Only Time Will Tell...

First printed copy...

Haven't posted in a while. Back in Toronto from SE Asia. I'm here for 6 weeks to launch my novel and like i said on Facebag, compared to Thailand this place is like going to church every fucking day. First thing that struck me is how quiet it is. Noise wise - but also in terms of psychic reverb. It runs at almost imperceptible levels.

I catch the odd spike from individual people but there's no generalized easiness you find over there, when an entire country doesn't give much of a shit about small stuff. Maybe it's cuz large personal financial debt isn't a birthright? Who knows. Whatever it is, coming back to Toronto after 8 months of walking through streets where the sensuality's so thick you can cut it with a machete, this place feels positively eunuchoid. Talk about your cock softening gloom. Well, when everybody's ass is owned by the bank, they must be pretty goddamn sore.

But there are a few glimmers of light. I was watching Steven Leckie, the legendary former Viletones singer, in a YouTube interview and he said something that kind of encapsulates what I'm getting at. He said that these days Marlon Brando's brooding would be considered dysfunctional and something would have to be done about it.

I'm staying with an old friend in High Park and there's something that's just too much to bear about watching these nice young white couples with their nice young white babies and their fuel efficient cars and their overvalued beautiful homes - there's something pathological about them. A kind of unacknowledged hysteria far beneath the surface. You know that statistically speaking, a certain number of them will be pedophiles and psychopaths but at the moment they're happily loading strollers into their sporty new hatchbacks, their officious little wives having given up sexuality for motherhood - too stupid to realize one actually feeds the other.

Hey, maybe everybody just needs a good black and blue and bloody ass-whipping to get their priorities in order. Maybe I'm just biased but it seems to have worked on some friends of mine and me. And I don't mean some fetlife bullshit paddle with rivets and wearing Texas Chainsaw skin mask. I mean a friendly, easy going thing with dad's old black leather belt, made supple and soft with time and use. But that might just be my own personal sense of salvation and won't work for everyone. Oh, well. Their tough luck.

So if you're in Toronto this Wednesday June 6th, come out to the launch party for my new novel, MOUNT ROYAL: there's nothing harder than love

It's at the Revival Bar at 783 College Street, a block or so east of Ossington.

Doors open at 7:30pm and I'll be going on at about 8 and there's no cover.

I'll read you a bunch of dirty shit and then we can get down to the serious business of drinking, dancing and bullshitting. See you there...

Tightrope Books presents Toronto & Montreal release parties!

you are invited to release parties for...

MOUNT ROYAL
there's nothing harder than love

the new novel by Basil Papademos

Live show, followed by Q&A and book signing in...
TORONTO

WED. JUNE 06, 2012

@ REVIVAL

783 College St.

Doors Open 7:30pm
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MONTREAL
MON. JUNE 25, 2012
@ FOUFOUNES ELECTRIQUES
87 Ste-Catherine Est
Doors Open 9:00pm

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LOOK FOR SHOWS THIS AUTUMN AT:

Pete's Candy Store, NYC

Boit 999, Athens

Ubud Literary Festival, Bali

Bangkok Lit Festival

PRESS RELEASE:

Tightrope Books launches...

Mount Royal: there's nothing harder than love

by Basil Papademos

A hilarious ride through addiction, sex,

music, movies, madness and more.

If a book ever needed a parental warning sticker, this is it.

Release parties in Toronto and Montreal June 2012

William S. Burroughs described earlier writing by Papademos as “morally dangerous.” The novel is a wildly entertaining roller-coaster ride, which combines ferociously clever slapstick, frenetic satire, and scorching love scenes to expose a turbulent 1980s Montreal. Mount Royal follows petty thief, drug dealer, and ladies’ man, Johnny Carp, as he explores his sexuality and unearths political cover-ups. The book examines issues of sexual power and individual identity, and the effect of history on us all. Concluding with the 1989 Montreal Massacre, the novel is, at its core, a bittersweet romance–a love letter to a time and a place.

Basil Papademos is the author of the novel The Hook of It Is (Emergency Press). A former resident of both Toronto and Montreal, he currently lives in Bangkok.

