Scott Nicolay
Ana Kai Tangata
Tag: Philip K Dick (page 1 of 2)
E. Elias Merhige: The Greatest Apple You’ll Ever Eat | The Outer Dark: Episode 29 — JANUARY 28, 2016
In possibly the most mind-blowing episode to date, filmmaker E. Elias Merhige (Shadow of the Vampire) traces his path from the genesis of the acclaimed experimental film Begotten to its highly anticipated rebirth in definitive and alternate versions on 35mm and Blu-ray in the near future. He explores and dissects his cinematic vision in the context of a shared interest with the Weird to push boundaries to create beautiful, powerful and terrifying works, recounts his first epiphanal encounters with Nietzsche and Artaud and the birth of his obsession with “art that actually lives,” relates his own creative process to a form of possession culminating in a volcanic eruption, transports listeners back to the life-changing screening of Begotten in Susan Sontag’s New York apartment when he was just age 25, discusses the fertile artistic nexus in the early-to-mid 20th century with surrealism, Dadaism and expressionism, muses on the artist/writer/filmmaker as our culture’s shamans, gets passionate about cinema as alchemy and 
creating film emulsions that act as a lens for exploring meaning, effuses about the CERN Collider (an example of how now there is “more going on in science and biotech than in most art galleries”) and photographs as “life forms,” discusses why he feels more freedom working with lower film budgets, talks about the joy he gets from conversations with his creative contemporaries and his excitement in connecting with the Weird community, draws back the curtains on a beautiful back story involving John Malkovich, cocktail napkins and the powerful train scene in Shadow of the Vampire, provides an eclectic playlist of the music that drives his creativity (Wagner, Iggy Pop, John Cage, Nurse With Wound, Diamanda Galas, Stuart Dempster, and many more) and reveals an intriguing roll of artists, authors, poets and filmmakers who have served as his biggest influences and provocateurs from Homer to Baudelaire, Bely to Ligotti.
The conversation concludes with what’s next for Merhige including making the final feature-length installment of the trilogy that started with Begotten, writing a new film script which relates the Hiroshima bombing through the eyes of schoolchildren, editing the second draft of his first 900-page novel, and culminating with the restoration of Begotten. Included are exclusive announcements about the upcoming Kickstarter campaign for Begotten’s restoration and dynamic details about the endeavor which go beyond your wildest imagination. As Merhige says, ”some exciting shit, my friend.”
News from the Weird:. Arkham Digest columnist/Strange Aeons fiction editor Justin Steele joins Scott for the latest news and a retro review of classic horror novel, Throat Sprockets (1994), by Tim Lucas, editor/publisher of the venerable Video Watchdog. The book was inspired by cinema, has been described as “If JG Ballard wrote Dracula,” and was recommended by author Gemma Files.
This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.
Next week’s guest: Simon Strantzas, author of Burnt Black Sons and editor of The Year’s Best Weird 3.
More Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Elias_Merhige
Begotten on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101420/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begotten
Din of Celestial Birds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCnp63TbxXw
Suspect Zero trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJLYRnHk8AE
Brian Jones Presents The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwEoDGeNyrE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Virgil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adalbert_Stifter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Nachsommer
https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/05/the-dissection/
News From the Weird:
https://vdarcangelo.wordpress.com/
https://perpetualpublishing.com/
Boy Eating
Awards seem to come naturally, or perhaps supernaturally to Helen Marshall whose words weave threads across horror, dark fantasy and into the Weird. Her most recent collection Gifts for the One Who Comes After (ChiZine Publications, 2014) earned her both a World Fantasy Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and is shortlisted for the ReLit Awards which honor the best new works from Canadian independent publishers. Her first collection Hair Side Flesh Side (ChiZine Publications, 2012) won the British Fantasy Sydney J Bounds Award for Best Newcomer.
Helen traces her transition from small town Ontario to poet to a PhD in Medieval Studies to managing editor for ChiZine Publications to short story writer and now novelist (she hopes to finish her first novel Icarus Kids, which draws on her Medievalist background and explores “plague, denial and apocalypse” this week). She also discusses how the writing community sustains her work, a certain unencumbered freedom in current Canadian spec-lit, and the strong indie press movement in Canada including ChiZine and Undertow Publications. References are made to Robert Aickman including Helen’s unexpected fondness for his story “The Swords” and a shared philosophy of endings, as well as Clive Barker, Stephen King, Etgar Keret
Boy Eating
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Helen takes us on a wild ride, peeling back the skin of her imagination including playing with the “rules” of genre, the capaciousness of the Weird, the strange economy of medieval relics, where magic realism and absurdism and medievalism intersect, and how personal transitions provoked her to engage the “monster in the basement” of her second collection: Legacy. They delve deeply into the archaeology of specific stories including “Sanditon” which plays off the concept of “body as book” in Medieval lit, “Ship House” which explores a legacy of violence inherited from her South African mother, her recurring theme of offbeat consumerism meets a childish sense of make-believe turned disturbingly real in such tales as “Supply Limited, Act Now” about kids in an idyllic Bradburyesque community who order a shrink ray that works, and more. Finally, Helen recommends Indian author Indra Das (The Devourers), recent The Outer Dark guest Gemma Files (especially her recent novel Experimental Film), and Nina Allan (The Race).
