kiev4am

RicStar fic drop.

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Moar fic...

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I'm just throwing this out here for anyone to see because it's so awesome: Retronaut. If you like abandoned buildings, old photographs, weird memorabilia, vintage or retro, history's junkpiles, haunting or poignant figments of the past of any kind, this is the site for you. Just don't come crying to me when you find it's done a TVTropes on you and sucked up your whole afternoon, that's all :)

This one is silly. It has orcs in it.

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Once in a while there's a film that makes me glad to be a geek. I finally saw 'Cowboys and Aliens' and loved it. I loved the way it was an absolutely straight-down-the-line western complete with a Man With No Name, scrubland, canyons, stray dogs, Biblical-named town, cowed townsfolk, wastrel rich boy shooting up the place, heartless cattle baron and a whole fistful of 'Searchers'-style empty-house, open-door-to-sepia-daylight shots. And then it had aliens, and it was still a completely straight-faced, dusty, deliberate western. With aliens. Oh, and a beautiful upside-down paddle steamer.

I liked Daniel Craig doing his best Lee Van Cleef and Keith Carradine doing his best Sam Elliott and I especially liked Harrison Ford getting to play his real age and be the evil-tempered old bastard of the piece. He barely cracked a smile, but he snarled and cragged and grouched and gnawed the scenery like a true Leone stalwart and generally looked like he was having enormous fun not being personable any more. I also sort-of appreciated the way the enigmatic, otherworldly beauty you so often find in washed-out backwater ghost towns (cough) really was otherworldly. It helped explain Olivia Wilde's eerie perfection and Keanu-like blankness.

It was an affectionate, daft, flashy mash-up of a film that meandered a bit towards the end, pulled every western trope out of the bag and closed with the classic 'Time Machine' gambit of blow-them-all-up-and-run-like-hell. But who cares. It had grizzled Harrison Ford, on a horse, shooting spaceships with a Colt - what more could you want?

...no matter how often I watch it. I love every single shot and every single line, and the chemistry and bickering of Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, and all of the gnarly and stellar supporting players, and the ridiculously assured racking-up of foreshadowing and tension. I just love this film to pieces. It makes me want to swill whisky while singing bad sea shanties and shooting barrels at all life's obstacles.

Silly alt!X-Factor-#230 fic.

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I think I'm about to start actually posting/reblogging on Tumblr instead of just lurking and following. I tell myself it's because Tumblr is fun and full of fandom, but it's really because it'll give me something else to do when I'm supposed to be doing all of this. I am shameless.

I was skimming through some of my Dad's New Yorker magazines recently. I still find the non-fiction stuff in the NY really interesting; one issue alone had pieces about giant Polaroid cameras, Edward Hopper's house, a writer's double life of lit-fic and pulp noir, and a deceased modern artist called Blinky Palermo who I wish I'd heard of before. I also still giggle like a fool at some of the cartoons (zebra to lion: I give up, what's black and white and red all over?). But then I happen to read a short story, and it's like going back in time to the eighties when I first started dipping into these magazines as a teenager and thinking, 'Oh God, is this what proper grown-up writing is supposed to be like? Really?'

You could make a bingo card. Middle-aged male narrator, horny but jaded - check. Dysfunctional marriage to ambitious but thwarted woman - check. (If the narrator's female, the marriage is the same but there's a mother-in-law and a lofty, feckless academic lover who'll never commit). Affairs described like dry, inevitable collisions between bits of furniture; one-note secondary characters; passing bigotry added without criticism because the target readership parses it as 'grit', 'authenticity' or 'colour'; bloodless, cut-off, non-ending endings with neither resolution nor resonance, as if the storyteller just hung up on you midway. It may not apply to every NY story but wow, is it a common template. Grim.

I love that my Google homepage is asking me to buy stuff from the Android Market. The fact that this conjures up a mashup of Chiba City in Neuromancer, the street vendor bits in 'Blade Runner' and the troll market in 'Hellboy 2' - rather than some boring website selling phone apps - makes me happy. And a big nerd, obviously.