I have got through the last fortnight by the judicious use of coffee and whiskey. Before anyone makes any smart remarks about that being how I get thought life all the time, I’ve been drinking more of both than I normally do, which in the case of the coffee, is a little frightening, even to me. And between that starting to catch up with me, and the stress of jury service (which is much, much, more tiring and stressful than I’d expected), I am utterly exhausted. So I’m going to meditate for a while, and then collapse into bed very early, in a effort to make my brain work again.
Unexpected Perks.
I’m doing my jury service at the moment. After several days, we’ve just finished the case for the prosecution of my first case. And frankly, bits of it have been crushingly dull. To the point where I was having trouble concentrating on what the witnesses were saying, despite the fact that I know just how important it is that I not miss anything.
The last witness was for the prosecution was the officer in charge of the investigation, who really didn’t have much to do but participate in a reading of the interview she had conducted with the defendant. I wasn’t complaining. I mean, normally any sort of Scottish accent will make me sit up and beg, but dear god, this was possibly the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard.
This is sort of amusing to me on several levels but mostly because I have a mental picture of trying to chat her up afterward, were such a thing possible: “Excuse me, you don’t know me, but I was a juror at the trial you just gave evidence at, and frankly, the sound of your voice damn near melted my brain. Would you fancy a drink, or possibly just reading to me at random from whatever book we can find?”
Later Is Sooner Than I Thought
Rocket Whores. The Tagline reads “Pop Culture Assault Site”. I will be producing words for them, periodically.
Shame And Degradation.
Yes. It’s true. I am a rocket whore. My mother will be mortified.
More news soon.
Rattling Around My Head.
It’s 2 am. I’m drinking hot coffee and cold whiskey at more or less equal pace. Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker and Nick Cave are randomly shuffling on the stereo. I’ve just finished the script to SIX STRINGS THAT DREW BLOOD. I’m more or less banging this out to give my fingers something to do while I wait for my brain to settle into a new gear, so I can get on and write some thing else. I’ve got the pitches for 2 BEATS SIDEWAYS and MARLOWE to write up, but i’m in the wrong headspace for them. I think I’ll probably wind up generating something new. I’ve got weird Buddha images sitting here in my head screaming to be let out, but I have no fucking clue where they’re leading me.
[addendum: I think I’ve just inadvertantly started a weird martial arts story. Yet another on the list for later…]
Strange Attractions.
Strange Attractor, Tuesday Night, London. A Lovecraftian ritual and a talk on Chaos Magick by Steve Wilson. Strange Attractor put on monthly events dedicated to The Weird. I’ve been meaning to get along to one of them for a few months now. And there’s no way I’m going to miss Tuesday’s.
White Noise.
V/Vm Hate You. And John Peel. And a long list of other people, according to the liner notes. Just bought this album (Hate You) having had V/Vm recommended to me for a while by friends. It is currently levering off the top of my head, and pouring bad static in. In a very good way. If you like experimental music, you need to get this.
Strangely productive.
It’s been a while since I had a night that useful. I got the bulk of Ninth Art’s re-build done – just some testing to do and a few trivial back-end functions to move across now, although it’ll probably be a few weeks before I get it all done. Then I went home and for some reason I don’t quite understand, decided to slot in an extra session at the gym this week. Having done that, I did the page breakdowns for SIX STRINGS, got a few pages of script written, and nailed down the storytelling approach I want to use for the project. With any luck, I’ll break the back of it tonight…
The One-Eyed God.
I’m not given to deity-worship. I don’t believe in encouraging the little bastards. But still, I have a certain amount of sympathy for Odin. Sure, everyone knows him as chief of the norse pantheon, but most people tend to look at him as Jupiter/Zeus figure, when he’s an awful lot more than that. He’s a christ-figure, a shaman deity, and a god of wisdom and knowledge. He has the more martial aspect present in Jupiter and Zeus, but with a grimmer, darker edge that I find more fitting to that role. He’s the Norse god of magic and knowledge, but everyone is so busy with Thoth or Mercury/Hermes that this gets forgotten, but unlike the book-magic that the others seem to favour, that hermetic tradition has imprinted on them, Odin’s magic is from that primal root, shrouded in visionquest, plucked from darkness and wind.
But today, listening to Julian Cope’s CD programme, I come across a single line “Myself a sacrifice to I”, and something kicks hard in my brain. This I like. The notion of a god whose power and knowledge comes not from outside, not from story or fable, not from simply being woven into his very being by his divinity (or from worshippers, or from the other means that you might think gods draw their power) from from their own effort to find it inside themselves.
A god whose basic example says “You don’t need gods. Anyone could do what I did, and get what I got.”
Fictional world annexes reality.
Well, no, not really. But it’s getting closer. A totally fictional country has a real world GNP per-capita only slightly behind that of Russia. New Scientist has a report on the real-world economic impact of Norrath, the fictional landscape that frames Sony’s EverQuest on-line game.
I find this interesting on several levels. My magical worldview is based in large part around ideaspace, the notion that our hopes, dreams, desires and gods exist on a “plane of concept and idea, where thought is form” (Alan Moore). The fictional worlds of MMRPGs (Massively Multiplayer RolePlaying Games) like EQ strike me as interesting, as a shared “unreal” space that has real and concrete impact in the “real” world. They don’t spring from the more abstract reaches of ideaspace that give birth to religion – they’re closer, more tied to reality, but they’re occupying some of the same bits of psychic real estate.
And y’know, more concretely, I’m just pleased to see that a country that doesn’t exist is worth so much.