised, wandering homeless in the streets without help and family. You should ignore your natural human tendencies to be a good Samaritan, because remember, your enemy will attempt to seduce you, because, let's face it, he's Satan. So don't be kind, and don't do good, because your enemy doesn't deserve it. And, anyway, enemy women are sluts."
Such is the magnanimous heart of religion. Founded on moral principles my ass. Anything that extols unkindness to people in need is neither good, charitable, nor godly. Unless, of course, he is that old testament God that we all fear so much – the wrathful, punitive one that always seems to want you to "take up thy word and slew mine enemy". Why doesn't he slew his own enemies if he's so damn powerful?
But the long and the short of it was that's where the money was going from anything I or anyone else bought in that shop. The bloke in the shop was perfectly nice and affable, but he still considered me the 'enemy' and that as a woman I'd be likely sent to try and seduce him and other good Allah fearing men off the path of righteousness. If I was in pain or distress he wouldn't lift a hand to help me – his preacher had told him not to. And he was listening to this bilge masquerading as righteousness in full hearing of a shop full of (at that moment) white people (aka 'enemies') like myself.
He obviously saw nothing wrong with that. After all, he was just practicing his religion and he has a right to that.
But what I want to know is this – why doesn't he, or the many like him, find himself hauled into court with Brigitte Bardot for "inciting racial hatred"? Perhaps because he's not famous and rich?
No. That would be wrong.
After all, he wasn't fat.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
23:35 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 09 April 2008
100 Reasons Why I am a Genius - no, really...
In the strangest of strange places right now. I'm chiefly engaged in writing new features for Cult Fiction to make it an "all new, all singing, all dancing" kind of publication.
So far, I have a new bio of me which confesses to my ownership of The Dirty Club – a child sex club that isn't nearly as perverse as it sounds, or is possibly more perverse than it sounds, depending on your point of view – then I have the Will I Like DANNY? 'criminal profile' i.e. a Cosmo style (not) listing of Are you the 'typical' (there's no such thing) DANNY reader? Then we have the Read a Good Movie feature which is a list of the 'if you like X movie, you'll like DANNY' variety and, last of all – at least so far – a feature entitled Subverting the Genre, about how DANNY subverts just about any genre you care to name.
And that's as far as I've got.
It's a strange place because I'm doing something I've never really done before – I'm using me as my Perfect Reader. We've had so many misfires with DANNY publicity that we've decided to throw caution to the winds and model the perfect DANNY reader on my likes and dislikes, the places I'd go (IMDB & Amazon, pretty much), things I'd see and do.
The only real basis we have for this breathtaking strategy is our most 'successful' fans share a remarkable similarity of taste in 'fiction' to mine, and our most 'unsuccessful' fans have had preferences and tastes where I'd never venture in a million years, so we figure, walk towards me and away from them and we're heading in the right direction.
Hey, it's a plan – the best one we've had so far – so don't knock it.
We've been sitting on advertising campaigns for IMDB & Amazon for ages – too scared to spend the budgets in case we cock up, or they are not the right place – but we've got to let go some time and that would be now.
Or, at least, after the 4th of July when DANNY Volume 1, the Revised Edition, officially hits the US.
It will be available here too, by the way, should you want to read The Version With More Commas as I've come to think of it. Truthfully, it will be a slightly better edition: easier to read, more graphic cover, better design generally, plus, of course, it may have some of the original beginning reinstated.
Still not entirely sure on that. After all, I cut it out the first time – must have had a reason. Personally, I think I just got the Must-Have-Striking-Opening-Scene disease and went a little nuts when I was editing it. But we'll see.
So, what other news? Well, the free extract of Volume 3 is up and running finally. You can read this via the Secret Site portal on Danny-is God (you'll find the link down below). Unfortunately it still has bold type on the first page because Mr Scratchmann has been doing a load of commissions in the US (he recently placed an online portfolio on the i-Spot after deliberating on whether he should for a mere 10 years). He was immediately inundated with work, which was nice, but which came on top of a load of commissions in the UK.
Still, never complain about work – you never know when it will dry up again. I will, however, keep chivvying his ass about getting it fixed to make it a more comfortable reading experience.
I, for my part, have decided finally to put the DANNY Elite Discussion Board (not sure it is a discussion board, but can't think what else to call it at the moment) on a whole new site, which is at neither MySpace nor Livejournal but is, instead, on Blogger, a Google site. And here is The Dirty Club.
It has been named in memory of the above-mentioned child sex club which I, disappointingly – (once again, or not) – ran as a child, and which got me into no end of trouble. Now, as then, I am going public, but we will definitely not be indulging in any actual sex, just talking about sex and its ramifications as viewed through DANNY – and other academic-sounding and fun polemics, of course.
As you can see, you have to be a member to get in and we will set up a page on DANNY-is-God in due course to let you join up.
The very rigorous testing will involve truth drugs, eyeball scanning and an oath of allegiance to the Lithuanian flag, plus some indisputably filthy hazing rituals and the sacrifice of your first child or a small pet – whichever the phase of the moon proscribes.
More details of that once we've set up the painstaking entrance exam (and I've actually written some content).
So that's my excitement for the week.
God, what a sad life I have.
Been watching Heroes and enjoying it but, dear God, it really does have fanboy coming out its ass. It's as if they sat down and thought "How can we capture that huge fanboy market out there?" and wrote an identikit story where all the fanboys get to play a part and sad losers get to have the dreaded "special powers".
As I am enjoying it, I consider myself very lucky that I saw a few episodes when it was just starting to get famous here, on the strength of which I got the box set for my Xmas. If I'd come to it from the fame end, as it were, I'd have undoubtedly run away from it screaming.
