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Sunday, April 18, 2021
THE STEELKILT MEDIA FESTIVAL AND AWARD TARGETS UNDISCOVERED COMIC BOOK WRITERS AND CREATORS
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
Time, Memory and Our Limited Attention Spans
April 15, 2021
I've received some amazing interviews back, and I am excited that starting April 22, interviews will appear each work week day for perhaps 2 weeks straight. A movie director, many writers, an artist, a podcaster, and a number of fun people with great minds will be here having been interviewed in preparation for my surgery, which seems now to be the beginning of May. The change happened due to covid. So I have nothing to complain about, as having insurance I can get treatment, whereas there are many who cannot.
COMIC BOOKS
I don't think we've reached the place in our popular culture where all media are equal. Films featuring comic book worlds do much better in film than comics themselves. Reading is a dying art. What I have found most curious in retrospect is how certain publishers have flourished, some have fallen, and for reasons I think most outsiders wouldn't understand. The direct market allowed certain products to exist that would've never happened otherwise, due to focus upon a group of buyers not found in newsstand distribution. I found it ironic that at a time comics were said to be aiming at a group of buyers, likely male between 19-25 or older, Image Comics were often dismissed for producing works that worked for a younger audience. The works were fun and well constructed to fit lock step with a
12-16 year old kid with money in his pocket. They were dismissed
for the lack of maturity in the stories or the kind of story telling. Whatever the stereotype had been (comics are for kids, comics today are too dark), you couldn't be seen as making comics just for kids, or for adults. DC Comics was taken to task for publishing darker works that seemed to change the market. But they opened many new paths forward when they began to publish creative works that took their characters from G rated adventures to more adult works. But in the present readers of comics know that they can appeal to numerous groups, and none should be left out, or hyper-focused upon.
If comics are ever going to be seen as a medium for all ages, from children to adults, that consider many genres, the world will have to accept that there is no single model to follow. Good comics have come from many publishers, different nationalities, and different life experiences, and while not every work will find an audience, the audience and sales does not redeem a work and make it important. Which is why there have been comic series that were canceled far too early, and later revisited. I've expressed here that I was and that I am still a fan of ECLIPSE comics as well as FIRST comics. Now, certainly I've read and enjoyed more publishers than that. Since the 1990s the two publishers providing me with entertainment has been DC Comics especially in their imprints VERTIGO and HELIX, and the publisher IMAGE Comics. IMAGE has grown from a publisher of superheroes created by popular talents, to producing works that are wide reaching, experimental, and worth reading. These two publishers are not more popular in sales than MARVEL Comics, nor am I suggesting other people should think as I do. I am suggesting that as a reader, DC and IMAGE created product that worked for me. And, while I've liked Marvel products, I am not able to say I've been willing to follow any long running or mini series they've released for any amount of time. I find them to be far too continuity intensive to want to know the entire big picture. DARK HORSE and IDW have had some great comics over time, but they are limited for me, as they are often licensed product related, which doesn't always move me, and I cannot say I've found myself compelled to keep buying any series.
IN MEMORIA
I am aware that upon this entire planet we live in a new and different place since Covid. For Americans this comes in numerous areas. For instance it is not just for the fact that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are in power versus Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Nor is it for the fact that in the US outrage is now ever present regarding the horrors of race relations. We've changed in our aim, the old ways of doing things regarding equity and race are now seen as being useless for most non whites, and non males. I've certainly known people who foretold a wave of disaster upon the ascension into office by Biden/Harris. But if Covid or the Border crisis are that disaster, the disaster isn't from the leadership's hand, but the world that they had inherited. I am not absolving anyone, by the way, I am simply saying, the changes over the last decade in America have been mind boggling. And unless a politician is directly responsible for a disaster, it is often unfair to aim blame, since the way of life in the political world is collective claims of victory, and rare individual's acceptance of blame.
