Prose and Graphic Novels by Warren Ellis
Crooked Little Vein
Available Light
Bad Signal: From The Desk of Warren Ellis
Come In Alone
Transmetropolitan
Global Frequency
Ministry of Space
Fell
Planetary
Desolation Jones
Ocean
Crecy
Aetheric Mechanics
Frankensteins Womb
Freakangels
INTERNATIONAL ELECTROPHONIC UNIT
http://www.electrophonic.net
UNITED KINGDOM • UNITED STATES
Published by arrangement with Lulu.com Publishing House.
SHIVERING SANDS
Portions of this book appeared as follows:
"Five Thousand Miles", "The Full Head Tingle", "Nothing Happened", and "Microcast" in Warren Ellis' Brainpowered at artbomb 2002-2003. "What Goes Into the Sausage?", "Comics & Ideas", and "Public Intellectuals" in Warren Ellis' The Ministry at the pulse 2006.
Copyright © 2009 by Warren Ellis Design and editing by Ariana Osborne All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. For information contact the author: www.WarrenEllis.com First Printing—November 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-557-16167-6 (pbk)
THE MOBILE PRODUCTION OF THIS BOOK ATE:
one Handspring Visor
one Palmspring Treo
one Nokia 810 tablet
six foldaway keyboards
more than seven thousand cans of Red Bull
sixteen thousand cigarettes
all my hair
and a playlist that if typed out would reach most of the way to the moon.
How It Works
An Introduction, of sorts
I still get asked with appalling regularity "where my ideas come from."
Here's the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information.
Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.
Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 2 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you've got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you've got what's called "an idea".
And for that brief moment where it's all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can't be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein's brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.
That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.
From my chair.
See, this is the good bit about writing. It's what keeps you going.
It's the wild rush of "shit, did I think of that?" with all kinds of weird chemicals shunting around your brain and ideas and images and moments and storyforms all opening up snapsnapsnap in your mind, a mass of new and unrealised possibilities.
It's ten past two in the morning, and I'm completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it's the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare.
Faster than the speed of anyone. That's how it works.
§
This Is What It Means To Be Me: wake up at 1pm. Check mail. Open envelope full of free money. Go to pub. Laugh.
Because I am a Writer.
§
Five Thousand Miles
Written in September of 2002
I hate Los Angeles.
I hate Los Angeles because it is a city not designed for humans.
It is designed for cars. Humans not required. One day it's going to be filled with nothing but robot cars, cavorting on the highways of a city where humans were never ever meant to be.
Having a cigarette after dinner elsewhere in LA tonight, I see a Crazy Homeless Guy with a megaphone. He raises it to his lips, makes to speak-to Announce, to make a Proclamation-and then thinks again, lowers it. Raises it again. But no. The time is not right. He gets on the bus, disappointed. Something was wrong. His megaphone hangs in his hand. Perhaps there wasn't an agent in earshot.
I also hate Los Angeles because it's not a city. It's six or seven cities stuck together by seventy five thousand miles of road. I write this in Burbank. Burbank appears to be one of those half-alive cities, like Canberra, that people drive to in the morning and utterly abandon at night. This hotel is like a colony on Mars. There's not another living thing in sight. And, in the distance, the cars jabber and scheme in the dark. The bastards.
Safety Dance
I am going to Cable TV Station, housed in Big Media Corporation building. I am told that there are two levels of heavy security here, as there are at all studios here. Level One is a bored Pinkerton drone who sticks a broom under our car to see if Osama Bin Laden is clinging to the chassis. Level Two is a guy slumped over a counter who asks my name and then writes it on a lapel sticker. Presumably this sticker renders me invulnerable to bombing outrages, anthrax showers and bags of sarin.
Los Angeles is disgusted with the world. It doesn't understand why terrorists haven't targeted it. It's Important. It's Hollywood. Surely the warty Al Queda baddies want to destroy Hollywood, right? So where are they? Was the meeting postponed? LA stares at its cellphone, desperate for the validation of meaningless mass destruction.
Action
I am meeting with my friends Producers and Screenwriter.
Screenwriter arrives pale and edgy. He is into the fifteenth rewrite of an adaptation. He's been in the business a long time and is very successful. But, despite being a professional screenwriter, he is still human. He has been asked if he can make the piece's second lead green. And Welsh. And a dog. He can't take any more. He makes an awful keening sound, like a stabbed dog. There's blood in his ears. He rips his pants down and shits on the floor.
The waiter passes, looks down, and says, "Who spilled this fine American food?"
Soon, it will be rinsed under the tap and put on the hotplate. And sold to me as breakfast for $20.99 plus tax.
§
July 21, 2009 Alive in LA. I has a balcony. I may give a sermon. After I sleep for 24 hours.
...Why does the minibar have a glowstick in it? Do I appear AS THE SORT OF MAN WHOD DRINK GLOWSTICK CHEMICALS?