On the face of it, it seems like a nightmare scenario: geeky kids; comic artists (nooooooooooooooooooh!); Japanese geeky kids in comics (nooooooooooooooooooh!); doughnut-eating-decent-policemen-with-nasty-friends-and-adulterous-wives; cheerleaders who spend the whole thing in split-front mega-short skirts, and who look like some terrifying cross between Shirley Temple and Amber Bosoms the Teenage Slut Porn Starlet from Texas whose web cam gets more hits than Youtube, and who may regularly get burnt/beaten/broken but who never loses the curl in her hair and whose lip gloss still shimmers in 1000 degree furnace fires; evil men who have huge art collections (why?); evil English men (I would say why again but we all know it's the accent) who chop vegetables; the Petrelli brother incestuous touchy-feely thing (oh, I'm the pot and it's the kettle); the evil über-villain who absorbs power to become über-villainous so that he can rule the world and reign supreme as The Evil One Who Feels "Special".
What? You might as well put The Evil One Whose Mother Preferred His Jock Brother.
See, that's what I mean, wall-to-wall geek. But, hey, it's good wall-to-wall geek, so more power to them. I suspect that the two Japanese boys, much as they are by far my favourite thing in the show, are raging racism of the worst kind, but what the hell – we're white, right? We can say anything.
So, the inexplicable title of this blog? I wrote a piece called 100 Reasons Why I am a Genius then decided I'd never publish it, but I so loved the title I thought I'd put it on here.
Got to give you something to wonder about me in your idle moments.
P.S. The child sex club mentioned in this blog DOES NOT exist, nor has it ever existed, anywhere, ever. It is A JOKE. Tasteless maybe, but still a joke. The Dirty Club™, is a discussion forum for readers of DANNY by Chancery Stone and has nothing to do with child sex, anywhere, ever. There is no such thing as child sex.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
20:05 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
Monday, 24 March 2008
Twinks, Tweenies and Why Dan is so NOT the Man
So, between jobs (finished the transfer of Vol 1's MS and half-way through correcting the last pad of Delaney) and felt like writing a blog.
So, what'll we talk about then? The full horror of watching La Vie en Rose then Control one after the other? Or a comparison of the OC versus One Tree Hill?
The latter, I think.
I'm a teen junkie. Can't get enough of that teen fiction (figuratively speaking, of course. I don't read the stuff.) I love teen movies, teen TV – all grist to my voracious and unnatural teen appetite.
It has to be grown-up teen, of course – not Marybelle & Ashley, or whatever they're called.
Having watched all the series of the OC, I was looking for my next TV project – and the only other things I wanted, like Entourage 2 or Prison Break 2, were all still too dear – when the opportunity to get One Tree Hill presented itself in Tesco's. They had them cheap in the sale so I, uncharacteristically for something untested, bought the first two series.
I've just completed the first and am starting on the second. And the differences?
Hell, a whole world apart. And not just in wealth either.
First, the OC is a million miles ahead in scripting, location, characters and fashion. Secondly, it has Julie Cooper.
On the plus side, One Tree doesn't have Marissa. The joy of that is hard to replace.
I neither love nor hate Mischa Barton – she does, after all, make a fabulous clothes-horse, being so tall and thin there are no actual body parts to get in the way of drape or line. She's a sort of walking coat hanger. But her character… Dear God, the pain. If there is a more annoying Californian brat out there I've yet to 'virtually' meet her.
Marissa pouted and snivelled and flounced her way through (3?) entire series before we got rid of her. She was the proverbial Scots 'Lang dreep o' misery' (long drip of misery). She wasn't so much a drama queen as a wet sponge. For some reason whenever she came into a scene it went all soggy, like pastry left out in the rain. Even when she was smiley-happy there was something innately whingey about her.
And her on again/off again affair with Ryan… To repeat, dear God, the pain.
Ryan was the second worst thing about the OC, and his combination with Marissa just about made them The Toxic Couple to be Avoided at Parties – or just about anywhere else, for that matter. (Someday I will delight you with an essay on the semiotic metaphor of Ryan's wife-beater vest. I kid you not.)
It didn't help that he only had 2 expressions – scowl 1 and scowl 2 – and after a while of watching him schlump and sulk his Brando-lite way through another We're-so-over/We're-so-not scene with long tall Sally I would gladly have fried my brain as a welcome release from pain. They were even giving Smallville's Clark & Lana a run for their money in the most annoying Hollywood would-they-make-up-their-fucking-mind pairing. No easy feat.
Despite this being the most overused plot line in US television, and despite it annoying a large amount of viewers, they still trot it out often enough to cause motion sickness.
Yelling at the TV doesn't help either. (And yet, I do. I do.)
One Tree has been no exception to this sadly used-to-death-please-kill-it-already rule, having an on again/off again pairing between just about everybody, including the parents from hell, Mr Man-breasts himself, Dan the lug-nut head, and Mrs I-fucked-your-brother-but-I'm-innately-decent Deb.
Oh Dan, Dan, Dan – he is such a cunt, and with probably the ugliest fucking haircut that ever made it into a square-jaw soap opera. What is with that fucking fringe?
But our hero, Lucas, in One Tree, is definitely cuter than Ryan, even if he is distinctly simian in appearance. But he can act, tearing up as often as Demi Moore, with about as much expertise and glycerine beauty.
I admire that in any actor, and even more in a 'teen' boy actor. Yes, he goes at it like an old pro.
But his girlf of choice, the truly so NOT artistic Peyton (even the name's wrong)... What is with the fucking Bubble perm? The poor kid looks like she's stuck in some 80's teen flick. They've given her a leather jacket and a terribly Chloe Smallville bedroom, right down to its counterpart arty version of the Wall of Weird, but the girl does not have an artistic bone in her body.
I've known a lot of artists, some of them scatty, some shrewd; some rebellious, some conformist; some Bohemian, some frumpy, but I have never ever known one who is a cheerleader, who looks like a cheerleader, and who dates sports jocks.
I'm guessing here they thought, "Oh, off the wall. We gotta be off the wall. We need an angle, something new, fresh. She can't be geeky, gothy, nerdy, bo-ho – they've all been done before. I know, let's make a her a cheerleader."