My father was a lifelong voter Democrat. He was
never wealthy and like most humans, worked diligently if not outright struggled to make a living. He was a working class
person who forged a life out of various difficulties that we all go
through, when not born wealthy. He made a life for his wife and
children as well. However towards the end of his life he said he didn't
recognize the world he lived in, and thought that his party had become
the same as communists in their beliefs. Along with that, my father
who almost never read books, had gone out to buy and read two different
Donald Trump books. Not that my dad saw him as a great moral leader,
or that he would like to spend time with him, rather, my dad came from
an era that being wealthy and a business leader wealthy, was something
that made the person worth admiration. I suspect that based upon my
father's comments about the Democratic party and his admiration for the
wealthy, he'd have voted Trump. For instance, rightly or wrongly, gay marriage in
my parents' era would have been impossible, and laughably out of step.
Even just 20 years back legal use of pot would have been considered a pipe
dream, literally. And this is just to say, I don't think you'd recognize my father in a group of Trump supporters, he was different than most but still, he felt lost, and many who followed Trump found Trump to be a leader or shooting star to wish upon or follow.
I taught in 1999 at a small college and on the last lecture for class was
asked in the modern US history course what did I predict for the
world after the turn of the millennia. I was moved by the opportunity to espouse the future predictions, mostly because it showed a hungry mind in the students asking and participating. But, importantly, I have a master's degree in History with a minor field of Political Science. History is about research and understanding the world that has happened. Political Science is about how to understand the human interactions that leads to diplomacy, laws, elections, and events. It isn't, really, about prediction of the future. My father had died 1 year prior to that moment in class, and I was aware that the world perceived itself on the precipice of change. As I certainly did, as my life had areas that were unrecognizable to me, for the changes. My father was gone, I had a 5 month old baby boy in my life, (my now 22 year old beloved son), the world was on the brink of war in the Balkans, I was working in a field I thought I wanted to be in, and the millennia, so pregnant with danger soon beckoned.
The human mind often doesn't understand the artifice that the logical mind uses to frame experiences in life to give them a way to understand that moment. As you might know, our being perceives time, and counts days or minutes passing, as if there were something that could be called time. But there is no such thing. It is a construct to give our minds a sense of context. We'd not know when things happened if not recorded in books, texts, or stone. And the written archive of human events helps us know why certain situations exist. I began the discussion without having prepared anything. I wanted to give an hour lecture about the political divide we could see growing, the inevitable war that would happen in the middle east, not that I wanted such. I thought it was important to talk about how the UN at that moment had more importance than any time before, since most of the world in the wake of the fall of Soviet Union, now had less desire in the world being divided between the poles of nations who are super powers. But my students were very excitedly asking questions, and I tried teaching by rapport and giving context for why they should learn and find a reason to know more.
My first point was about the international world. With a new power structure in world affairs being that the US, having won the cold war, had the military, economic and infrastructure to demand a position of controlling how the world behaved. Not that they SHOULD do so, I was and remain opposed to one country becoming a police power to enforce their version of affairs. Not because of cost, financially, rather, for the effect it has upon the nations both doing the policing, and the nations being policed. This change from two sides in a mass conflict to a single winner had to have enormous consequences beyond being the winner and receiving accolades and awards. What it meant was that the US had no "known" nation state enemy. The enemies it had would come from those who held personal grudges and sought to create vendettas, as well as the religious political cultures who hated Western culture. (The US and particularly the products of Hollywood California at the forefront.) Ultimately the ideologies of our modern civilization and individualism, versus more traditionally based and group oriented perceptions of being were the area of existence that I felt would birth most conflict.
Furthermore I said, conflict from such sources would not be the only conflicts. I said, when a state reaches the high point of existence what inevitably happens is decay from within, and a time when unresolved issues have the likelihood of rising from the calm. Change can be accompanied by revolution and violence, but the constancy of the status quo often seems to spark fires from the underbrush of simmering issues. Certain groups of Americans in the 1990s began calling themselves militias, who presented themselves as being devoted to the Constitution. Often they were guys with guns who wanted to blow up stuff. In most cases where an empire or civilizations falls, the rot came from within. Whether from racism, opportunism, pure chaos, Americans did see attacks from extreme religious groups, and from state actors who sided with those extreme groups.
