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Poppy Z. Brite: Iron Chef
"If anything, when Liquor began being shopped to U.S. publishers, it ran into problems that were the opposite of Exquisite Corpse--that is, it wasn't extreme enough. It's not at all like my previous work, and publishers hate that--once you've had some success in a particular genre, they want to keep you there forever. I ended up changing literary agents, because my previous agent, while very good, was also very dedicated to genre fiction and thus uncomfortable with the direction my work is taking. My new agent has been able to get the book in front of editors who didn't have so many preconceived ideas about my work, and consequently understood it on its own merits rather than expecting it to turn into a psychosexual horror story halfway through."
Joe Strummer: Armagideon Time
"Joe Strummer's sudden death on 22 December 2002, possibly from a heart attack, came as a shock. For the last three months of 2002 I had been re-exploring the agitpop legacy of The Clash, the influential punk band that Strummer fronted with guitarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Topper Headon. Strummer had wisely avoided the multi-million dollar offers for a reformation and American stadium tour, preferring to concentrate on his new band the Mescaleros. He had just finished a United Kingdom tour with the Mescaleros and was planning a third studio album. But in press interviews Strummer had also made peace with his past. He had made up with Jones: ending a split that tore apart The Clash at their commercial peak. He now disowned the disastrous follow-up album Cut the Crap (1985). And, poignantly, he gave his approval to a one-night reformation of for their March 2003 induction into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. Now we'll never know what could have been."
Startup.com: Lights, Camera, Dotcom Revolution?
"The sequence featuring Sapient's design team will be familiar to anyone who has had the misfortune to hire a major dotcom consultancy. The design team take-over several offices and crash the internal network. There are numerous problems during site development: the interface looks terrible and the "search" feature turns up a Texan named "Mr. Speed" instead of Tuzman's query for "speeding fine." The evening before the site goes live, Tuzman confronts Sapient's team leader and sweet-talks him into some last minute fine-tuning. The scenes reveal, through fleeting conversations in over-lit offices, how dotcom consultancies added several new sins (poor aesthetics, novice coders) to the charges leveled at management consultancies (exorbitant client fees, over-staffed and inefficient teams)."
'You're Drinking With Number Three': An Interview With Kenn Thomas
"The term "parapolitics" is one I like to promote because its alternative, "conspiracy theory", has such a derogatory connotation in the larger media. Of course, the larger media (CNN/Fox/ABC/NBC/CBS) has no credibility in making any judgement about conspiracy writing or research. It is virtually owned by the military and serves only to disparage anything that isn't a government or corporate press release. In You Are Being Lied To I tried to draw attention to Arthur Koestler's old technique of looking at disparate things and trying to connect them in creative ways, as a means getting past the corporate dumb-down in the media and at some actual truth."
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