I know you are, but what am I?

Got into an argument today with Nikki's uncle. He's trying to tell me I'm not an atheist.

First let me say that I'm not ashamed or embarrassed or anything like that, but I tend not to advertise the fact. Largely because it elicits gasps of horrified disbelief, or it leads to incidents such as the one today. I've even lifted the term "radical atheist" from Douglas Adams, which he used "to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it's an opinion I hold seriously."

So we're together with Nikki's family for Christmas (I can hear you already: "What's the atheist doing celebrating Christmas?" Well, I wasn't celebrating Christmas, alright? We just get together with the family then because that's the time they choose to gather together from their various corners of Victoria), and the conversation turns, as it is wont to do on this day, to religion.

I can't even remember how it came about. Something about the South Park episode where Family Guy was going to show a picture of Muhammad. This reminded Les, Nik's Uncle, of that "Piss Christ" photograph and how it offended him. My argument was, of course, on the side of freedom of speech: If Andres Serrano wants to plunk a crucifix in a cup of his own urine and photograph it for artistic self-expression, that's one thing. Even if I don't like it, I support his right to do it. However, if he's doing it specifically to get a rise out of people and anger the church, that's another story, and it annoys me even though I'm an atheist.

"Ah, but I don't think you are," says Les.

How do you come back to that? I'm trying to imagine someone saying "I don't think you are Catholic/Muslim/Jewish" or what have you. I was thrown.

"No, I'm an atheist."

"I think you're not."

Now Les is the guy, I've learned, who will argue for the sake of argument. He may agree with you completely, but he will test you because it's fun for him. So you've got to really have your argument worked out. I reckoned I had him simply on etymology alone.

"Les: Polytheists believe in many gods, monotheists believe in one god, atheists believe in no god. I don't believe in god, therefore..."

Not a lot of wiggle room there, but Les comes back with "But where does your moral structure come from?" And he says it with a smile, like the guy, you know, you're playing Connect Four or something and he's just seen that he can win three ways with one move.

Of course by "moral structure" he's talking about you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet they neighbour's wife, that sort of thing. But it's long been my argument that the Ten Commandments need not have come from God; they're just kind of logical rules for a civilised society, yeah?

Les is having none of this. Because I haven't killed anyone, apparently I must believe in God. Couldn't possibly be because I know it's wrong.

I had to finally admit that, yes, being brought up in a kind of passive religious household (God exists because that's what we were told, not because we believe), my morals were grounded in religion. But that did not mean that when I found atheism (is that how you say that?), that I suddenly went, "Great, now I can go out and kill and steal and covet!"

"Look, you're confusing morality with religion," I said. "Morality can exist without religion, just as religion - as it's proven so many times throughout the centuries - can exist without morality."

Oooh, that didn't go over very well. But he didn't have a comeback.

Maiden Tix

Woke up today at ten past nine and started ringing Ticketek for the Maiden tickets. Took twenty-five minutes to finally get through, meanwhile I'm on their website being told I couldn't get two tickets together. What the...?

So at 9:35 I finally got through to Ticketek and was told that all tickets were sold out.

Crushed.

But keep watching the website because they may decide to add another show.

I'm thinking later in the week, something. No.

At 10:00 tickets went on sale for a second show. I had Nikki on the phone, hitting redial, while I tried to get through on the website.

Result!

So on Thursday 7 Feb, we're off to Melbourne again to see Iron Maiden. First time in... nineteen years? That can't be right. Somewhere In Time tour... twenty-one years! That's even worse...

Somewhere Back in Time

My birthday today. Thirty-seven, if it makes a difference to you.

I'm having a coffee, Nik's in on the computer, and I decide to have a look at the paper. Not the newspaper, so much as the entertainment insert. Like most people my age (and younger, I'm reminded), I can't be bothered with real news, and get most of my information via The Daily Show.

So I'm there, still a bit groggy, and I see on the cover of the "paper" - IRON MAIDEN DOWN UNDER.

Heh?

Flipping furiously through the paper, I find (on the last page) that Iron Maiden are, indeed, coming to Australia for the first time in fifteen years. This is exciting on its own, but... they're apparently only doing songs from the mid- to late-80s, which is when I saw them last. It's like time-travel. In fact, they're calling it the Somewhere Back In Time tour, in reference to their late-80s album, "Somewhere In Time".

Tickets go on sale September 27th at 9am.

There's a 9am now?

