I’ve been trying (fairly unsuccessfully) to recall all of my science fiction writing credits. As a result, I’ve been ego-searching various strings like +”amelia g” +”science fiction” and +”amelia g” +”author” and so forth.
I was surprised to note the book SexCrime: an anthology of underground love and subversive erotica, edited by Cecilia Tan, had come out in a Kindle edition. I wish people would tell me these things. I’m not that hard to find. But it is still fun to find new credits, even if via search engine.
The book collects an assortment of stories on the topic of dystopian cyberpunk sorts of futures and gets its name from George Orwell’s 1984. I believe the story I have in this collection is one called “Rocket Queen”, which you will have already read if you have a vintage copy of Blue Blood magazine #3 in print with the Genitorturers on the cover. “Rocket Queen” also remains the only science fiction tale to ever be published in Thomas S. Roche’s celebrated noir crime Noirotica series.
With the inauguration of Barack Obama and the new administration, the world expects the economy to pick up. He could do nothing different and people’s expectations would help the economy. So much of how paper and digital money works has to do with trust and faith.
So we have faith that, pretty soon, everyone is going to be able to afford more than $1 for a BlueBlood VIP membership. There has never been a Blue Blood sale this discounted before, and there very likely never will be again, and this one is almost over.
The site currently featuring tens of thousands of photographs of 387 hotties and counting. From punks who like to smash things to ethereal gothic beauties to fetish deities, Blue Blood features the most stunningly and uniquely beautiful. A battalion of coffee table book and nightclub photographers have contributed to BlueBlood.com. Not to mention erotic fiction from some of the top names in genre writing and just a dab of video. The BlueBlood.com megasite offers excellent value with all the content from the multigirl gothic, punk, and rubber subsidiary sites produced by Blue Blood, as well as the world famous signature couples content, and the erotic fandom science fiction and fantasy content. And your BlueBlood VIP memberships pay to keep BlueBlood.net free.
And right now, you can check all that out for one dollar. Channel your inner Bixby Snyder and say, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” (Robocop references optional.)
Although generally less unsavory than the sorts of webcomics I tend to like best, Weregeek is a genially humorous comic by the very talented Alina Pete. It is the sort of thing you will appreciate best if you think Cylon when someone says Scilons.
The comic gets its name from its normal guy Mark. Mark is working on coming to terms with his taste for geeky fun. Hence Weregeek.
In today’s comic strip, Mark, who is in the process of coming over to the geek darkside, is chatting with more classic geek and DM Dustin. A gothic girl has been aggressively hitting on Dustin in their coffeehouse hangout, but he is clueless. Mark gives him some clue, but is a wee bit concerned when Dustin says the goth girl wanted to run a character who is a Gungan Sith Lord.
Footnote: Jar Jar Binks was a surprisingly poorly-animated cg and possibly racially-offensive character in one of the Star Wars movies which don’t count. Everyone knows Star Wars is for action figures, and Jar Jar Binks was a lame bid for a non-ironic plush toy. Jar Jar Binks was a member of the amphibious “Gungan” species from the Naboo planet. Sith Lords, of course, are the sexy Jedi types like Darth Vader. It is no surprise when a goth chick likes a powerful bad boy who has gone over to the dark side. There has been an extensive, largely tongue-in-cheek movement in online fandom to demand a Gungan Sith Lord from George Lucas. I think the feeling is that, if he feels compelled to eff up one of the greatest science fiction movie franchises of all time, he might as well really go for the gusto. Running a Gungan Sith Lord character in an RPG game would be pretty annoying, especially if the gothic girl talked in the horrible Jar Jar Binks Gunganese dialect e.g. “Meesa so hornyem. Meesa loven yousa longisha timen.”
Personally, I believe the original Star Wars was primarily directed by his ex-wife Marcia Lucas and George Lucas just got credit for it, the same way everyone now knows that best-selling fan favorite author Alan Dean Foster wrote the original Star Wars although George Lucas accepted awards for both directing and writing. I believe the more recent Star Wars movies appear to present a different vision because they are genuinely put together by entirely different people.
If you can tell me how to improve my Gungan dialect, or you just got heated up over what I wrote about credit for Star Wars, or if you actually have any sort of developed opinion on any of these Star Wars issues, you’ll probably enjoy Weregeek.
So I am just clocking in for a day at the orifice, watching porn movies based on World of Warcraft. There are a group of magical “whores” on a quest to battle an evil darkness spreading through the land. The fantasy quest episodes open with some appropriately mood-setting medievalist-feeling music and then get down to doing battle or doin’ it. A demon directs a threesome. An elf gives a pirate her booty in exchange for something decent to wear. Delightfully, a magic-user, played by Bianca Dagger, makes a special prismatic rock a lil bigger for a lesbian tryst. There is a recurring motif of characters, momentarily befuddled by magic and illusion, coming to their senses and being like, “OMG, what did I just do?” The best of these is when a Paladin, played by Monica Mayhem, suddenly snaps out of it and declares that she would never fuck a barbarian . . . while his splam is still on her face.