Crime + Punishment

NOW PLAYING: How To Fuck Your Psychiatrist - Part 7

I’ve been in Thailand now for about 7 months, recovering from various ills – bodily and otherwise and it’s been pretty magickal. All the stuff I was fairly skeptical about, all the “Healing Arts” cliches I used to make fun of… well, mostly they turned out to be true and effective. In some cases, much more so than Western medicine and especially more than Western psychiatry. Yeah, all the cliches are true. Come to Thailand and get your life back - or create a new one from scratch.

I’m preparing to head back to the West for a while, for the launch of my novel, Mount Royal. Took long enough but it’s worked out the way it should and the book’s about as good as I could make it, I guess. Thank christ for my editor, Halli Villegas. She was pivotal in cutting out a lot of dross and pulling the thing together.
At heart, I see it as a combination satire/romance. Some say the language is too dense, too obscure perhaps. Yeah, it’s possible but I don’t care about the ‘average reader.’ I have no way of knowing who they are, if they’re anyone at all.

I wrote the book for a couple of people, neither of whom is alive and I wrote it as a tribute to them and the era we shared. That’s a big question for someone who’s writing fiction: Who is this for? Who are you talking to? Or as agents and marketers put it: “Who is your audience?” That’s easy; a couple of dead friends I miss very much. Beyond that, if readers get my stuff and enjoy it in some way, I’m grateful but it doesn’t change the fact it was written as a kind of love letter to a couple of my Long Lost Glorious Dead.

Now – after several months of laying low and licking my wounds in a situation that couldn’t have been better had I described it in detail beforehand, I’ve been trying to recover the confidence I need to do live shows – and to do them utterly sober. That’ll be a fucking trip. I’ve been fairly scared shitless – feeling like I’ve lost my edge, as if too much laying around being fussed over had made my critical faculties go soft.

More than anything, I’m a satirist and satirists are awful people, traitors to the human race – iconoclastic assholes who can’t leave anything alone, can’t be content, consider the concept of ‘happiness’ a panacea for idiots, can’t take anything others value seriously, always making fun. You don’t want a satirist as a friend – they’ll fuck you over every time. Perhaps not straight away but they’ll soon see your life as a 2-dimensional conceit and work to undermine it, especially anything to do with security.

I think it might have been Swift who said something along the lines of: “Never befriend a satirist.  They truly believe in nothing. A satirist exists within a terrible and unrewarding mixture of aloof disdain and bitter disappointment and he is generally not fit to dwell within civilized society. A satirist seeks only to destroy faith, not encourage it.” He knew what he was talking about, being one of the bitterest, most vicious satirist of them all, right up there with that Roman big-mouth, Juvenal.

Thing is, in this world of raging ironies, it’s pretty tough as a writer not to go that way – at least for me it’s tough. And of course the satirist’s most ruthlessly attacked target is his or her own assumptions.

So… no, nothing is sacred, actually. Some here get on my case for questioning Buddhism, making light of it. I mean, I love some parts of it. I should, it’s helped me reclaim some sanity and focus but at the same time, I can’t give any belief system a free pass. Why would I? Anyway, the moment a mass religion forms that has absolutely no problem with same-sex tendencies or menstruation, sign me up. Till then, I’ll cherry pick and take what works for me. Total devotion, the vows of silence, the humility, the subsuming of the ego - sure, all admirable ideals but I wouldn't last an hour. We humans are just too goddamn ridiculous, especially when we get all serious 'n' shit.

Untitled Film Still #3 - 1978

One of the early images of Cindy Sherman, among America's greatest satirists

THE INFLUENCE OF OTHER WRITERS

This is something I've written for literary mag, Open Book Toronto, answering the question:  How does reading other writers of fiction inform your work?

Here goes...

A more direct way to phrase the question might have been: How does reading other writers of fiction influence your work? I’ve sometimes heard authors say they make a point of not reading other writers while they’re in the middle of putting together a new book or story because they don’t want their “voice” being influenced. Sure, I get that but I do find it a bit precious – and anyway, it assumes the author has total control of everything he or she is communicating.

