Less Cyber, More Punk

• 
• 1 roll of exposed Kodak Verichrome film
• 1 “Felix the Cat” keychain
• 2 rubber stamp ink mats (one black and one red)
• 2 nylon guitar plectrums, Dunlop brand, .73 gauge
• 1d20
• 1 cent
• 2 tubes of silver-based thermal grease
• 1 rubber roll for printmaking
• 1 tube of Uhu glue
• 1 cymbal (broken)
• 1 paper mask – T-Rex Head
• 1 wire armature for a lizard man
• 200 bucks
• 1 tube of black printer’s paint
• 3 scisors
• 1 empty package of mocca-flavoured mini-cigars
• 3 pizza coupons (if I find 7 more I get a free pizza)
• 7 pages of a comic book I planned to do 10 years ago
• 1 stray holder from a Pentel mechanical pencil
• Color screenprints from old CCCP pictures
• 2 flyers of a sex shop in Spain
• 3 different brands of glue sticks (Pritt, Uhu and Mercur)
• 144 red pencils
• 1 blue pencil from the Czech Republic
• 2 DVDs of racing movies featuring Steve McQueen (”Grand Prix” and “24 Hours of Le Mans”)
• 10 aluminum rulers
• 1 collection of franch pulp fiction covers
• 1 galon of white latex (not related to the sex shop mentioned above)
• Sequoins
• 1 picture of my 20th birthday
• 1 rubber band
• 1 guitar neck
• 3 old pants
• 1 rabbit fur
• 1 popcorn
• 1 harmonica (in the key of C)
• 2 yellow Sharpies
• 2 S-Video-RCA adapters
• 2 packs of Ernie Ball Super Slinky guitar strings (gauges 9 and 11)
• 1 fake Zippo lighter with a picture of the Ramones (I found that on the floor of a sauna room)
• 1 flip-flop (I can’t tell whether it’s the flip or the flop)
• 3 animation pegbars of 2 different standards (Oxberry and 2-holed)
• 1 frame of 35mm color negative of an unknown man dressed up like Santa Claus
• 1 motherboard chassis for an Intel chipset cooler
• 9 pencil sharpeners — 6 metal, 2 plastic, and a big one with a handle and a dispenser
• 1 copy of the book “How To Organize Your Life” wrapped in plastic film.

My office is usually a big dirty pile of mess that ashames my wife, parents, and everyone else who knows me. I usually don’t care much, but today I had such a hard time trying to find a hole puncher (and failing to find it) that I decided to storm out of the door and do something I usually loathe: buy something.

Off I go to the office supply, where I quickly find all sorts of plastic organizers, folders and drawers. After chosing some and paying for them, I strutted out of the store for a nice little walk back home. It was a mere 6 blocks of distance and the weather was quite nice.

Suddenly, a cry for help: a woman starts yelling that her father was stuck under a car and asked for people to help pull up the car. I threw my recently-purchased goods to the air and rushed across the busy avenue. There were already 2 guys trying to pull it up when I arrived, and soon a bunch of people were trying to help. The man hastily pulled his arm from under the car wheel, and stood up saying he was OK and asking his daughter to stop yapping.

The crowd left the car, disappointed because the man didn’t lose his arm and there was no blood-shed. I left too, disappointed at the crowd, but figuring it was just a crowd. The crowd always wants the suicidal to jump, the car to crash, the artist to die on stage.

I strolled along the next block feeling good with myself for helping anyway. Then I stopped on a corner to wait for the traffic lights to change, when a huge yellow bus passed through a dirty water puddle and showered me with the smelliest dirtiest water I’ve ever tasted.

And that’s how our little adventure ends, with life, fate and destiny teaching our hero the true value of his acts.

Tachyon Publications is releasing a deluxe book with “The Best of Michael Moorcock”. The title is fairly self-explanatory, unless you don’t know who Moorcock is. In this case, you shouldn’t be reading this blog.

As part of the marketing campaign for the book release, the publishing company asked Boing Boing readers to send questions to master Moorcock. A chance not to be taken lightly.

I was sure that whatever I wanted to know about his books and fictional universe would be contemplated in other questions, so I tried to ask something a bit different:

Poeira: Ever since the late 60’s and early 70’s there has been a strong connection between fantasy fiction and heavy metal music, and most fans of one are also into the other. Mr. Moorcock has always been involved with rock bands like Hawkwind and the Blue Oyster Cult, not to mention his own band The Deep Fix. I’d like to know from Mr. Moorcock what his views are on this curious relationship between fantasy fiction and heavy metal music.