I think that these swords and sorcery sex videos would have been perfect viewing material when I was Treasurer of Science Fiction Club in college. The sort of group experience where everybody would have gone around afterward for weeks saying, “I would never fuck a barbarian.” Which would be pretty awesome.
The Whore Lore episodes are directed by Dez and the stories are mostly by Dez and Staci with a screenwriting assist from Marcus London. Marcus London also plays a well-built, tattooed, red-cloaked rough partner for some of the whores. He looked familiar and I figured out that I didn’t recognize him for his 2007 win for Best Oral Sex Scene, but I did recognize him because he played a pornstar in a scene on HBO’s extremely porn-cozy hit Entourage.
As I go through the fantasy episodes, I realize that a bit more is familiar and not just because Forrest Black and I have shot some of the armor worn in various scenes. See, there is this castle in the Hollywood Hills which regularly has pretty notorious after-parties. It is a beautiful space, lots of fun to hang out at, and, if there is a drug you’ve never seen anyone in Los Angeles do before, it is definitely the spot to go to rectify that lack of experience. It is also a very enjoyable place to get into the sorts of intellectual conversations which are not as common in Hollywood as I might prefer. The castle peeps keep telling me I should shoot naked gothic girls there and had told me a lot of porn had been shot there (also part of Spinal Tap!) and I always thought it was odd I had not recognized any. That circumstance has also now been remedied. So about a third of Whore Lore sex scenes take place at a place where I have spent some quality late night time. And actually so have quite a few of the people who appear in Blue Blood pictures and post on the boards.
Suddenly I have a whole new perspective on the Whore Lore repetition of scenarios where people are all wondering what they did and who they slept with. Which is kinda awesome. We’ve got a free Whore Lore photo gallery for your viewing pleasure and I recommend checking out the site for the naughty stuff. But I want you all to know I would never fuck a barbarian. To the best of my recollection.
I’m going to admit that this year, like many Americans, I’ve been too caught up, either following election coverage or avoiding it, to properly celebrate Halloween. Sure, Blue Blood is sponsoring a few Halloween parties, most notably the Release the Bats decade anniversary. And I remembered to freshen up my hair color and play with squash a little. Some years, I get all freaked out about wanting to do too much for Halloween, but this year I haven’t even had my favorite holiday at the front of my brain most of the time. But I’ve been enjoying a bit of vicarious Halloween joy today, checking out the work of people like Dana Dark and Ray Villafane.
More on Dana Dark’s Halloween secrets later, but I want to tell you all about Ray Villafane now. He is an artist who primarily appears to work on sculpture for folks like Sideshow Collectibles and McFarlane Toys. In the unlikely event you are not familiar with those companies, they make collectibles for the horror, science fiction, fantasy, and general monsters and comic books realm.
But, wow, can Ray Villafane sculpt a pumpkin! Some people paint or draw on pumpkins. Most people just scoop out the guts and cut holes for features. I like to make jack o’lantern art at one step remove and have nude models scoop out the guts and cut holes for features. But Ray Villafane turns the pumpkin carving process into real sculptural works of art.
I’m feeling more buoyant about Halloween just thinking about it!
Okay, this is just plain awesome and entirely made my day. I am mostly familiar with Kerrang! for being the well-written and well-photographed hard rock magazine which used to cover a lot of the bands who played Taime Downe’s late lamented Pretty Ugly nightclub in Los Angeles. Apparently, on the other side of the pond, Kerrang! also does radio and television and such. One of their on-air personalities is Nick Margerrison who does a show called The Night Before.
I’m not sure what astronauts have to do with hard rock, but I guess MTV’s early call sign video interlude involved the moon landing, so maybe it all just fits together in some secret cosmic way. At any rate, Nick Margerrison was interviewing astronaut Edgar Mitchell, on Kerrang! Radio, when the famous astronaut casually pointed out that life definitely exists on other planets and aliens have visited earth. The obviously usually-smooth Nick Margerrison is kind of like ha, ha, wait are you serious? He sort of sputters and says wow a lot, while waiting for his interview subject to admit he was kidding.
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell: “We’re not alone in the universe at all . . . The UFO phenomenon is real, although it’s been covered up by our governments for some time.”
On-air personality Nick Margerrison: “I’ve had crazy UFO nuts before, but I’ve never had Dr. Ed Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon, a respected scientist in his own right, announce to me that we’ve been visited by aliens from other planets and they definitely are out there and there’s no debating it . . . I’m just wondering if I’ve stumbled on astronaut humor and in a couple minutes you are going to go I was only pulling your leg.”
The Apollo 14 veteran astronaut goes on to point out that he grew up in Roswell and we really did have aliens come to Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. He says there are aliens who conform to the popular concept of little humanoid creatures with big heads and big eyes. Additionally, we are lucky the aliens are not hostile because we’d be totally gone by now if they were. The record-holder for longest moonwalk ever says that some governments are going to be declassifying their UFO information soon and implies that, in preparation for this, the Catholic church issued a proclamation that
“Belief in life on other planets does not compromise your Catholocism.”
