>>Nostalgia For Infinity

I’m not going to pretend these are the best records of 2008. I’ve only heard a tiny fraction of what’s come out, and I listen for pleasure – not to pick out something unique, evolutionary, or a “generational lightning rod” (source: the Observer, predictably). No doubt next year I’ll hear something I missed that will blow me away, and I’ll be kicking myself and mixing metaphors all up the creek without a paddle. But as of right now, at the very end of 2008, these are my favourite albums released this year.

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Many of us have our personal best-ofs for the year that has passed but it’s always interesting to see what others thought, be they friends or critical/commercial venues. Personally, I’m always impressed by how I seemingly bought completely different records to everyone else.

Anyhow, for fellow music nerds here’s a collection of such round-ups…

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Harold Pinter.

Fuck.

A bit of WordPress blogstat geekery: I’ve been looking at the posts that have proven most popular over the past year. Predictably, It’s post-a-rejection-letter Friday! is sitting pretty at the top by a wide margin: 1,056 views. This just goes to show that cheeky responses to blogosphere teacup-storms are always good. I was at first mildly horrified when I saw that hitcount zooming skywards, but the responses on various blogs and in comments from people who felt similarly were wonderful. Oh, and this was also the first time I experienced my name being widely misspelled. Hurrah!

Pleasingly, second place is held by my review of Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores, with 133 views. It’s been receiving a lot of search engine clickthroughs in the last month – clearly people are starting to pay attention to the book, and damn right too. In third is a post about snatching music and sound files from the game Portal, which is probably assisted in its position by the title (“If at first you don’t succeed, you fail. And the test will be terminated”).

In 4th is my review of issue #2 of Greatest Uncommon Denominator magazine, which also pleases me. The people, they want the good fiction (probably why my own stories appear quite far down this list). In 5th is a linkfest page that places so highly because I linked to it for background/context for the rejection letter furor.

Other worthies are my review of Mitch Clem’s Nothing Nice 2 Say collection, the About Me page (haha), and my most popular piece of Friday flash, We’re Never Going Home!, with 54 views.

Taking my cue from Gareth L. Powell, here are my top ten Friday flash fiction stories of 2008.

1. Our Bright Horizons – A deliberate stylistic and thematic departure from much of what I’d written before. Difficult, but fun.
2. We’re Never Going Home! – the first of a series of latter-’08 tales with titles stolen from my favourite bands, and an attempt to fuse my love of punk rock with my love of surreal fantasy/horror.
3. Interdiction Zone – a mildly amusing – and slightly inhumane – piece of post-apocalyptic SF set in the same dying world as several other F3 tales.
4. Love Story – an experimental piece of fiction that tries to bind language directly into the narrative, a trick I freely admit I stole from Ellis Sharp (who does it much better than me).
5. My Mother the Robot – yet another stylistic experiment, this was written in the style of a young girl’s diary. You can either take it literally, or regard it as the sort of fantasies children develop to deal with parental divorce.
6. Watching the Valves – another post-apocalyptic SF piece which is inspired by both Mad Max 2 and The World Without Us (specifically the chapter about the Texas oil refineries).
7. This Urban Aesthetic – probably one of the few F3 stories I wrote that works well as a stand-alone story. One of only a few of my stories to receive a positive response in Zinos-Amaro’s review of Illuminations.
8. Bitterness the Star – it’s very recent but, to paraphrase Neil, I like the macro/micro scale juxtaposition. Has some thematic similarities with ‘Love Story’, above. I wonder why that might be!
9. Earthbound – the other F3 writers who commented like this quite a lot, perhaps more than I did. Just goes to show that writers oughtn’t listen to themselves too often.
10. Releasing Moments – a flawed 2nd-person perspective experiment that revisits the concept central to Carry These Songs Like a Comfort Wherever You Go.

I think the calibre of my writing has improved greatly over the last 12 months, especially where flash fiction is concerned. I’m proud of these stories.

