A Feast For Crows comes out in three weeks, on November 8th. I’m contemplating saving money by downloading the audiobook rather than shelling out for a hardcover. If I do, it’ll be a minor milestone — the first time I’ve chosen audio over print for the first read of a new book I was excited about. And I am excited. I’ve had to stop reading the ASOIAF message board so that no one will spoil the book for me. Those lucky brits already have their copies, and significant numbers of Americans who ordered from Amazon UK. I thought about doing that, but buying the book plus shipping to get it here before the American release was prohibitively expensive. And I haven’t finished rereading the first three books yet anyway. Sure, you might say: Is it really necessary to reread them for a fifth time? To which I say, simply, yes.
World Fantasy
So the Slush God announced it’s “National Badger Dave Kirtley Into Going to World Fantasy Week.” It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that my presence is so greatly desired. I don’t know if it’s going to make a difference, as my reasons for not going have everything to do with time and money and nothing to do with not wanting to go, but I appreciate the sentiment.
Weekend
So yesterday, totally exhausted from my late-night bicycle shenanigans, I managed to get up and drag myself as far as the couch to watch USC play Notre Dame. Yeah, I finally gave in and watched a game. I mean, you can hear the whole neighborhood cheering every time there’s a good play, so it’s kind of hard to focus on anything else. As far as football games go, it was pretty amazing. I’d still get bored just watching football though, so at the same time I also listened to the rest of Back in Action by David Rozelle, about an army captain who gets his foot blown off by an anti-tank mine in Iraq but then returns to combat with a prosthetic. I’ve been listening to a bunch of memoirs by soldiers recently to try to improve the versimilitude of my military/combat scenes and characters. (I also recently listened to The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, Shooter, and One Bullet Away.) The thing that’s struck me most so far is how incompetent many U.S. commanding officers seem (which surprised me). These books make being in a war sound kind of like Dilbert, except that the dumb ideas your out-of-touch boss wants you to implement are likely to get you killed.
Today I had to get up at 7:00 a.m. That was no mean feat, considering I couldn’t get to sleep last night until 4:00 a.m. I took part in an AIDS charity walk up in West Hollywood. There was a huge turnout — it seemed like thousands of people. Parking was a nightmare. We spent half an hour driving into and then out of the Cedar Sinai parking garage without finding a place. I went with a bunch of people from USC College Democrats. They all had snazzy blue shirts with the name of the club on the back, and on the front was printed, “If you can read this you’re probably a Democrat.” Those shirts attracted a lot of admiring comments from the crowd. As we approached the end of the (7 mile) walk, one of the volunteers saw us and cheered, “Yeah! Yeah! USC!” and then added bitterly, “I just got my rejection.” Afterward, we went to The Hard Rock Cafe. I don’t think I’ve ever been to one before, and I really don’t see why so many people I’ve known over the years have been so proud to wear the T-shirt. It seemed like mediocre food at absurdly inflated prices. I’m still pissed because they charged me $10 for a draft beer. But oh yeah, that did somehow include a souvenir glass with the Hard Rock logo on it, so now every time I use that glass it’ll bring back memories of the Hard Rock cafe and how I was frikkin’ gouged there.
