Due to a mix-up, Rachel Swirsky over at Podcastle ended up with two readings of Jeffrey Ford’s, “The Dreaming Wind”. One by Paul Tevis, the other by me. They are both up at the site now.

You either know that Jeffrey Ford is one of our finest writers, or you are due to find out.

But that’s not all. Podcastle has also featured works and readings by more of our members. Here’s a quick list:

“Change of Life” by K. Tempest Bradford (read by MA in PA)

“Elf Aware” by K. Tempest Bradford (read by Marguerite Croft)

“The Annals of Eelin-Ok” by Jeffrey Ford (read by me)

“Hell is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang (read by James Trimarco)

“All Flee the Vocab. Quiz” by Kristine Dikeman (read by Alasdair Stuart)

“Red Riding-Hood’s Child” by N.K. Jemisin (read by me)

“The Grand Cheat” by Hilary Moon Murphy (read by me)

If you have the time, check them out.

Kris Dikeman’s “Nine Sundays in a Row,” has made the top ten list for the storySouth Million Writers Award. Congratulations, Kris!

Voting is now open for the best story of the year.  Go there and vote now (for Kris)!

Like geeks everywhere and several other Altered Fluidians, I went to Star Trek last week, and I saw that it was good. It was not without its problems, but it far exceeded my expectations. Read my fairly non-spoilery review over at Tor.com.

If you’re a fan of Sybil’s Garage you may have noticed that the names of Altered Fluid members tend to crop up in association with the zine. That’s because most of us, at one time or another, have done duty in the editorial department and/or contributed non-fiction. It’s the secret way SG gets to be so fabulous — slave loving volunteer labor. Somehow I escaped from the mines, thus granting me the ability to actually submit stories, the result of which is that I am going to be in the fabulous issue #6 along with many other talented writers, some of whom are also my friends.

I told you that story so I could tell you this one:

Sybil’s Garage 6 is due out in a couple of weeks, and as a special preview editor Matt Kressel put one of the offerings online for Mother’s Day. The story: Elan Vital. The author: me. Go read and then watch the Senses Five website every second of every day until the zine comes out, then buy it. Seriously, it is going to be fabulous.  All the hard working members of Altered Fluid told me so.

On the sixth of May I went to the Gershwin Theatre to see Wicked, a musical version of Gregory Macguire’s novel that tells the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from her own point of view.

In the end, I liked Wicked a lot more than I expected to. Most Broadway musicals have a lot of cliched, overly cheerful twirling about that gets on my nerves. But Wicked finds an ingenious way to avoid this flaw, while still getting the twirling in: because Elphaba, the young woman born green who eventually becomes the Wicked Witch, is a geek so awkward she goes through the entire production with her shoulders hunched and her elbows jammed into her hips, she can’t embody those cliched movements I expect to see. Other characters do engage in the obligatory magic fingers and theatrical pirouettes, and this is pretty. But you can’t help but notice that they are mostly nameless munchkins and citizens of the Emerald City, and the story is constantly criticizing them as brainless conformists.

Wicked also fulfills, at least to some extent, the feminist promise of its concept: take a woman who’s demonized in the original movie and rescue her by giving her a chance to tell her story herself. This works. I’m surprised to say it, but after you see this musical, you will never be able to watch the original Wizard of Oz movie and take the cackling feminine evil of the Wicked Witch of the West at face value again. You will be aware that she is a human being with her own story and her own series of misfortunes that brought her to come riding down on a broomstick to kidnap cute little Judie Garland…

The only problem with this is that the play for some reason lacks the conviction to bring this transformation to its logical conclusion and allow her even a single moment of true evil or cruelty. A lifetime of being rejected, maligned, taunted, and isolated by her peers changes Elphaba from a good-hearted and brilliant young woman into a hated villain. Yet even at the very end of Wicked, she is still trying to do the right thing, and grabs Dorothy only because she wants her sister’s ruby slippers back. Just before the little girl melts her, she even instructs Glinda not to clear her name in a final act of generosity and nobility.

What would have sent real shivers down my spine is to let Elphaba own her cackle, to let her strength finally fail her, to let her succumb to the temptation to cruelty—if only a little—after that agonizing life we’ve been shown. This would have deepened her humanity and made the musical’s condemnation of Elphaba’s peers more stinging. But then, that’s just me.

A final thought about Wicked is that the whole edifice rests oddly on a kind of closeted audience sympathy with animal liberation politics. The context of Elphaba’s story is that a reactionary movement is mobilizing to rob Oz’s animals of their ability to speak, implementing a regime of cages and injections that looks more like today’s America than that technicolor world that gave us the Cowardly Lion.