More than the events, the people asked about other things, all quite interesting. Someone asked if clones were in the near future, and I said no, but the existence of clones and cloning technology does present the world with ethical questions to answer. Is a clone equal to any other human life? Could clones be developed for replacement parts and made to suffer, due to them not being life? Will we become overrun with clones as the human fertility rates crash, and our own existence becomes threatened by lack of population? At the time a number of cultural conflicts within the US were going on. There was political correctness (PC) culture going on, on each side of the political divide. I was asked what I foresaw happening in terms of culture. I said, you can see certain things looming in the distance, such as addressing racism, addressing the standards and limits of marriage, and I said, most of this will fall upon libertarian concepts but not because I agree with the Libertarian party. It was because with rights and laws, often society fractures on lines that get directly into rights, what is it that is being asked, and how does it affect ME? Racism would fall into the realm of free speech for more people, such as in the right to say certain words, but society would try to change how words are used and consequences of them in industry and cultural institutions would enter legal ramifications. I saw affirmative action being perceived as unfair and illegal by the courts, due to the strict views towards equality. I know it can't and won't go away until some equality was perceived. (Frankly, I find affirmative action to be a day late and a dollar short, I don't think it goes far enough, but that isn't what I was expressing. I was pointing at how the world or the US would do things, not me). Things like Marriage would be defined differently, because if the state is involved we must all be treated fairly, and, equally. SO, if the government is involved in our personal relationships, official or otherwise, I said, you have to accept that marriage will change from two adults of different genders, to purely as two adults. Eventually you might see government not being involved in marriage at all, due to the libertarian outlook, that is, why do you need the state to affirm your decision?
Lastly, for this discussion, the class went on for some time, I suggested that the internet would change human minds to such an extent that letter writing would generally end, that magazines and newspapers would lose revenue, and that for better or worse, politics, entertainment, academia, and creative content would all become based upon and rely upon the internet. I saw it as both dangerous and alluring, and had a potential of changing how we think, due to the addicts of the internet that the fledgling creature had already become. One solar flare or series of EMP weapons and the internet goes away for a while, if not forever, and our archives in the cloud are gone. Some of these outlooks were somewhat correct, and others were dead on. I've always thought that most social scientists could do the same thing and achieve similar results. The area in which we all fail is the unknown unknowns. That is, you can make a generally correct prediction when you can see and know what is going on. It requires some thought but it isn't hard to do. What is hard is imagining trends, ideas, events, that haven't happened and won't without the changes that you do predict happening. You can't predict what hasn't been possible, until now, without pure and flawed speculation.
I write all of this, all of the memory archives of the past revealed, because while my dad is still dead, the world has changed in front of me, and I can't for a moment tell you where we are going with it. I feel like he felt watching the changes of his time unfolding, that he had known one world, and by the end of his life he didn't recognized the world in which he lived.
QUESTION AND ANSWER TIME
I get many emails at my address AlexanderNess63@gmail.com, even though I don't create much of anything in the realm of comics, prose, music or games. I love them all, some more than others. And I do like getting good emails, and by that I do not mean good because they compliment me, almost none do. A good email often will lead me to discover new things or old things I'd never heard about. Even fair criticism gives you opportunity to grow. Sometimes humans offer chances to grow by what they consider to be important to find out. While I don't plan to do Q&A's for myself much, I will do one here. Perhaps once every 6 months I'll do them. (Questions answered here were asked by 6 different people.)
Question 1, Will you review Chuck Dixon's work with/published by Vox Day, why or why not? Isn't he a close personal friend of yours?
Last
question I'll answer first... I do like Chuck a great deal but his best
and good friends are in the industry and in his personal life. I'd call
him a friend but I think we might be considered friendly acquaintances
by others.