Oh, for fuck sake, there's subverting the genre and just being plain daft. It's like casting a Greenpeace veteran as the president of the United States, or a vegetarian as the new head of the Meat Marketing Board. I mean, technically, why not? Just a job, right? But we all know it doesn't happen.
What makes it worse, is that the actress so can't handle that part of her role. Every time you see her doing something 'artistic' (bless…) she is colouring in. The poor bitch only ever gets to put tiny finishing touches, with Tippex and big, safe marker pens, to already completed projects. They are so uncertain of her talents that they don't even let her draw a big line or whack paint on a wall. I'm surprised they didn't issue her with plastic scissors to stop her cutting herself.
And what about Haley, who turned into Mormon girl? "Yes, I want to have sex with you, Nathan, it's just that it's important to me…" (soulful eyes) "I need to know you care." (I do, I do, he cries, uselessly.)
What the fuck was that all about? If they were trying to sell teens on the idea of being careful, they failed miserably. Worse, if they were trying to make it look like self-respect, they killed that concept dead in the water – and then beat it with a shovel. She came out looking like some mad, deranged frigid old-woman-teen who collected recordings of the Sound of Music and had a crush on the local priest.
These kids' shows can never resist the siren call of sanctimoniousness. You never get very far into any plot line – particularly if it is dark or 'controversial' – before it sinks into a morass of judgmentalism, often throwing little things like plot and characterisation right out the window to do it. Middle American must not be upset.
But the worst thing about One Tree has to be dear old pancake-face Nathan. No, of course we don't ever notice that his face is four shades of orange darker than his neck, desperately trying to cover up those nasty teen acne bumps, nor that he can't even rustle up two expressions – just the one.
An actor straight out of Joey's smell the fart school of acting, he flounders around like a beached whale when asked to do anything not involving balls (basket, not gonad). It physically hurts me to watch him trying to squeeze out an emotion. Any emotion.
I honestly do not know how he got cast. Sure, he's tall, dark and nondescript (and somehow so gay – that teeny toy nipple ring he coyly sports doesn't help), but after that he's a total non-starter.
So One Tree Hill versus the OC then?
Entertaining enough, but some serious acting flaws, too many square-jawed TV soap stars to be truly engaging and, sadly, with nothing else to offer us as shiny and beautiful as Orange County to save its duller moments.
Anybody want to buy two box-sets?
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
00:15 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Amy Winehouse, 2 Useless Ex-husbands and 23 Pounds of Funyun Pudge
She has a Jewish nose, a dyed beehive and LOTS of mascara – crazy bitch. What's not to hate?
A couple of weeks back, Maxim magazine website was running an article called The 5 Unsexiest Women Alive. Couldn't resist that gem – off I went. And, so you can enjoy the Amy (and other crazy bitch) bashing, here it is for you, Please don't show me real women, it upsets my fragile male sense of self.
So who are the five unsexiest (no, it's not a word, but a man made it up, and only dykes argue with men) women ALIVE!!!!!!!!!! (Felt that needed a good screaming headline.)
Well, it's pretty much a straight job-share between successful, older celebrities and young CRAZY (I'm really getting into this tabloid thing) bitches that do unseemly things in public.
You know, they used to lock women like this up in lunatic asylums. Nothing guaranteed to get a woman in the loony bin faster than doing things that any average bloke does of a Saturday night – you know, the drinking, snorting, public brawling kind of thing. When women do it it's CRAZY. Only now we can't lock them up any more.
Oh, wait a minute didn't we lock up Britney Spears recently? Yeah, she got in an altercation with the police when they were coming to take her children away. Wow – weird, crazy bitch. Why the hell would anybody freak when someone comes to take their children away? I hear she had some dodgy tooth brushing habits too. These celebrities, where do they get off?
And now that I come to think of it, isn't Lindsay Lohan always getting dragged off to psychiatrists, or threatened with psychiatrists, or introduced to psychiatrists, by Oprah, her father, mother, Jay Leno, President Clinton and the National Enquirer? Hell, haven't you signed the petition to have Lily Allen, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan put away as CRAZY BITCHES WHO SHOULD BE LOCKED UP AND STOP ENDANGERING THE AMERICAN WAY… OR SOMETHING.
Okay, I promise I won't use any more big letters suitable for small children. But you have to promise me that you will get a T-shirt and a marker pen, pin a picture of the Crazy Bitch Celebrity of your choice on your front and write underneath it, "I once ate 2 sponge cakes – deliberately. Now let's see you lock me up, motherfucker."
No-one will have a clue what you're talking about but we'll all know. It will be like a secret club.
Today, of course, as part of the general 'Amy Winehouse is Ruining Our Way of Life' hate spiel (remind me again – what did she actually do?) Yahoo has a headline with a picture of Amy looking like the Wicked Witch of the West (not difficult, Amy looks like a harsh Jewish Princess) with the sneery headline "So… who wants to look like Amy then?" with the not-hidden-at-all inference that no-one – I repeat, no-one – would want to look like Amy.
She's launching a fashion/perfume range, you see, and Yahoo just can't get past the fact that a drunken no-good, crazy bitch like Amy, who is no conventional beauty (but rivetingly imperfectly delicious) dares to think that young people might want to buy into some of that bad girl chic. The bitch, the bad, evil, crazy, successful, wealthy, incredibly robust bitch. (Dd we get to lock her up yet? Why isn't she collapsing under the barrage of this constant assault? After all, Britney folded, Lohan's showing cracks. Oh, fold, you crazy bitch – fold.)
We used to burn them, of course, and then we tried locking them in convents and, finally, lunatic asylums. That's what we do with 'crazy' – i.e. disobedient, mouthy, badly-behaved – women. Then we had to stop burning them, locking them up, tarring & feathering them. Now we are much more crafty. Now we burn them at the publicity stakes. Now we send packs of jackals after them to photograph their every move, post the most unflattering pictures we can find. If they're not too fat they're too thin (Kate Moss, bad, snorting not-role-model nearly-crazy-bitch anyone?). If they're not compulsively eating, drinking or snorting, they're compulsively shopping, partying or tanning (Paris Hilton, Mrs Beckham, the Ritchie girl?).
