home • about • books • writing • zines • comics • design/animation • press • mollusc • contact
blog
graveyard of DOOM index < | > Okay, more in brief stuff, perhaps without the Stan Lee impersonation this time, even though I have been continuing to indulge in the current resurgence of my nostalgic obsession with 70s Marvel comics. The GDS gig in Daylesford two weeks back went well, thanks for asking. Lauren W, Steve S, Edwina P and Peter O'M all read really well to an attentive good-sized crowd and we sold maybe fifty bucks worth of books, which made up for being almost an hour late to the gig. Which isn't a great thing if you're the MC and you have one of the poets in your car with you. Lots of traffic jam love to be had that night. Anyway, we rocked up, I MC-ed, the poets po-ed and it was all good. Anna and I stayed in Daylesford overnight in the top room of our friend Philippa's cute little A-frame house and the next day we indulged ourselves in the best way possible when one is in Daylesford: two and a half hours at the spa centre and then a decent slab of second-hand book shopping. At Avant Garden I scored myself three beauties of the comic form: a cheap issue of Jack Kirby's "adaptation/continuation" of 2001: A Space Oddyssey (in this issue a purple robot is captured by the army and rescued on the final page by the Monolith - you know, the big black rectangle that taught the apes to bash each other with gazelle bones?); an old Marvel Premiere featuring Man-Wolf, the otherdimensional albino space werewolf who in the issue I picked up is revealed to be "Stargod of the Other Realm" and reunited with his band of wise-cracking space-vikings and their herd of purple dragons; and a 1985 reprint of a bunch of Steve Ditko comics that are just so fucked up and indicative of a personality devolving into paranoia and rabid polemic that they're beautiful. It's the second Ditko collection from his later period that I've scored, and I get the feeling that I'll be doing some more research about Mr. D's life and career in the near future, just to find out exactly how he managed to become such a car crash. Something else I wanted to mention was the UK Man Bites Dog situation. For those of you reading this outside the Wide Brown Land, MBD is now available through Amazon UK, which should make things a little easier. Sweet Mr. Balfour has gone so far as to write a customer review, keeping in that great Amazon tradition of your friends saying nice things about you. But don't get the wrong impression - people I've never met are also welcome to say nice things about my book. It's a simple process - why don't you give it a go? Go on, you know you want to. This weekend coming is the three-gig weekend that will test my stamina like no other weekend has for a long time. Friday night's the Cape Lounge gig, Saturday arvo's the Carlton Library gig - just MCing at that one, but it's still a gig - and then Saturday night is the big Bam Slam for the Sleepers kids at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Our team, Five is a Four-Letter Word, had another rehearsal last Friday and the whole lavender bush meets ghost of astronaut through the agency of juvenile delinquents and hippie busdriver is toddling along nicely, thanks. Details of wheres and whens in the gigs section. I think that's all for now. Related links:
|
|
