Friday, November 26, 2010

11.26.10


It is with real sadness I note the passing of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, of Throbbing Gristle, Coil, etc., a few days ago. Sign his condolence book here.

Don van Vliet gone, too. No condolence book except the day and nothing to write with but your feet.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

10.26.10




"If William Burroughs was helping Cormac McCarthy rewrite Blood Meridian as dark fantasy, it might look something like this. The Narrator is wonderfully grotesque and slippery book, a meditation on the nature of violence chock-full of palpable, haunting and shocking strangeness."

- Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State

My latest novel, The Narrator, is now available here.

Read what Nick Mamatas has to say about it here.

Read what Ekaterina Sedia has to say about it here.

Read what J.M. McDermott has to say about it here.

Read what the OF blog has to say about it here.

Read what Paul Charles Smith has to say about it here.

Happy Halloween.

That is all.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

10.10.10




We are proud to announce The Great Lover, a new novel by Michael Cisco, has been accepted for publication by Chomu Press. Expect to see more about this on their website soon.

Yet still more material is on the way. I have a new piece in an upcoming anthology and another one is in the works right now. Information will be forthcoming.

The Hedayat essay is in print.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

7.15.10


Further information.

We here at Cisco Gold Star Values are proud to announce the publication of a new novel: The Narrator, to be published by Civil Coping Mechanisms. This is currently scheduled to appear in October of this year.
http://copingmechanisms.net/?page_id=148

The Centipede Press omnibus is planned for Fall 2011 at the earliest.

Also due in Fall of 2011 is a new anthology on the subject of vampirism, edited by Ellen Datlow. Blood and Other Cravings will feature a story by your reporter.

Friday, June 4, 2010

6.4.10


Recent publishing activities:

"Mr. Wosslynne," Phantom.

"Machines of Concrete Light and Dark," Lovecraft Unbound.

"Violence, Child of Trust," Black Wings.

"Modern Cities Exist Only to Be Destroyed," Cinnabar's Gnosis: A Homage to Gustav Meyrink.

"Last Drink Bird Head," Last Drink Bird Head.


Coming Soon:

"The Cadaver is You," The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Homage to Mikhail Bulgakov.

"Bread and Water," in a yet to be announced anthology.

A Michael Cisco Omnibus from Centipede Press, which will include all the novels published to date and some short fiction as well, including a few new items. Also, a new essay on supernatural literature, and more.

A new novel! The Wretch of the Sun has been accepted by Ex Occidente Press for publication this year.

Nonfiction

Joshi's upcoming Encyclopedia of the Vampire will contain a piece by your reporter on Gogol's short story "Viy," and the (first) film adaptation.

I am also very proud to announce that my essay, "The Eternal Return in Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl" has been accepted for publication by Iranian Studies, and is scheduled to appear this fall (September, I think) ...

And there is more to come ... I am authorized to say that one of my already-published stories has been selected for a truly remarkable anthology from Atlantic. Formal announcement in the months ahead.

I'm attending Readercon as usual. Assassins take note.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Why I Like Damon Packard's Movies

(Don't be mislead by the date. I'm not joking.)

I think they’re hilariously funny; he pays close attention to sound design; they have the kind of weird energy I associate with seeing live performances; most of them are shot in the Los Angeles I remember growing up in; they remind me of the hours I spent in front of wistful 1970’s horror movies with orange sky and hexagons in the sunbeams on my grandmother’s Zenith television. These are my personal reasons for liking them. What follows are my "professional smart person’s" reasons for liking them.

They represent the relationship between the audience, the blockbuster, and the people who make the blockbuster. These movies are designed to overpower audiences; they are stories turned into commodities, carefully designed to induce compulsive re-watching. People incorporate into themselves elements of the stories for which they have an affinity. To a considerable extent, my identity is a narrative about myself I tell to myself and others. The composition of my storyline is improvised from one day to the next and highly susceptible to all kinds of influence, including and especially the cinematic variety.

The commodified blockbuster film story is not a folktale. It has the same effect; it influences its audience in the same, often powerful, way; it becomes another component of a common frame of reference; but it is produced to make money and, once it doesn’t make money any more, it gets thrown contemptuously aside. The fans who have taken these stories into themselves are just so many suckers and those who try to live the story somehow, by dressing as the characters etc., are first class prize suckers. Commodity films prostitute epic tropes in a crude attempt to synthesize a sure-fire story-formula, hence big box office.

On the other hand, because the fans socialize around the films and use them to create their own stories, however derivative, this means the films still function like myths in some ways. That’s the discrepancy between the money value and the use value of the films. Discriminating between these two values is difficult, and can involve being humiliated.

Packard’s movies always have blockbusters in the background, and somehow they always manage to show them in both lights at once, both as commodities, which is how they are produced, and as magical stories, which is how they are received. These stories are designed to burn themselves into people’s brains using the most sophisticated special effects and the most immersive presentation and editing technologies. Whether it’s a character or the film itself that’s affected, Packard’s movies show the derangement that a steady diet of spectacle can induce by jumping back and forth between the movies and spontaneous street footage. There’s also a similar jumping between the movie as a story and the movie as a product.

Packard takes whatever he wants or needs from other movies and puts it into his films. Why go through the trouble of putting together a paltry imitation when you can simply edit the effect you want from one movie into another?

For that matter, now that commerical moviemaking is only a matter of editing together elements from tried, safe films, remade with different actors who themselves are only versions of each other, what’s the difference? What’s the difference between Packard’s technique and the technique of the major studios, apart from budgets and pretenses? Isn’t it more honest simply to collage films together?

If Packard’s movies are often incoherent, they’re usually only more incoherent in the same way that the biggest ticket contemporary Hollywood movies are incoherent. It’s the same incoherence.

http://www.youtube.com/user/pookie67