Even more awesome than the conversation between Nick Margerrison and Edgar Mitchell is the conversation between The Night Before producer Alex and the NASA media rep. Kerrang! had the balls to post their producer’s call to NASA where they asked if anyone from NASA wanted to come on the show and comment on Edgar Mitchell’s assertions. Kerrang! did have the consideration to bleep the publicity person’s name and email address though.
NASA PR Person: “He said that? Okay, what do you want me to say to that? . . . That an astronaut said that there were aliens? . . . Let me see who would be willing to dispute what an astronaut says.”
Although the NASA guy says he will get back to the show, he never denies what the astronaut stated, just says he needs to find someone willing to dispute it. As it turns out, apparently no one was willing to go on the radio to refute what the devil-may-care 77-year-old astronaut had to say. NASA merely emailed the show saying,
“Dear Alex,
NASA does not track UFOs.
NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe.
Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinion on this issue.
Thanks for the opportunity to comment.”
Is Dr. Ed Mitchell telling the whole truth, senile, or pulling a damn funny practical joke? There’s just no way to know, but it makes for great listening. Kerrang!’s interviewer asked him if he was worried for his safety, blabbing stuff like this.
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell: “I don’t think they are knocking anybody off for that any more.”
A long long time ago, in a land far far from here, I found myself in abrupt need of a place to live. After approximately five years in Connecticut, my parents convinced my lovelorn and underemployed self that I should come stay with them for a while in part of Northern Virginia which is really a suburb of Washington, DC. I think they maybe thought I would get into some kind of government work, which, in a way, I eventually did for a while. But one of the problems with being a prodigy is that you are never quite on the same playing field as everyone else. I graduated from college without being legal to drink in America. When I got to the DC area, I thought I might apply to work for the FBI. I liked the idea of a job which required intelligence and education, which also involved learning how to use all sorts of weaponry and getting paid to stay fit. Only I did not meet their minimum age requirement. I signed up to take the GMAT for entrance to business school, but my father was pissy that day and wouldn’t drive me. After getting into an accident years prior, I was not on their insurance, so I couldn’t drive myself. I often wonder how different my life would be now if I had just figured out how to put together the seventy bucks or whatever a cab would have been and taken the test. It hadn’t seemed like the sort of activity I could have asked a friend to help with in the early morning.
The sort of activity I could get a ride to was generally a science fiction convention or a punk show. There was a guy named Steve who I met at a con and got to know largely because he lived in the same area as my parents and was willing to drive me places like that. He and I always had a great time together out on the town and quickly became friends for real. So, when my parents abruptly suggested I move within the next day, he was who I called to help me. I was nursing a terrible cold with the hope of getting entirely well in time for a New Years con. My mom had received word that she would be stationed in Brazil and a snot-spewing daughter with an inappropriate wardrobe and funny-colored hair seemed like it might be nonideal adornment for selling their house. It probably didn’t help that, because they had taught me to be unashamed, I never thought to hide my inappropriate reading material kept in shelves in the garage. I think my dad had decided not to buy some house, partly because they’d had a kid around my age lying around in a way he found unappealing. To this day, although I am close with my parents, I do not know if they actually intended me to get out of their house in 24 hours or if they simply lacked the faith that I could meet a reasonable deadline. They certainly offered me extra time when Steve and I were clearly going to manage to get all my stuff into storage within the day. I was blowing my nose with one hand and packing boxes with the other, but we made it. Steve and I made it to the New Years festivities too.
So I went to sleep on the living room couch at Steve’s place and we set about looking for a great house to live in. It was surprisingly difficult to find a place which would rent anything decent to unrelated individuals. As time dragged on without us finding a place, my friend Johnny gave me a room he was sort of renting to stay in. I say sort of renting because he had agreed to live there but decided he wasn’t really nuts about who his housemates would be and the location was kind of far out from the city. So he had paid without moving in. My friend Julia from college was paying rent on a super-expensive place in Washington, DC proper and found herself suffering trying to afford it. Even though all four of us were gainfully employed, we found that most landlords in the area would not even show places to unrelated groups of people. It seemed to me that what was functionally a four income family ought to have been a better bet for landlords than a single income one with kids, but people who owned rental properties did not see it my way.
So, like the main characters in the BBC America show Spaced, the four of us eventually pretended that I was engaged to Steve and my cousin Julia was engaged to Johnny and we were serious couples. I don’t recall exactly how Julia and I were supposed to be related, but, after coming up with this egregious fiction, we quickly found a spacious and easily affordable townhouse. Best of all, the landlord was a futurist who, for sexually harassing the previous tenants, had been court-ordered not to visit his own properties.
If you have not seen the incredibly entertaining BBC comedy Spaced yet, I deeply suggest that you rectify the situation. Blue Blood readers are probably all familiar with actor/writer Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead. Simon Pegg and actor/writer Jessica Hynes together created Spaced. In fact, Simon Pegg got the idea for Shaun of the Dead while working on an episode of Spaced where his character plays a zombie-killing video game. Simon Pegg has described the Spaced show as “a cross between The Simpsons, The X-Files, and Northern Exposure.” Despite numerological references to the X-Files and a lot of pop culture references in general, the show most reminded me of a more realistic, modern version of The Young Ones.
