June | 2009 | Carlton Mellick III

Archive for June, 2009

Meat Ship

Posted in Random Shit on June 13, 2009 by carltonmellick

meat ship

If you haven’t seen this before, you must see it now. The glorious meat ship. Of course, it would be much cooler if it were the size of a real ship. And it actually floated. And the cannons actually worked. And I was able to sail around in it and fire meatballs at hungry people hanging out along the Oregon coast. And if it ever got boring I could just eat it and then swim home.

1 Comment »

Bizarro vs. Surrealism

Posted in Writing Related on June 11, 2009 by carltonmellick

Rich Ristow asked me this question last week:

What separates Bizarro from run-of-the-mill new surrealism? Or, the difference between bizarro and the older, more “classical” sense of surrealism?

I’ll start with classical surrealism. While classical surrealism seems weird, it is not bizarro at all. Classical surrealism was all about examining the subconscious human mind. Through the process of automatic writing, the early surrealists would just let language flow out of them at random. Andre Breton, who started the surrealist movement, was a Freudian psychiatrist who studied the subconsciousness of his patients during WWI. He believed that automatic writing was the purest way to study the subconscious. He turned this into an artform. A lot of early surrealism read like dreams.

While bizarro can be considered dream-like at times, it is not like surrealism. Bizarro is the genre of the weird. Dreams and the subconscious are not weird. They are incredibly common. Weirdness caused through dreams, insanity, or drug trips cannot be bizarro because those things are far too normal. Other differences between bizarro and classical surrealism is that the surrealists were politically motivated and took themselves far too seriously. If a writer didn’t share the same political views as Breton he wouldn’t let that writer get involved with the movement. In other words, he was a complete douchebag.

New surrealism is harder to define. There’s no new surrealist manifesto, there’s no new surrealist movement, and most people who are considered new surrealists never use the term “surrealism” to describe their work. There is actually a lot of confusion over what surrealism is these days. Some people think that all surrealism is just the old style of surrealism, some people think that anything that takes place outside of reality is surrealism (including sci-fi/fantasy), some people think that surrealism is just weird fiction. Personally, I think if anybody is writing surrealism these days they need to get rid of the “ism” part unless they are doing automatic writing or a Breton tribute. Just call it surreal fiction. Or better yet, call it irreal fiction. Very few people know about the term irrealism, but what most people are calling surrealism these days is actually irrealism…which can be defined as “a style that features an estrangement from our generally accepted sense of reality.” I would put Russell Edson in the category of irrealism.

Irrealism is definitely weird. Bizarro is the genre of the weird. So bizarro does include the irreal, (a lot of bizarro is irreal). But bizarro cannot include surrealism… because dreams/subconscious are not weird. Also, bizarro is mostly about weird plots and weird characters, and the automatic writing of surrealism has no plots or characters (unless by accident) so it cannot be bizarro.

14 Comments »

Jeff Burk on Metal Crypt

Posted in Bizarro Authors, Bizarro Events on June 10, 2009 by carltonmellick

Jeff Burk will be a guest on the radio show Metal Crypt at 3pm-6pm EST on June 10th. He will be talking about Shatnerquake, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, and lots of other bizarro goodness. Check it out.

Jeff

Crypticon Photos

Posted in Bizarro Events on June 9, 2009 by carltonmellick

Just got back from Crypticon. Of the bizarro crew, there were twelve of us: Rose O’Keefe, Jeremy Robert Johnson, me, Jeff Burk, Cameron Pierce, Forrest Armstrong, Angie Molinar, Kevin Shamel, Gina Ranalli, Karen Townsend, Bruce Taylor and Mykle Hansen. It was a great time. Here are some highlights.

The Eraserhead Press crew on the way to Seattle:

Eraserhead crew

The Eraserhead Press table:

ehp table
(Tabling is a pain in the ass, but Eraserhead always tends to sell a ton of books at every convention, even when the turnout isn’t as good as expected)

ehp table

Me and Forrest Armstrong:

me & forrest
(my head against my head)

Mykle Hansen being attacked by Angie in a bear suit:

mykle
(To promote his book “Help! A Bear is Eating Me!” Mykle did this impromptu comedy sketch in the lobby.)

bear

Mykle eaten

Jeremy, me, John Skipp, and Cody Goodfellow at the Elysian Brewery:

elysian
(Drinking at a local brewery is usually my favorite part of doing conventions)

Rose with shirts of my head on them:

cm3 shirts
(These shirts might be on sale soon)

Rose with Lloyd Kaufman:

lloyd
(Rose hung out with Lloyd quite a bit over the weekend. He’s a cool guy, of course, and was really
supportive of bizarro fiction and Eraserhead Press. He seemed genuinely interested in what we were all about and perhaps some bizarro writers might even be writing for Troma at some point. We’ll have to see.)

