The Unimportance of Being Earnest

[In 2004, seventeen years and six PCs ago, I pitched to the Christian website Ship of Fools a long form article about the upcoming Christian Union mission. I had thought it lost – it’s no longer online and I had long ago lost the file in the move from one machine to the next. But recently, I found a full printout of it in a drawer. This piece was written a long time ago, and it’s fair to say that I’m a much better writer than this now. It’s also fair to say that the students involved are now in their mid to late thirties, and the current crop of students were toddlers when this happened. We’re literally a generation down the line and, as you should hope was the case, as I’ve gotten older I’ve known better than to continue to mess with student politics. I am out of touch. I should be.

So how relevant is this piece now? Probably not very relevant at all. I’m keeping it because this was an important moment for me, professionally and personally. It’s part of my story.

If the practices of UCCF are anything to go by they have probably caught up by now with the cultural milieu as it was in 2004. They’ll hit relevance for 2021 sometime in the mid 2030s, I expect. I don’t know how much has changed. But certainly, the influence of evangelicalism was in a campus freefall in 2004 and I cannot see how that could have been reversed.

When I wrote this, I was not to know that the result of my weird week on the mission coalface would be to be publicly denounced and privately excommunicated by representatives of a national Christian organisation, and for the church I then attended to ban me from working with students. Did I deserve that? I think you should be the judge of that.

The one thing I think I learned from this experience is that you can’t ever expect to do this type of journalism and get an honest result. You know how you can’t observe quantum phenomena without changing the state of the thing you’re observing? Journalism is like that. It never gives you an unbiased view. I’ve annotated this piece to put it in context and perhaps think about what’s changed in the last 17 years.]

[Repost] A letter from Mr Caspar

(A repost from last year. With reference to Matthew 2: 1-18.)

Cults, Politics and the 2020 Election

I know I've been quiet lately. It's been a pretty mad few months, and hoepfully normal service, inasmuch as anything you could call normal, should be resuming imminently. 

In the meantime, here's a video. My close pal Avril Korman is the only person I know who has so far correctly called every development of the American election. She's been doing videos about the process on Facebook which have been getting a ton of and the other day was asked about why some of the political groups currently active in the US seem like cults. She tagged me in the ensuing discussion, and we agreed to talk about it on camera.

First principles for the magician

This is a repost of a piece I wrote in August 2016, while I was in the midst of a breakdown. I had forgotten I'd written it. Back then, every day was an aching, gnawing ordeal. Someone mentioned it today, and told me that they come back to it often.

We would see ourselves as the secret witnesses of the world, you and I, but that would be to overstate our importance; we live in secret, inasmuch as everyone does. And we pay our attention to the moment. We claim no special status beyond the simple fact that we are magicians.

Template

(Recently rediscovered in the archive. memory of too many open mic poetry nights.) 

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(adverb) (participle) (adjective) (adjective) (noun)
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(thought-provoking reversal in final line)

On the abuses of the sincere

I was talking to a close friend last night about people she's seen doing literal simony, because that's the sort of thing we talk about, and it moved on to how sincerity is not a barrier to abuse.

So, the famous psychic I'm writing about who got caught cheating his phenomena (and kept getting caught cheating) is particularly interesting, for example, because he made a point of never earning a penny for his work (he made his actual living from owning a grocer's shop, what my American friends would call a general store), and the more interesting question becomes why? Why would you do that? Somehow it moves to a place where fraud comes from motivations we don't expect or assume.

We Don't Go Back #91: Folk Horror at Fractured Visions

I was lucky enough to have an invite to once again represent Miskatonic Institute at the Fractured Visions Festival in Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff this October and got the chance to stick around for a couple of the day's showings. I was glad of that, it provided a decent folk horror double bill, with one film I'd been looking forward to seeing for a while and one I'd never heard of, and it made for an enjoyable few hours' viewing. On to Tumbbad and Hanna's Homecoming, then, two films that had little in common save their venue.

Portuguese Short Films at MotelX

(That's me at the closing ceremony with Raquel Freire.)

In September 2019, I was asked to represent Kier-La Janisse and the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies at the 13th MotelX Horror Film Festival. There, I met a load of great people, and got to interview Hereditary/Midsommar director Ari Aster about folk horror on the big stage at Lisbon's Cinema São Jorge. I was also asked to take on the responsibility of being part of the jury for this year's short horror film competition. MotelX is part of the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation, and each year awards two Méliès d'Argent prizes, named for Europe's father of fantastic film, George Méliès. One is for short Portuguese film, one for features. Aside from a cash prize and a trophy, the winner gets to compete for the Méliès d'Or, alongside the winners of other festivals across Europe. It's a big deal, and it was a highlight of my career so far to be part of the team entrusted with the decision.