I think he is mega talented and his combination of quality
and output make him really an amazing talent. We've talked a lot, (via
email or facebook chat) and in person, and I can tell you that I have
never seen a discriminatory word he has said about any group or ideals.
However Vox Day is a writer who has views that skew to the
farther right on the scale. He has been an agent provocateur taking
stands with the intent to offend people about subjects he is interested
in, and those subjects include race and gender. I am perfectly content
that Chuck remains talented and a morally good human, I cannot for the
life of me understand his working for or with a person who goes out of
his way to trigger people as best he can. I've no doubt the content of
the comics is written well, but I've grave doubts about the who that
publishes that work.
Question 2, (same questioner) Are you getting the fake covid shot? And, as long as I am asking, if you did already get it, I would also guess you voted Biden, so did you vote for him?
I
got vaccinated, and I don't want to get the virus nor share it nor get
it from others. So I am doing a utilitarian thing, trying to do the
best for the most. And I am not discussing my vote, there is a reason
the ballots are secret. I don't have tell anyone. It really doesn't
even matter. My one vote for or against either candidate is like one
single cell out of body of 330 million cells.
Question 3, I am a fan of your interviews, and like your reviews, but could you ever review more new stuff?
Thanks.
But unless I receive product I can't review it. Since I have no money
to buy new comics, there are a bajillion comics I'd need to have to
understand all the world of comics since I stopped in 2010 from being
active in reviewing. Frankly, paying 4 dollars per comic is a lot of
money for a chump like me. I can't do it, so sadly, no. I can't review
more new stuff.
Question 4, I bought your Sasquatch and Bam Too. When is your next comic work coming out?
Easy,
no idea, probably never. I do honestly love comics, but writing them
isn't my area of expertise. And to forestall inbox jerks, I acknowledge
that I have no area of expertise. Loving a genre or a medium is not equal
to being talented enough to work in said genre or medium.
Question 5, Are they ever going to announce when Spring Con is?
Another
easy one, some time in Spring 2022. This year's show was canceled.
Although I've definitely heard Fall Con will take place. I certainly
hope so.
Question 6, Hey I heard you had a project involving UFOs, is that a comic, and when is it coming out?
No
idea who told you, but at one point I did want a book with prose and
comics discussing or showing or story telling about UFOs. But my
financial and health situation led to that being canceled.
Question 7, Why not interview people that others, me included, have ever heard of before?
Now, I've had people say this before, so it is not insulting, but I've done over 400 interviews, most of those featuring comic book world talents were names you'd have heard of. If my website popthought hadn't been hacked and the data corrupted you'd see how many different people were interviewed by me. On that site usually about four or five interviews a month appeared. But that was then, and this is now.
ABOUT GETTING REVIEWS FROM MEFirst off, I can be found on Facebook, Twitter or through email at Alexanderness63@gmail.com. I accept hard copies, so when you inquire at any of these places, I'll follow through by telling you my street address. I no longer have a post box, although I regret that. It was a crushing defeat to no longer have a p.o. box, when I came to realize I was getting so little product it made no sense to pay for the privilege to not receive mail at both my home and at the post office. If you send hard copies for review I will always review them, but if you prefer to send pdf or ebooks to my email, I will review these at my discretion. I don't share my pdf/ebooks, so you can avoid worry that I'd dispense them for free to others.
My Poetry Blog alexnesspoetry.blogspot.com
Published alexnesspoetry.blogspot.com/2007/01/My-Work.html
My Amazon Page Amazon.com/author/AlexNess
Personal Blog catastrophicmemories.blogspot.com
Lovecraft Horror cthulhudarkness.blogspot.com
Atlantis MU, Lemuria alexnesslostworlds.blogspot.com
Friday, April 2, 2021
Interviews, Reviews & Updates, Events of Late
By Alex Ness
April 2, 2021
HEALTH UPDATE
While covid and an array of horrible events are still ongoing, my health isn't getting any better. I was told to expect surgery to happen 3rd week of April or nearly so. It has been postponed before and might be postponed again, but in the meantime, I plan to have work appear on this blog consistently, and of quality. Among the things appearing will be 8 or so interviews with writers about their work, and about the writing process for them. I'll ask questions about the creative fire too. Some writers are comic book writers, others write plays and movies, one is a multi faceted talent doing work in many formats, and some work in a single genre, but are skilled and have writing in their DNA. So far the email responses to my questions have been genuinely moving. I look forward to sharing that with you.