The Brutally Evil Satan Show:

satan show
(So this is my retarded satan performance.)

satan

My book signing session:

signing

The bizarro hour:

Cameron + audience
(Picture of the audience for the Bizarro Hour. Too many people came to see this event to have it in the reading room, so it had to be moved to the lobby.)

Cameron doing lloyd the centipede (Cameron Pierce the banana man doing Lloyd the Centipede during his performance.)

Jeremy
(Jeremy Robert Johnson doing his magic show)

Jeremy+mykle
(Jeremy and Mykle hosting the Bizarro Hour)

bruce
(Bruce Taylor’s performance.)

mykle
(Mykle Hansen’s reading)

Forrest
(Forrest Armstrong’s performance.)

jeff
(Jeff Burk doing his Shatnerquake performance)

Jeff as shatner
(Shatner)

More photos:

Rose O’keefe’s Crypticon Photo Album on Facebook

Kevin Shamel’s Crypticon Photo Album on Facebook

(You might have to be facebook friends with them to access the images)

8 Comments »

Goblin Music

Posted in Random Shit on June 4, 2009 by carltonmellick

I love the really cheesy electro-funk music from ’70s Italian horror films, most commonly written by Goblin. They bring me back to a time when only keyboards and bass guitars mattered. I’m getting ready to go to Seattle tomorrow for Crypticon and decided to make myself a road music CD filled with nothing but these electro-funk theme songs to hopefully piss off everyone in the car.

Here is a sampling of some of the songs that are going on the CD:

6 Comments »

Cameron’s Show

Posted in Bizarro Authors on June 3, 2009 by carltonmellick

For those of you who didn’t get a chance to see Cameron’s video interview on Lair of the Lak, you can still check it out. It’s not so much an interview as it is a drunken online party. Still, there’s some good stuff said about bizarro fiction and Cameron’s work.

Check out part one here:

http://www.blogstar.com/shows/154/episodes/14590

Check out part two here:

http://www.blogstar.com/shows/154/episodes/14665

Promote Bizarro…on your car

Posted in Promoting Bizarro on June 2, 2009 by carltonmellick

If you want to help promote bizarro fiction, then an easy and effective way to do it is to completely deface your car with vinyl stickers that read “bizarrocentral.com” like this:

bizarro car

This is a much better way to promote bizarro than a mere bumper sticker. People will be able to read it from several car-lengths back or even from sidewalks when you drive by pedestrians. It will only cost you $5 and if you happen to be a bizarro writer you might even be able to write off some of your car payments and/or gas as a business expense.

Here’s how you do it:

1) Buy some white letter vinyl stickers from a crafts store such as Michael’s. As I said, it only costs $5.
2) Cut out a white circle from the negative space on the sticker sheet. This is for the period of “.com”
3) Measure the letter stickers and then measure out the length of the back of your car. Then figure out how much space between letters you’ll be able to work with. You’ll have to get the spacing just right or it will look sloppy.
4) With the trunk closed, start from the middle and then go outwards. When we put on the stickers for “bizarrocentral.com” we started with the letters “e” and “n” then did the letters “c” and “t” then “o” and “r” and so on. This will make help with spacing it evenly.
5) If the letters go over the opening of the trunk, just cut through the stickers and curl the edges inwards. It will look fine.

This is an easy way to promote bizarro. Rose O’Keefe has this on the back of her car and she has heard from several people (who are now fans) who have said they discovered bizarro just by seeing her car around town. If you’re willing to sticker up your car, I highly recommend it.

Weird Japanese Music Videos

Posted in Random Shit on June 1, 2009 by carltonmellick

This is pretty much the only music I listen to these days.

Polysics: these guys can dance…

3-Nin: Japanese cuteness on crack…

Lil’B: great song, but what the heck is going on in this video…

Stance Punks: laser gun that turns people into punks…

Soul Eater: if South Park was Japanese anime…

If you know of any other weird Japanese music videos, let me know. I love them.