When I’m working on piece of writing, I’ll read all sorts, old favorites and new material, vaguely hoping my own stuff will get a boost of some kind. If a piece of prose truly reaches me, maybe its effect will be visceral and not just cerebral - I mean make me feel differently, see things differently. Something like that can help validate unformed and even unrecognized concepts of my own and bring them to life. Besides, I’ll take all the help I can get.

But what I really love is when a writer tells one story on the surface - the direct narrative – but then there’s a whole other set of meanings beneath, working between the lines, so to speak. Handled by a skilled practitioner, an entirely different tale emerges. And I don’t mean symbolism – more like what amounts to a parallel world of unanswered questions and mysterious possibilities. The beauty of that is to wonder how much the writer consciously intended and how much of this submerged story is the reader’s projection.

In the same way, I get a big kick out of a reader mentioning something they understood from a passage I’ve written but their interpretation wasn’t what I’d meant at all – at least not what I thought I meant. So it can be the reader who tells the writer what the story is actually about, forcing the writer to reconsider their own motives and methods.

It makes me appreciate writers who always push the outer edge of that tenuous ground, not entirely sure what exactly they are revealing about themselves and what is being communicated with absolute certainty. Among modern fiction writers, someone like Jeanette Winterson gets to me that way, or John Banville, William Burroughs, Angela Carter and Michel Houellebecq, to name a few. It’s a thrill to see them handle an idea so deftly and work it so subtly. Like a great rock’n’roll hook, on the surface it might seem simple but can evoke an unexpected emotional response that takes you to places you’ve never been and could not have predicted.  

SONG KRAN: Spring Break Thai style!

How To Fuck Your Psychiatrist - Part 6: Now up at EXPLICIT CINEMA

This past week all of Thailand has been celebrating the beginning of the new year with something called Song Kran. Also known as the “Water Festival”, it  started out as quaint fertility ritual heralding the beginning of the rainy season. However, Chiang Mai veterans told me it’s degenerated into a massive drunken water fight that results in several thousand deaths and maimings every year. Kicking off in mid-April, it goes on for about five days. In the south it’s not the be-all but here up in sleepy ol’ Chiang Mai, it’s the year’s biggest blow out.

    A week before Song Kran got going, I had a boozehound and a cokehead yelling at me about how great it is. The cokehead got hysterical, kept shouting: “You can’t be cynical, Baz! You HAVE to go!”

I don’t usually take advice from cokeheads – and of course she didn’t stay in Chiang Mai for the festivities but that’s another story. Anyway, I thought I’d check it out and basically, what we have here is Spring Break as practiced around the globe – people getting drunk and acting out. Like elsewhere, the idea is to swill great amounts of low-grade alcohol and behave like a binge-drinking halfwit. But the Chiang Mai difference is you stand on the road with massive waterguns while others stand in the back of passing pickups trucks, also armed with massive waterguns and have these massive water fights –  using stinking filthy canal water. Meanwhile, other combatants hurl buckets of ice every direction.

   Forewarned, I put on a full-face Dakar helmet with dark visor locked down, board shorts, Caterpillar work boots laced up tight and armored riding gloves for landing with hands on road, if it came to that. I also sanded the sidewall edge of my dirtbike’s tires, for better wet grip.

   Here in the outskirts it was fairly muted, a few kids on the roadside meekly chucking little plastic buckets full of relatively clean looking water. But down in the old city, within Chiang Mai’s ancient moat and walls, it was pretty much a shitfaced madhouse. Perhaps the universal language is not music but acting like a tittering idiot while wasted on alcohol. That seems to bring down all language barriers in a big hurry.

A central theme of Song Kran seems to be that if you see a scooter or motorcycle coming past, it’s a real laugh to hit the rider and passenger with a powerhose or big bucket of ice, temporarily blinding them. I saw a teenaged girl riding a scooter take a face full of ice and slam head first into the tailgate of a pickup without even slowly down. Even the ambulance was hosed and pelted with ice.