Midnight Ridazz Redux
Did Midnight Ridazz again last night. This time there was a news crew who followed us and interviewed people in the parking lot before we started, though they didn’t interview me. (They were only interviewing people with crazy costumes.) We rode from Echo Park down to USC and back. I think it’s kind of funny that I keep driving an hour to join bike rides that end up going around my immediate neighborhood. This ride involved some pretty serious hills, and it is not easy to ride up a steep hill amongst a crowd of 500 without colliding with people. One guy was shouting funny stuff like, “I love this city! Yeah! You can’t spell ‘playa’ without ‘L.A.’!” There was a heavy police presence this time. We were followed for an hour or so by a police helicopter, known affectionately(?) around here as the “ghetto bird.” If I looked back, I could see it shining its floodlight down on the riders behind me, and the tableaux was eerily reminiscent of the tripods in the new War of the Worlds movie. (I mean, the ghetto bird doesn’t have legs, obviously, but in the dark you can certainly imagine that it does.) As we rounded a corner downtown, the police had detained one of the riders and were asking for ID. The mood of the crowd changed instantly. Whereas earlier they’d been waving to police, now they started booing. One guy started riding up and down the line chanting, “Who sucks? Cops suck.” But later we ran into the guy they’d stopped, and it turned out they’d just let him go. I had been looking forward to seeing some of my new random acquaintances who’d said they’d be there, but either they didn’t show or I just couldn’t find them among the hordes (and the hordes were massive). Toward the end of the ride, I was really struggling. I was already tired from exercising in the afternoon, and as the guy with the bag I was carrying all the water bottles for our group. I also discovered, near the end, that my tires were really low. Finally, utterly exhausted, I made it back to my car and went in search of food. Fortunately, the Jack in the Box drive thru is open at 1:00 a.m.
Correction
Correction. Apparently, the helicopter and teams of police running around with guns and dogs that I saw on Sunday was not related to the baby in the dumpster. It was instead due to a different crime (a burglary) that happened on my street around the same time. What a fun neighborhood I live in.
Caught
Yesterday my Writing for Film class was cancelled, so I went to a non-partisan “Support the Troops” candelight vigil over by Tommy Trojan. While there, I heard that police had caught the person who abandoned the newborn in the dumpster across the street from my apartment, and that she’s a USC student. I really didn’t see that one coming. They released her name, so of course everyone was looking her up on Facebook. (In fact, the news is now showing her Facebook photo.) It’s kind of eerie reading her profile in light of what’s happened. One gets the impression that she was partying a bit too hard (30-40% of her Facebook groups have to do with partying, including “SAY NO TO CUPS: students for drinking straight from the container,” “Crack Changed my Life,” and “People Who Should Quit Drinking and/or Drugs But Don’t Neccessarily Want To Support Group”), but that hardly makes her stand out around here. Actually, she seems pretty average in all respects. Her favorite movies list includes Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Three Amigos, The Secret of NIMH, and “Chronicles of Narnia (out Dec 9 2005 – fun day).” I can only imagine what kind of messed-up circumstances led to this situation. Her favorite quote now seems eerily prescient: “I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had problems with the police.” -Keith Richards. She’s being arraigned today on murder charges. Sad.
Manhunt?
Minutes after my previous entry, the police helicopter blared something along the lines of, “Surrender now and force will not be used.” People (not me) started gathering in front of the buildings, but a cop came by and told everyone to go inside. Shortly thereafter, four police with guns drawn and a K-9 moved through the alley below my window. They knocked on the ground-floor window of the building next door and it sounded like they wanted someone to let them in so they could search the building. Then they disappeared from sight. One guy from my building stepped outside to smoke, and I told him the police had warned people to stay inside, and he was like, “Okay sure, just let me finish my cigarette.” He smoked his cigarette, then came back inside. Shortly thereafter one of the police dogs started barking, and it sounded like people were yelling in the parking lot of the apartment next door, but I can’t see back there. Later I saw the police come by and search the parking lot behind my building. The helicopter is still circling right overhead.
Update: Apparently a dead baby was found by a dumpster on Hoover, and police were trying to use bloodhounds to track whoever had left it.
Poetry & Police
Saw lotsa poetry today with poet and fellow MPWer Lisa. First we went and saw Galway Kinnell read at Antioch University down by Slauson and the 405. Galway Kinnell was amazing. His poem about his son’s long ago birthday party was wrenching and beautiful. The event also included a surprise visit by Ray Bradbury, who spoke briefly about the fortuitous origins of his novels The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Viggo Mortenson was supposed to arrive there later, but we couldn’t stay to see him because next we were off to Long Beach to see a poetry slam that some of Lisa’s friends were participating in. The slam poetry was great too, and I talked to a bunch of new people, including one guy who was an enthusiastic sf fan. LAPD had closed down the intersection adjacent to the venue because someone saw a suspicious package on a city bus, and the police forced everyone inside and then detonated the package. I never found out if it was actually a bomb or anything, though I kind of doubt it. Actually, right now a police helicopter is repeatedly circling over my apartment, sweeping the nearby streets and alleys with a floodlight, so I’m assuming there must’ve been a crime. I guess I’ll find out when I get my next USC crime alert.