Oh, Crazy Bitch comes in lots of flavours, but it's always about excess, un-ladylike behaviour. And, of course, being very public. We really hate them for being everywhere – like it was their fault. In the case of Paris or Posh you can blame them for publicity seeking – if you really feel that publicity seeking is a terrible cruel thing to do and your small children should not be exposed to it. But Winehouse, Allen, Spears and co. are not big on hunting it out – it's more a case of them not being able to out-run it.
Nobody seems to question the validity of what is credited to the ladies as 'wild' behaviour. Male rock stars have been trashing rooms, puking up and decking people since the year dot. They're just living the rock star life – those wild guitar heroes. What about Oliver Reed, whose behaviour makes all of the girls' naughtiness together look like Noddy on an outing with Big Ears. Ah, Oliver, such a character – what a bloke, eh? Funny, I don't remember anyone locking him up, and he spent his entire life drunk, never mind a week or two. Shane McGowan – never sober. Keith Moon – don't even start.
To my knowledge never once sectioned, any of them. Nor were they called crazy, other than as the most flattering, blokey headshaking epithet. And what wild Oliver stunt has Britney pulled? She hit a car with a brolly. Oh, and she shaved her head. Wow, scary shit. No wonder her dad wants to take her money off her – just to manage it, of course, until she gets better. Yes, poor Britney, she's losing it. Literally, if dad has anything to do with it.
Or Amy, what about her? She had a fight. With her husband. In public. There was blood. She also – and please stop reading this if you're under eighteen – smudged her mascara and looked messy.
And we won't even start on Lohan. She once went out without any pants on.
What I want to know is what were the paparazzi doing sticking lenses up her skirt anyway? Bet no-one ever dared stick a Pentax down Oliver Reed's trousers to see if he was going commando. Hey, maybe she should have hit him with her brolly, then she could have got herself sectioned and given her fortune to her father. That would have been the proper thing to do, show young women you can't just smudge your mascara in public without paying the price.
So, I'll just leave you with this little witch-burning thought, care of Maxim's delightful list on just how we women fail to be sexy, so that you can make sure you don't do this and LOSE YOUR MAN (sorry, couldn't resist one last yell).
Don't get menopausal (Madonna), don't be in a hit TV show or have a boyish figure (Sandra Oh), don't let your drug use outstrip your boyfriend's (it threatens his manhood, Amy), don't have children or gain weight – any weight (Britney), don't ever, ever wear short skirts and behave like anyone out of Sex in the City – oh, and don't get famous, rich or successful.
Feminism is dead – long live Celebrity Culture! God, I am one crazy bitch……..
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
23:40 Posted in Blog , Film , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Monday, 11 February 2008
Heath Ledger - Naked Dead Guy
Let's talk about Heath Ledger. It's about time.
He's dead, took too many different pills, but had the wits to die naked in the middle of the day.
Also had the wits to mix lots of interesting drugs: tranquilisers, pain killers, anti-depressants, sleeping pills – the definitive tortured artist list. How interesting, how tragic.
How pathetic.
Pathetic that he took them? Not at all. Any idea how many people take that lot every day in any Westernised country? Pathetic that we think it teaches us something about him.
It does – he was careless with pills. He was a man who was perpetually wound up and who found it hard to sleep. His performances have that odd repressed quality of something frenetic held down. It's what gives him that interesting fragility used to such great effect in Monster's Ball. The fact that he had been using cannabis all his life (yes, you all saw the – haha – suppressed footage on Youtube), but had recently given it up only ups the ante on the risk of medication overdose.
Here's a man who is hyper by nature. He sedates himself with cannabis. This works for him but he gives it up to go clean – being a father and all. He does a film role that demands a little of that old inner darkness. He's hyper, strung-up, can't sleep, can't use his usual crutch, (what's yours, friend? Chocolate, booze, cigarettes, sex?) result – he takes more and more prescription drugs, trying to get onto some kind of even keel, bingo – he's dead.
It's not rocket science. It doesn't mean he was chronically twisted forever by acting the Joker. It doesn't mean he was suicidal or tormented. It doesn't mean he was a junkie, dope-fiend loser from hell.
But, oh, we gotta build that story, we have to make something deep out of it. Suddenly Heath has to get his Dead Hat on. He can choose Dead & Tragic, or Dead & A Junkie Loser. He doesn't get to do just Dead & Fucked-up, that isn't nearly interesting enough – can't write me no eulogies on that one.
If he'd been fat & forty would he have lost the tragic card? Would he only have had the Sad Loser card then? The washed-up actor past his prime?
If he'd fallen down dead on the tennis court would he have had quite the same erotic appeal as naked on his bed waiting for the massage he never got?
It's so sexy. Yes, Heath had the wits to die a sexy death – naked, across the foot of his bed, waiting for Swedish Nympho Masseuse to turn up and deal with a real big stiffy – all the way to his feet and back.
Yes, I think it's tasteless. Tasteless and predatory and pointless. I detest the way he's reduced to a handful of filmic clichés, as if he's become his own plot in a bad B movie – Drug Fiends of Hollywood! Naked & DEAD! His Final Sleep in a NARCOTIC HAZE!
Has anyone seen pictures of the masseur/masseuse? Is he/she sexy? If you have, then of course they are. They only get to play a part in this great mythology we call 'News' if they've been screened by the casting department for The Drama of HIS Life!
Suddenly Heath's life is not his own. He has to become an urban legend for our gratification. We have to make 'sense' of it because he was too young and pretty to die and, of course, he had the world at his feet.