Moorcock: In my experience, sf and rock have always gone together. Not just heavy metal. In the UK, at any rate, during the 60s and 70s when New Worlds was being published, the ‘cultural mix’ contained as many NW people as rock people. Admittedly this was in Ladbroke Grove/Portobello Road (pretty much the equivalent of Haight/Ashbury in San Francisco) where so much literary and musical experiment was going on. I have to say that more musicians were fans of sf writers than the sf writers of the day were rock fans. I remember when one very well known SF writer, a good friend of mine, asked me to introduce him to some rock people (to do music for some lyrics he’d written) he was uncomfortable when I took him round to see some equally well known rock musicians and let’s say their ‘lifestyle’ didn’t suit him. Generally, the musicians were a lot friendlier and easy going than the writers.

This was as true of US sf writers of the day as UK ones. Admittedly, I was in a fairly unique position, since I’d been a performer from an early age and for some reason also had a lot of readers amongst other performers, but I wasn’t the only sf/fantasy writer musicians read. Not so many that I know of in what you might call the ‘first wave’ (Shadows,Beatles, Swinging Blue Jeans etc) but a lot in the next waves (Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Elton John, David Bowie, Cream, Lou Reed, Marc Bolan, Roxy Music etc. etc.). I was always surprised to meet well-known musicians who were as familiar with my stuff as I was with theirs. Not so much with US bands, I have to say, though I didn’t know as many Americans, of course. I remember talking to Lou Reed, who was anxious to let me know he had an English degree! He didn’t read sf as far as I know, but we had Burroughs in common). Ballard was another great favourite. And, of course, Tolkien and Peake. Why this eventually seemed to become mostly heavy metal bands (by the 80s, say) I’m not sure. Mod bands seemed to have as many sf fans amongst them in the early days, at least. I knew a lot of people on the Stiff label who were pretty keen readers of imaginative fiction. Deep Fix was by no means a metal band and Hawkwind was more prog-rock than anything. Even BOC was scarcely typical metal. It wasn’t just sf — Hesse, Burroughs, then magic realists — and probably psychedelic drugs had something to do with it. The Damned were huge Harlan Ellison fans, but the one time I tried to introduce them, Harlan was very nervous and uncomfortable and took exception to one of them asking him when he was going to write a novel and left. Later he described us as battling our way out of a den of ‘punks’ (it was at Blitz, about the most middle class club for New Romantics I knew), so after that I gave up trying to bring rock people together with the people they admired. These days, as you suggest, most bands who like sf tend to be heavy metal, but, living in Austin, I meet a lot of individual musicians of all kinds who are keen sf readers. Demographics explains that, I’m sure. I suspect drugs have much to do with it with metal/sf mix. A liking for ’souped up’ entertainment with a bit of extra punch? I’m not a great metal fan myself but of course I see a lot of my titles (and others) turning up on metal albums. The last band I was seriously talking about working with was New Order, quite a while ago, but I wouldn’t call them metal. I worked on Calvert’s albums and although he used sf influences and imagery he wasn’t metal either. I’m not a great fantasy fan in the way the term’s used, these days (Tolkien and LOTR derivatives). It perhaps had more to do with urban themes, for me at least, originally. I did that Sex Pistols ‘newspaper’ and got on as much with punk bands like The Adverts as I did with anyone. Long answer, I’m sorry to say. I’d say with me it was urban imagery but a lot of the metal bands seem somewhat retro/rural — maybe metal is designed to carry across long distances. Visionary rock uses a lot of acid. I know a lot of metal guys were convinced that Ballard and I did tons of acid. Ballard did one tab in his whole life, admittedly supplied by me with due warnings. He ignored warnings, had a terrible trip and never touched the stuff again. I tell people that, when I wrote, my drugs of choice were strong coffee and sugar.

Read the rest of the interview here.

It all begins when the narrator describes a peculiar interesting man he met while in prison. This man told him this story.

He met this girl once and they were into all kinds of cultural alternative stuff, but not really into it. You know, like 19 year olds, more eager to learn new things than actually understanding them. So they go to this strange old french movie and try to get into it while in the movie theatre, but they finally admit to themselves that they can’t understand anything and it’s pretty fucking boring.

They leave and have dinner and talk about other stuff.

A few days later, the woman calls the man, crying. She went into a bookstore and accidentally found a book on french cinema that had a chapter about the movie they tried to see but hated. She read a few paragraphs and the true meaning of the movie struck her like lightning. “We must go back!” she urges on the phone.

The man takes a bus downtown and meets the woman in the street. The woman shortly explains to the man what she had read in the book. They buy two tickets in the same theatre and go inside again to re-watch the movie under the new light of the information in the book. The movie begins and it’s a whole new world for them, each phrase spoken by the characters and each scene making a huge difference. They get so involved in it they end up kissing and making out, and then take off their clothes and start making love in the movie theatre.

Both the man and the woman are arrested and sent to jail for indecent behavior. While in prison, they exchange love letters every day, planning their wedding for when they leave prison, in a few months from now. The story ends with a sample from a letter, stating that the couple is very happy to know that, instead of being on the other side of the prison walls but still imprisoned in their ignorance, their bodies are in jail but their minds and hearts are free after the enlightning experience.

The end.

Now all I have to do is buy me some time to write this in prose form.