§
July 22, 2009 Good morning from Los Angeles, sinners. Off to have seven thousand meetings.
Abandoned to feral roaming producers on the WB lot. Am fashioning a spear from the bones of interns.
The power of Hollyweird compels you. Or possibly me.
i have fooled you all. I use Twitter to steal your souls and increase my Powers. Which Compel you. (Yesimighthavehadadrinkshutup)
Trying to work out if aged poolside guy is really that hairy or if he's wearing an animal pelt of some kind
Yeah, you keep that towel on, buddy. I have a lighter.
§
The Full Head Tingle
Written in December of 2002
At the end of the Eighties, I became the manager of a small shop that sold books and comics. Finally off the dole, living in a room that was six feet by seven feet, blac
k dustbin sacks taped to the window to keep the light out, I sat down the day after I got the job and wrote a letter to Savoy Books.
Savoy were and are a publisher based in Manchester, in the north of England, a couple of hundred miles away. In those days of no money, it seemed an ocean away, especially since I was struggling through a long-distance relationship with a girl who lived not far from Manchester. She had rich parents, and would come down to live with me for a few weeks at a time, but I could never get any further out than London, thirty-odd miles down the train line. Savoy were a march and a generation away from me. Publishers Dave Britton and Michael Butterworth emerged in the late Sixties/early Seventies, on the tail end of the New Worlds/New wave" sf movement. They actually published an issue of the groundbreaking New Worlds magazine, before putting old and obscure Michael Moorcock work into print, as well as an early graphic novel, Moorcock's Elric adapted into sequential art by Jim Cawthorn in raw Celtic style. They grew a list of selected reprints, an eclectic and vital catalogue; the Sixties TV criticism of fantasist and commentator Harlan Ellison, the newspaper columns of Jack Trevor Story, the gothabilly art of Cramps album illustrator Kris Guidio. And, apocalyptically, Dave Britton's transgressive novel Lord Horror. Which got them prosecuted on obscenity charges, slammed through the system by James Anderton, Manchester's notoriously Christian Chief Constable. Anderton was a creature that could only have existed in the slightly surreal atmosphere of Thatcher Britain; repressively conservative, of dubious competence, and given to worrying statements about hearing God's voice while Manchester filled up with guns and pushers. Lord Horror was strong drink, to be sure: a hallucinated vision of Lord Haw-Haw, the English traitor who broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain during World War 2. It was difficult, horrifying work, the Nazi atrocities made superreal with the tools of DeSade and Bataille, very much an extension of the "New Worlds school" and its intent to use fantasy as a way to present the real world in a new light for our consideration. Britton is neither a self-hating Jew nor a childish monster. He is clearly haunted by the pre-1945 world.
And they sent him to prison. And I sent my letter, because I wanted to sell Savoy books.
The Savoy PR guy was a brilliant man called Martin Flitcroft.
Within a week, he sent me ordering details-inside a huge fucking box filled with one copy of everything Savoy had in print. I had no idea they were making records, and especially not with the mental Sixties rock'n'roll star P.J. Proby. Piles of stuff by Kris Guidio, lurching between the drawing board and the hospital, his artistic recordings of a time just past when everyone in London, in his words, were "dressed like tattooed undertakers." His stuff, as anyone who saw one of his Cramps covers will tell you, radiated a kind of weird junked-up heroic ideal. Pen and needle, he was living in his own graphic novel world, no difference between him nodding out in front of "a nurse with an ass DeSade would have died for" and his credo of "let's make our heroes wear black," his private reimagining of a toxic intake of crappy old comic books.
Comics had a grip on Savoy still. In the box was the beginning of a serialised Lord Horror graphic novel, written by Britton and illustrated by Guidio.
I don't see Britton as a drug-fiend, but it reads like what you'd get if Grant Morrison liked smack. The serial is something of a prequel to the novel, illustrating how Horror left Britain for Germany. It's saner, more considered than the book. Horror is never quite sympathetic-he can't be-but the graphic novel reveals him as a smaller man, trapped between monsters bigger than himself. Britain is a sick place, and in his naivete he expects strong Germany to be somehow cleaner. By the penultimate episode, Horror, broadcasting from a concentration camp, has plainly gone quite mad.
Before that, though, we have met Horror's extended family and circle of class traitors. In the former camp is a gloriously nuts portrayal of James Joyce, killing policemen at night with switchblades and fighting clockwork assassins sent by Churchill: "To fuck Horror!" In the latter is Unity Mitford, one of the English aristocracy who supported Hitler, cast here as one of Horror's lovers-Britton's tool to expose Britain as a sinkhole of hatred and stupidity. Stuck in Germany, his poison dreams dashed, he turns on contented Unity in a graveyard, excoriating her and upper-class England for their beautiful emptiness, their happiness at being ruled by the unbalanced and the monsters, their wilful blindness. She stares at him, his last intimate, her assumed fellow-traveller: "Leave now, or by Christ I'll show you why they call me Horror."