The basic storyline revolves around comic book store assistant manager and aspiring artist Tim Bisley, played by Simon Pegg, and perennially fired employee and aspiring writer Daisy Steiner, played by Jessica Hynes. The two of them meet in a coffeehouse, read the housing listings together, and eventually pose as a professional couple in order to get approved for a lease on a comfy apartment at a great price. Their new place is ninety pounds a week. (In current dollar terms, I think the conversion rate would place this price at around $33,000 monthly, but the show first aired in 1999.) Their new home comes with the tortured artist Brian downstairs and the lonely boozy landlord Marsha upstairs. There are frequent appearances from Tim Bisley’s best friend Mike, a military fanboy and aspiring soldier, and Daisy’s best friend Twist, a dry cleaner clerk and aspiring fashion designer. Bike messenger and night club king Tyres bicycles through from time to time as well.
The show is laugh out loud funny, but it is also about a time in your life when you are in the process of becoming. Pretty much everybody, except for the divorced landlord with lost Olympic dreams and a daughter who hates her, is an aspiring something. And who gets their dreams and who settles and who enjoys their personal outcome is still all in the future. This series will speak, on many levels, to anyone who has ever done anything creative and lived in a group situation.
When my faux-fiancee Steve and my faux-cousin Julia and her faux-fiancee Johnny and I moved in together, we were all at that stage. I was a stagehand and aspiring writer. Johnny was a plumber and aspiring sex symbol. Julia was a production artist and aspiring graphic artist. Today, I am a writer, although I’ve certainly missed a lot of milestones I set for myself. Johnny was a sex symbol, at least in the DC punk and fandom scene of the time. If reality shows had existed at the time, he would have been global. I’m in touch with Johnny today via LiveJournal and, even though he was badly injured in an accident last year (he was hit by a cop), I’d still cast him now, if I were putting together a reality show. I’m in touch with Julia today via Facebook and she got additional degrees in architecture and works in a field which is one of the highest forms of graphic arts today. Oddly, although I would have described Steve as my closest friend in the group at the time, I don’t really know what he is doing now and I can’t think of what, if anything, he wanted to be when he grew up. From his well-decorated leather jacket to his obscure music collection, he seemed very cool and creative to me at the time. I remember thinking he should aspire to do stand-up comedy, but he never agreed on that point.
Some of the humor on the show Spaced comes from the fact that Tim Bisley and Daisy Steiner have told their landlord they are a long-time couple. But they are not. Only Daisy is more and more interested in having the story be true. For a long time, I thought that Steve eventually couldn’t be friends with me because he (and admittedly many of our friends) had thought he and I would eventually be engaged for real and not just to get a place to live. I did ask him once if he thought we should sleep together. His response was to drop acid and, while still tripping, tell me he was too worried about jeopardizing our friendship which was the most important thing to him. In retrospect, I realize that he was also really freaked out that I started Blue Blood magazine in print. He was one of the coolest guys I knew in DC, but all of a sudden I was meeting all of his heroes. I wanted his approval very much and had thought I was celebrating things he was interested in and would be excited about. Worse, I think he actually had some Puritanical objections to the erotic subject matter. He started freaking out about bizarre things like being afraid I would invite “clients” to house parties and expect him to be nice to them. We’d had a great run, but the party was going to have to move. Maybe I should have asked Steve to drive me to take that GMAT test after all, even if it was boring to him and early in the morning, and my whole life would be different.
I enjoy the show Spaced partly because it makes me remember some extremely fun times I had at a very carefree and adventurous point in my life. Spaced is one of the most real shows I have ever seen, in terms of my own personal life experience. It is very rare that I see characters on television or in movies who seem exactly like people I would actually know. Spaced is that rare exception. I highly recommend picking up the new Spaced DVD set or adding BBC America to your cable lineup.
I’ve written about writer/director/producer Sean Abley’s Socket movie here before, when it first hit the festival circuit. Now the movie is out on DVD and available from TLA Video. TLA Releasing put out Socket and the TLA media empire is descended from the Theatre of the Living Arts experimental theatre group in 60’s Philadelphia.
A couple of days ago, Sean Abley and a couple hundred of his closest friends got together at MJ’s Bar in Silverlake to celebrate the release of Socket on DVD. The event was hosted by promoter Jovy Janolo and producers John Carrozza, Doug Prinzivalli, Matt Mishkoff, and of course Sean himself. The VIP goodie bags included an interesting-looking DVD of a spooky movie called Amnesia, a coupon for a discount on TLA releases, and a pass for thirty free minutes of VOD which promise to “put the HARD back in hardcore DVD.” Blue Blood’s Forrest Black had the honor of receiving the final goodie bag of the night. The doorman apologized to me and told me he guessed I’d be re-gifting because the stuff in there was for, you know, jacking off. I was expecting the DVD and such to be more like what I would get at a regular business convention for web professionals, but TLA in general and Socket and Amnesia in specific appear to be for the purposes of movie movies and not jack off vids. Then again, I couldn’t get the VOD site to load, so maybe my tender sensibilities would have been scalded. Oh, and I’m a chick, so I guess I’m expected to care whether fictional characters romance and fuck exactly who I would personally want and be able to romance and fuck. Or not. I’m a fan of quality, so you know I’m a pervert. Polite of the doorman to warn me, just in case, though.
