That people are out there tracking down strange, amazing, otherwise-impossible-to-find things and showing them to the world is probably what I love most about living in the internet age. But what was new in 2011 for me was that much of the music that thrilled me this year reached me in the form of compilations.

Independent music suppliers Boomkat are brilliant at finding and recommending music. Their compilation site 14Tracks has been an absolute highlight of my year…

Every week brings a new themed selection – always interesting, sometimes nothing short of stunning. If you’ve time to spare (warning! it’s addictive!) check out the 14Tracks back catalogue: it’s full of treasure. Examples? Concrete Phantoms collects jaw-dropping experimental music from back when sampling was done by splicing tape: I’d read about this music but had no idea how to go about hearing it, so I was (and continue to be) astonished and delighted by that one. Other 14Tracks favourites of mine include the teeth-whiteningly awesome industrial racket of No Hat, No Boots = No Job, and whenever I want to feel like I’m in a seedy Italian horror movie – which is often – A Giallo Thriller has me covered.

Despite the blow of losing most of their stock in a warehouse fire during the looting in the UK back in August, self-styled ‘B-Music Specialists’ Finders Keepers Records continued to dazzle me this year. I already loved their perfectly-preserved pick of ’60s/’70s Persian pop, Pomegranates, and lots of other musical goodies from them besides. But then came this…

Bollywood Bloodbath is blinding. That’s all I’m going to say. Hit this link and hear for yourself.

My third and final compilation recommendation comes in the form of a book: Seasons They Change, by Jeanette Leech…

With the passion of a fan – but also with the precision of someone determined to do right by its creators – this book introduced me to a world of great music that I’d known next to nothing about. New favourites for me now found through Seasons They Change include this, and this, and this! For further details on this excellent book and a link to an accompanying Spotify playlist by the author, click here.

What amazing music am I going to hear for the first time in 2012? Here’s looking forward to finding out. Hee hee hee!

Sam

This picture was inspired by a very early poem concocted as a result of playing the Word & Question game with my old school and silly co-writing mate Val (Valerie Crook then, Valeria Cass Bell now).

Here’s how the game works. Everyone writes a word on a bit of paper. Any word. The sillier, the better. Fold over the paper and pass it along – or throw them all in a pile and randomly pick up another. Then everyone writes a question. Again, daft is good.

Then – throw in a pile again. Randomly pick out. Now you must write a poem including the word and answering the question. WARNING: the subsequent readings out usually result in someone choking on their egg nog.

The example from my teenage days is this – Word and Question set by Val: Bilberry. Has your hamster sharpened all the green pencils yet?  And my poetic response? Get ready for Byronesque greatness now…

Well, he’s trying very hard to get the pencils sharp

And his heart’s not really in it; he’d rather play his harp

But I put him in a cornflake packet with nothing but some nuts

I gave him one and said, ‘Now hack it – and none of your ifs and buts’

So he’s trying very hard now, very

Da da da da da, bilberry

(I think I was having an off day.)

OK – want to have a go? I’ll start you off. The word is Fossick and the question is Do you have one of those in green with spots on?  I wait with extreme excitement for your poems!  (I don’t get out much.)

I might fault the extra ‘i’ in ‘Moriarty’ but with the rest I only heartily concur: it may well be that behind Chuck Norris‘ beard there is another fist, but in terms of miles covered and enemies suavely bested Peter Cushing is still the greatest.

In another change from the Japan-related nature of my blog posts lately here’s In Chambers, an awesomely sinister short film by promising Norwegian director Aleksander Nordaas. I saw it on my favourite film website, Twitch. It’s been festering in my brain ever since.

More soon,

Sam

LOVELY!

NOT.

Isn’t he adorable? This is a kelpie. Kelpies live in lochs and rivers in Scotland, are very beautiful horses, and are terribly friendly. A kelpie will always be happy to help, a bit like an assistant in B&Q, but with teeth.

Well, you can always trust a B&Q assistant, but NEVER get on a kelpie. You can’t get off. And once you’re on, a kelpie will execute a sudden flip to the Dark Side, gallop into the loch with you, and eat you.

Except for your liver. They don’t like liver. Your liver will float to the loch’s edge, where the local farmer will find it and pick it up, shaking his head sadly, and musing on the naivety of tourists.

Allegedly, according to my trusty Myth Book, this legend came about because of a form of waterweed that lives in lochs; apparently, when it’s saturated, it looks exactly like a human liver. This is self-evidently VisitScotland spin, because it isn’t weed, it’s liver.

I love kelpies. Not in the flesh, obviously. I get enough leftover internal organs from my cats each morning. But I always wanted to get them into a story, so I’ve made them the warhorses of the Sithe in my Rebel Angels series. After all, you can’t beat a warhorse that is even happier to kill your enemies than you are.

They are also enormously useful for scaring your disobedient children away from dangerous water.

Isn’t he handsome? His name is Silver Streak. He was created by David Mach, he’s a good couple of metres tall and he appears to be made entirely out of coat hangers.

Silver Streak is currently part of a really brilliant (and free) little exhibition called The Power of Making, an amazing mixture of handmade things and new machine processes like 3D printing.

While there at the V&A I also checked in with an old friend, this guy:

This is the Rotunda Chandelier, by Dale Chihuly. As you can imagine it’s not easy to keep those tentacles clean.