Dark Half redux

BLAZE turned out to be pretty good - not great, but it definitely ranks toward the upper-middle in Bachman's ouvre. Somewhere below THE LONG WALK and THE RUNNING MAN, but just above RAGE and ROADWORK. (And I'll just have to assume it was better than THE REGULATORS.) I wasn't disappointed, but I wasn't cheering by the end, either.

What I've noticed about Bachman is that he's writing a lot more like King than he used to. Witness his turn to the supernatural. RAGE and ROADWORK, were set in solid reality, a world of school shootings and government bypasses. In THE LONG WALK and THE RUNNING MAN, Bachman dabbled a bit in Sci-Fi (something King wasn't exactly averse to, either), but once it became known that King and Bachman were one and the same - coincidentally, with the publication of Bachman's first horror novel, THINNER - he seemed to get typed, as did his real-life counterpart, as a horror writer. According to the synopsis on Amazon.com, THE REGULATORS is about "an evil creature called Tak [who] uses the imagination of an autistic boy to shift a residential street in small-town Ohio into a world so bizarre and brutal that only a child could think it up." That has, if you'll pardon the pun, King written all over it. And not good King, either, but latter-day DARK TOWER spin-off King.

Although I'd only read the Bachman books after I found out he was King, they always seemed different - not "King Lite" different, but different in a very real way, as if King and Bachman really were different people, different personalities - or at least different sides of the same personality. But they were written as Bachman, published as Bachman, and then revealed to be King. Now that the secret's out and everybody knows who's who, King's continued use of the Bachman name seems almost disrespectful. Even though BLAZE was written during the Bachman years, it was Stephen King who went back and did the touching up. And it was published with the knowledge that everyone already knows Bachman is fictional - that has to have an effect on the way it's written (or in this case, edited).

I've gotta say, I hope BLAZE isn't the last of the Bachman books, no matter what genre he decides to focus on. I prefer BLAZE to any of the newer King, anyway. And now we have DUMA KEY to look forward to...

Bachman vs. King

First he was retiring from writing. Then, not so much from writing, just retiring from publishing. Now, three books later, Stephen King is not only still writing and publishing, but he's publishing books he wrote back in the early 70s.

Not that I'm complaining. Look, I like a good King book as much as the next fella. A good King book. Like The Shining, Salem's Lot or The Dead Zone. Even once he became a Brand Name in the mid- to late-80s, the stuff he was putting out (It, Misery, The Tommyknockers) wasn't markedly different from his early work, but it was different enough to let you know he'd turned a corner, creatively. Lately, though, it seems he's not only turned another corner, but gone completely 'round the bend.

Ever since Insomnia. That's where I first started noticing it, and to date it's the only King book I've never been able to finish. It was the introduction of the Crimson King, and the first book in the Dark Tower cycle that wasn't lumped in retroactively. ("The Talisman? Sure, that's a Dark Tower story. Crouch End? Er, um... yep, that one too!") Instead, King confronted us with the "Crimson King" in various novels, poor second-cousins to the Dark Tower series, for the next decade, until finally wrapping "everything" up in the lame-ass final DT book.

This new one, Blaze, was written in late 1972 and early 1973, which gives me some hope. As King explains in the introduction, it was the last book written in the 66-73 period, when he was publishing under the name Richard Bachman, and so Blaze, too, carries this name.

Personally, I don't care if he wanted to publish under the name John Swithen again - early King is always going to be better than latter day King, no matter whose name is on the cover.

Alice and Left-Overs

Lacking anything new to post, here are two one-act plays I wrote for the LCTI play writing contest. The rules state that all plays submitted "should center on a common theme, idea or concept." The theme for the first one was "reflections". The second one was "food".

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (or "The Heisenberg Principle and How it Applies to You") was written at 3:30am in a haze of allergy-induced fever and allergy medicine-induced perplexity. I didn't realize until the second draft that what I'd written was an indictment of organized religion.

I'd been reading a lot of Mamet around this time, as should be obvious from the dialog - which is probably a bit try-hard, I don't mind admitting. My friend Robin Reck was going to make a short film based on this, but I don't know what ever happened to that...

Left-Overs, was written after my first year of marriage. A bit absurdist, this one. Clearly influenced by David Ives. It's kind of a meditation on realizing you need to let go of whatever personal bullshit you brought into the relationship, and just move on from there. File that under "Water is Wet, Sky is Blue and Other Not-So-Shocking Revelations".

