Rumpus columnist Ryan Boudinot will be all over San Francisco this week, accompanied by his newly released novel Blueprints of the Afterlife. There are two events to choose from, or double up on. The first is Wednesday, January 25th at Booksmith. And the second is Saturday, January 28th at SF in SF.

Today’s HTML Giant interview with Rumpus columnist Ryan Boudinot coincides with the official release of his new novel Blueprints of the Afterlife. Discussion veers toward the book after Boudinot reflects on the interview process and his ambivalence toward the promotional side of publishing.

“Even the best reading I’ve ever done is nowhere near those moments alone with my work, when it’s going well, when I discover something about a character that’s been eluding me for months. At the same time, I want to reiterate that a lot of the promotion stuff is fun. It definitely is. But nowhere near the soul transformative experience of writing itself.”

The January 3rd release date for Rumpus columnist Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife is fast approaching. i09 interviewed Boudinot about the post apocalyptic novel a while back, and now they have previewed an entire chapter. Here’s a snippet:

“An iron stairwell led to a basement. The stairs opened into a dim, low-ceilinged space that smelled of opium smoke and industrial-grade lubricants. A soldier elbowed past them on his way out, zipping his fly. The 83rd turned on their beams and swept the floor with light. The room appeared littered with dissected mannequins. An arm crawled out of their way and hid under a sofa as they advanced. They followed the sound of sex groans to a curtained alcove.”

Last year my friend Tom Nissley appeared on Jeopardy!, winning eight straight games, which allowed him to quit his job as a Books editor at Amazon …more

Rumpus columnist/ writer, Ryan Boudinot is interviewed by Steve Barker on episode 1 of his podcast “Ordinary Madness,” in which he talks about his new book Blueprints of the Afterlife, which sprawls two different time periods—one being the distant, post-apocalyptic future. Hear about it! (And like it on facebook for updates.)

Last week for my Hugo House class on using experimental films as writing prompts we spent 88 glorious minutes with House, the 1977 Japanese haunted pajama party freak-out directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. This week we puzzled ourselves with three stop-motion animated shorts. …more

Session four of my six-part class on using experimental films as writing prompts commenced last night at Richard Hugo House.

In previous weeks we viewed films by Buñuel, Brakhage, and Anger, moving westward from Spain to Colorado to Los Angeles. This week we hopped across the Pacific to Japan, where we encountered Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, quite possibly the most psychedelic movie ever to come out of Asia. This week I came prepared. I brought my students beer. …more

Are there some films you have to take drugs to enjoy? I asked this question toward the end of this week’s session of the class on experimental films I’m teaching at Richard Hugo House, after spending two hours with the films of Kenneth Anger. …more

I’m teaching a class at Richard Hugo House in which we look at experimental films as writing prompts. I’ve always wanted to teach a film class, and marrying writing exercises to viewings of films seemed like a good way to shoehorn this desire into a nonprofit literary arts center. There are aspects of cinema that overlap with fiction (narrative, obviously), but I’m becoming more interested in cinema’s points of divergence from fiction, the points at which it achieves something beyond narrative, where it leaps into a realm that can only be expressed visually.

What better place to start than Un Chien Andalou? …more

What’s going on with Michel Gondry’s career these days? Well, this, for starters… …more

You want to watch an on-demand movie with your wife, something funny, something in which you can become invested in the characters’ problems, something from the “New Arrivals” section, and you keep scrolling back to It’s Complicated, a film starring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, and you hate yourself a little bit for even considering it, but …more

On New Year’s Day this year I removed all the bookmarks from my Firefox bookmarks bar. When I mentioned to a couple friends that my resolution was to lay off the political blogs, I got variations on the same response: Yeah, that’s a pretty popular resolution right now. My resolution hasn’t worked out all that well; instead of clicking links I simply type andrewsullivan.com into my browser window to maintain my daily outrage level. I worry that I’m addicted to incredulity, that for some twisted reason I need to seek out the tawdriest filth erupting from the mouths of the Limbaughs and Becks and Palins of the world in order to define myself in opposition. …more

My family was recently out of town for a five days, leaving me home alone with over 800 pages (no exaggeration) of student work to read and comment upon. My reward for getting through a day of writing about free indirect style and character arcs was to watch a lot of movies, both in the theater and at home, cranked up loud on the home system and with a fuckin’ beer in my hand. Here’s how those five days went.

Saturday:
Inglourious Basterds. By now you’ve probably read lots of commentary on Tarantino’s latest. My two cents is that I could listen to those characters talk all night. It felt like a 5-hour movie in a 2 1/2 hour movie’s body and I wanted it to go on and on. A few weeks ago I happened upon a Sirius/XM radio broadcast in which Tarantino guest-deejayed. He played songs that he’d listened to while making Basterds. Here’s the complete set list.

Wu Tang Clan, “The Rulez”
KT Tunstall, “Hold On”
Bob Dylan, “Political World”
Barbra Streisand, “Stony End”
Robin McNamara, “Lay A Little Lovin’ On Me”
Sir Douglas Quintet, “Mendocino”
David Bowie, “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” – from Bowie’s Greatest Hits (not Cat People Sdtrk)
Jay Z, “S. Carter”
Roy Orbison, “There Won’t Be Many Coming Home”
Jason Mraz, “I’m Yours (Acoustic)”
Maroon 5, “Wake Up Call”
Steve Poltz, “Waterfalls”
Britney Spears, “My Prerogative”

I happened to tune in at the end of the Roy Orbison tune. I can respect people who like Roy Orbison, though to me he was always little more than an immobile wax dummy who occasionally purred. Wow, rock and roll, man. As someone who lived off the Pulp Fiction soundtrack for years, I am, like a lot of people I suppose, inclined to give Quentin Tarantino the benefit of the doubt when it comes to music. But there’s really no other way to say what I felt except that I thought his playlist sucked. That “Waterfalls” song is an acoustic cover of the TLC hit from the mid-nineties. I’m going to stop writing about this now because it’s starting to make me upset.