I’ve already praised the fun story and killer funny dialog in Socket and I’ve already told y’all you should see it, so I’m just going to mention an awesome factoid about the film, which can only now be revealed. Velvet Candy Entertainment and Dark Blue Films are so resourceful that the whole flick was made for $45,000. Sean Abley says that it was very difficult to have people judging his baby like it cost many times what it did, when he and his team were really very clever about how they did things. The filmmaker says, “I’d learned through my previous producing projects that you should never reveal the budget of your film until you’ve sold it. “Well under a million dollars” is the standard response. So while Socket was making its way through the film fests and then on to the release date, being reviewed by every internet and gay rag critic on the planet, we kept our mouths shut and took the hits.”
My view of Sean Abley and Socket is that I know indie is usually just a buzz word, but this is truly what independent filmmaking and DIY are supposed to be about.
I know some science fiction fans get peeved when SF movies have overly traditionally attractive people in them. Then again, some science fiction fans found the captain in that Serenity thing attractive, so there is no accounting for some people’s taste. Ew. Anyway, The Fifth Element is one of my favorite movies, mostly because I’m a big Luc Besson fan and nobody does exhausted-but-toughing-it-out like Bruce Willis, but, while perhaps not my own personal perfect woman, Milla Jovovich was just fine there too. And she looks mighty badass fine in the trailers for Resident Evil 3 aka Resident Evil: Extinction. And she is playing opposite Oded Fehr, who was the terrifying genius mastermind on Sleeper Cell. I’m not really down with the Vegas being all destroyed though. I love Vegas. Aesthetically, the movie looks like a more Western-styled Mad Max via Maxim or FHM. Check out the trailer to see what I mean.
The tagline slogans for this flick are all pretty entertaining across the board:
1. A zombie needs only one thing . . . the living.
2. All bets are off.
3. Experimentation. Evolution. Extinction.
4. This fall all bets are off.
5. We have witnessed the beginning. We have seen the apocalypse. Now we face extinction.
6. What happens in Vegas . . . stays in Vegas.
As all of my friends know, what happens in Vegas only stays in Vegas if we don’t take photos and then post the pictures online.
Harlan Ellison was going to be doing some sort of screening and question and answer session tonight. I realized that it had been about a decade since I read anything by Ellison, meaning I pretty much stopped reading his work when I came out to the West Coast. Although books are a serious vice of mine, Angelenos do not tend to be big readers and this makes it easy to just sort of not think of some writers I once would have been hyper-aware of.
At any rate, some friends and I went to see a sort of documentary/promo piece for Harlan Ellison tonight. It was a potentially not quite final cut and of course it was a book event in Los Angeles. I was all fretting, when we arrived with only three minutes to spare, that it might be sold out. Oh yeah, book event in sunny Southern Cali. It was only about a quarter full, but the audience struck me as quite devout, despite Ellison heckling us all during the Q&A portion, comparing our relative silence to a boring Jackson Pollack painting or something. I don’t recall the exact analogy, but, even though it did not quite work for the situation, it still sounded fairly entertaining the way Ellison said it.
The movie had a lot of delightfully well-delivered lines and a few bright spots. Writer Neil Gaiman describes a telephone answering machine message where Ellison told Gaiman he was a dead man, that his house would be burned down, salt would be poured on the radioactive remains, etc. and finishes saying “call me” and Gaiman tells the story with surprisingly humorous delivery. Actor Robin Williams wanders in and out of the flick and of course it is no surprise that he brings the funny. The biopic begins with Robin Williams asking Harlan Ellison a series of true/false questions. Each question features an outrageous incident which the author then confirms is true, sometimes with footnotes. Finally, Robin Williams asks Harlans Ellison if it is true that he slept with 500 women and bragged about it. Ellison replies that this is false. Wait a beat. Then he caveats that he actually slept with 700 women.
Ellison describes the way Warner Bros asked him to let them use an interview with him in the behind the scenes DVD for a science fiction show. Ellison asked them to pay him. They got peeved. He tried to get them to at least send him the DVD he is on and they told him to buy it and finally sent him the wrong DVD, by, uhm, accident no doubt. (The saavy director points out during the Q&A that he thinks it is cute that Ellison can believe that was an accident.) Ellison explains he needs to get paid for his work, even if the work is an interview with him for a DVD extra, and he doesn’t take a piss without getting paid for it. I am personally sick to death of people who want to make money off of other people’s entertainment value and are hostile to the notion of even comping anyone, much less compensating them. It was nice to hear Ellison describe making the lives of those who exploit in this fashion just a little bit harder. I couldn’t help but think, though, that he probably could have written something cool in the time he spent fighting over a single copy of a DVD. And, of course, if most people are happy to be interviewed for BTS extras for free, then the going rate de facto is zip.
