My review of Clockwork Phoenix 4, edited by Mike Allen and containing stories by many awesome people, is live at Strange Horizons. Short version: I liked it a lot and think it is one of the major anthologies of the year. Also, I am now really looking forward to Nicole Kornher-Stace's upcoming-eventual novel, because her short story in this anthology is one of the best short stories I have read in the last few years.
I wanted to point this out because when was the last time anyone saw the U.S. government, any branch, go out of its way to do a moral and awesome thing without being asked, prompted to, or expected to by anybody? A gay married man in Florida is approved for a green card. The relevant bit, emphasis mine: "For the last two years, the agency [Immigration and Citizenship] has kept a list of same-sex couples whose green card petitions were denied, the officials said, anticipating that the Supreme Court would eventually weigh in on DOMA. Those denials will now be reversed without couples having to present new applications, if no other issues have arisen." Immigration is an agency that has done a lot of frankly terrible shit over the years and is still in the process of doing it. This is the best thing I have ever heard of them doing, period. I cried.
My friend Tili is trying to review all of the print nominees for this year's Hugos before Worldcon. True, that's not before the voting deadline, but it will still be interesting for those of us who haven't managed to read all of them, and her review of Captain Vorpatril's Alliance interests me by using romance novel reading protocols a lot more than most other reviews of that book I've seen.
Recent travel journal is still forthcoming, but I lost a thing I have a(n already-past) deadline on to the vagaries of vacation internet and I have to finish reconstructing it first.
A couple of very short reviews of recent media:
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman. The reason I keep reading Gaiman is that, although my opinion of him as a novelist is basically that he is terrible at it, he visibly improves with each novel he writes, so that I keep hoping he'll write something which justifies one-tenth of the hype. Also it is interesting watching somebody improve. Anansi Boys was a completely respectable cute little unambitious comic novel. This one is a completely respectable, quite ambitious non-comic novel! Points, Mr. Gaiman! It is the best novel he has yet written! Now if only it were doing one single thing not already accomplished by Peter S. Beagle's Tamsin. But hey, maybe the next one will be both this good and contain some elements I haven't seen elsewhere. This is what progress looks like. I await his next book with interest, assuming it is not related to American Gods, because that cosmology is too borked to sustain serious fiction. If he does another American Gods sequel, I await his book-after-next with interest.
Berberian Sound Studio (2012), dir. Peter Strickland, starring Toby Jones, Cosimo Fusco, Susanna Cappellaro, etcetera. I want to write a fuller review of this, but in case that doesn't happen for some reason: this is the best horror film I have seen since... uh, since![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sovay and I watched Kaneto Shindo's Kuroneko (1968), and the best recent horror movie I have seen since... wow, I'm not sure I've ever seen a horror film this good in the year it came out, I usually catch up to them later. SO GOOD. The premise is that the protagonist is a sound guy hired to work on what turns out to be an extremely nasty Italian giallo movie at some point in probably the late seventies, and what follows is an amazing exploration of the uses of sound in a movie, the intersections of art with ideals, and, and this is why I am flailing happily about this, a nuanced and detailed examination of gender both in horror fiction and in the horror fiction industry in a way which does not fall into any of the classic tropes and cliches on the subject and in fact explicitly brings them up in order to discard them. The fictional giallo (almost unshown, only described) is at the same time a piece of cheesy homage fun for those of us familiar with the genre, like Argento on even more id-fuel, hilarious and nostalgic, and so screamingly misogynistic that its content is violently distressing to everyone involved with it... except its director, its producer, and its writer. The horror in the best horror fiction is horror that is based on real life: the horror in Berberian Sound Studio follows you right off the screen. [Note: without even any explicitly shown sexual violence. Major points for that too.] Will also show you fascinating details about sound in film in an era slightly before our own in tech, and is full of ridiculously good acting.
I wanted to point this out because when was the last time anyone saw the U.S. government, any branch, go out of its way to do a moral and awesome thing without being asked, prompted to, or expected to by anybody? A gay married man in Florida is approved for a green card. The relevant bit, emphasis mine: "For the last two years, the agency [Immigration and Citizenship] has kept a list of same-sex couples whose green card petitions were denied, the officials said, anticipating that the Supreme Court would eventually weigh in on DOMA. Those denials will now be reversed without couples having to present new applications, if no other issues have arisen." Immigration is an agency that has done a lot of frankly terrible shit over the years and is still in the process of doing it. This is the best thing I have ever heard of them doing, period. I cried.
My friend Tili is trying to review all of the print nominees for this year's Hugos before Worldcon. True, that's not before the voting deadline, but it will still be interesting for those of us who haven't managed to read all of them, and her review of Captain Vorpatril's Alliance interests me by using romance novel reading protocols a lot more than most other reviews of that book I've seen.
Recent travel journal is still forthcoming, but I lost a thing I have a(n already-past) deadline on to the vagaries of vacation internet and I have to finish reconstructing it first.
A couple of very short reviews of recent media:
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman. The reason I keep reading Gaiman is that, although my opinion of him as a novelist is basically that he is terrible at it, he visibly improves with each novel he writes, so that I keep hoping he'll write something which justifies one-tenth of the hype. Also it is interesting watching somebody improve. Anansi Boys was a completely respectable cute little unambitious comic novel. This one is a completely respectable, quite ambitious non-comic novel! Points, Mr. Gaiman! It is the best novel he has yet written! Now if only it were doing one single thing not already accomplished by Peter S. Beagle's Tamsin. But hey, maybe the next one will be both this good and contain some elements I haven't seen elsewhere. This is what progress looks like. I await his next book with interest, assuming it is not related to American Gods, because that cosmology is too borked to sustain serious fiction. If he does another American Gods sequel, I await his book-after-next with interest.
Berberian Sound Studio (2012), dir. Peter Strickland, starring Toby Jones, Cosimo Fusco, Susanna Cappellaro, etcetera. I want to write a fuller review of this, but in case that doesn't happen for some reason: this is the best horror film I have seen since... uh, since
sovay and I watched Kaneto Shindo's Kuroneko (1968), and the best recent horror movie I have seen since... wow, I'm not sure I've ever seen a horror film this good in the year it came out, I usually catch up to them later. SO GOOD. The premise is that the protagonist is a sound guy hired to work on what turns out to be an extremely nasty Italian giallo movie at some point in probably the late seventies, and what follows is an amazing exploration of the uses of sound in a movie, the intersections of art with ideals, and, and this is why I am flailing happily about this, a nuanced and detailed examination of gender both in horror fiction and in the horror fiction industry in a way which does not fall into any of the classic tropes and cliches on the subject and in fact explicitly brings them up in order to discard them. The fictional giallo (almost unshown, only described) is at the same time a piece of cheesy homage fun for those of us familiar with the genre, like Argento on even more id-fuel, hilarious and nostalgic, and so screamingly misogynistic that its content is violently distressing to everyone involved with it... except its director, its producer, and its writer. The horror in the best horror fiction is horror that is based on real life: the horror in Berberian Sound Studio follows you right off the screen. [Note: without even any explicitly shown sexual violence. Major points for that too.] Will also show you fascinating details about sound in film in an era slightly before our own in tech, and is full of ridiculously good acting.