Wax Poetic
Tonight I went to artist Matthew Price’s gallery opening at Wax Poetic, which is a strange sort of art gallery/beauty salon up on Magnolia street in Burbank. I thought the art was stunning. You can actually see images of most of the pieces from the show on the artist’s website, but they really look totally different and much more amazing in real life. The piece shown at left, “Clingut Orphanage,” was my favorite. I prefer art that’s representational but nonrealistic, and that suggests stories, which this piece definitely does. I met a few new people, enjoyed free wine and cheese, and entered a raffle to win a free beauty treatment, which could be worth quite a bit considering that a basic haircut there can cost $59. (They gave me a price menu — hair extensions can run up to $2000.)
I Rode My Bicycle at Night Through Skid Row
I did another one of those Midnight Ridazz-style rides last night. This was much smaller, only about 25 people. We started from SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) over on 3rd street and rode down to USC. I met a bunch of new people, including one woman who’s a artist and art teacher. During one of our breaks she said, “I hear you write science fiction?” and I said, “Yeah.” Then she was like, “Have you ever read George R. R. Martin?” Actually, as a matter of fact, I have. We spent the next half hour or so riding and comparing notes on China Mieville, Tim Powers, Roger Zelazny, etc., interrupted only by the occasional sharp corner or police vehicle yelling at us to disperse. Then she and her friends were going to break off and go to a bar, but I needed to stay with the main group so I could retrieve my car. She wanted to give me her email, so I stopped, and as she searched for pen and paper I watched the flickering lights of the main group recede into the distance. Finally I got her email, said bye, and took off after the group, but they’d vanished. It was after midnight, and I was alone in downtown L.A. with only a vague idea of where I was. Not good.
Another straggler came up behind me on his bike. He said, slurring slightly, “Fucking where’d they go?” and I said, “I’m not sure.” He got out his directions, stared at them, and was like, “Okay.” I said, “You know where you’re going?” and he was like, “Yeah, man. Fuck.” So I followed him. He was kinda weaving all over the place, through alleys and in front of buses, hooting and hollering at random homeless people, who subsequently become irate, and singing to himself. I thought at first he was crazy, but quickly realized that he was just very, very intoxicated. He had an entire backpack full of cans of Budweiser, and was chugging and discarding them as he rode, despite which I was still pedaling as fast as I could just to keep him in sight. (Found out later his job is bicycle messenger. And that he was behind me because he’d stopped to get more beer.) I wasn’t positive this was an improvement over being alone, but he seemed pretty sure of where he was going, so I followed, but man he took us down some sketchy streets. I swear that downtown is busier at night than during the day — except that at night everyone on the street is homeless, a hooker, a dealer, a junkie, or some combination thereof. The sidewalks are so crammed with homeless that it looks like they’re lining up to try out for American Idol. I mean, there are whole neighborhoods of them. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. We did finally make it back to where we’d started. I hung out at a nearby party for a while, met a few more people, then came home.