11 Comments »

Featured Titles

Apeship
Six people are stranded at sea on a derelict cruise ship filled with immortal cannibal mutants.
Splatterpunk satire.

Why I Married a Clown Girl From the Dimension of Death
An man who is scared of clowns marries one and instantly regrets it.
Creepy and fun.

Glass Children
An old man is forced to get a job at a daycare center for children made of glass.
Absurd and dark.

You Always Try to Kill Me In Your Dreams
A man struggles to survive in the hellish dream worlds of his college crush.
Dark and surreal.

The Girl with the Barbed Wire Hair
A boy is stalked by a dead girl that’s fallen desperately in love with him.
Dark and creepy.

Goblins on the Other Side
A girl visits her dead grandmother in Heaven.
Creepy and surreal.

Full Metal Octopus
A fairy and an octomaid go on the run from the elf yakuza.
Pulpy and sexual.

The Bad Box
A class of fifth grade students find themselves at the mercy of a malicious godlike teacher.
Dark and absurd.

Snuggle Club
A short horror comedy that takes the art of communal snuggling to a whole new extreme.
Awkward and creepy.

Mouse Trap
A group of school children try to survive an alien invasion within an abandoned amusement park.
Dark and pulpy.

The Boy with the Chainsaw Heart
A Bio-Mech pilot drafted into Hell’s army must fight his way through a surreal afterlife in order to save his wife from slavery.
Dark and pulpy.

Neverday
The story of what happens to society after everyone in the world gets trapped in a never-ending time loop.
Dark and dystopian.

Stacking Doll
The story of a man who falls in love with a Russian nesting doll.
Dark and surreal.

Parasite MIlk
A travel show producer is infected with deadly sexually transmitted parasites after visiting a brothel on an alien planet.
Body horror science-fiction comedy.

The Big Meat
A kaiju tribute novel that explores the surreal aftermath of a giant monster attack.
Dark and gritty.

Spider Bunny
A group of college kids get trapped inside a deranged children’s cereal commercial from the 1980’s.
Creepy and absurd.

Exercise Bike
The story of a man who transformed himself into a human exercise bike and the woman who is forced to ride him.
Absurd body horror.

The Terrible Thing That Happens
In a post-apocalypse world, a small community of scavengers must survive by looting a grocery store that’s stuck in a time loop.
Dark and surreal.

Every Time We Meet at the Dairy Queen, Your Whole Fucking Face Explodes
A tale of childhood love and spontaneous face explosions.
Cute and disturbing.

Bio Melt
Within a toxic wasteland, six strangers find themselves trapped in an abandoned hotel, surrounded by a mysterious black ooze.
Dark and surreal.

ClownFellas
Six interconnected novellas revolving around the Bozo clown crime family
Surreal and Pulpy.

As She Stabbed Me Gently in the Face
A sociopathic killer meets an even more sociopathic victim
Dark and strange.

Sweet Story
A children’s book gone horribly wrong.
Dark humor.

The Tick People
In a city where people live like parasites on the back of a giant animal, a professional sadness-maker discovers that his soul mate is a hideous mutant.
Dark and surreal.

Hungry Bug
In a world where magic exists, spell-casting has become a serious addiction.
Gritty and pulpy.

Clusterfuck
A bunch of douchebag frat boys get trapped in a cave with subterranean cannibal mutants and try to survive not by using their wits but by following the bro code.
Comical and violent.

Quicksand House
Two children who have never met their parents before, even though they live in the same house with them, must fight for survival once their nursery becomes uninhabitable.
Dark and Dystopian.

Village of the Mermaids
An eccentric doctor travels to an isolated village of carnivorous mermaids to investigate a new disease spreading through the herd of human livestock.
Dark and Dystopian.

Cuddly Holocaust
A tale of survival set in a world where most of the human race has been exterminated by vicious stuffed animals.
Apocalyptic and brutal.

Hammer Wives
Six novellas and short stories.

Kill Ball
A slasher thriller set in a city where everyone lives in plastic bubbles.
Dystopian and surreal.

Tumor Fruit
Seven castaways stranded on a bizarre deserted island must go to extremes in order to survive.
Surreal and disturbing.

The Handsome Squirm
It’s Franz Kafka’s The Trial meets an erotic horror version of The Blob when a man is forced by law to marry an alien woman who devours her mates.
Absurd and dystopian.

Armadillo Fists
Set in a world where people drive mechanical dinosaurs instead of cars, a female boxer with armadillo hands is on the run from deranged mobsters.
Pulpy and fun.

I Knocked Up Satan’s Daughter
A parody of romantic comedies about a man who finds himself engaged to a succubus who’s pregnant with his child.
Light and satirical.

Fantastic Orgy
One novella plus four short stories.

Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands
The sequel to Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland.

The Morbidly Obese Ninja
A 700 pound killing machine must go against his corporate employers in order to save a terminal child.
Pulpy and fun.

Crab Town
A bizarre bank heist set in a radioactive post-nuke ghetto.
Dystopian and relevant.

Zombies and Shit
It’s Battle Royale meets Return of the Living dead in a fight to the death game of survival where twenty contestants are put against each other in the middle of the zombie wasteland.
Apocalyptic, pulpy, and epic.

The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2
A group of adventurers learn they are actually fictional characters trapped in the worst Dungeons & Dragons campaign of all time.

Satirical and dumb.

Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland
A Wonderland Book Award-winning novel about a three-armed man who finds himself in the middle of a war between a gang of road warrior werewolves and mutants from a dystopian version of McDonaldland.

Apocalyptic, pulpy, and epic.

The Cannibals of Candyland
A man finds himself imprisoned in an under ground world populated by child-eating mutants made of candy.
Erotic and horrific.

Apeshit

A parody of cabin in the woods horror stories where the victims turn out to be far more deranged than the mutant killers who hunt them.

Campy and fucked up.

The Egg Man
It is a survival of the fittest world where humans reproduce like insects, children are the property of corporations, and having a ten-foot tall brain is a grotesque sexual fetish.
Dark, dystopian, and ugly.

Cybernetrix
A dark and bizarre parody of the movie Tron where a game world and our world bleed together into one reality.
Pulpy and awesome.

The Faggiest Vampire
A bizarro children’s book about two vampire rivals competing in a mustache contest to determine which one is the faggiest.
Cute and relevant.

The Ultra Fuckers
A landscaper and a trio of Japanese punks find themselves stranded in a suburban gated community that seems to go on forever.
Nightmarish and absurd.

Adolf in Wonderland
Nazis from an alternate world of absolute perfection go down the rabbit hole into a dark surreal world of chaos and imperfection.
Absurd and horrific.

Sausagey Santa
A bizarro Christmas story… filled with sex and violence.
Satirical and pulpy.

The Haunted Vagina
It’s difficult to love a woman whose vagina is a gateway to the world of the dead.
Satirical and absurd.

Praise for Carlton Mellick III

"If you like satires which are highly imaginative, subversive, gory, funny as hell and completely surreal CM3 may be your literary messiah."

—Ricardo Gonzalez Del Valle

"CM3 is the most imaginative writer since Lethem and Vonnegut. Different, and absolutely thought provoking..."

—Daniel McCreary

"Carlton Mellick creates fascinating and intricate worlds out of meat, slime, sexuality, wire, and the kind of nightmares that make you laugh when you wake up."

—Jemiah Jefferson

"Brilliant writing that oozes into your skull and melts your brain like a box of a zillion crayons."

—Idiot Alien Thought Creature

"His books are from another universe."

—Cameron Pierce

"Mellick is smarter than the dumbness he tries to coat his writing in; you feel like you're reading a comic or watching MTV - but that underneath there is something deeper and smarter than the cartoonish presentation before your eyes."

—Euchrid

"Through childlike narration Mr. Mellick can present to his reader some of the most curious and knee-slapingly hysterical blaspheme."

—Ian David McGowen

"There is depth behind his simplistic prose, and humor all around it. What at first seems unsophisticated quickly becomes a firm identity to the characters, and you realize the intelligence behind the naivety. Yes, it's all on purpose, and you've just been had!"

—Schtinky

"Mellick has definitely joined the ranks of the bizarre literary geniuses such as Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, and Vonnegut."

—Charles Glover

"Mellick's imagination is boundless, and his writing truly shows this. His characters, plot, and writing style are original, enjoyable, and inspiring."

—Lionel Bigsby

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Carlton Mellick III