Sunday:

Waltz with Bashir. Animation is a great medium in which to explore the elasticity of memory. And even though both Basterds and Bashir are both about war, I think it’s fair to say that only the former one is a cartoon. Waltz with Bashir was a sobering plunge into repressed memories of war, and of the strange juxtapositions of cultures in wartime. Amid animated sequences of bombings and ambushes, the voice of John Lydon suddenly erupted on the soundtrack, singing “This Is Not a Love Song” from his PiL days.

Paprika. Another animated feature, this one from director Satoshi Kon, based on a story by–I didn’t realize this upon renting it–Yasutaka Tsutsui, whose story collection Salmonella Men on Planet Porno I picked up not long ago. While Bashir uses animation to illustrate untrustworthy memories, Paprika seeks to do the same with dreams. There’s so much crammed into the frame with this film, my favorite sequences being a procession of animals and objects marching along through various characters’ subconscious minds.

Monday:
The Holy Mountain, by Alejandro Jodorowsky. I’ve blogged about this film before, and about Jodorowsky in general. For my second viewing of this film I invited my old friend Nate over. We drank Corona and tequila and kept an armchair commentary going through the Chilean auteur’s steady unveiling of wonders. I was impressed again by how ballsy the film is. In my head I’ve been attempting to reverse engineer the directions Jodorowsky must have given his crew. Like, “I want the amputees dressed like Roman soldiers to assemble in the Jesus factory.” Or, “Let’s make sure each toad has a firecracker under it.” Or, “Let’s get some climbing gear for the prostitute and her chimpanzee.”

Tuesday: Death Proof, by Quentin Tarantino. This was the only Tarantino film I hadn’t seen. So I watched it. It was cool, whatever. Great car chase at the end, one of the best I think I’ve ever seen. The bonus features are worth checking out, particularly the featurettes on the stunts and those who performed them.

Wednesday: A Scanner Darkly. My animation streak continued with Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s paranoid drug novel. I think this movie helped me figure out what the problem is with Keanu Reeves. In any movie in which he’s required to get all fired up he ends up looking ridiculous. He is not an actor made for big, hysterical speeches. That actor would be John Malkovich. What Keanu does best is simmer and lope through a movie. I’m thinking of his great performance as Scott Fortune in My Own Private Idaho, which he’s never matched in my book.

Man on Wire: My five-day movie binge came to an end with this documentary about Phillipe Petit, that French dude who crossed the chasm between the World Trade Center towers on a tight rope. Completely riveting and unexpectedly emotional, and the perfect note with which to end five days of student fiction and movies.

Years ago I happened upon a series of arresting images on cable. There was a young Mick Jagger cavorting in a bath tub with two svelte beauties. A child wearing a fake mustache. A still image of Jorge Luis Borges rising out of a gunshot wound to the head. …more

Short fiction is often spoken of in terms of genre, a genre of ephemeral writing that is erased from the mind as quickly as it was most likely written. But the fallacy in this is that genre presupposes a style and tendency. But short fiction doesn’t necessarily “tend” the way romance tends toward the quest, the division and reunification of lovers, and/or an interest in the occult. …more

I Remember

Last night I met up with some of my former Amazon colleagues, guys who, like me, served tours of duty on the DVD team, to watch Fellini’s Amarcord at Siff Cinema. The faces, rumps, busts, and girths of the cast jiggled, jumped, and danced. Fantasies and art direction cast their vaudevillian spell. The movie is all about the auteur’s nostalgia for the events of his childhood in 1930s, Fascist Italy, but I read film more as an evocation of a feeling of a place. Which is why my thoughts this morning were drawn to memories of floods, migrant workers, dusty fields, forests, gnarled apple trees, and livestock. By offering the feast of his own childhood, Fellini made me hungry to remember my own.

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Suck it.

Hey tweens who enjoy a little abstinence-only subtext thrown in with your vampire movies: go out and get a load of the non-virginal variety in Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. This was one of the Maddin movies I’ve been saving. It’s the Canadian director’s collaboration with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Which means that in addition to bared fangs there is DANCING. I have to say this wasn’t one of my favorite Maddin films. While the art direction made its nods to German Expressionism, Maddin’s presence only really became obvious in the editing–the droll title cards, a sequence of blood spreading across a map of Europe, …more

Your Weekend Popcorn Recipe

My brother-in-law Chad Johnson’s popcorn recipe is the best. I’ve enjoyed it at his and my sister-in-law’s place over the years while watching Pulp Fiction and during their rigorously opinionated James Bond sessions. I don’t know if he got the recipe from somewhere else, but in our house my son calls it “Uncle Chaddie Popcorn.”

When I met Chad years ago, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a dreadlocked George H.W. Bush under the words “The Dreaded Republican.” His popcorn is equally leftist. If you’re the kind of person who reads Naomi Klein and don’t shave your nether regions, this is the popcorn for you.

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