The final piece-at least, the final piece that I saw-is illustrated by John Coulthart, and is a long, silent consideration of the concentration camp. No-one can argue that this is pro-Nazi, incitement or infantile shit-throwing.
A year later, the bookstore shut down, a victim of circumstance. I became a full-time writer, which meant I was astonishingly poor. I fell out of touch with most people. I split up with the girl up north. When I got a phone again, I called Martin Flitcroft. But Martin Flitcroft was dead.
The pressure on Savoy from the police was constant. People said Martin felt it more than most. He felt things hard. Wanted to feel things hard. Put a drink in him and he'd talk about "Wagnerian soul music" and feeling "the full head tingle."
He walked out in front of an oncoming train in the dead of night.
Turned his back on it. Balled his fists and threw his head back. The train driver never had a chance.
The full head tingle.
Savoy publishing got patchy. Court fees, imprisonments, distribution troubles. I wanted to order them in the first place because they just weren't penetrating bookstores or comics stores. Some comics kept trickling out, mostly the inferior comedy Horror spin-off, Meng AndEcker. They seemed never to sell that well, but it gave Kris Guidio something to do; in Martin's words, he had "a hungry arm", and that costs money, and he was their friend. I don't honestly know if he's still alive. It'd be funny if he'd finally outlived Johnny Thunders.
Savoy have a website, but I haven't kept up with it. Go and look.
It's the secret history of comics publishing in Britain. It's important. They were important. And, ten years down the line, I still miss my friend.
Nothing Happened
Written in December of 2003
21st Century, all the millennium tension went away, 2001 went from science fiction to historical artifact, and the majority of people looked around and saw that things were pretty much the same on this side of the line as they were on the other side. And that was that.
Today (Monday), I read an interview with Marilyn Manson where he explains his evocation of Cabaret in his recent work as a reaction to present times, Thirties vaudeville as a haven from politics. Notably, however, Manson describes himself as broadly apolitical, which makes you wonder exactly who said haven was devised for. To me, it's an interesting mess. Cabaret's paean to decadence only gains its enduring power from context-the knowledge that the Third Reich awaits it upstream, which lends it the authentic final doom of all true legends, Ragnarok and Robin Hood's final arrow shot to mark his grave. Wearing the clothes of the period doesn't reiterate the lessons of the time or the film-that you can't hide from evil, that the machinery of conservative societies will always find a way to crush the Too Much Fun Club-but it does produce other, perhaps graver signifiers.
Popular artists generate two forms of address. They produce a sense of collusion with those who already agree with them-through this CD, this book, this graphic novel, I'm telling you that it's you and me against the world, I am your friend/ally/leader in this, I understand you-and they also, unavoidably, tell the receptive mind what to think and what to identify with. Through this work, I am telling you that this is an apolitical time, that voting doesn't matter, and we may as well go to the Kitty Kat Keller while we can.
Post-millennium relaxation. Nothing's happened, nothing's changed, and you and me, we can't change anything.
Now, I have a lot of time for Marilyn Manson these days. Much of his music doesn't do a lot for me, but I enjoy his persona, himself as
art. He's a clever man, and I suspect his apolitics are not all artifice. He's thirty-four years old now, an experienced artist and an experienced media operator, and he must know his audience. And America, and Britain, currently exist in a political dead zone. George W. Bush does not have credible opposition, and whoever's put up against him in 2004 will likely be crippled by the nomination process in any case. In Britain, the same holds-the leader of the opposition, Michael Howard, is a leering, unelectable monster with criminal tendencies who was until recently shunned and vilified by his own party as a moral mutant.
In the face of all that, it's an understandable message to broadcast:
find a place away from politics, because this is a time in which voting genuinely doesn't matter. We're all fucked. Apathy is nothing to be ashamed of. Anger is pointless.
And certainly we're in a time where anger in art has largely gone away. This isn't the cool detachment of post-modernism, so much as just a turning inward. The kind of stuttery lurching rise of emo over the last couple of years is a case in point: a total defanging of pretty much any working definition of punk in service of whining about how you've got no fucking girlfriend. "Emotional punk" = Crying Ugly Kid Music. There should be a sign in guitar shops: "We reserve the right to refuse sale to people who want to write songs about wearing glasses and being dumped by girls who didn't know your name anyway."
It's understandable, and certainly it doesn't hurt for Manson to bolster the "outsider" self-perception of his audience.
But it bugs me nonetheless. Is it a creative reaction, to answer "nothing's happened" with "nothing's going to happen and you can't do shit about it"? Is that doing anything more than prepping an alienated audience for a doomed life of dyeing your hair back to brown and getting a job in insurance? Is that where we've ended up? That all popular culture has to say is, "well, fuck it"? Even as a transient pose?
The lesson of the 1930s is that, in a time of encroaching conservatism and creeping repression, the correct response is not to flush your fucking spine down the toilet.