What makes you so sure? For all you know, in the Universe Where Heath Yet Lives, every film he made from the day of his death on was mediocre to crap. Maybe in the next ten years his career went steadily downhill until he was starring in bad sci-fi with Rutger Hauer (he too was once a beautiful demi-god with a shining future), or cheap thrillers with Malcolm McDowell (he too was once a demi-god with…) or Christopher Lambert (he too was once…) – need I go on?
The world is paved with beautiful people who don't die naked in the afternoon and whose beauty, talent, uniqueness goes slowly down the drain like some seeping banal decline. How about Terence Stamp? A man of extraordinary beauty (even now) who has just made more and more dismal films/TV (The Hunger anyone?) which don't even begin to tap the possibilities in him. See? If only he'd had the wits to die naked on his bed at twenty-five.
Living is humdrum, even for beautiful people. Dying is humdrum, even for beautiful people. Our need to turn it into some cheap Hallmark Cards tear-jerking parody of human life is nauseating beyond Chancery's Limited Vocabulary of Nauseating Things.
Heath Ledger was a talented, good-looking boy with a lot of charm and a few weaknesses, just like the rest of us.
Even if he was a drug-fiend of epic proportions it would be nobody's business but his own. If he shot up, snorted and popped on an hourly basis it would still be nobody's business but his own. Drug-taking has to be the ultimate in 'fuck off and bother somebody else' activities. Drunks piss in the streets, vomit on you, annoy you, start fights. The worst most drug addicts do is steal from their families. Annoying as hell for the families but as far as social nuisance goes – minimal.
Sure, every once and a while one mugs an old lady, shoots someone, but you're at no more risk from them than you are from the perfectly sober criminals doing the same things without the aid of narcotics or stimulants – so what's your beef? What the hell business is it of yours what Heath took or didn't take? Do you really suppose you know something about him by the medications he used?
Jesus Christ, get a grip.
On the odd day in the year you'll see me rollicking about the street with dilated pupils and an odd detachment. Stoned again. Of course. And I am. But only to go to the dentist. When I get home I even get naked and pass out over the end of the bed while waiting for a massage. Sometimes I've taken painkillers. Sometimes I take sleeping pills too.
Bingo, there I am, cloning Heath. God, we have so much in common – don't you just feel you really know me now?
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
23:50 Posted in Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Sunday, 20 January 2008
Not in My Movie
Filmic clichés – how I loathe them.
So, in that spirit, here is Journalism Cliché Number One – The Easy to Digest Soundbite List for Morons.
Yes, it's Ten Things I Hate About Movie Cliches – a decidedly uncomprehensive list of the lazy, irritating filmmaking semiotic tricks (we know it, so we're going to [mis]use it) you will never see in a movie of mine.
1. Throwing up in the toilet. Why, in the name of God, would anyone want to put their head in a toilet when they feel sick? Would you? Yes, it maybe has the dubious benefit of being easier to flush away, but are you really thinking that rationally when you're hungover/poisoned/dying? People shit and piss in toilets. They smell. Intelligent people do NOT stick their heads down toilets. End of conversation.
2. Blue lights during sex. Okay, where are they – the blue lights? I mean, every Hollywood film has them, so where do people get them? Hotel rooms, Midwestern bedrooms, barns, offices – doesn't matter where they are, as soon as those clothes come off the blue lights come on. Stop it already. Enough.
3. Washing down drugs with booze. I'm not talking cocaine here, I'm talking headache tablets or painkillers that the hero falls back on when he loses an arm or two. Can you begin to imagine how you'd feel with four paracetamol and a triple whisky gurgling around inside? Yeah, unconscious or puking – neither of which would spruce you up to go on fighting.
4. Even more drugs. We're talking quantity issues here. Heroes never ever take the 2 or 3 tablets as prescribed on the bottle. In fact, have you ever seen a hero actually read a label? They always knock the lid off (usually with their teeth or their one remaining foot) and empty maybe ten tablets into their hand, which they then proceed to swallow dry. Have you ever tried swallowing ten tablets dry? Come to that, have you ever taken ten Paracetamol and not had to have your stomach pumped? Some of them even do it repeatedly in one movie. Are they taking painkillers designed for very small rodents?
5. Somersaulting when you can jump. Okay, I know this is part of that whole fun thing you martial arts fans go for, but Christ, it's so overdone. Nowadays even fire-fighters leap backwards out of tall buildings to save the cat. It spoils pacing, and don't even start me on believability: "Oh, no, a man with a machine gun, I must run away, but not before I do a triple somersault off this balcony…"
6. Paper disguised as money. How many films? Come on, honestly, count 'em. Yeah, you can't, can you? How many otherwise really scary shaved & tattooed or sharp-suited & slimy gangsters have you seen conned by the old $700,000,000 in one-real-bill-on-a-pile-of-blank-paper trick? My cat knows when I'm pulling a fast one. (No, this really is expensive Sheba. It just happens to be in a jumbo-sized own brand tin.)
7. Fly-wire rigged jumping, fighting, leaping, kicking, bullet-dodging. Like lighting your own farts – fun the first time, but after that? Might be original if they used it for an inventive sex scene, or an underwater ballet, but otherwise, sick, sick sick of it. Give me fight scenes a la Brick any day.
8. Serial killers who keep pretty journals. Yes, we know they're nuts, and, yes, we know crazy people write bizarre things in their journals. Reality check – some of them are barely literate, actually, but you wouldn't know that on Planet Hollywood. No, there they keep notebooks worthy of Leonardo Da Vinci, with miniscule mirror-writing and detailed collage-work and superb graphic art. Hell, they ought to give up the mass killing and take up batik and macramé – give that creative urge an outlet.
9. People who take energy saving too far. Yes, you know what I'm talking about – the chronic misuse of light-bulbs. Nobody bloody switches them on. What is wrong with these people? They go into the dark, scary, dangerous house/basement/crypt where there is a serial killer/zombie/angry stalker, AND a light. But do they ever use it? No. It's not that I object to Dark is Scary, it's just that if you want to use dark at least give us a plausible reason for it so that we're not sitting there shouting, "Turn on the fucking light, you idiot."
