Jellicle jollies

I assume furries are rejoicing even as the po-faced internet harpies shriek with horror - there's going to be a movie version of Cats released this year! 😻😻😻

I saw the original stage show (video below) in London many years ago and I remember it as being weirdly sexy (in a "let's-not-mention-this" kinda way). From where we sat below the stage it seemed to be an endless parade of lithe lycra-clad butts and crotches gyrating in our faces. Needless to say, I loved it 😁😁😁



Up, up, up to the Heaviside Layer!

Mad Max MMMMMMMYEAH

When Lisa Jenkins, publisher at Sinful Press, asked me what my ideal cover image for Lust in the Dust would be, I told her, "THIS:"

Mad Max: Fury Road

Post-apocalyptic grime? Check.
Conflict? Check.
Imperator Furiosa sitting on someone's face? Check.

That's my personal idea of sexy 😄😄😄 but hey, your experience may vary.

She's beautiful though...

And so's the eponymous Max, let's face it:

In fact if you are old enough to remember the original trilogy, and Mel Gibson before he officially outed himself as a dickhead, the entire Mad Max franchise is a rich seam of moody, post-apocalyptic hotness...

... and kink:

HELL YEAH AUNTIE ENTITY!

And if that's got your juices flowing, well, there's always this book... 😜

Amazon US (paperback) :: Kindle

Amazon UK (paperback) :: Kindle

2018 in the rearview mirror

This is my annual post where I look back at the cultural touchstones of the year.

Best Movie:

I saw very few films this year, sadly, because my regular movie-buddy upped and moved to Nottingham, and then I moved house, so was too busy on most weekends with Painting Everything White.

Of the paltry 13 I saw on the big screen, my faves were:

1) Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

2) Avengers: Infinity War

3) Deadpool 2

Best Book:

Sapiens just bowled me over - it's a history of humankind which focuses on the big forces not the events, and has a way of taking everything you thought you knew and framing it in completely unexpected ways. All I can say is that the section on the development of share-based capitalism was riveting, which was one hell of a surprise to me, I can tell you!

Best TV:

We finally finished watching Breaking Bad this year! I've also enjoyed the second series of Westworld, the first few series of Justified, Inside Number 9, Black Mirror, Altered Carbon, The Terror ... but my greatest love this year went to two very different series:

A piratical romp:

And a philosophy-based sitcom:

Best DVD/Download:

I actually managed to catch up on a few movies I should have seen at the cinema (The Quiet Place, I Fight Giants, Black Panther) but my fave off-the-shelf finds were a Bollywood horror:

And a piece of 1970s family entertainment complete with embarrassing blackface and execrable SFX.:

Best Music:

Oh pooey, I've let my musical tastes fall into a bit of a rut this year! There were new albums from old faves Frank Turner and Muse, but I've only been to one live gig 😞

New-to-me bands whose CDs I've been listening to are: Heilung, Madisen Ward and the Momma Bear and Greta Van Fleet...





Best Picture:

Elon Musk is busy devolving from Bruce Wayne into Doctor Octopus, but THIS WAS AWESOME:

May 2019 be the year we start to raise our collective selves from the gutter to the stars...

Tentacular Spectacular

(This pic, BTW, is from Tumbbad, which is definitely worth watching on Amazon)

After a week which has felt like wading through cold custard in lead wellies, I've finally finished the witchy erotic story I was writing. I'll be pushing right up to the deadline, but if I can get it tidied up and handed in tomorrow, all is well!

Also I've finished redecorating the dining room in time for Xmas. Yay me!

The tree has been up for nearly a week but I haven't had time to decorate it. Naturalism is in this year.

I've not written a single Xmas card. BOO me!

The new dog we were hoping to adopt will NOT be arriving in this country at 4.30am on Xmas Eve after all ... I had a bit of a blub but it'll certainly mean the holidays involve less driving the length of the country in the middle of the night. So that's good, I guess.

I need 12 hours sleep and a drink, not in that order!

DVD review: Strange Days

Remember Strange Days? No? Even sci-fi fans might have missed this 1995 movie, despite the fact it was written and produced by James Cameron, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, stars some well-known actors and has a kick-ass soundtrack. It tanked at the box-office for reasons that are beyond me.