Don't do that, Rupert

(I just needed a picture of an exceptionable Rupert. Sorry.) 

I saw a review of a poetry book this morning, which I'm not going to link, and I mean I'm not a good poet and I don't know much about poetry, but here's the thing, this was a little book by no one you'd heard of, from a tiny publisher, and the guy (from the name, 95% sure it was a white guy, English, and from the writing, 95% sure he's straight) who reviewed it was utterly scathing, and not even in any methodical way. He was just mean, picking out a couple of terrible lines without giving you any idea of the book beyond "this has some bad lines in it".

And OK, maybe I'd read those lines too and go, "ouch" – and the lines he singled out were indeed pretty ouch – but seriously, Rupert? What does it achieve?

You know I write about film, right? And you know I'm not afraid to say bad things about a film if I think it's bad? But the thing is, sometimes I get sent movies that were made by first time directors and which cost like 25p and I don't think it's fair to rag on those. Like, there are things you can say, but there's punching down and punching up.

There's a qualitative difference to saying, for instance, "This piece will spoil plot points, but to be honest nothing will ruin things for you quite as much as actually watching the film,"* about a multimillion buck blockbuster to saying that about a self funded folk horror short made in a back yard in Glasgow.

Pointing out that a film about monsters that cost gazillions to make, made gazillions in the box office and has gazillions of fans is bad is not going to hurt anyone. They're big enough to take it. It's like a BB bullet shot at, well, at Godzilla. Ruthlessly dumping on the production values of a film that can't afford to look like a Hollywood blockbuster because the cash was scraped together from a mid-range Kickstarter, or squashing like a bug the aspirations of a first time scriptwriter, or tearing out the bad lines of someone's small press poetry collection?

The word for that is not "criticism". The word for that is "bullying". When, like me, you're just someone with a blog, OK, you can feel like you're on the bottom of the tree too, but the role of the critic is never really just to say whether something is good or not anyway.

And there's an intellectual discipline in writing a redemptive reading of a thing. People seem to think that it is somehow more clever to be negative about stuff. That's false. To find reasons to see the value in things is often more difficult and challenging (and trust me in this: I watched Hellraiser: Hellseeker last night, or Hellraiser 6 to you), and much, much more worthwhile.

And all the more important when your subject isn't, for whatever reason, strong enough to take a hit, even if it's just from some random with a blog.
___

*Yes, I was pleased with myself for writing that. And yes, I do understand that makes me a bit of a dick. And no, I don't care.

Neopagans, Neoreactionaries and Folk Horror

We know that the neofolk movement has a problem with the far right; we know that paganism, specifically white paganism, has also long had a problem with the far right. Neither of these things are things I’m going to write about much. Many more interesting and proficient and knowledgeable people than me have tackled those things.

But they’re related to Folk Horror fandom, and it has a problem with the far right too. So this is about that problem, and about how the (specifically) pagan far right problem intersects with that.

The breadth in our hearts

(For Gela and Frances, on their wedding, 29/6/19)

The thing that is most magical of all
Is that after having spent so long
In worlds of the heart
Where everything is narrow –
Where our horizons are constrained –
Where all the spaces that we had to live in
Are defined by other people's boundaries –
The thing that is most magical of all
Is that within you, within me, within us
There is a breadth of love that covers everything,
A space to be ourselves;
A space to take each other on.
In you and I, there is a breadth in our hearts
Enough to make a hope, a life, a family
In a shape that we have chosen,
A space for us to be only, forever ourselves.

Why I Have Not Been Seen Upstairs Recently

Since you broke your leg, they said,
We became aware of the missing stair
And it is important to make sure you know
That from now on everyone will remember
To take care to step over the missing stair.
Obviously, it would be too expensive to fix,
And we do not want anyone to think that
We think any less of them because
They have let their house go to ruin
From lack of care because of one missing stair.
By the way, they said,
We haven't seen you upstairs recently.
Is everything OK?

Tabletop games as fanworks

(This piece was written for the compilation In Other Words, a collection of essays on fanfiction compiled by my friend Eve Moriarty) 

Torvald the Contradictory of the Nihilists Militant.

I have an ambivalent relationship with role-playing games. There's something disreputable about them, and certainly having written for them cannot be said to have been beneficial to my career. But nonetheless I cannot leave them behind.