10. Computer nerds who save the day. The only reason we get these fantasies in movies is because Hollywood is overrun by computer nerds making homages to other computer nerds. Computer nerds never save anything. No, trust me, they don't. Even the rare bright ones are incapable of having a conversation, never mind overriding NASA. The idea that any of them could have the wits to 'save' anybody belongs in the same league as them winning the girl by force of personality. Besides, most of them really fancy the square-jawed hero anyway.
Right, that's it. I could give you more, but I won't. Cliché of Journalism Number Two – people are too stupid to handle lists of more than 10 items.
Next blog, Wanky Hitchcock. Don't know what it's about yet, but I just love the title. (Thanks be to Jodie.)
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21:39 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
Monday, 07 May 2007
MOMMEEE... I Just Done a Big Buffy!
Doing the new web site.
Oh ha-ha, ha-haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Am I fuck.
Getting exactly nowhere. In fact I'm so stuck it's sticking everything else for me too. Everything in life has lost its flavour. It's all pointless. I want to die.
Understand, this is not writer's block. I don't get writer's block because there is no such thing as writer's block. Writer's block is fear, plain and simple, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar and a self-deluding fool – shun him. Pander not to writer's block; it is a chimera, an illusion, a way of dignifying the cowardly and dubious emotion of fear.
Why would you need to? Easy, because if you told the truth you'd have to face something even uglier about yourself. Why you are writing in the first place. And, believe me, a lot of people can't afford to face that one.
This is how it goes.
We have a 'writer'. Said writer can be anything from a rank amateur who wants to rewrite his favourite TV show to a literary darling with one novel to his name that won the Booker. What these two have in common is this – they don't write.
Strangely though, they have other things in common – far more than you might think. In fact I have a pet theory that they are exactly the same person just wearing different uniforms.
The Rank Amateur meticulously studies his favourite TV programme. He knows – to a stalkerish level – what the characters eat and drink and all the back history he has been able to find on the internet. He collects children's toys, wears the T-shirt and goes to conventions. He belongs to so many chat rooms it's a miracle he has hours in the day to pee. In fact, he doesn't. He does that at his computer.
Rank Amateur wants to be the characters, or at least the person who writes them.
It used to be that Rank Amateur couldn't get anywhere near the professional side of the business, now he is the business. You've seen the articles saying fanboys are running Hollywood. Sadly it's all true. Otherwise how do you account for every second film being from a comic book, the 12 certificates, the total absence of sex and, of course, special effects instead of characters. For fanboys SFX are the characters.
And this is how our Rank Amateur, aka The Fanboy Who Took Over Hollywood, gets writer's block.
It's the pressure. And the pressure for fanboys is exactly the same for them as it is for The Literary Giants – performance anxiety.
All writer's block is fear and that fear is performance anxiety by any other name.
For the Literary Giant who wrote The Great American Novel it's how to keep his 'edge', his 'nowness', his 'unique voice'.
Newsflash – the annoying cunt next door has a 'unique voice', all voices are unique. No matter how dumb you are there's only one of you in the world and, like your fingerprints, that makes you unique. Sorry, world of artistic greatness, unfortunately God cornered the market in uniqueness ahead of you.
The Literary Giant knows the world is waiting for him to slip up, to fail to be as obscure, 'deep' and meaningful as the last time – hell, the only time.
Remember that novel he wrote about the impoverished biscuit maker in Brazil? Remember his inspired use of unique voice, that character that spoke in tongues – yeah, it was Aramaic except every third word was a bakery ingredient in German and that contained the code that would cure AIDS. God, that was something, so moving. And his gay dog, the one with hepatitis C that saved the lunatic who thought he was a seagull. Remember that beautiful, haunting passage where he sings to the moon, lip-synching to Maria Callas? So touching. I wasn't the same after I read that.
In actuality, nobody got past page 28 before they lost the will to live but, fortunately, there was so much talk of it in the media, and there was that film with Mel Gibson, Keanu Reeves and Justin Timberlake as the dog – you know, the manga-inspired version with the great ILM AIDS cartoon sequence – that we all know what it was about anyway.
Hell, it was the literary sensation of the year, the Art equivalent of all those kids that own Harry Potter novels as fashion accessories but don't actually read them. It's like Coles Notes for the TV generation. Less words than a cereal box.
How the hell is Mr/Ms Literary Giant going to top that?
Answer – they can't. And they know it.
So, writer's block is a fear of not being good enough? But, of course. Only that's not the question.
The question is – not good enough for what?
And it is in the answer to that that you find the real dark heart of writer's block.
Fanboys and Literary Giants both fear exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reasons, because they are exactly the same people.
Writer's block is a fear that all those people you are trying to impress will be unimpressed or – worse, much worse – contemptuous. They might dislike you and your work. They might say you are a bad person, talentless, a hack, a no-hope, a………..LOSER!
God, no, the pain.
It would be nice to believe, because it gives us such an elevated sense of our own importance, that writers are all perfectionists, so determined to create the best writing in the world that they can't live up their own concepts of Greatness.
Yeah, my arse. What the fanboys and the Literary Giants fear is that their ruse has been rumbled. The fact of the matter is they are all derivative, imitative, far more interested in being WRITERS than in writing.
For love of the craft? You'd have to explain what the fucking craft was first.
For those of you old diehards who have been reading this column since its inception you may well remember Eileen Barnetson, my childhood friend who wrote fan fiction - although she didn't know what that was at the time as it hadn't been invented yet. (See archives – Eileen Barnetson Lives!)
You will also perhaps remember how much I admired Eileen's skills – and she was skilled. Obviously my memory is maybe a little rosy but I remember her at thirteen writing like a woman three times her age. I remember it being professional, that writing. I seriously admired that girl. I was even a touch envious. (Aha, see, I can be envious too, you know. I knew I had it in me.)
But the fact remains that I seriously doubt if Eileen went on to become an author. (If you're reading this Eileen and I'm wrong, do let me know.)