News from the Weird: Arkham Digest columnist/Strange Aeons fiction editor Justin Steele reviews a weird work from the Vault, Matt Cardin’s Divinations of the Deep (Ash-Tree Press, 2002), an excellent collection of five cosmic horror stories that may lurk just outside the radar of some readers recently discovering the Weird.
Then Mike Davis, editor of Lovecraft eZine, joins Scott and Justin again to talk about exciting Kickstarter stretch goals for his highly anticipated Autumn Cthulhu anthology and more. Plus two new fiction magazines and a major Weird market now reopened to submissions, as well as another author reveal from the much anticipated Lost Signals anthology (ed. Max Booth III/Perpetual Motion Machine Press).
This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.
Next week’s guest: Rios de la Luz, author of The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert.
More links:
https://www.facebook.com/gamutmagazine/?fref=ts
https://whatdoesnotkillme.com/2015/12/22/gamut/
https://www.facebook.com/mantidmagazine/?pnref=lhc
https://mantidmagazine.tumblr.com/
Nightscript: https://chthonicmatter.wordpress.com/
Stories from the Borderland: https://scottnicolay.com/blog/
Date: October 4, 2015, HP Lovecraft Film Festival, Portland, OR
Moderator: Andrew Fuller (Three-Lobed Burning Eye Magazine). Panelists: Ross Lockhart (Word Horde), Richard Lupoff (Ramble House, Surinam Turtle Press), Scott Nicolay (The Outer Dark), Rose O’Keefe (Eraserhead Press, Deadite Press, Fungasm Press), Kelly Young (Strange Aeons magazine)
Description: Panelists discuss everything that publishers face in this genre, including topics like “Where does the money come from?” “Building a table of contents” and “Print vs E-publication.”
Note: There are some sound issues at the very start due to people talking near the camcorder, with Rose and Ross particularly hard to hear, but this clears up after the first couple minutes, so please hang in.
An overarching Small Press Renaissance has been pivotal to the current Weird Fiction Renaissance. In this panel from the 20th annual HP Lovecraft Festival, editors and writers discuss trends in spec-lit small press publishing from the 1950s when Richard Lupoff started publishing fanzines to the present including technology advances in print-on-demand and ePublishing that have sped up and made production more affordable, how these changes have fueled the creative side to go “bonkers,” the collaborative process and freedom of small press publishing among editors, authors and artists, Scott Nicolay’s poetry small press roots, the Heavy Metal-inspired origins of Strange Aeons, Ross Lockhart’s road from reader to publisher, how Eraserhead Press started as a collective of authors and the birth of Bizarro as a publishing category, what’s changed in the kinds of stories editors are looking for, the market for publishing out-of-print spec-lit classics, the thrill of supporting a great author to get into print, demographic changes and connecting through social media with writers and readers, the small press boom creating a fertile ground across all literary categories, the driving force of a more diverse readership, the creation of opportunity due to current risk avoidance attitude of the big five houses, how technology is continuing to change at a fast pace, a DIY punk ethos, ongoing challenges and strategies for marketing and distribution, and what’s next!
Once I also bought it at https://tramadolhealth.com and tried to take Ultram, when I had terrible stomachache.
This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.
More Links:
https://christopherconlon.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Eklund
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Jameson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Belknap_Long
Next guest on Dec. 3: Robert Levy, author of The Glittering World.
Kate Jonez discusses the weird side of obscure California history and Tom Waits in her novel Ceremony of Flies, her own unique spin on Mesoamerican and Christian mythology and archetypal characters, methods of divination in fiction and her use of Tarot Cards in developing the women in Candy House, larger-than-life and grotesque characters, the theme of supernatural abilities vs. mental illness, “All the Day You’ll Have Good Luck” in Black Static magazine, a possible sequel to Ceremony of Flies. and her next novel which may be called Swamp Logic, film director Peter Greenaway and seeing the more beautiful aspects of life by contrasting with the ugly, exploring the worldview of schizophrenia, the supportive community of weird fiction now, her publishing house Omnium Gatherum and the thrill of discovery, the rise of eBooks and novellas from a publisher’s perspective, other small presses to watch, the impact of women publishers in horror fiction, and her recommendations of current authors including Daryl Gregory, Emily St. John Mandel, and Alison Littlewood.
This archival episode will be available again at This Is Horror soon. In the meantime, subscribe at iTunes or Blubrry to make sure you don’t miss an episode.
NEXT WEEK: “H.P. Lovecraft and Racism: Moving Past the Howies.” A Special Presentation of the Panel at NecronomiCon Providence, Sat. Aug. 22, 2015. Moderator: Niels Hobbs. Panelists: C. Morgan Grefe, Andrew Leman, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, David Nickle, Faye Ringel.
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