Education of Shelby Knox
On Thursday I went to an event sponsored by the USC Women’s Student Assembly, a screening of a documentary called The Education of Shelby Knox, about a teenage girl (the eponymous Shelby Knox) in Lubbock, Texas who was raised in a conservative religious household but is driven by her conscience to become an advocate for sex education and later gay rights. The Lubbock schools, which teach abstinence-only, of course have more teen pregnancy and STDs than almost anywhere in the country. The film opens with a funny epigram (didn’t catch who said it) along the lines of, “Growing up in Lubbock taught me two things: 1) God is love, and you’re going to burn in hell, and 2) Sex is the most evil, sinister thing in the world, and you should save it for someone you love.” The film shows interviews with various citizens of Lubbock, and some of the things they say are just appalling beyond belief. It makes Children of the Corn look like a documentary. The most moving scene is when the gay students stand strong against vicious religious bigots carrying shockingly disgusting signs like “AIDS Cures Fags” and “Matthew Shephard: Five Years in Hell.” The gay students, by contrast, carry signs like “Hate is Tacky.” Shelby carries a sign that says, “God loves everyone, even these crazies.” I have lived long enough to know that any true story involving moralism crusaders will inevitably involve the crusaders being exposed as a rank hypocrites, abject slaves to the impulses they claim to combat. In this case, it turned out that the head of the school board, who refused to even consider a sex ed program because it would “encourage” sexual activity, was caught using school computers to send messages to his secretary offering her $500 if she’d strip naked in his office during school hours. After the film, the actual Shelby Knox appeared to answer questions, along with representatives from Planned Parenthood and the Feminist Majority Foundation. The person from Feminist Majority looked oddly familiar, but I couldn’t imagine where I might have met her. After half an hour it suddenly came to me — I’d met her at my cousin’s apartment my first week in L.A. Small world.
Flightplan
Saw Flightplan today. If you saw the trailer, you already know what it’s about: Jodie Foster is on a commercial airliner with her daughter. Her daughter vanishes. No one else remembers seeing the daughter board, and they all try to convince her that her daughter is just a delusion. But she finds physical evidence in the form of a heart drawn on the the foggy window that shows that her daughter is real and was on the plane. I really enjoy these classic Hitchcock-style “ordinary person caught up in a dangerous mystery” sort of stories, but since the trailer has already revealed 70% of the plot, the only remaining issue is: Is there some clever, logical explanation for what’s going on? The answer, in this case, is a resounding no. The ending is patently ridiculous. During the last 30 minutes of the movie, most of the theater was openly laughing at the contrived plot. (Though to be fair, the two guys sitting behind me also giggled at just the opening credits. I think they were stoned.) So many people were getting up and leaving that it felt like the captain had just turned off the fasten seatbelt sign. Oh well.
Paradise Regained
So once upon a time if you googled david kirtley my site was the first to come up, and if you googled just kirtley my site was the second. But then I moved my site from www.sff.net/people/davekirtley/ to the current and much more succinct www.davidbarrkirtley.com. One unforeseen side effect of this was that my Google rank plunged and I found myself exiled to the pit. If you googled david kirtley I was like number 6, and if you googled just kirtley I was on like page six. I was just like, “Is this the region, this the soil, the clime, this the seat that we must change for Heaven? — this mournful gloom for that celestial light? Farewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells! And hey Google, $#@! you!” Fortunately, after most of the year, my Google rank is now back where it was, though I still can’t seem to overtake that Pat Kirtley guy.
Peter S. Beagle Needs Help
Locus online has a link to this page about Peter S. Beagle needing help. Beagle is the author of the novel The Last Unicorn, and also wrote the screenplay for the animated film. I first read The Last Unicorn on a camping trip as a small child. I saw the film shortly thereafter, and I’ve seen it probably hundreds of times since. It had an incalculable effect on me. Its rhythms still influence the way I speak and write. The image of valiant Prince Lir writing poetry helped inspire me to write, and also inspired my (somewhat less successful) attempts to be a sword-wielding prince. One of my earliest surviving writing projects is a picture book adaptation of The Last Unicorn that I started drawing the night I came home from the theater. I wish Peter S. Beagle good luck and all the best.