REVIEW OF KIM CORMACK's CHILDREN OF THE ANKH
I considered it in poetry HERE . I've interviewed the very fun Kim Cormack prior to this (found HERE), and have another interview upcoming for the interview week. She is a force of nature.
The work in question is a five book (so far) series wherein the question of immortality is central. What is life like for beings who can live forever without fear of their life ending? Or, is life for them more a curse? They choose to create savage loyalties and build clans... who are tasked with repairing or destroying the normal human timeline's existence. They fight other clans, knowing they might win, or be cast into a very dark place, perhaps forever. The books build upon each other, and what you learned and were told in the beginning will matter later in the story. So you can't enter the world by whim and pick up the latest edition and think, this will give me enough of a flavor or taste to know the whole of it. It doesn't work like that. Now each book is individually satisfying... but if you didn't read the one before it, by book 5 you'll be wondering many things.
If you are looking at this thinking where it falls on what I've read before, what it reminds me most of is Interview with the Vampire, but Kim is way more about dark humor, and action than the more introspective and erotic Anne Rice work. Mind you, some will find eroticism in Kim's work too, I guess for me I am too old to be moved by such, however present that trait is. For the record, I remember reading Interview back in 1990 and thinking, holy shit, this is nearly approaching Lolita in some of it, and a romance novel in the rest of it. The quality of writing won out for me, I love Ms. Rice's work, but it faced some obstacles in my brain before arriving. Kim's work would be equally interesting if made in movie format. Perhaps she'll cast me as the grumpy old white guy too slow to avoid the impact of a fist or something. Ah stardom... one can wish...
3 AUTHORS & 4 BOOKS I LIKED THAT THEY WROTE
I am a fan of a variety of talents in different areas. This will be a small feature where upon giving you a small blurb about an author followed by an image of 4 books they wrote that I enjoyed. The 4 books are shared as suggested points of entry to that author's work. I'm not actually saying that these are the best of that author, more accurately they are books I really enjoyed. Some names will be familiar to you, but others will likely not be. I don't mean this to say these are the only great writers, obviously. Just to offer a taste and why I do like them.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Ernest Hemingway became a favorite writer of mine, when after a reading marathon where I'd read dozens of books at 12 years old I realized some writers work for me, and others, however good will not work for me. Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy's War and Peace and a French author who I can't recall nor the book (Maybe it was Victor Hugo) were all great books. I could see why people liked them. But even after I'd read all of the great works they'd all had exhausted me. I wasn't a dullard, but I was age 12 so maybe I was unsophisticated, but still, I'd invested many hours, and got little back from the effort. I thought nuts, I'll go and build Lego buildings or something. On my way out of the room with the book shelf I saw a Hemingway title, For Whom the Bell Tolls and I thought, OK, I'm going to try that. That book and those that followed were a divine experience.
The work was pure, clear and thought provoking. The lack of description allowed me to fill in the blanks, and it worked especially well after reading the other others. The idea of shadows and light in photographer, lighting for plays and inks and dark areas for comic art are all similar, I find that it exists in Hemingway, because he gives you only the most important details, and in the absence of other details you partake in the story by filling in details. The characters feel real, act normally, and don't go into a many page long monologue. The action feels real, the emotions feel that way too. His work deeply moves me. And when I read the last of his works that I hadn't read yet, I thought to myself, why the hell didn't I get more to read from this guy? I wanted more.