Elphaba seems to be the only one who resists this movement, which Wicked suggests will lead to the end of all magic in Oz—the annexation of Oz into modern civilization. Elphaba’s green skin makes her a creature of magic herself, of course, and so she has something in common with the talking animals on that score. But here’s the rub: Wicked generates huge sympathy for Elphaba, and it does it by portraying her as what boils down to an animal-rights insurgent, who eventually occupies a Zapatista-like role as a black-clad warrior who hides in the forests between her battles with the state.

And people love her for it. Somewhere, deep down in the psyche of Wicked‘s audience, strong sympathies for animal and those who fight for their freedom may lie. I don’t think the story would work without them.

As someone who rides around on the New York subway system pretty much every day, I hear a lot of subway music. Musicians are constantly arriving in the city from somewhere else and many of them want to start playing without having to sell some club owner on how many drinking/paying customers they’ll be able to attract. Some of the more fearless ones figure out that simply setting up in the subway and playing can be a great way to build a sound while making about what you’d make at your shitty job.

And so we get the diverse world of subway music, which most of us happily ignore. Yet the other day I had a pleasantly startling experience with it. I was walking through the 14th St. A/C/E station wanting to transfer to the L, dog tired and needing a beer, when I hear this very abstract simple figure played over and over again on a sax. “Wow,” I think. “Something about that tone is so conscious, so creative, so grabbing-me-by-the-balls.”

So I turn around and check the guy out. He’s wearing a black hoodie and jeans, looks just like the typical subway rider. And then he poured out this stream of Coltrane channeling Bartok that really blew my mind, especially when he pursed his lips and played an actual chord on the sax, a painful squeal like elephants being tasered behind the scenes at the circus that was simultaneously as beautiful as a dewdrop on a cherry blossom. This, I would later learn, was Aaron Burnett.

One day later, I was happy to see the same guy setting up with a drummer at the Bedford L station in Williamsburg around eleven PM. I was there with my friend Al and we stood around to watch. Some local sleepyhead was in Aaron’s face right from the beginning, telling them they couldn’t make noise and that “A lot of people in Williamsburg don’t like music.”

Way to get the crowd rooting for you, man. People were literally shouting from numerous local rooftops for the little group to start playing. And so then they did.

With a snap of the snare drum and a squeal of the sax, the two players suddenly started peeling off blisteringly fast drum ‘n’ bass. I must say, only in the presence of Jojo Mayer have I seen a purely acoustic band create such hot music in this genre. And Mayer tends to play a little too closely to the book, a little on the cold side, whereas this was full of energy.

Five minutes into it, about a hundred people were standing around, camera flashes strobing and video cameras sucking up the vibes. Some local Polish kid in office wear came stumbling drunk out of the subway and started dancing like some kind of sexed-up go-go dancer, at one point going so far as to hump a nearby ATM machine. Aaron started pulling those sick chords out of the saxophone, and the crowd was literally screaming. The scene was openly more fun than the scene in any nearby club, and it was free. The path from the curb to the subway had been instantaneously transformed into something in between a fashion catwalk and a circus sideshow.

Such are life’s beautiful moments. A few minutes later, two donut-munching cops pulled up, responding to the complaints of the original guy who didn’t want the band to play. “You got a permit?” the first cop said, and the music ground to a halt. A boo went up from the crowd, but the cops weren’t going to play villain. They told the band not to stop but to move it to McCarren Park, which they did.

In short, Aaron Burnett put on the best impromptu street party music I’ve seen since, maybe Rude Mechanical Orchestra at the Mermaid Parade two years ago. But Burnett has a singular vision and an energy that’s different from the marching band scene, harder and more intellectual with far-out influences like Schoenberg and Squarepusher. Keep it up, Mr. Burnett. We’re glad to have you in Brooklyn.

From right: Chris Carter, Sleazy, Genesis P-Orridge, Cosi Fanni Tutti

I was lucky enough to see the seminal industrial band Throbbing Gristle last night. I’ve been a fan since high school and, because all the members are mostly dedicated to current projects like PTV3, Chris & Cosey/CarterTutti, and the Threshold Houseboys Choir, I never really thought I’d get to see all four TG members gristle-ize it on the stage together.But all that changed last night at a show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in Fort Greene.

A band like TG, known for defying every expectation in its initial run from 1975 to 1981, is going to have a hard time living up to that reputation. Additionally, in the late ’70s TG was innovating relentlessly, seeming to produce or inspire whole genres with every note they played. Again, that’s a hard—or even an impossible—act to follow.