I watched it for the first time this week and I want to sing its [qualified] praises. It's set in a then-futuristic 1999 just at the flashpoint of the Millennium. Society is barely holding it together and in LA the law is stretched thin. Ralph Feinnes stars as Lenny, a weasley seller of illegal VR experiences recorded direct from peoples' brains, who is still pining for his dead-eyed ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis), who ditched him for an even slimier low-life music producer.

 Angela Bassett plays his best friend Mace, who puts up with Lenny's shit WAY above and beyond the call of duty.

"There there, you useless idiot. Who made you the hero FFS?"

There's a plot involving a secret SQUID recording that Must Not Fall Into the Wrong Hands, a serial killer who tapes his snuff adventures, and much hanging about in neon-lit clubs or next to burning cars. It's beautifully shot, and though Lewis isn't the greatest actor she sure belts out a song:

But what really makes the movie now is its unnerving prescience. Without giving too much away, its tangled plot resonates with the current Black Lives Matter movement and eyeballs a racially divided America. When Mace asks if maybe they shouldn't just let full scale revolt kick off and burn everything to the ground, you've really got to wonder if the old system is worth preserving , and at what cost, to whom?

Caveats: This might not be the movie for you if you are sensitive to cinematic violence - and particularly sexual violence. It's a hardboiled thriller. Also, at this stage even middle-aged white peeps like me are wondering "Why's the protag a white guy? Can't Mace be the main character?" ... but that's 1990s Hollywood for you.

You should really watch it for Angela Bassett though, because she is DA BOMB.

The Domino effect

I watched Deadpool 2 yesterday. Don't worry, no spoilers, but I thought it was loads of clever, violent fun. And now I am drooling over super-cool Domino, played by Zazie Beetz.

You know how I like kick-ass women ... I mean, 😍😍😍

Green Man Date ftw!

Last year one of the things I did for the first time in my life was Help Make a Porno - and now it's going to be released upon the world!

Green Man Date, an Arthurian tale set on the wooded isle of Avalon, starring Fauni Cate and Charlie Forrest, will debut at the London Porn Film Festival on Thursday 12th, as part of their "Local Heroes" lineup. Tickets are already sold out!

And no, I don't appear in the movie, but you can hear me and Mr Ashbless singing on the soundtrack, and my wood does appear, a lot (along with others' wood, ahem) ... and it looks suitably fabulous and magical. But viewers will just have to imagine the overpowering smell of wild garlic for themselves 😁

2017 in the rearview mirror

This is my annual post where I look back at the cultural touchstones of the year.

Best Movie:

I watched 20 movies on the big screen in 2017 - a rather low number for me (and TBH we intend to see Jumanji this week, but somehow I suspect it won't be a major highpoint). In retrospect the five I enjoyed the most were (in order):

Hidden Figures

Dunkirk

The Ritual

Logan

The Last Jedi

Worst movie of the year? Hands-down it was Valerian and the city of a thousand planets, a SF wannabe-epic-that-just-looks-embarrassingly-dated that I believe I described on Facebook as "a gilded turd".

Book of the Year:

It was about time I got round to this:

And it did not disappoint. Fascinating and eye-opening in its detail, it is also (I believe) profound in its insights and supremely relevant to the world regime we find ourselves in now.

Best TV:

Two standouts this year: hard SF masterpiece The Expanse on Netflix:

And we started trekking through the whole of Breaking Bad on boxed set too. I'm loving it!

Best Music:





I belatedly discovered Muse. Don't laugh.

Quote of the Year:

May we all persist through 2018...

XXX
Janine

Q: Why's he called Aquaman?

A: Because he makes women wet 👿

In honour of the fact I watched Justice League yesterday, here are some pics of the sexiest man in all the Seven Seas:

And here's the haunting Leonard Cohen song the movie opens with, since this was my Facebook review:

"Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich"

Well WOW, if you want a metaphor for Trump's West, just try the death of Superman. JL opens with a montage, to Leonard Cohen's lyrics, of a world where hope has died; stuck in a spiral of hate and vicious self-interest, where white supremacists attack hijabied shopkeepers and nihilistic terrorists attempt to return us to a medieval age of "holy fear". The good guys hide in the shadows, firefighting but not daring to lead. To be clear: I never liked Superman as a character, but this really hits home with why he mattered.