PETER GREEN
I've read works by hundreds of historians. I've read some amazing stories from the recorded history of mankind. Being that history is the recorded events of the past, there is a cut off date from where we know from what we speculate. Archeology is needed for non recorded events. Peter Green, a British born historian made a beautifully well told story from the tapestry of human events. He used both data and information from the past, along with an ability to tell a cogent tale of what we know, and make it artistically beautiful. With a focus on trying to peel back the onion to the portion that seems to be completely accurate, he weaves a tapestry of human event that is layered, complex and thoughtful. Part of my degree field in history came in the area of the ancient Near East, Greece, Rome and Egyptian cultures. Within that realm of information I found the deadly dull, the wildly inaccurate, the false facts, and the political ideologies of the present being glued upon the backs of the past. Peter Green didn't do that, and his work being vibrant, well crafted, accurate, and deep, allows the reader to absorb a great deal of information, at the same time the crafting of the word is so perfect, it feels like you are watching as history unfolds. Very few writers achieve this, and far fewer Historians even come close to this. His ideas as expressed about Alexander the Great, and the Greco-Persian Wars are the most clear, the most persuasive and the most vital to an understanding of the past.
BRIAN LUMLEY
Brian Lumley writes in clear prose and poetry works of enormous power. He created characters who respond to the danger there are in, in a way that reveals Lumley's own life lessons and experiences. He is a retired military veteran who worked in the military police. Most people I know who like Lumley's writing are fans of his vampire stories and especially the character Harry Keogh. Some people I know who read him seem to think that that is all he has written. I did like his vampire tales, but I wouldn't say I loved them. However I think that it is in his Cthulhu work that he demonstrates a brilliance. He differs from some writers of the Cthulhu mythos by having characters who are brave, and thoughtful, without simultaneously possessing hubris, or lacking in wisdom or solely being victims. As much as I love HP Lovecraft's work, his main characters are rarely truly wise, brave or develop in ways in which I care for the works' survivors. In Lumley's character Titus Crow, the character possesses a sort of solidness of character that makes you appreciate his bravery, even in the face of uneven odds make him also, perhaps, risk taking or rash. His characters possess more agency and thereby more potency in their reaction to the cosmos' most powerful beings. In this way his work has characters who the reader might want to identify with, rather than be forced to accept. Lumley's Cthulhu and the beasts of the mythos are not less powerful, but not all encounters with madness or terror lead the main character to lose his mind or die most painfully and gruesomely. While it might well be that Great Cthulhu is so powerful that there can be no response that will save one's self, a Lovecraft character will go mad, flee, and perhaps die. A Lumley character respond with a punch to Great Cthulhu's scrotum, before being overwhelmed, and while madness or death might happen, it is only after great insults have been given. There is humor in this, and I think great quality of plot and dialogue. I trust Lumley to take me on adventures that I want to go with him upon.
SAD NEWS
Since December of 2019 I've lost a number of friends, and family. Some were lost to cancer, some lost to Covid, and one person was lost to a drug interaction that caused death. Two of these people were powerful supporters of my work, in terms of buying it, but also, sharing my links, doing proof reading and more. Their names are Marsha Nelson and Cherry Rose, and I miss them, and will no doubt realize how much more they did for me as time has a way of revealing. I know as a person gets older they have to deal with more deaths of loved ones, friends, family and more. But some wounds never heal. I know that I still mourn my mother who passed in 2012, and my wife's and my friend Cathy Roberts, who passed in 2014 on or around the date when I was declared cancer free.
ABOUT GETTING REVIEWS FROM ME
First off, I can be found on Facebook, Twitter or through email at Alexanderness63@gmail.com. I accept hard copies, so when you inquire at any of these places, I'll follow through by telling you my street address. I no longer have a post box, although I regret that. It was a crushing defeat to no longer have a p.o. box, when I came to realize I was getting so little product it made no sense to pay for the privilege to not receive mail at both my home and at the post office. If you send hard copies for review I will always review them, but if you prefer to send pdf or ebooks to my email, I will review these at my discretion. I don't share my pdf/ebooks, so you can avoid worry that I'd dispense them for free to others.
