Stories published by Australian venues (other than Antipodean): 92

ASIM: 3
Aurealis: 6
Hope: 17
TPP Novella: 1
Johnny Phillips: 5
New Ceres Nights: 11
Shiny: 2
Ticon4: 6
Midnight Echo: 11
Masques: 30

Stories published by Antipodean: 50 (I suspect perhaps 10% may be by OS authors?)

Stories published by Australians in overseas venues: 20
(Online venues: 7, Print venues: 13)

Total: 162 stories so far in 2009

So here is a list of the stories published by local writers this year, to the best of my knowledge.

Under the cut

( Read more... )

What have I forgotten?

Aurealis #41
ASIM #38, ASIM #39
Masques
New Ceres Nights
Horn
Shiny #5
Midnight Echo #2
Hope #1 & #2
Antipodean SF (6 issues so far)
Borderlands #11 (although I haven't found a copy anywhere yet)
Ticon4

I am ashamed to say that, so far, I've read barely any of it! How about you?

I was talking to some friends about how the scene seems a little dead; there doesn't seem to be much buzz around.

So I'm thinking over the next month or so that I'm gonna have an Aus-fest and see if I can plough through all the above, and try to get a feel for what's out there at the moment.

Anybody care to join me?

How many collections of stories by Australian writers would you like to see published in a year?

Given that there are many variables, and quality is a factor.

How many would you, as a reader, be interested enough to read? How many is too many? How many is not enough?

Just thoughts.

So today's adventure: the discovery of the rotting corpse of possum Our Nicole decaying stenchily under the outdoor setting.

The quandry: How to remove without a shovel?

The solution: Rubber gloves, poking stick, rake, binbags (3). Method: Pry possum from paving with poking stick. Use poking stick to flip corpse onto rake. Hold bag open and slide possum from rake into first bag. Quickly shove bag into further bags while squirming. Place bags in bin.

Wash hands three or four times. Shower. Change clothes.

A dignified send-off. Goodbye, Our Nicole!

I was just talking to somebody recently about people who need to shop to cheer themselves up. How we laughed!

Anyway, today's purchases:

Love is Hell (short stories by Westerfeld, Larbalestier and three otehrs)
The Hotel Under the Sand... Kage Baker
In the Night Garden... Catherynne Valente
Ice Song... Kirsten Imani Kasal

So mum is doing pretty well so far. She was pretty sick last weekend, particularly her lungs but she's steadily improved, and all being well she might be allowed to go home early, maybe early next week.

She must be starting to feel better because tonight she was nagging me about going on a diet :-)

This is a cool clip.

Note to VB. Your ads during the ashes are *The* very worst ads I have ever seen.

Is watching Stuart McGill host the ashes making anybody else feel like we're watching  Australian writer Andrew Macrae?

So a few blogs around the music scene are quoting their midyear picks for best albums of 2009 so far.

Fwiw, here's my list of my favourites of the year thus far. They may change later as albums grow on me or fade.


Dimensions - The Lovetones (actually this one came out Christmas eve, but I'm counting it as 2009)
Merriweather Post Pavillion - Animal Collective (not loving it as much as a lot of critics but still interesting enough to make the list)
Tonight - Franz Ferdinand
Get Guilty - AC Newman
Major General - Franz Nicolay
The Rebirth of Venus - Ben Lee
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Hold Time - M Ward
Grand - Matt & Kim
It's Blitz- Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Hazards of Love - The Decemberists
The Jasmine Flower - Heather Nova
Outer South - Conor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band
University A Capella - Ben Folds etc
Yours Truly, The Commuter - Jason Lytle
Rearrange Beds - An Horse

How about you?

So my search for contemporaryish jazzish singers has been going on for about three months now. I've found a couple of good articles but in general found the topic hard to google. I kind of started with some of the obvious suspects and then followed recommendations and similar artist links from them, as well as picking out a couple of others from articles.

I thought I'd share the list, for those who might be interested. I haven't yet decided which I like and which I haven't, other than I think I like Mark Murphy (who is contemporary by virtue of me buying an album he made recently, although he's been performing for decades) and Jamie Cullum.

Here are the artists I've "discovered" as a step toward making my contemporary jazz vocal cannon. (I'll also list the album I have as they may not be indicative)

Bebel Gilberto - Live Session EP
Cassandra Wilson - Closer to You
Ceu - Ceu
Diana Krall - Quiet Nights
Eliane Elias - Bossa Nova Stories
Holly Cole - Temptation
Ian Shaw - Drawn to All Things
Jamie Cullum - Twentysomething
Jane Monheit - Surrender
Kurt Elling - Live in Chicago
Luciana Souza - An Answer to Your Silence
Madeleine Peyroux - Bare Bones
Mark Murphy - Love is What Stays
Matt Dusk - Back in Town
Melody Gardot - My One and Only Thrill
Sara Gazarek - Yours
Sophie Milman - Live at the Winter Garden Theatre (EP)
Dena DeRose - Live at Jazz Standard vol 2
Dave Mooney & John Pizarelli - Last Train Home

Any recommendations?