And if "Batman vs Superman" was the turn of the wheel into darkness, "Justice League" is the very necessary counterpart - the turn toward the light again, the righting of past wrongs, the reaching out from isolation to others. The two movies make a whole. 

"The deepest darkness is not the absence of light, but the belief that the light can never return".

That cobra though...

I came across this clip today - a jaw-dropping blend of sexy dance, Orientalism, and really bad puppetry - from a movie I've never seen BUT NOW MUST WATCH.

It looks truly epic: equal parts awful/highly entertaining ;-)

Don't forget the library...

2016 in the rearview mirror

Okay, no two ways about it - 2016 has been the most crushing, terrifying year on the political front, and to be honest it looks like it can only get worse in 2017. On top of that we've lost so many cultural icons dear to people of my generation that I'm reeling.

This is literally our best hope 

But this post is where, as every year, I frivolously look back on things I've enjoyed in the public domain.
So here goes, and here's hoping we're still here this time next year for another one.

Best Movie:

I watched 24 movies at the cinema this year, which started off well but saw a bit of a slump in the middle, quality-wise. My fave five in retrospect were:

Moana

Rogue One

Deadpool

The Witch

The Revenant

Worst movie of the year? X-Men: Apocalypse, because I expect so much more of the X-Men than that.

Best TV:

A late great entry this year - Westworld - just pips the triumphant Game of Thrones Series 6 for my sofa-glue.

Honourable mention to Yonderland, for all the dick jokes ;-)

Best Music:

Oh dear. I haven't been to any gigs, or listened to any new music this year except for vintage episodes of Top of the Pops. Not sure why, except I've been doing less driving on my own now that Mr Ashbless is working in the UK.

Best Book:

I bought Empire of Death: a cultural history of ossuaries and charnel houses, on a library pilgrimage to Manchester. It is just stunning in both its photography and its textual content. If you are at all interested in this sort of subject, this is the book to buy.

Website of the Year:

Classical Art Memes fills me with guilty joy!

Best online photo:

This is a detail from Sleeping Forest by photographer Péter Bognár. You can see the whole thing here on his website. It fills me with sehnsucht and I could stare at it forever.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost

We all have miles to go. Best wishes for 2017, everyone.

XXX

WIP - The Prison of the Angels update

Joys of research: boy have I found some Crazy on the web. 

I've never written a novel so fast. Part 3 of The Book of the Watchers: The Prison of the Angels is already standing at 35K words. It helps that I know the characters so well by now, I guess!

The action so far has gone from here:

Minot in North Dakota

To here:

"Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0"

To here:

Jotunheimen National Park, Norway

Setback: I watched Angels and Demons and saw that Dan Brown had beaten me to all the best sites in Rome, damn him...

My go-to sites are Wikipedia (of course), Bible Hub, the Vatican, (for its rather wonderful virtual tours) .... and oooh look: 101 Lokis

Milja's character has evolved in quite radical ways - anyone who complained that she was 'too reactive' in Bk 1 isn't going to have a leg to stand on now. Egan has turned out to be kinky AF. Penemuel has acquired a personality that surprised me. Poor Azazel is still struggling to cope with human ways.

I'm in the process of finally answering a bunch of questions that have been deliberately left hanging since the first volume -

• "Why did the Nails work?" 
• "Why have only three out of four archangels made an appearance so far?" 
• "What does God Himself think about all this?" 
• "What is Uriel plotting? Why do the other archangels shun him?" 
• - and most disturbing of all: "What the hell is Egan's problem?!" (OMG OMG OMG)

I've introduced the Blasphemous Plot Revelation.

I'm a pantser, of course. At this stage my characters are approaching a big action scene. I don't actually know what the result is going to be or how Milja is going to get out alive ... but I do know that things are going to go REALLY BADLY WRONG at this point.

I can't wait to find out how :-)