The exhibition presents beautiful and rare editions of a host of wonders from the history of SF, together with perceptive commentary, author interviews and all manner of other imagination-expanding goodies. There’s even the chance to design and display your own alien, and see the designs of other visitors. On the subject of aliens, I was particular taken with these dudes:

‘The Tree People of Nazar’ as depicted in ‘Niels Klim’s Underground Journey’ by Ludvig Holberg, 1789

…Though these guys are pretty handsome too:

‘Distant descendants of bats, fifty million years hence’ as depicted in ‘After Man’ by Dougal Dixon, 1981

I emerged inspired, having discovered a stack of classic SF to catch up on – just in time to meet a terrific selection of modern editions in the Library’s shop. But the exhibition itself is FREE, and there’s nothing stopping you making a list of books to order from your local public library. ;D

Visiting this exhibition and my reading since have been two of the absolute best things about my summer so far. If you’re in or near London and you haven’t been yet, don’t wait any longer.

Sam

• You have to read. This can be whatever format you want: paperback, hardcover, eBook, newspaper, comic book, etc.
• You have to enjoy yourself.

Click here to go to the DNBRD official sign-up form, where (if you wish, and you give your name) you can enter for a prize draw just for taking part.

Want some recommendations for what to spend Saturday reading? Check TBM’s very own Brilliant Books category or even my LibraryThing Profile, where I’ve listed a whole bunch of my personal favourites plus reviews and whatnot.

Book(s), comfy reading spot, something to eat and drink maybe, and breathable air. What else do you need?

Roll on Saturday. Hee hee hee!

Sam

PS: The bags in the pic are available from The Literary Gift Company. I’ve got the orange one.

For those of you who like monsters, movies and comics (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) this is the stuff for you! You may recall my rather swift last post which mentioned my mental busyness on ‘super fun top secret project’ ???? No? Fair enough. Well the time has come to reveeeaall my secret!

Tadaaaaa…

Monsters from the Morgue is a 70′s zombie comic which can be found (and read) while sneaking around Joe’s Desk. Who is Joe I hear you ask? Joe is a young boy making his own horror movie with his friends, all of which are characters in the upcoming movie SUPER 8 by J. J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg. Go have a snoop around his stuff! 

There you will find lots of clues as to what the film is about. You can even play an old-fashioned arcade game! I think  you’ll love it.

You can go to my blog for more info on what I actually did

Catch you later!

It has long been observed that the phrase ‘cellar door’ is the most beautiful in the English language, perhaps because of its poetic sound and/or because of some romantic notion behind the meaning – the mystery of what lies beyond, the possibility of escape, of adventure, of release, of leaving the mundane world behind.

Literary admirers of cellar door include Dorothy Parker, JJR Tolkien and CS Lewis,the latter observing that writing the phrase as ‘Selladore’ you produce ‘an enchanting proper name’, one that would definitely be at home in Lewis’ Narnia universe! More recently the mysterious loveliness of cellar door was incorporated into the mind-mangling plot of Donnie Darko, a movie I caught three times on its release in 2001.

Now I want to suggest to you a contender for an ‘anti-cellar door’. A phrase that has its own mystery and poetry but which, to my mind, possesses a darker and more troubling aspect. The phrase: ‘cabin in the woods’.

It has a kind of staccato quality: cabin-in-the-woods, cabin-in-the-woods, cabin-in-the woods. Like a train clattering over rusted tracks, hurtling through a dark forest, the fingers of overgrown trees scraping against its carriage windows. I’m not sure why this image comes to mind, it just does. There is also that collision - cabin in  - an insistence that you are trapped inside the little wooden hut which, in turn, is isolated in the great expanse of the wood.

Like cellar door, semantically speaking it is a simple enough thing, its meaning straightforward, even dull. A cabin, probably wooden, located in the woods. Couldn’t be simpler. But the sound of those words coupled together strike me as rather lovely – and yet chilling at the same time. Whereas the cellar door holds out the promise of escape the cabin in the woods suggests captivity, loneliness, vulnerability – in the face of unloving Nature or any stranger who might happen upon you, holed up in your wooden hideaway.

Maybe I just can’t shake off the memory of all those backwoods horror movies I watched growing up, particularly such controversial (in their time, at least) classics like The Evil Dead… And now, to reawaken my morbid appreciation for the anti-cellar door comes a new movie by writer, director and all-round genre genius Joss Whedon. A movie called - you guessed it – ‘The Cabin in the Woods.’

The film was finished in May 2009 but due to the long-running bankruptcy problems that engulfed MGM (problems which also saw delays in production on the new James Bond movie) it has sat on the studio shelf ever since. Its release date was continually shifted around until yesterday when Lionsgate announced that they had acquired distribution rights and will be releasing the movie on April 13 2012. Finally we will get to see what promises to be a very special horror movie. Whedon and all the other creatives involved have been very tight-lipped about the plot – all we know is that it follows the classic set-up: a group of friends taking a holiday at the mysterious cabin in the woods…

But it seems that Joss Whedon’s ambitions for the movie are anything but conventional. He has described it as ‘the horror movie to end all horror movies’ and promises to play with the rules of the genre, doubtless taking the audience into unexpected new territories. I’ve been a huge fan of Whedon’s ever since his ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ days. The very least we can expect is the wittiest dialogue that has ever graced a horror flick. My only hope is that, now he has finished with cabin in the woods, he might turn his attention to that rather beautiful cellar door…