West Hollywood Book Fair
Went to the West Hollywood Book Fair today. It was basically a few square miles of tents with book vendors, author signings, and panel discussions. I didn’t see any spec fic authors, which was a drag, though supposedly Neil Gaiman was there, but he left before I even arrived (indeed, before I even heard about it). Bill Maher was there, but not speaking, only signing. I hadn’t even heard of any of the other authors, who were mostly chick lit or mystery writers. I did sign up with the Writer’s Guild to receive email bulletins about upcoming events (supposedly they’ve signed up Charlie Kaufman for a rare public appearance in a few weeks), so that was worthwhile. I also picked up a book for $1, an anthology of stories that appeared in Galaxy magazine that includes an essay by each author about how they wrote their story.
Supposedly the Book Fair included a “giant” cake. When I asked how big it was, one of my friends said, “Six feet by four feet. Don’t ask me how I know that, but I’m sure. Maybe I dreamed it,” and then, “Wow, six feet is really tall for a cake.” I said, “Assuming those dimensions are correct, I’m sure it must be six feet long by four feet wide. Who ever heard of a six foot tall cake?” My other friend suggested that maybe it was one of those big cakes like the ones strippers come out of at birthday parties, in which case it could very well be six feet tall. I’ve never seen one of those stripper-style cakes in real life and, intrigued at the prospect, decided to check it out. We somehow got the idea that the cake unveiling was at 5:00, and hung around for an hour just for that, then went looking for the cake. The cake was hidden inside an enormous, cordoned-off red velvet tent, which seemed promising. But then we realized that the cake unveiling wasn’t until 6:15. Unwilling to wait around another hour, my friend surreptitiously reached past the cordon and pulled the tent flap aside. The cake inside was six feet long by four feet wide and all of about six inches tall. Do you call that “giant”? What a frickin’ ripoff.
Gaiman Reading
Last night I went over to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena to see Neil Gaiman read from his new novel, Anansi Boys. The event took place in this really cool multi-layered back courtyard. There were several hundred people there. Gaiman read the section where Fat Charlie dreams about his brother the spider god disrupting a fancy L.A. pool party. There was something really magical about listening to that scene while actually being outdoors at night in L.A. Gaiman also noted that Anansi Boys has hit the New York Times Best Seller list at #1, and then said something that stuck in my mind all night: “And I didn’t have to change what I write to do it. I just kept writing the kind of thing I wanted to write, and eventually enough people found it.”
While there, I randomly ran into a few of the USC students who I’d gone with to Serenity. I mentioned to one of them, the guy who’d organized the Serenity expedition, that Vroman’s carried a copy of Empire of Dreams and Miracles, which includes two of my stories, and he wanted to see it, so we wandered over to the science fiction section. He ended up buying it, and as it’s a bit pricey, I offset the cost somewhat by giving him one of my copies of Game of Thrones. (That’s four I’ve given away now. Just one left.) We loitered among the shelves a while, discussing various books. I couldn’t believe how many books he’d read. Most undergrads these days seem to have never read anything that wasn’t assigned for high school English class (and I mean come on, Of Mice and Men is cool and all, but if that’s really one of your favorite books of all time, you need to read more), but I had the feeling that this guy might’ve even read more science fiction than I have, which is a scary prospect. He’d even read Redshift Rendezvous by John E. Stith, which despite being one of my favorite books is fairly obscure. I was like, “Who are you?” He said that his mom is a voracious science fiction reader and will sometimes come home from the bookstore angry because they don’t carry any science fiction she hasn’t already read, and that she recommends the good ones to him. He also said that an adult mentor had died and left him his entire science fiction collection, and as a tribute to the man he’d read them all. I was impressed.
Classic Stories
I notice that Fictionwise carries some really great classic science fiction short stories. These are stories that just blew my mind and were a huge influence on me and many other people, but might not be so familiar to younger readers. It’s exciting that they’re online where anyone in the world can find them instantly. If you haven’t read all of these, check them out. And come on, they’re selling for like the price of a Coke. I’m sure there are many more out there, but here are a few must-reads I’ve run across:
“Sandkings” by George R. R. Martin
“Inconstant Moon” by Larry Niven
“Neutron Star” by Larry Niven
“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison
“‘Repent Harlequin!’ said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison
Serenity
Saw Serenity tonight with a big group of students (15 or so) that I hooked up with through Facebook. I’ve only watched an episode or two of Firefly, and had no particular expectations going in, but I was really blown away. The script was damn near flawless. The Operative is the coolest character I’ve seen in a long time. Even given that the opening night crowd was mostly diehard fans, the audience response was extraordinary. I’ve never observed a crowd so audibly enjoy a movie — not even close. I want to see the movie again. Now.
It was an evening of firsts: my first trip to the amazing Arclight Theater in Hollywood, my first ride on the not-so-amazing L.A. subway system, my first Giovanni Ribisi sighting (he was hanging around outside the theater smoking a cigarette).
After the movie, the group went out to a diner. After that, the girl I’d been chatting with very nicely offered to drive me back to my car, but her sense of direction was, if this is even possible, even worse than mine, and we ended up driving around in completely the wrong direction, very confused, getting honked at constantly, until after half an hour we ended up, totally by accident, back at the diner. This time, having established which way was north, we managed to locate my car.
Quick Update
I haven’t been feeling very motivated lately to provide complete coverage of my life, but briefly: last Friday I partied at a house up on 23rd street with the Literary Association. Saturday I partied at a house over by Echo Park with some MPWers. Both parties were a lot of fun, and I met a slew of new people.
Tuesday’s Academy Series featured the guy who wrote Scent of a Woman. He was really interesting, particularly when he talked about the range of things that had inspired that story — the original Italian movie, his brother getting expelled from Exeter, an officer he’d known in the service. This officer always wore the fanciest, most expensive shoes anyone had ever seen. They later learned that he did this to try to compensate for his feet — he’d lost all his toes to frostbite.
My Writing for Film class last night was pretty cool. We watched The Player, and the instructor, Kershner, also read long excerpts from Bradbury’s new book of essays singing the praises of horror and science fiction, so I really enjoyed that. One of the girls told Kershner she’d seen him on TV last weekend talking about Star Wars (he directed The Empire Strikes Back). He said, “Did I sound stupid? I always sound stupid in those things. They always ask the same dumb questions, every time. None of these journalists today care about anything important. None of them have passion, anger.” So I burst out, “Well I was really angry when they released the Star Wars Special Edition and they made it so that Greedo and Han Solo shoot at the same time. Man, that just pissed me off.” Kershner stared at me for like a minute, trying to decide if I was joking (or maybe just trying to figure out what the hell I was talking about). Finally he said, “Yeah okay, anger, that’s what I’m talking about.”
I finally got my first L.A. haircut, and finally found the post office and got postage to mail off a fiction submission. This afternoon I’m going to meet with a grad student I heard about who’s a writer in the English department and has taught a summer class on science fiction here at USC.
Bullshit
In class last week someone mentioned Marie Antoinette saying “Let them eat cake.” I have, of course, heard hundreds of times that she said this, and have never questioned it, but suddenly my bullshit detector, which grows keener with each passing day, went off, and I said to myself, “You know what, I have no knowledge about this topic whatsoever, but that just sounds like bullshit to me. I bet she never said that.” I just looked it up and I was right. The phrase was already a commonly used joke when she was 10 years old, though it was later attributed to her by her enemies. In the course of this research I also discovered that lots of other things I believed are also not true. Did you know that: Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” is grammatically flawless. “Ring around the Rosie” has nothing to do with the black plague. The F-word is not an acronym for “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.” Neil Armstrong did not say “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky.” Also, I already knew these last two, but I’m getting really sick of hearing them, so please never repeat them in my presence. The flush toilet was not invented by Sir Thomas Crapper, and NASA did not spend $12 billion to develop a zero-gravity pen while the Russians just used a pencil.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- …
- 64
- Next Page »