I was interested in the subject matter and I’m glad I went to see it, but overall the movie bummed me out. Here was someone I once worshipped and he just seemed so old and so discontent and so shticky. How can I have someone be a role model, if the path they took looks like it leads to a bad place? Although it is impressive that director Erik Nelson was able to put the project together at all, given its famously cantankerous subject, I kept wanting to re-light the interviews he did with Harlan Ellison. I felt like some of the disturbing and tragic way the author came across was probably the result of lighting choices and I was curious how he would come across in the Q&A portion. The Q&A kicked off early with an intoxicated gentleman from the audience interrupting to say he also liked the part about yelling at people at Warner Bros on the phone. I actually couldn’t make out precisely what he was saying about the movie giant, however, because Ellison was yelling at him because he incorrectly thought he was someone who posted mean things about a friend of his on the internet. Then other audience members asked Ellison about his dead father, about mortality and legacy, about what to do when your artistic dreams are really not panning out, and some other cheery topics. Even if I hadn’t been bummed already, that took the gloom a little farther.
There is a signing across the street at a pseudo-bookstore, after the Q&A. I have resolved that I will take a flattering picture of Ellison when I shoot him with the one of my companions who brought a book to be signed. My friend with the book and I and another pal wait for the fourth member of our party to come out of the theatre. Bizarrely, Ellison stops to chat with my friend. They have never met before and it is a really cool moment when my friend tells him that the first time he ever saw the word fuck in a book was Ellison’s short story “A Boy and His Dog.” It seems like Ellison is perhaps going to sign the actual edition of the specific book in question, which my friend has brought along, but he repeats my friend’s name and tells him he has to head across the street. Then he steps kind of into my personal space, looks at my other companion, then stares directly into my eyes and also bids farewell to something along the lines of “people he does not know at all.”
I look sadly after him and glumly mention that he never remembers me. I’ve met Harlan Ellison around half a dozen times over the years, yet he always oddly aggressively claims to have no recollection of me, despite our first meeting being very memorable, at least for me.
We go across to the bookstore and it is called Every Picture Tells A Story. The store’s niche is visually-oriented books, so a lot of their merchandise is collectible volumes and prints and beautifully-produced children’s books. If I were decorating a house, it might be a bitchin’ store, but it kind of freaks me out as a bookstore. They have many beautifully printed art books and limited edition prints and incredibly glossy children’s books. These are the sort of items an interior decorator would buy to give a room a certain flavor. The store has a good selection of books for appearance, but it does not appear to have much in the way of books for reading.
I look around for a new Ellison book to buy. Even though I have read no Ellison for a decade now, there are none. I own everything they have by him, except for a couple of art books and these are interesting mostly for their collectible value. I start thinking about the headspace I was in when I first discovered Ellison’s dark writing. We wait in line so my one friend can get his symbolically significant book autographed by Harlan Ellison. The line is good-sized for a book signing, but it is not so giant that it needs to take particularly long. I even think we might still make it to the Cabinet of Curiosities show in Silverlake later in the evening. Ellison chats extensively with most of the people in the line, all the while complaining about how stupid it is for anyone to want a signature in a book, that it is basically defacing the book. I semi-agree, but I’m hanging out with my friends and that is cool. Plus I’ve promised to take a photo of my one friend with the great author. There is a poster for Charlotte’s Web and we start talking about that and I mention how much the book upset me as a child. Then I start really thinking about how bad Charlotte’s Web made me feel as a little kid. Then I point out that certain kinds of nostalgia give me a stomach ache.
We are finally almost at the front of the line, but Ellison takes forfreakingever with the trio in front of us. He signs multiple books and does photos with them all and even answers questions about whether he really hates doing signings. Finally, Ellison goes to sign my friend’s book. I take out my camera and hold it by my side. Ellison tells the room that devices like digital cameras cost you. I point out that I’m pretty sure my camera has paid for itself. He looks nonplussed. My friend asks the great writer for tips on overcoming writer’s block. Ellison tells him that he personally never ever sends email or goes on the internet, although he is at pains to point out that there are five sites devoted to him, and there is only one he sometimes goes on. Ellison goes on to advise my friend that lower tech is the way to go. I realize that Ellison believes he writes speculative fiction and not science fiction, but, as an SF fan who discovered his work in the SF&F section of the bookstore, I find it dismal that he would limit his ability to benefit from technology and human progress. Ellison uses only a manual typewriter. He shows us a DVD a fan brought him of all the interviews he did with a beloved and now deceased interviewer. Ellison points out that he will never watch the DVD. I think, from what he said in the Q&A, that he prefers to watch Betamax, but I can only listen in horrified fascination. Then he shows us a flyer for a gallery show he says a fan gave him tonight saying he might like the art, but that he will throw the flyer out and never look at that inconsequential web site on it. I kind of think he says the site in question is Salon.com, but I don’t read the flyer and I’m not sure. One of my other companions, a successful cameraman, taps my arm to give him my camera, so he can get photos of us talking to Ellison. I shake him off because I don’t think Ellison likes being papparazzied.