One guy hurled a plastic bucket of water at me then threw the bucket, bouncing it off my helmet. I instinctively booted him in the chest with the flat of my left foot as I rolled past and sent him sprawling into his friends. I was told you’re not supposed to get annoyed or angry with people constantly hurling toilet water and ice in your face or pouring it down your back. You’re supposed to laugh along with them. Which is why most expats who’ve live here through several Song Krans either leave town for the week or get supplies and hole up at home, avoiding the whole moronic affair. Me, I lasted a couple hours of getting soaked and bombarded with ice and almost wiping out a few times. Good thing I’ve ridden drunk so often in the past – all that  practice came in handy.

Oh, and if you do want to know about the legitimate cultural origins of this festival, go do a goog-wank. I’m sure some pinhead has plenty to say about it, with linked footnotes and everything.

   At least with Spring Break in places like South Padre Island, Daytona and Cancun, you can rely on seeing – or maybe even getting - some random public sex but not in prissy ol’ C.M. Nope, sorry. No girls flaunting their awesome tits and no boys showing off their hot butts. Though I did see one white chick with blonde skull-braids flash a single breast. Thanks, kid.

   Of course your average Thai is far too demure for something like that. Perhaps they could invite the endless mob of illiterate peasant kids who work as criminally underpaid whores in this otherwise morally pristine society. Now THAT would spice up the party. But pay them something decent for a change. After all, they are the hardest working people in the whole country.

How to make a faffy little Thai girl wipe out on her scooter

South Padre Island: Going head-to-head.

Sadly, something you'll  never see in prissy ol' Chiang Mai

FISTS OF FURY - Part 2

While splabbing on about whatever in my previous post, Fists of Fury Part 1, I never got around to the actual point...
Okay, so here's the deal. A month ago or so my publisher got an email from this alleged boxer/poet/playwright/all-round tough guy, Combo - a creep I know in Canada. I'd threatened to torture and kill him for reasons outlined in my previous post - basically he's an asshole who treated his gf like shit - and i happened to have a crush on her but whatevs, that's a whole other story.
His email to my publisher was a proposal for a boxing match between he and I at the launch party for my upcoming novel, Mount Royal. However, he did say he'd require 3 months warning so he could get back into fighting trim. It's been a couple or four decades since he's heard the bell of pugilistic manliness ring in anger, etc.
My publisher laughed her ass off when she told me about it. She never quite believed my so-called exaggerations about what a jackoff Combo could be. His emails sealed the deal - he officially became a completely untenable idiot in her books. Till then she'd harbored an illusion he might be a legitimate human being. As if.
But the best part is - and this is just a fucking scream - a week after his first email wanting to fight me, he writes back to my publisher and tells her he regrets he won't be able to take part in this boxing match he's proposed because his doctor has advised him his back is too fragile. What a big fat drag, eh?
Last year around this time, I'd threatened to run him over with a tow truck I was driving back then to try to make a living (don't bother - long hours and dangerously abusive customers for shitty pay).
I had my reasons for want to hurt Combo, as I've outlined above and in my previous post, but also because  he called Mike Tyson a "ghetto punk." It's too bad Combo won't be able to work himself into a 175 pounds of coiled steel because that means while his fit and buff self is waiting at the bus stop to go to the book launch party where he plans to beat my brains in, I won't have the chance to come racing up in a tow truck, jump the curb and run him over without even slowing down.
Or as another legendary "ghetto punk", Jack Dempsey, was reputed to have quipped: "If you fight fair, you fight once."

FISTS OF FURY + other tales of abject misery

Before I get on my high horse about committing grievous bodily harm via email, you can click on this link to read: HOW TO F*CK YOUR PSYCHIATRIST 5