Eileen married a policeman and worked in the local tax office. Eileen didn't become an author because she didn't love writing, she loved what the story gave her. Eileen only wanted more of the same. She had no burning desire to tell her own story, or indeed say anything very new or original – she just wanted more Little Women. She couldn't make Louisa tell her more so she mimicked Louisa's voice and carried on telling herself the story.
Eileen was a fangirl extraordinaire. And a very good one too. What she wasn't was a writer.
Oh, she learned how to be Louisa May Alcott and no doubt she could have learned to be anyone else she chose but that was all she was learning.
So I'm saying you can't learn how to write by copying other writers?
Hell, no. That is how you learn it. Well, at least how you learn to do it well. What you can't learn is a burning need to say something. Nobody teaches you that. Absolutely no-one. Ever. No discussion.
Eileen didn't have a burning need to say something. The creator of the current high-vogue TV show, Heroes, didn't have a burning need to say something. He doesn't even look like a fanboy on first glance and he isn't, not of comics or superheroes. But he was a fan of Lost and thought it would be a good idea to combine that idea with some "kids with special powers" – always guaranteed to get you those fanboy votes.
And votes he has.
I haven't seen Heroes and it will no doubt be a good long while till I do (is it showing in the UK?), so I have no idea whether it's good, bad or indifferent. But it wouldn't make any difference if I did. Good fanboys make good fanboy TV. Just as Eileen wrote good Louisa May Alcott.
That's not the point. The point is this – if you have a whole world of fanboys out there waiting for you to give them more of the same, and they are very touchy on just what typifies 'the same' – you better not fucking disappoint.
And there you have writer's block in a nutshell.
Because the fanboy is not saying anything of his own, merely regurgitating, he always runs the risk of alienating his very picky audience. The pressure is immense. He has no inner resources to fall back on. Unlike the Ernest Hemingway school of writing wherein every author has "an inbuilt shit-detector" he has no such luxury. He doesn't have an inner voice. He's never had one. He has vampire voices, filmic voices, super-hero voices, Clark Kent voices, super-villain voices, James Bond's voice, film noir's voice – even the voice of grindhouse cinema.
There is no him. So that if he, unfortunately, develops his own voice, decides he has something to say – oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Now the fans don't love him. Now he is going to know what hate feels like. All that thwarted loss of the Mother-teat, and it's all coming at him. All those people who feel offended and wounded because Buffy would never do that, Superman isn't conflicted, Dr Who can't be Scottish, Welsh, Irish, black. All coming back to bite the fanboy in the ass. His career, riding high in Hollywood, his Emmy award, his reputation, all going down the toilet – all because he decided what would be good for the characters. All because he decided he could write.
That wasn't the contract. That wasn't the deal. Think we loved you because you were a writer? Think again, fuckwit. We loved you because you gave us more of the same. We don't want you. Who you?
And it's exactly the same for the Literary Giant. Don't be fooled by the fact that he has a "unique voice". That voice is like every other "unique voice" that went before it. If you don't believe me look at all the true "unique voices" that he aspires to. James Joyce, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, e.e. cummings. All condemned out of hand as everything from illiterate rubbish to unspeakable filth (that one was Bronte, believe it or not). They were not "unique voices" in their own time. In their own time they were either common trash (Dickens) or even more unspeakable filth (Joyce this time).
The Literary Giant knows that The Art Establishment is watching him, judging him, making sure he doesn't get too cocky, doesn't get to thinking he gets praise out of hand, for the asking. No sir. He has to perform. He has to give them more of the same.
Metaphors, allegories, allusions, insights, literary Tradition, prose poetry, lexiconography, linguistics, erudition, meaning, depth, and lots of dense, impenetrable prose with big words you have to look up. If his book doesn't help you understand a junta somewhere he is in serious shit.
What both these schools of writers lack – and they make up a formidable body of artisans – is anything to say, so that when they are facing an empty screen, a blank piece of paper, they have nothing to fall back on, no inner well of purpose.
People who have writer's block are afraid - that simple. And they are afraid of performing, being judged. They are afraid they can't measure up to the people they are trying so desperately hard to impress, the people who give them meaning, a definition of themselves, self-validation.
Writers who are blocked crave one thing and one thing only, acceptance, love, the belief that they are Writers – capital letter. They don't care if they can write, if they have anything to say, if they are saying it well. They care that their significant others – the public, the critics, the fans - believe that they are Writers.
It is one huge con game with needy, hungry little souls thirsting at the centre of it, belligerently pounding on their chests and announcing "I'm a Real Writer, me. Look, all them people says so – so there!"
At last……. Mummy loves them.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
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Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust. 
21:55 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 17 April 2007
FAG-GLASSES - MEN, SEE THRU (boys') WALLS!!!
Just watched The History Boys. Ah, the rose-tinted power of fag-glasses. Wish I could get me a pair.
Fag-glasses are indeed wondrous. The extent of their powers is truly awesome. This is what fag-glasses can do for you:-
Negate all women. Yep, they can make them simply disappear, entirely. With fag-glasses you can write an alternate universe where there literally are no women. Wondrous.
If, however, you are aiming for at least a smidgen of reality then there's the PC version (that's correct, not computer) wherein THE WOMAN gets to be a cipher of universal everywoman. Good God, gay writers use female stereotypes – who'd ever have thought it?
Fag-glasses also make paedophilia okay. It's amusing, it's RITES of PASSAGE. No, it's not. It's gay porn thinly disguised as autobiographical reminiscence and I seem to be the only person on the planet that notices it as such.
Hello!!!!!? Anybody there!!!!!? (Echoes to infinity.)
Fag-glasses allow gay fiction to morph the universe so that you get staggering incidences of homosexuality much higher than any national average, cluster-fucks of queers coming at you from all angles (now there's an image). Two gay teachers, a gay pupil and one ambivalent in a group of nine, say. Ten per cent? Only on Planet Rose-tinted Gay.