My Poetry Blog alexnesspoetry.blogspot.com
Published alexnesspoetry.blogspot.com/2007/01/My-Work.html
My Amazon Page Amazon.com/author/AlexNess
Lovecraft Horror cthulhudarkness.blogspot.com
Atlantis MU, Lemuria alexnesslostworlds.blogspot.com
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Update, Surgery, Music, and Other stuff
By Alex Ness
March 24, 2021
 |
| Not my actual xray |
I thought I might let everyone know what is going on for me, since it will influence what happens here. I am going through imaging tests and electric nerve tests to determine the damage that causes me so much pain and thereby so little sleep. If things progress as they are likely to, I will have surgery the 3rd or 4th week of April. It will be similar in nature to the surgery that saved my life in November but it isn't, at this point, nearly so urgent or emergency in the perceived reasons for action. The pain is huge, life dysfunction is huge, and loss of sleep robs you of your soul, but ultimately it is a needed surgery of a less than immediate need nature than the one I had previously. In an era of Covid and who the hell knows what else emergency and necessary change their meaning. So, at the moment I am tap dancing like crazy trying to gather reviews and interviews to post and forward date so that when surgery happens, there will always be content appearing here. Primarily, the content will be interviews, but, I have almost a month before I suspect the surgery will happen... I say suspect it to happen because every test, procedure and thing that has been planned is contingent upon beds being available and operation theater time clear for scheduling. Also, I need to stay Covid free, so if you have it, go away from me, in person at least.
MUSIC
I have mentioned the work of Aaron Kerr, and did an interview with him. Along with getting to know him, and that's been a beautiful thing, his music has begun to accompany my writing. I am moved by his work and the instrumental nature allows me to focus, and still listen, primarily through his instrumental music from the Dissonant Creatures, his special project band. His compositions move me deeply, and I cannot explain it well, but, that music has entered my being in ways that are profound. I was exhausted by life, and my poems had a risk of being all darkness. The more I listened to his work my soul was awakened. Hope was a common feature of my own work. I don't think it is from any other source, since Covid, Car accident, Surgery, Friends dying, Computer dying, and more were powerfully draining my happiness and there were no other additions of joy to balance it. Sorrow was crushing my artist mind. And as I found myself inhaling new air into my lungs it was with the music of Aaron and his associates. Now the band Swallows where he is also an important member has released a new CD and it also blew me away. I recommend finding them and buying the hell out of them.
Check out the websites:
Dissonant Creatures
Swallows
OTHER STUFF
Facebook blocks links to my poetry blog. If anyone from Facebook would look at my poetry blog and say why it isn't allowed, I'd listen, but they use the phrase spammy. If you look at the piece yourself, and find it spammy I'd eat a bug. Now for those who want me to eat a bug, I am not going to promise to do that. It is a phrase. But if you are willing to read it and visit it, and tell Facebook yourself that they are full of shit, I'd really appreciate that.
ABOUT GETTING REVIEWS FROM ME
First off, I can be found on Facebook, Twitter or through email at Alexanderness63@gmail.com.
I accept hard copies, so when you inquire at any of these places, I'll
follow through by telling you my street address. I no longer have a post
box, although I regret that. It was a crushing defeat to no longer have
a p.o. box, when I came to realize I was getting so little product it
made no sense to pay for the privilege to not receive mail at both my
home and at the post office. If you send hard copies for review I will
always review them, but if you prefer to send pdf or ebooks to my email,
I will review these at my discretion. I don't share my pdf/ebooks, so
you can avoid worry that I'd dispense them for free to others.
My Poetry Blog alexnesspoetry.blogspot.com
Published alexnesspoetry.blogspot.com/2007/01/My-Work.html
Amazon aAmazon.com/author/alexness
Lovecraft Horror cthulhudarkness.blogspot.com
Atlantis MU, Lemuria alexnesslostworlds.blogspot.com
Jean de La Bruyère "Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think".
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