I tried not to come in with impossible expectations and just listen to the music. The four members of the band seemed to be thinking the same thing, as they avoided the kind of bizarre performance antics they were once known for and seemed to listen carefully to the sound of their instruments and each other. Singer Genesis P-Orridge put a huge amount of energy into every song, stretching that cynical yet cosmic voice like taffy in old songs like “What a Day,” “Hamburger Lady,” and “Something Came Over Me.” That last one was a special treat to me as it’s a little obscure and one of my favorites. Meanwhile, Cosey hammered out abstract guitar grit with a slide, while Carter and Sleazy—in an oversize leopard-print robe—sat at a table full of implacable electronics.

The music sounded good but it was a little confusing that the bouncers came in and stopped people every time they started moving around. The combination of wild music and aggressive policing was a little hard to take—especially when one guy who was bouncing around in an obnoxious but harmless manner was literally carried out the door.

The Emeralds’ opening set was a treat as well. The three members of the group played a single long analog jam rich in grit, deep sawtooth drones, and sparkling processed vocals.

Over at Fantasy Magazine, I review the Red Dwarf special, “Back to Earth.”

Check it out.

Fifth Estate is a radical journal of theory and action. The new issue—on “Subtext, Subversion, and Sabotage”—is out now, and may be of added interest to this list because it contains a lot of short fiction. See below for more information, including an invitation to submit pieces to the Ursula K. LeGuin issue.

Fifth Estate #380 (Spring 2009)
issue theme: “Subtext, Subversion & Sabotage”
www.fifthestate.org

* Henry Reed – “Between Orwell and McCarthy: The Crucifixion of Marie Mason”
* anon – “The Green Scare Rolls On”
* Cara Hoffman & Joe Ricker – “The Jumper”
* Ambrose Nurra – “Miscarriage” and “Proverb”
* Gavin Grindon – “Second-Wave Situationism?”
* Jason Cook – “Eschatology”
* Jacob Bennett – “An Elegy for Malachi Ritscher”
* Jack Bratich – “Subjectivity Rosa: Undercurrent Affairs”
* Bianca Shannon – “Tracks”
* Walker Lane – “Nope to Hope: False Capital & the Spectacle Triumphant”
* Peter Lamborn Wilson – “Seven Subversive InstaSonnets”
* Don LaCoss – “Sucker”
* Cara Hoffman – “Rachel Pollack is Willing to Change Everything”
* Kristian Williams – “Sexual Liberation and the Possibilities of Friendship: Foucauldian Proposals and Anarchist Elaborations”
* anon – “Our Hearts Never Hibernate, Neither does the State: An Update on the RNC 8”
* John Gibler – “ ‘We Will Continue’ – Street Art in Oaxaca”
* Charles Hale – “Solidarity in Slowmotion”
* Jim Feast – “ ‘The People’s Luck’: Anti-Authoritarian China”
* Stevphen Shukaitis – “Workers’ Inquiry, Militant Research, and the Business School”

BOOK REVIEWS

* Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark, edited by Paul Bogard. Review by Don LaCoss * AKIBA: A Gnostic Novel, by p.m. Review by Dave Meesters
* CYCLONOPEDIA complicity with anonymous materials, by Reza Negarestani. Review by Peter Lamborn Wilson

Issues are $4pdd (US) each and subscriptions are $14 (US), $20 (Mexico & Canada) and $24 (world).
www.fifthestate.org or Fifth Estate, PO Box 201016, Ferndale, MI 48220.

***

SUBMISSION CALLS for #381 and #382

for #381, SUMMER 2009
Now accepting submissions; no theme. Deadline is June 1, 2009. Write to: fe@fifthestate.org or Fifth Estate, PO Box 201206, Ferndale, MI 48220

for #382, FALL 2009
In honor of Ursula K. LeGuin’s 80th year, the Fifth Estate plans a very special issue with writings by and about this esteemed and visionary author. In particular, we seek artwork, poems, essays, and short stories that explore LeGuin’s living legacy of ambiguous anarchy, of her utopian, feminist, ecological, Taoist, and anti-authoritarian work.

Please write with any questions.

Submissions accepted starting July 1, 2009!
sunfrog@gmail.com or Fifth Estate, PO Box 6, Liberty, TN 37095

Yesterday the Million Writers Award list of 2008′s notable stories came out and I was proud to see four Fluidians on the list:

• “Snatch Me Another” by Mercurio D. Rivera
• “Until Forgiveness Comes” by K. Tempest Bradford
• “Nine Sundays in a Row” by Kris Dikeman
• “Down the Well” by Alaya Dawn Johnson

The ladies are pleased as punch that we make up half of the stories chosen from Strange Horizons this year.  Technically David makes up half the stories from Abyss & Apex, too!

We’ll have to wait until May 15th to see which of us ends up on the list of top 10 stories.  Then our friends and fans (hi mom!) can vote on their favorites.  Until then, we will all enjoy being awesome and notable.