Okay, now on with Fists of Fury + miserable tales of abject stupidity or whatever...
A while ago my publisher writes me a tipsy email about this idiot we both know. This guy and me - let's call him Combo - we'd had a bit of a run-in. I got all fired up and felt like I really had no choice, no option - so I threatened to kill the asshole, run him over with a tow-truck I'd been driving at the time -really shitty way to make a buck, by the way.
Combo he had some claim to fame, was an ex-boxer or something, played an 'old school' tough street dude persona to the hilt. Well, he pulled that act with good girls; well brought-up women with plenty of brains but somewhat naive about how venal guys can really be and with the nicely bred manners to not dump these creeps immediately.
With other guys around Combo kept his trap shut. He seemed to hang his whole schtick on having worked at a car factory for a summer and having had one big deal boxing match where he beat the living shit out of some bald old fool.
Combo mostly got on my nerves cuz of how he mistreated his girlfriend, just using her in the worst ways possible, taking up all her time, money, attention, freaking out if she didn't immediately answer his eight thousand daily phone calls, that kind of Pass/Agg bullshit, really gross to watch. He'd just sweat and hang onto her elbow in public, always shooing her away with lines like: "You've got that appointment to go to, right?"
And she'd look non-plussed for a second and then look crestfallen when she realized she's being told to get lost cuz some guy friend of Combo's is paying attention to her - as in her specifically.
She was passive and nice enough to do as she was told. Combo refused to discuss her and always acted like he barely knew her when the chick was his conduit to anything to do with the real world.
Now the really stupid part is my 'attacks' on Combo happened over email. Some of them while I was still back in Canuckistan and some while I was overseas. No, really. I'm not kidding.
I wrote him and threatened to run him over with a tow truck and he writes back and says - get this - "I never thought I would do this but I'm calling the police. I am old and sick. You have no right to bully me."
I kept at him, threatening all kinds of castration and mayhem and he actually goes to the cops. Unbelievable but true.
And you'll love what the cop at the precinct desk told him. I laughed my ass off - I'm sure the cop did too.
Okay, imagine this scene:
A guy walks into the station, goes up to the desk. Some bored cop is reading The Sun, shaking his head about those hopeless, overpaid morons, the Toronto Maple Leafs. He hears somebody clear his throat. Glances up and sees Combo - who looks like he's slept in his clothes for the past decade.
The gimp's got one of those big, wide-eyed looks on him, like he's caught in the high-beams of a big ugly tow-truck speeding toward him in the dead of night - that kind of look.
So Combo's mouth goes dry suddenly, can barely get his lips apart, white spittle at the corners and the cop's instantly annoyed, thinking: "What's this asshole want?"
He listens to Combo's tale, some guy on the other side of the world is threatening to kill me... via email.
"Where'd you say this guy is?"
"Vietnam."
"He's Vietnamese?"
"No, he's Greek."
"Ya don't say? Have you asked him to stop?"
Combo, the tough guy, street heavy ex-boxer looks around, still unblinking. "Uh.... no."
"Try that and lemme know what happens."
"Uh... okay."
The cop goes back to his paper, half grinning to himself, again shaking his head, thinking: "And I thought the Leafs were useless fucking retards."
A younger cop saunters out to the counter from some back room and lifts his chin at the slowly retreating Combo who barely squeaks out the words: "Um... is that it?"
"Yeah," the cop says without looking at him. "Try what I said and report back." He turns and mutters to the younger cop. The two of them stare at Combo as he tentatively goes toward the door, unsatisfied with the outcome but unable to think of anything else to say. Well, he has just been told to fuck off so there isn't much left to do but fuck right off.
Anyway, a few months later - oh, in the meantime I'd threatened to punch out a friend of his - this fat little moron called Howie who got his rocks off screaming at a couple women I know whenever he'd run into them at lit events and the like. Howie would just walk up to them and start flipping out in their faces, super ugly and aggressive and just losing his shit on them. So I wrote HIM from overseas and told him to stop that shit or I'd straighten him out when I got back - or I'd get a couple friends of mine to pay him a visit and teach the stupid fuck some manners. Apparently, he's stayed away since then. It's too bad in way. I would have enjoyed running into him at some boring lit gathering and giving him a nice fat open-handed slap, the same way you spank a hot girl's ass - nice red hand print - but this time across Howie's fat cheek. What's he gonna do, call the cops? And say what? "That man slapped  me." The cops would see me smiling and nodding and saying; "Yeah, I gave him a little love slap. Don't worry, it's a domestic. He's my boyfriend."
The cops would shake their heads and grin and look at each other. "Fuckin fags..."