Both plays were performed on the LCT stage. I got to direct myself, my uncle Fred and my brother Mike in Alice, but I was living in Australia when Left-Overs was staged, so my friend Beth Lapp took the reigns on that one, directing my friends Jenny Loy and Jonathan Bjorkstedt.

I love writing shorts like these. You couldn't base a full-length play on either of these ideas, but they're too good (in my own ever-so-humble opinion) to just let go altogether.

Inked

So I got this tattoo today. After much deliberation -- The Crimson Ghost? The Ramones crest? A Pennyfarthing bicycle from The Prisoner? -- I decided to go with a simple line drawing depicting The Thin Man. I'll post a picture once it heals a bit.

I was told it's addictive. I wouldn't say I found it to be that, exactly, but I definitely plan to go back. Maybe "addictive" isn't the right word. More like "breaking the seal". Once you've got one, you know, may as well keep going.

Cruci-fiction

From the "shameless self-promotion" file...

Here's a pilot I wrote a couple years ago for an animated TV series, based on an idea my friend Doug and I came up with back in '95. It's called CruciFiction. Probably piss some people off, but what are you going to do?

The horror... the horror

Having just watched the low-budget horror cheapie It Waits, I have to say I'm getting sick of the lack of shitty direct-to-video horror movies lately.

Not that there's a drought, exactly - movies like Spirit Trap and Kaw still keep the shite level from bottoming out - but the majority of bad horror movies that we've seen in the last few weeks haven't been all that bad. They're not good, by any means, but they don't suck... and that's really starting to bother me.

Let me be clear - It Waits was nothing to rave about: Cerina Vincent stars as a park ranger who goes up against a creature from Native American mythology (and which looks a lot like the spawn of Pumpkinhead and the Creeper), while dealing with her own personal demons in the process. Nothing particularly new or shocking here, but It Waits was actually better than it had any right being. A few creepy moments, some good scares, a nice fake-looking severed head, and a little something called Character Development (possibly laid on with a trowel) helped this one rise above.

Plane Dead is another one that sticks out. Think Snakes on a Plane with zombies instead of snakes. Obviously it wasn't great - it was never going to be - but neither did it fall into the fabled So Bad It's Good territory. The zombie make-up was standard, if not sub-standard (and I could have done without the yellow Salem's-Lot contact lenses, thank you very much), the plot was whisper thin (I did mention Snakes on a Plane, right?) and their "star power" consisted of Raymond J. Barry and Dale Midkiff. Also, that creepy guy from The Mummy remake was in it, so there's no reason on God's earth that this should have been as entertaining as it was. Yet we couldn't look away, and were never bored by it.

Same with Altered, the second offering from The Blair Witch Project's Eduardo Sanchez. Basically, it's what might have happened if Travis Walton's buddies from Fire in the Sky had grown some rather than fleeing like little girls from the scene of his alien abduction. The IMDb synopsis reads thus: "Fifteen years ago, five men were abducted by aliens. Only four returned. Now, these same four men have managed to capture one of the creatures who killed their friend and ruined their lives. It's time for payback..." X-tro meets Deliverance might sum it up better. And apart from one cheesey CGI effect - which only came in the last five minutes - this movie rocked! And Sanchez managed to pull it together with only one set and $8 million.

I'm not so much lamenting the passing of bad horror - hell, we have Eli Roth and Leigh Whannel to see that we're up to our fucking bile ducts in Hostel and Saw movies for the next fifteen or twenty years - as I am wondering when these low-budget, direct to video flicks (the modern day equivalent to the drive-in splatter-fests of the 70s) started to give the big-budget Hollywood shite a run for its money.

The Unquiet

Just finished reading John Connolly's The Unquiet. Not bad - certainly better than the last one, Black Angel, which went a bit overboard on the supernatural for my tastes. I don't know, I just think if you have a detective who gravitates to the dark side, it doesn't have to be because he's the reincarnation of some dark angel, you know? Sometimes people are just bad.

Connolly's all right, though. I'm always looking forward to reading him, which is something I haven't been able to say about King for more years than I care to count, sadly.

Check out www.johnconnollybooks.com, if you're not familiar.

Shameless self-promotion

So I've decided to use this space to post some of the work I've done over the last few years - plays, scripts, short stories, what have you. Might as well get practiced in the art of shameless self-promotion.

Used to have a LiveJournal account - still do, for what it's worth - but haven't posted there in ages, and rather than have two blogs that get no use, I'm thinking of transferring some of those posts over to here. From the Archives, or whatever. Keep an eye out.