This year I’ve written 23 pieces of fiction, which is a bit less than one every fortnight. I think my poor output over the last three months has really dragged this figure down. So it goes. Still, ‘Bitterness The Star’ last Friday brought my overall total to 39 pieces (or 40 if you include Excerpts from Eastercon as two, or 39 again if you exclude the over-long Half-day of the Dead). Roll on F3 ’09.

Via PunkNews comes word that US hardcore/country act Scout’s Honor have split up. Apparently they toured Europe one year, but I never had the privilege of seeing them play. Despite that I was a big fan of the band – there was something a little bit special about the band. They weren’t great, but they were damn good, and I always hoped that whatever they did next would fulfil that potential. Looks like that’ll never happen.

The band will be traveling for its FINAL TOUR in March 2009. After six years of doing this band and fighting to keep it’s line-up filled, I’ve decided to call it a day. Around the release of 2006′s I Am The Dust, I was struggling to keep things afloat. In the course of one year, Scouts Honor played 150+ shows with four different drummers and two different bass players.

Finally, after moving to Chicago, I found a new Scouts Honor “family” in David Dobbs and Ernesto Castillo. We had written most of an album, toured Europe, and just had a blast joking around in the van. Well, in recent months, our drummer David returned to Arkansas for family reasons, greatly limiting his activity with a band based out of Chicago. He has decided to return to college, keeping him in Arkansas until 2010.

Meanwhile, our bassist Erny is focusing more and more on his career. I no longer have an interest in teaching new members to play old songs. It just doesn’t seem like Scouts Honor is a good use of my time anymore. So, I’ved called it.

Scouts Honor’s final tour will take us down to SXSW in Austin, TX and around the Midwest in March of 2009. We will be recording a final EP of new material during the tour to be released after the band’s breakup.

Howdy, readers. It’s been a while. I hope you enjoy this.

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Okay, that’s not quite how he phrased it. But here’s the money shot from George Monbiot’s interview with Faith Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency:

“In terms of non-Opec [countries outside the big oil producers' cartel],” [Faith Birol] replied, “we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. In terms of the global picture, assuming that Opec will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is, of course, not good news from a global-oil-supply point of view.”

As George Monbiot explains, this is quite a change from the previous official line of “everything will be fine. Here’s American Gladiators. Here’s 58 channels of it.”

Anyhow, have a read of the whole article. As with most of Monbiot’s writings these days, it’s chilling stuff.

My review of The Dark Wraith of Shannara - a graphic novel written by Terry Brooks, adapted by Robert Place Napton and drawn by Edwin David – appeared in Vector #257. If you’re a BSFA member you’ve probably already seen this issue. If you’re not, the best place to go to find out more about the journal is the official site, here.

I’ll probably post the review online in about a month’s time – I believe this is generally considered a courteous amount of time to wait before republishing.

I finally saw that billboard poster advertising butter – the one featuring cracked peroxide landfill site John Lydon. When I first heard about it I was annoyed, which I know is a little odd given his other semi-recent TV appearances, not to mention his little spat with Kele Okereke. Nonetheless I felt a little annoyed that someone still widely considered to be a punk icon (by non-punks, and perhaps by those who stopped paying attention to punk in ’81) was advertising butter marketed by a sizable British corporation.

That said the news wasn’t half as irksome as this:

“The Sex Pistols? We’ve done our bit this year…we’ll meet again in the new year and see what we want to do,” he explained.

“We were not recording a new album – I think that journalists are making it up, but you can never say never,” he added.

“We all got ideas between us. It’s a double-edged sword if you do it not good as the original, and if you don’t do it people want to know why – but it’s up to us. We are the masters of our own destiny.”

[Glenn Matlock to NME.com via XRRF.]

Hmm. Well. Punk moved on long ago; shame about this lot. How does that old joke go? “Punk’s not dead, it just smells that way”?

‘Nuff said, really.