Sex, Drugs & Rock n Roll

In explaining how they built "what may be the most ambitious audiobook yet" for Nick Cave's new novel, "The Death of Bunny Munro," two artists explored the wide-open crossroads of audiobooks, digital books, and web video.

Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have created materials for rock & roll artist and novelist Cave in the past, and they were granted access to a huge collection of sounds, clips and music from Cave's musical vault. They created the iPhone app demonstrated in the video above, an audiobook mixing video, music, and Cave reading his novel. The essay also contains photos of Cave's manuscript, extensively annotated for this unique audiobook application.

Here's more from the essay: "The text is incredibly vivid and without doubt we'd begun to construct a mental image of Bunny's world from our first reading, so we began by sharing those images with each other, and developing a kind of shared non-existent movie ... But clocking in at over eight hours the soundtrack analogy only really goes so far. The finished result is really something else altogether. Something between a film soundtrack, a radio play and an hallucination."

To celebrate the release of Decibel magazine's DaCapo anthology, "Precious Metal," the LA Times has collected some heavy metal memories from rock journalists around the country--an oral history of this strange genre of American rock.

The collection includes the stories behind such classic metal albums as Black Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell" and Slayer's "Reign in Blood." In the article, rock reporters reminisce about heavy metal dinners, drug abuse, and satanism.

Here's rock journalist Adem Tepedelen with an anti-climactic memory: "[I arranged] an interview with Mercyful Fate on their first U.S. tour in late 1984 ... lead vocalist King Diamond['s] stage get-up at the time featured corpse paint and an upside down cross painted on his forehead. He also used a microphone holder reportedly made from human thigh bones to screech lyrics largely about Satan and other occult-themed topics ... The things that I remember most vividly to this day are how blue his eyes were, how well he spoke English and how smart and how nice he was. Which I gotta admit, at the time, was a little disappointing."

Rock & roll frontman and novelist Chris Eaton will launch a Twitter publishing experiment on July 4th--intertwining his rock & roll tour with Rock Plaza Central, microblogging, and his writing career.

While touring with his folk/rock band, Eaton will publish 21 Twitter stories--encouraging readers to contribute their own twists and turns to the story on Twitter. The collaborative results will be published in Steel Bananas' upcoming anthology GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose, a Tightrope Books release.

Here's more from the article: "Anyone who follows Chris's Rock Plaza tweet is also asked to reply to any story with one of their own, using the rhizome model to intertwine the two stories so that they both are a part of each other. The story need not follow the original in theme. All that is asked is that replies should contain 1/3 of the words from the original text."

Over at DoubleX, cultural critic Katie Roiphe analyzed the bestselling genre of the stripper memoir, an unromantic look at a titillating bookshelf.

The essay outlines nine conventions that play out over and over in these books, perhaps laying the groundwork for a theoretical better stripper memoir. Among others, the essay looks at Diablo Cody's "Candy Girl," Ruth Fowler's "Girl, Undressed," and Lacey Lane's "Confessions Of A Stripper."

Here's a sample: "It is puzzling that such promising and prurient subject matter would lead to such flat books. This stylized form of sexuality seems to lend itself to cliche. In all of these memoirs, there is something false in the revelation and mechanical in the execution, that is--if we take the word of these bored and jaded ladies--something like stripping itself." (Via Raquelita)

Rock star Iggy Pop's new album was directly inspired by Michel Houellebecq's novel, "The Possibility of an Island."

The former lead singer of The Stooges released "Preliminaires" this week, a jazz and rock infused album. According to Google News, the singer was approached to write music for a documentary about the French novel, and the project evolved into a solo album.

Here are Iggy Pop's thoughts, from the article: "Literature's like coke and music's like heroin! Literature sharpens the mind, music stupidifies ... The book had soul and at the same time it showed great skills in just calmly illustrating some things that were inside my mind about sex, death and the opposite gender." (Via Maud Newton)

GalleyCat vastly underestimated the number of foolish people in the publishing industry. Despite our best efforts to cover the madness, our Twitter feed, RSS reader, and email were overwhelmed with additional April Fools' Day pranks.

Here are the tricks we missed the first time around: Dear Author organized an elaborate scheme, rumored to have used a GalleyCat editor for the nefarious plot. Then Phoenix Books hired Jason Pinter as senior editor to work on a few unconventional titles.

Shelf Awareness studied the long-overdue publishing industry bailout. MobyLives reported that George W. Bush lost his book deal.

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There are far more fools in the publishing industry than GalleyCat ever imagined. Here's a round-up of the literary news breaking around the Internets on April 1st, 2009...

Jeff VanderMeer sold his newest book, Bookdeath, including chapters like: "How to Use Personal Information About Your Enemies in Your Fiction." Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly raved about a new reality TV show for writers.

The Kenyon Review has purchased conglomerate publisher Random House for a low six-figure deal. The FBI has deputized the entire team at Writer Beware for a special publishing scam task force: "Rich, Victoria and I will be reporting to Quantico for special training next Monday. At the end of our training, we'll be issued our badges and guns, and begin our tour of the country."

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On Friday night, memoirist Chris Campion brought his band out for a book party, turning the "Escape from Bellevue" launch into a rock show at 92YTribeca.

GalleyCat went backstage, getting some book publicity tips from Campion, who also works as the lead singer of the Knockout Drops. After the reading, the whole band joined Campion on stage, going electric for a sold-out audience.

Here's more from the release: "[Campion] masterfully shares stories from growing up in an Irish-Catholic household on Long Island, to a very interesting college experience at "Vanillanova," and captures the squalor and rolling bacchanal that was the Knockout Drops' world."

In true holiday spirit, GalleyCat readers shared their favorite music over the last few weeks.

Today's installment concludes the first annual Best Writing Music list. We'd like to say thanks to everybody who emailed their suggestions. Want more music? Follow these links for Part One and Part Two of the GalleyCat list. If that's not enough, Largehearted Boy has plenty more literary and music content.

One reader suggested: "The ultimate weapon is Bach's unaccompanied cello music. Yo Yo Ma, Pablo Casals, other fine recordings -- up to you. But it's like Liquid Wrench when I'm stuck. Among things that have come out more recently, I like Hanging Gardens by the Necks, New Tones by Nomo, anything by Tortoise, and (for entering longhand changes on the computer) anything by the New Pornographers."

A reader from Yockey Communication writes: "The Analord 10 singles by Aphex Twin really do it for me. Also, from 2008, Skeletal Lamping by Of Montreal (pictured) is great for editing / rewrites."

More suggestions after the jump...

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In GalleyCat's continuing bid to keep readers cheerful during a tough holiday season, here is another collection of music to keep you writing despite all the bad news.

For your listening pleasure, novelist Michael M. Thomas had a simple recommendation: "Strauss waltzes. Makes the fingers glide and the mind sweep."

Russ Marshalek from Wordsmiths Books writes: "There's nothing that has been better for writing over the past few weeks than Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak (pictured). