me and my monkey
12/13/2004 @ 4:34 pm Comments (32)surveying the boards over at the velvet, sometimes I suffer the uneasy feeling that I have 200 plus people crashed on my living room floor and there’s no beer left in my fridge. the bathroom is a blackhole of introspection, sucking its victims into the bowels of my rented house. there are only two controllers for the playstation and my DVD collection is sorely lacking and I have an irrational compulsion to make sure nobody gets bored.. and sometimes I imagine that the internet is the zoo, and everyman’s personal website is the monkey house, where the chimpanzees scream and flail around and swing from one branch to another and perform somersaults in midair, and eventually they run out of tricks and resort to public urination and contemplative ass-scratching.. always tempting. instead I’ll take a break for the holidays and devote my energy to the family and the new book and come back with my eyes on the prize after the new year.
silent night, holy night.
-wcb
slut of books
12/8/2004 @ 12:37 am Comments (9)this may well be my favorite magazine name of all time.. as with meat served on a stick it comes very much to the point and is meaningful on multiple levels. and conjures the sexy librarian I fantasized about in the 7th grade, nervous and sweating.. bookslut. it has such a cheerful don’t fuck with me ring to it. I can’t think of a better name for a magazine about books and writers and people who like books and writers. seriously, if I were starting such a magazine, the wind would be sucked right out of my sails. it would be like inventing the cock ring and discovering that the name cock ring was already taken by some other asshole. (sorry, Mom. I couldn’t help it.) and speaking of meat on a stick.. the guy who invented the corndog was no doubt a genius, but the guy who decided to put the corndog on a stick is the fucking man. anyway I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for the December issue of the slut of books by geoffrey goodwin. not much to say about the slut except it was an enjoyable and painless procedure. although an interesting and unforeseen flap did arise over a benign reference I made to jeff buckley, a conversation which may be pursued in the Velvet. the bookslut interview in question hovers in the ether like a plum, waiting to be eaten.
seek and destroy.
-wcb
the cult forever
12/3/2004 @ 11:24 am Comments (21)immersed these past few weeks in two parallel and strangely similar worlds, one the fever dream and blue light interludes of midnight baby survival, the other the self hypnosis and surfacing delirium of writing at full throttle. I have taken to bringing my laptop to bed with me in an attempt to swim from one world to the other and back. the reason I mention it, I haven’t had much else on my mind and I wanted to allow Lucia’s eulogy time to breathe, to give it the respect it deserved atop the log. now I want to change gears and talk about the rumblings going on over at the Cult, specifically that what began as a chuck palahniuk fan site has grown into a beast to be reckoned with, a pop culture force that so far has encountered no limits, will evolve into a pay site early next year, meaning that members will be asked to pay a small monthly subscriber fee to romp there. some areas of the site will remain free, I’m told, but the prime time stuff will be subscriber only. this is a move that was a long time coming, and one that I wholeheartedly and unconditionally support. Dennis Widmyer- who created the site in six days and rested on the seventh- has been the webmaster and chuck guru and ringleader of the demented Chrismas elves who keep the place up and running for years now, and he has worked his ass off in what can only be called a labor of love and lust, offering workshops and interviews and author features and a book club and labarynthine discussion forums and more. And miracle of miracles, so far the site has been free to one and all. when Dennis first told me of the move, I told him I would have done it two years ago, maybe sooner. think about it- comparisons being rancid, Nerve and suicide girls, two of my favorite subscriber sites, were both free to the masses for about five minutes, and the only thing those sites have got that the Cult does not is naked girls. and knowing Dennis, you never know. I wouldn’t put it past him to one day install a special curtained-off area of meat puppets and dreamweavers for adults only within the Cult. someone asked the other day if the Velvet would likewise start charging at the door, and the answer is no. I would probably be horrified if we ever grew massive enough to warrant such a move. But I have given some thought to rounding up Craig Clevenger and Joey Goebel and disturbed editors like Walsh and Jason the Redeemer, and other individuals I enjoy drinking the Kool-Aid with, and starting some sort of online collective high and low art & lit zombie porn mag that would be the magazine of your most graphic dreams and nightmares, and for such a heavenly place there would surely be a cover charge. but I don’t expect to begin construction anytime soon. for now and forever, the next best thing is the Cult.
sound off, people.
-wcb