Fag-glasses take us back in time, where the world is set in any period of porn nostalgia that does it for you, where every boy is beautiful, where they have paper girlfriends who, strangely, are sexually absent as well as physically absent.
Fag-glasses make 'flirting' (aka sexual harassment) with anything straight and delicious not only non-threatening (they're all ambivalent, don't you know) but delightfully tender, sweet and humorous. Oh, you saucy old queer, you.
Fag-glasses turn dirty old men into love interest.
Fag-glasses take us back to more innocent times – aka when the author was permanently hard.
Fag-glasses make Britain great again, when women were either wrinkled, old and bitter or thin, insubstantial and dumb. Think of it as Ealing in the age of AIDS.
Fag-glasses make schoolboys smart, witty and entertaining – even in Yorkshire. And that isn't easy.
Fag-glasses make Sheffield a hotbed of tortured romance. And that's even harder.
Fag-glasses make everything and anything politically correct, from sexism and misogyny to child molestation, because - bless 'em - it's a fag that's wearing 'dem fag-glasses and we all know that as a repressed minority they can do no wrong.
Fag-glasses are the Positive Racism of sex.
We want more fag-glasses! We all want a pair! We want them now!
The History Boys is Alan Bennett's prose poem to lusting after teenage boys and he has covered all the bases.
All authors put themselves in their work, but Alan has taken this to the nth, managing to star himself in The History Boys in no fewer than three of the major roles and in a few of the subservient ones too.
Alan is young Posner lusting after Dakin from not very afar. Alan is the revered, hip, erudite Mr Irwin to whom Dakin loses what slim grasp on heterosexuality he has because he is just so damned attractive. Alan is the fat, old Hector for whom the straight, Northern - ha-ha - 1980's boys all perform camp film scenes, musical numbers and sub-rosa male bonding poetry. And, as if that wasn't jammy enough, they also permit - laughingly of course (oh, the dear, harmless old thing) - to cop a feel of their dicks, on a daily basis, in a Tom of Finland, sexy motorcycle-fantasy-with-fat kind of way.
Alan has written a curiously dated wankfest of every sexual fantasy he's ever had since 1954 with some funny dialogue and a lot of literary references and we, the discriminating voting public, have given it a 6.8 rating on IMDB, while the true arbiters of taste have seen fit to nominate it seven times for various film awards.
Now here's a thought. A daring and controversial one, but a thought nevertheless. Let's practice some of our own reverse sexism.
We are going to rewrite The History Boys using Positive Sexism.
The Geography Girls.
Our author is Alana Bennett. She is a fat, middle-aged, sagging dyke from Lancashire. She writes herself into the story as a geeky little girl lusting after Delilah, the bad girl. She is also Miss Quim, the sexy, hip young dyke teacher that Delilah decides to give up men for, itching to get into her thong because she craves her attention and approval. And giving a teacher a blow job will do that for you. We have a lot of scenes where Delilah gets close and flirts and seduces. Temperatures rise.
Lastly we have porpoise-sized Hermione. Whale-sized Hermione. Hermione has a belly that looks like two watermelons with a crease up the front. Her front bottom is indeed a front bottom in that it looks like an Exorcist-style happening has afflicted her and stuck her arse where her belly should be. Hermione looks like she's a feeder's prime project.
Hermione has chin hairs that Alan Rickman would be proud of. Hermione has specs indenting her puff-ball face like chicken wire on cheese. Hermione sweats and wheezes. Hermione lusts after her pupils. Hermione bullies them, in the most genial way, of course, into riding pillion on her bike. Every day one of them must come. Literally.
Hermione gets hot and sweaty reaching back at the traffic lights and inserting a pudgy finger into those juicy little leg-spread pudenda.
Hermione is a wheeze – bless her.
Right, now tell me something. Are we watching some kind of weird bastard cross between a seventies exploitation movie and a grotesque horror movie here, or what?
Old fat bird who likes fingering her cute girl pupils. I can see the nominations rolling in now. Lovely school girls lining up to seduce tasty young lesbian teacher. Yeah, alright as far as any of the boys reading this right now go, but up for an award?
I don't think so.
The History Boys can win awards from here to Blackpool and back. It can have a rating of 9.9 on IMDB – a rating I've never even come near seeing – that's all fine by me. Who cares? It's a well-written, funny movie with good dialogue but it's about as comfortable as watching Brady & Hindley selecting pretty girls from the Marshall Ward catalogue.
All the time I'm thinking, This is supposed to be okay? Earth to Planet Bennett – not okay. No how.
And here's another thing you can tell me. I've read far too many gay books. I've seen way too many gay films. I've experienced way too much gay culture. Know it all, seen it all. No-one can claim I 'don't know no better'. So why, why why is paedophilia such a common theme in gay 'art'?
How often have you heard gay men bleating "Homosexuals are not paedophiles."?
Why then is it impossible to escape it in everything they think, write, film, photograph or do? Maybe someone should stop yelling it at the heterosexuals who misjudge them and tell it to Alan Bennett and the trillion and one other gays who seem to be completely unable to get past their fourteenth year.
I mean it's very nice for me because it backs up my theory that they are a) all stuck in their childhoods (fits their obsession with dressing up as cowboys and their infantile delight with pissing and shitting) and b) have way too many undeclared victims of child abuse on the team to be any way coincidental.
Any homosexuals reading this? Okay, hands up - truthfully now - were you molested as a child?
Thought so.
Fortunately not all molested children grow up to molest but it certainly leaves a lot of the male ones with a life lived through fag-glasses.
I don't find that strange (actually, maybe I do) but I do wonder quite why they are in such denial about it and when, exactly, it became politically correct to condone paedophilia because a respectable gay man was indulging in it.
If a straight male director had made the same film about school girls he'd be immediately classed, along with Larry Clark, Tinto Brass and Bertolucci, as one of The Dirty Old Men School of Directors. And get nominated for awards?
Ah well, that one would be open to debate. Wouldn't be the fir