Hip-hop group Atmosphere are offering free downloads of their new EP, Leak at Will, here.

Haven't listened to it yet, but I loved their last album, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold.

In other news, likely to be of very limited interest to my f-list, Childish Things have released the new version of International Cricket Captain.

Word.

It's Saturday, and coutesy of Boing Boing, I'm looking at pictures of celebrities with their heads turned upside down.

A Handsome Laundrette, a Box of Lovers and Two Dozen Happy Seacows.

A Call for Submissions.

Have you been writing stories for years in abject squalor, perhaps in a small room above a dirty store full of hamburgers and no buns, never ever any buns?

Have your stories been stolen by an angry buzzard and returned with great holes in them that were not there before, probably?

Have you been waiting and waiting and waiting for an anthology of stories which explore the magical, bewildering, even muddled world of un-realism???

Then look no further, or indeed, do look, at the following words [note: edit this sentence later]

A Handsome Laundrette, a Box of Lovers and Two Dozen Happy Seacows  is looking for stories of an experimental, odd, or surreal nature, WITH WHICH TO FILL ITS OWN ANTHOLOGOUS BELLY!

You too can be part of its digestive majesty.

BUT HOW??

AHLABOLATDFHS, to its friends, is open to submissions throughout the month of July, that preposterous month fast approaching.

YOU WANT MORE DETAILS?:

Stories: Up to 5000 words

Publication: Via the magic of Internet PDF.

Payment: $50 (Australian)

Turnaround: Two months maximum.

Format: Rtf attachment. Email to moonlighttuber@gmail.com

No reprints.

AHLABOLATDFHS is open to writers of all varied nations, but is particularly interested in publishing Australian writers and funny dogs.

To Arms, My Jolly Breathren!

The Seacows are (metaphorically) in your hands…

So I don't know if I'm the right person to blog on the death of Michael Jackson. But I'm going to anyway.

I was never a huge fan of his music. Growing up, I liked a couple of songs, but I guess I was more into emotional songs than dance music, and I was always put off by the lyrical stupidity of songs like "Bad". Plus, those really long film clips could kinda grate on you when you saw then tooooo many times, you know?

But that's not to deny him his place in the hall of fame. Looking back, I know an awful lot of his songs, for an artist I never really liked, which says something. 

Mostly, though, to me, Jackson was a kind of riddle that the public longed to solve. He was a canvas onto which we projected the best and worst of ourselves. Let's face it, we don't know, or at least, I don't know, what kind of a man Michael Jackson was. I don't know if his relationship with young people was innocent or not. I've always kind of found it distasteful the level of certainty other people seem to feel about his guilt or innocence. Too often they seem to be based on minimal research and to resort to stereotypes; "He's just so creepy-looking" etc. In that sense, the way that we react to Jackson has always said as much about us, as a society, as about him, in my opinion.

There was always something tragic, too, in his ever-evolving physical appearance. Again, I don't know much at all about why or how he ended up looking the way he did. Were there medical reasons, was it the desire to look white, was it a combination of different factors? If we knew it would possibly be a great study in the way we humans learn to hate our own bodies. Or possibly not. Again, by the end, his appearance turned him into this kind of cartoon-like figure so far from whatever truly drove him that Michael Jackson the media icon seemed ot bear no relation to a real person.

I hope that, behind all the talk and speculations (and think, if he was innocent of all those charges, how horrible, how astonishing an experience it must be to see yourself labelled that way), regardless of which aspects of public performance and interpretation were true reflections, I hope that somewhere in there Michael found a way to be human, found a way to be a happy person and live a life that felt real. I hope amidst all the hype he found a little block of wood to hang on to and I hope it carried him someplace peaceful.

I don't know. I guess that's all I have to say.

Ok so in the end I de-pressurised and just picked ten songs. Maybe it would be totally different tomorrow.

These are my ten picks for my favourite all-time songs. I went for honesty rather than songs I though had a shot.

I had to add all but the Cure and New Order songs, so I don't hold out much hope of the others making the list!!


The Rentals - Jumpin Around
Knievel - I Keep on Waiting
Grant McLennan - Ballad of Easy Rider
The Church - My Little Problem
New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle
The Cure - The Same Deep Water As You
Mazzy Starr - Fade Into You
Concrete Blonde - Little Conversations
The Beatles - You've Got to Hide Your Love Away
Sebadoh - Think (Let Tomorrow Bee)

I really have no idea where to start.

In less depressing news, er, at least in a sense, here is a photo of people with ostrich feet!

There's been some remarkable, heartbreaking news from Iran, not least the video of a young woman shot in the street.

It's heartbreaking. I find myself somehow ashamed that it takes the immediacy of footage to make me feel this way, that this one death shouldn't matter any more than those that go unseen.

It doesn't matter any more. But it haunts me.