The act of playing a role is revolutionary in a lot of ways, and for me it can be dangerous, even self-revelatory. Pretend games and role-playing are an important part of child development, one of the ways that children work out who they are, who they want to be. Role-playing games (and for the sake of this piece, I'm writing about the tabletop variety, although entire books could be written about venerable online games like Second Life, World of Warcraft, EVE Online and so on) extend that in a controlled, directed way, often with complex and ever expanding rulesets. They allow us to continue to explore these things into adulthood. I know I'm not alone in having in the past tentatively explored my queerness and my gender identity through role-playing.

Final Frames

The Fourth Annual Final Frame Horror Short Film Competition – StokerCon, Grand Rapids MI, 2019

Knock Knock.

If I've been quiet this last month, it's because I've been fortunate enough to go to StokerCon 2019. As I expected, I did not win the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction, that was Johnson and Mynhardt's It's Alive: Bringing Your Nightmares to Life, which I knew was going to win the moment I saw it on the preliminary ballot. This is OK. I got to meet Eugene Johnson and shake his hand, and the morning after a gentleman called Scott Edelman gave me a Bram Stoker Runner Up loyalty card, which makes me giggle like an idiot every time I see it. Getting a nomination for a self-published collection of blog posts that doesn't pretend any authority is massive anyway. I'm properly chuffed.

I could write at length about StokerCon and the basic warmth of the event, the very real family feel it had, but it would be self-congratulatory. Suffice to say that it was a good time, and I made a number of connections I hope to keep alive going forward.

In the meantime though, the one part of StokerCon I do want to talk about is the film contest. Because I would, obviously.

Balloted

Last year, I was told by a friend that he'd submitted We Don't Go Back to the Recommended Reading list for the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards. I wasn't sure what that meant. So I checked it out.

Haunted Britain

A catalogue of hauntings from the landscapes of my life, 1987–2002.

A Message for a Young Game Writer

This was originally posted 28th May 2017, the day after the Swansea Comics and Gaming Convention last year. This year's is happening this coming Saturday (5th May), where I'm going to be giving the panel on Finding Your Identity in RPGs. I never found out if this message reached its recipient. 

Yesterday I was once again fortunate enough to be present at the Swansea Comics and Gaming Convention. It was a lovely, friendly event, and Simon, Adam and Ricky ran a supportive, active and helpful team. Well done, guys. As I had last year, I gave a panel (inasmuch as it counts as a panel when you're the only one doing it) about first principles of rpg design. It was well attended and full of people who wanted to engage and participate. Afterwards, I got to have a lot of conversations with people who had really exciting ideas and got to sell a bunch of books too, which was nice.

Some time afterwards, though, as the event wound down, a young man approached me and handed me a note. He explained that his friend was at my panel and had wanted to ask some questions, but lacked the confidence to ask me face to face, and he asked me if I would write some answers for his friend. It was a lovely note and the questions were thoughtful, so I briefly dashed off a reply, but of course you never answer the way you want to, and some of the questions my anonymous audience member asked deserved better, fuller answers. I was moved by the note I received, and if you read on, you might understand why.

Chariot II

So, once the book versions of We Don't Go Back, On a Thousand Walls and Cult Cinema are finished, I'm going to do a second edition of Chariot.

Funny thing about Chariot. I wrote it nearly three years ago now, I crowdfunded it, I laid it out, and I played it with my friends for a while, and then I put it away and did some other stuff. And you do, that's what you do, isn't it? You put it to one side.

And about eighteen months after I last looked at it, I looked at it again. And it's full of typos, which it would be, because no matter how good you are at proofreading, you don't proofread your own work; and some of the art I'm still happy with, in an outsider art sort of way, and some of it I'm less happy with; and some of the rules need to be explained more clearly and given better examples. I came up with a better way to do the card mechanics.

But for all that, I read this, and I thought, by God, this is good.

Cult Cinema, Appendix: God only knows what you're missing

See the Beginning Stages of... The Polyphonic Spree (2004)

1. So over the last week or two I've written about Tetsuo, Salò, Eyes Without a Face and The Skin I Live In. It's time to have a close watch of something that isn't traumatic, something easier, at least in some ways. Let's find something more affirming.

2. I know that I said I wasn't going to do documentary films in Cult Cinema. And I'm not. But a concert film, that's a slightly different matter, and this concert film in particular, that's different, too. Go with me here.

Ways I have been lied to

Ways I have been lied to include but are by no means limited to the following: