Ridley Scott: I went to art school in west Hartlepool in the north of England, alongside the Durham steel mills and the Imperial Chemical Industries plant. The air smelled like toast. Toast is quite nice, but when you realize it’s steel, and it’s probably particles, it’s not very good. Crossing the footbridge at night, you’d be walking above the steel mill, crossing through the smoke, dirt, and crap, looking down into the fire. Later, I spent a little time in New York, which always seemed to be a city on overload, and Hong Kong at the time it was wonderfully medieval — pre-skyscraper, when the harbor was filled with junks. When it came to deciding whether to go Hispanic or Asian for what seems to be the majority culture on the streets in San Angeles, I opted for Asian. And I felt I knew what it would be like to ride in a spinner. In the years when I was doing a lot of TV commercials, once a month I’d fly into New York. I’d get off the plane at JFK and take a helicopter, which cost $20, to the top of the Pan American building. Winter or summer, high wind or balmy evening — it was hairy. I did that for almost two years. Then, one stormy winter evening, a chopper nearly missed the top of the building because of the wind gusts. It perched perilously on the edge, and they nearly lost it. And that was the end of that. There were no more helicopters; they just closed them down. But I always remembered that.

Ridley Scott is about to release his final cut of Bladerunner.

(via nulldevice)

I’m supposed to be packing for a trip to my mother’s place tomorrow, but I got distracted catching up on Nobody Passes. Mattilda alerted me to the news that Punk Planet is over.

It’s funny how remoteness from ‘the centre’ creates a timelag, or how it used to. Mattilda notes that by the time she had left high school, PP’s politics felt old hat. Me, I didn’t discover it until one fateful day in 1999, in my second job after uni, sub-editing for a [tacky] youth portal. Maybe the second or third day I worked there, the editors sent me down to Borders to pick up some magazines. Whatever magazines I liked. The best find was a ‘DIY media’ issue of Punk Planet. I still have that issue. I was really into the instructions for recording and digitizing audio interviews, for some reason. (Back in the day, that tech was new. Weird huh.) And yeah, it was full of articles on boring straightboy ‘punk’ bands, but it also featured Mimi’s columns. This alone was worth the cover price, for $15.00, a lot of dough for a newsprint magazine.

B. was talking the other day about how he didn’t really immerse himself in the canon of gay literature until he started traveling; that in Manila the absence of a reading culture meant there were simply no places to buy queer books or even know which books to read. In London and LA, he hung out in big bookstores and developed a kind of book gaydar: the abliity to predict, from the title or spine of a book, whether it would be queer or not. That was before the Internet, before Amazon, before people were compiling Amazon shortlists and before Amazon itself began pre-empting its customers’ desires… What I notice about both of these anecdotes is how so much of peripheral reading of ‘centre’ subcultures happens through those huge multinationals. Amazon and Borders: somewhere, some kid is finding some obscure title amongst the dross, just because ‘huge’ = ’somewhat diverse’. Not that reading Punk Planet changed my life, or that it was better than the zines lots of people in Melbourne were already producing. Just that it was another world, and a world that lived and died somewhere in the future anterior, the place that is to come, but that has always already passed by.

Bye bye, Punk Planet.

Reading:

• Wildly Parenthetical.
• Slaves of Academe on interracial marriage and miscegenation politics.
• Kpunk and Poetix on Lee Edelman, a crossover of theoretical fields (queer theory-freud vs high-philosophy mondopostlacanian-badiouism) that has resulted in some unintentionally amusing claims. Like, ‘the queer event’, assuming there was only ever one and we can know it: Stonewall, or Freud? People are seriously debating this.

  On the other hand, Kpunk’s musings on Rebecca are serendipitous (as well as interesting), as I’ve been rereading that novel this week, enjoying the slow build of our unnamed heroine’s desire for this hauntingly beautiful, but curiously also genderbent, object of desire: “I knew her figure now, the long slim legs, the small and narrow feet. Her shoulders, broader than mine, the strong and clever hands.” Mmm, gotta go watch the film again soon.