So I ask the author if we can get a picture and prepare to turn my camera on. Ellison says, “no.” I look at him, sort of waiting for the rest of the sentence. I have a $20 bill stuck into the top of the cell phone pocket in my purse, on the theory that, if he doesn’t take a piss without getting paid for it, he might not take a photo either. But all he does is raise his voice and ask me what part of no I don’t understand. I start to walk away pretty bummed. I know, I know, Harlan Ellison can be a dick to fans and also the sky looks blue sometimes. But, in my fannish heart, I want him to be a righteous warrior, rather than a petty bully who justifies meanness as honesty.
And people just don’t usually forget me, not when they have interacted with me extensively. Plus it seemed weird that he went on and on to the guy in front of us about how he never forgets anyone he meets. So I turn around and point out to him that we have met like six times and even had dinner together and yet he never seems to remember me. He asks me if he tried to get in my pants. I am blindsided by the question, utterly unsmooth, and I stutter, “uhm, yes.” Flabbergasted by the whole interaction, I turn to his wife and point out that it was before they were married. After a bit more interaction, Harlan Ellison tells me that hand-feeding a girl cookies is not the same thing as trying to get in my pants and that the cookies in question were Hydrox rather than Oreos and that he remembers me perfectly and that it is just terrible that I would go around saying a thing like that. Uhm, he was the one who asked me. I certainly didn’t bring it up in front of his wife. That would have been rude. So what does one say to a surreal onslaught like his? Does he remember me or not? Why would he repeatedly tell me he does not remember our meeting, if he remembers it “perfectly”? If he does remember me, why the fuck would he ask me, in front of his wife, whether he tried to sleep with me, when he knows the answer? If he doesn’t remember me, why the fuck would someone that promiscuous ask a woman if he tried to get with her? What if I had turned out to be someone he fucked? Having turned it over in my mind for a while, I really have no idea.
I really think it would have cost him nothing to get his picture taken with my friend, after we had waited hours for it. Not doing so was pointlessly cruel and needlessly stingy.
And, of course, due to the Murphy’s Law of Unsmoothness, someone is shooting video of the whole signing. Due to a bizarre series of coincidences, most of my interactions with Harlan Ellison over the years have had an embarrassing number of witnesses and been recorded on audio and/or video.
Walking away from Every Picture Tells A Story, two things occur to me. The most important is that, for all his talk of just being a man about it and getting down to the brass tacks of writing, I’m not sure Harlan Ellison is really still writing. Did he take his hands off the typewriter keys when Keebler acquired Sunshine Biscuits and discontinued the Hydrox cookie? I think the only teleplay he has done, since the turn of the century, is The Discarded for Masters of Science Fiction and, in the book department, Every Picture Tells A Story appeared to have only new editions of older work. The second thing which occurs to me is that I’ve already written about my first meeting with the great author.
Below, you will find an article which first ran in Blue Blood in print in 1997, after the fourth or fifth time I ran into Harlan Ellison. The then most recently prior meeting was in the VIP area at a White Wolf party at a convention Harlan Ellison and I were both guests at. As it was already a theoretically exclusive gathering, it was the sort of situation where it would be normal to shake the hand of anyone friendly and ask who they were, but Ellison seemed oddly standoffish to me. For the unitiated, White Wolf is a roleplaying game company with a flagship product kind of like Dungeons & Dragons. They had grossed like three or four million bucks that year and were hoping to get into more standard genre book publishing. I could be slightly off on the figures, but these numbers are close. White Wolf paid Harlan Ellison like $200,000 to reprint some of his work. Unfortunately for them, Harlan Ellison found out that writer Michael Moorcock, creator of Elric, got a quarter mill, so he called up the company and pitched a fit. Although I was more into Ellison’s work than Moorcock’s, so I probably would have paid him more in White Wolf’s shoes, I also believe that, when a grown man makes a deal, his word should be his bond. I don’t think it is right to renegotiate because you realize you left some money on the table. And, in all fairness to those who chose to pay Moorcock more, inside sources familiar with the Borealis Legends imprint at White Wolf told me that the Moorcock did better for them in sales.
At the time, I viewed the great author Harlan Ellison as such a giant that I did not imagine anything I did could particularly touch him. Maybe it was really a bummer for him that I put our real life interactions in print. Maybe, the first time he met me, he waited up in his hotel room all night and is still pissed off that I never stopped by. In my mind, I absolutely did not reject him; I was just really young and inexperienced and starstruck. It might be better to have an anecdote where I could say I was such a badass, even then, that I tied Harlan Ellison to the headboard and rode him with my young cunt, like a teenage girl rides a pony, but, alas, it didn’t go down like that. Years after the fact, I figured, if he didn’t even remember me after being reminded, wasn’t even particularly interested in finding out my name, then how much could he possibly care what I had to say. I kind of feel that Ellison’s own words are some of what probably created my view that it would be okay to talk about such things. If the man slept with 700 women and talked about it, how much could it matter if he happened not to hit a 701st and she talked about it?
