The Cultural Gutter

taking trash seriously

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." -- Oscar Wilde

High Point Down Under

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Canadians and Australians tend to go together well. Our affinity makes sense: we have so much in common. We both have a lot of British in our backgrounds. We both live on the edges of our very large countries. And our climates are quite extreme (although in opposite directions). Plus there’s all that beer drinking. [...]

Camera Obscura

Watch the first 3 episodes of Camera Obscura, a webseries about a woman who captures demons with her grandfather’s specially-altered camera. (Also, the grandfather? Played by Jack Klugman).

AX: An Edged Collection

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There are reasons I left alternative comics for superheroes and there are reasons I keep going back. They each have their wonder and joy; they each have their irritating and sadly heartbreaking points. Nothing’s perfect, not Superman, not Jimmy Corrigan. But there is a way to find comics that you love and avoid ones that [...]

Genre on TV: Fantasy, Zombies

HBO has a teaser up for George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones.  Meanwhile, AMC has a clip up of actors learning to act like zombies for its upcoming The Walking Dead, based on Robert Kirkman’s comic.

Pencak Silat!

In Merantau a young Minangkabau man goes to Jakarta, where he uses pencak silat for the power of good.

Nak Prok’s Shadow

Wise Kwai reviews, Shadow of the Naga / Nak Prok, and talks a little about the film’s legal problems and the fear of a Buddhist backlash.

Good Things Gro-o-ow in To-ron-to

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Right. So you’ve joined the RWA, and are enjoying the information and advocacy your membership entitles you to. But National’s a long way off, and RWA headquarters is in Texas, and you’re starting to get a little lonely. So what do you do? You join your local chapter. Where I live, that means the Toronto [...]

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  • Of Note Elsewhere

    “It’s easier to tell the same stories everyone else does. There’s no particular shame in it.

    It’s just that it’s lazy, which is just about the worst possible thing a spec fic writer can be.

    Oh, and it’s not true.”

    Kameron Hurley writes about lazy writing, cannibal llamas, female soldiers, and women here. (Thanks, James!)

    ~

    Patton Oswalt’s multi-franchise super-movie described in his Star Wars filibuster from Parks and Recreation, animated.

    ~

    Corrigan Vaughan writes an open letter to “Fans of Geek Things“: “I appreciate that you think I have a nice rack and that some of you even find my friends and I to be pretty. That’s very kind. I’m not, however, super in love with the fact that having a rack at all seems to preclude me from being considered a ‘real’ fan.”

    ~

    The Black Girl Nerds Podcast discusses Black girls and women in the Heavy Metal industry with author and journalist Laina Dawes and Ursula “She-Wolf” Parson from Hear Evil News.

    ~

    The Hollywood Reporter interviews director Takashi Miike about his new film, Shield of Straw: ” In Japan now, films are very safe. When I was young and went to old cinemas, they had a distinctive feel, an adult smell about them. As you got in your seat and the lights went down, there was a feeling of excitement: What if the film is scarier than I thought it’s going to be? You’re taken into that world. Nowadays, you can sit in the theater and know it’s going to be safe. That’s good for business, but not for filmmaking.”

    ~

    The Atlantic profiles Spectral Motion, creators of monsters, “effects, and other mechanical grotesqueries that have since become household nightmares, if not names.”

    ~

  • The Book!

    From ETC Press

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