My friends and I go to a diner named Dolores and it is yummy and the conversation is good. I tell my friends I sometimes wish I were a boy.
And it fucking well was Oreos and not Hydrox.
When I was about seventeen, my friend Keith Kanik brought Harlan Ellison to my college to speak. Ellison did an informal talk with the Science Fiction & Fantasy Club in the afternoon and a more formal speech for the Jewish Lecture Series that night. (It was a total coincidence that Keith was a budget officer for both organizations, we swear.) At the time, my pleasure reading consisted primarily of Harlan Ellison collections of short stories, with the occasional longer work by Harlan Ellison thrown in. So I was excited to see the author speak, but that didn’t keep me from showing up late for the SF Club thing. I think maybe I had a class or something pesky like that. By the time I got there, the only seat free was the one next to Ellison. Lots of my classmates had seated themselves on the floor in order to avoid taking that seat, but I was born without the normal number of intimidated chromosomes.
So I sat down next to Ellison and he immediately started flirtatiously bantering with me and touching himself. (He claimed he wasn’t touching himself; he had a tear in his pants. But I wasn’t buying it.) What I didn’t know, because I had arrived late, was that my little pals were taping this whole exchange. So somewhere there is an audiotape of Harlan Ellison offering to fly me to Florida if I would fuck a flamingo while he watched. (Years later, I wrote to him and offered, but it turns out he was married by then.) As a result of discussing bestiality and such with our honored guest, I was invited to the dinner for Ellison and seated opposite him so he could play footsie with me or whatever. A number of people I liked were at the dinner, but there were also more than a few I didn’t. I shared my little opinions with Ellison on the car ride over. So when introduced to a member of the Wesleyan Clergy, Harlan Ellison goes, “I’ve heard so much about you.” “All good I hope,” says the clergyman with a guffaw. “Actually,” Ellison replies, “I heard you were an asshole.” Technically, I said the man was incompetent and devoid of compassion, but watching his face was still worth it. Harlan Ellison, unlike most celebrities, is exactly the way his readers would want him to be.
After the dinner, we rode over to Ellison’s lecture together after he had picked up some Oreos in order to increase audience participation. (He likes to throw cookies at an audience.) So it is dark and the two of us are in the back of my friend’s car and I’m eating cookies out of Ellison’s hand and he’s whispering in my ear, hot and wet, “I bet you’re kinky, I bet you’re kinky in bed, I bet you’re kinky as Hell . . .” Technically, he was right; he was just a little early. Somewhere there is a videotape of Harlan Ellison calling me a sex object in front of a lecture group, but I thankfully do not have a copy. Today, I would insist on at least some oral sex for a statement like that, but then I was too young even to really respond to the tongue he slipped me at the end of the evening and I skipped going by his room. Hopefully, he doesn’t remember the incident too clearly as I had a different name and hair color at the time.
But for years afterwards, I continued to scour used book store racks for books by Harlan Ellison. I loved his ability to slip in and out of different genres, to weave genres together, and to remain angry and righteous for so many years. At a certain point, I gave up looking, however, because only a few of his books could be found and I had read all of those. Today, all of Harlan Ellison’s works from 1958 to the present are being rereleased in a series of omnibus editions. I dislike the omnibus format because the hardcovers are heavy and I’m likely to have read at least one of the sections in every one. But I believe that Harlan Ellison is one of the best living authors writing in the English language and I think he ought to get paid. Watch for the Edgeworks series finally once again coming to racks for new books.
I’ve been trying (fairly unsuccessfully) to recall all of my science fiction writing credits. As a result, I’ve been ego-searching various strings like +”amelia g” +”science fiction” and +”amelia g” +”author” and so forth. 
So I sat down next to Ellison and he immediately started flirtatiously bantering with me and touching himself. (He claimed he wasn’t touching himself; he had a tear in his pants. But I wasn’t buying it.) What I didn’t know, because I had arrived late, was that my little pals were taping this whole exchange. So somewhere there is an audiotape of Harlan Ellison offering to fly me to Florida if I would fuck a flamingo while he watched. (Years later, I wrote to him and offered, but it turns out he was married by then.) As a result of discussing bestiality and such with our honored guest, I was invited to the dinner for Ellison and seated opposite him so he could play footsie with me or whatever. A number of people I liked were at the dinner, but there were also more than a few I didn’t. I shared my little opinions with Ellison on the car ride over. So when introduced to a member of the Wesleyan Clergy, Harlan Ellison goes, “I’ve heard so much about you.” “All good I hope,” says the clergyman with a guffaw. “Actually,” Ellison replies, “I heard you were an asshole.” Technically, I said the man was incompetent and devoid of compassion, but watching his face was still worth it. Harlan Ellison, unlike most celebrities, is exactly the way his readers would want him to be.
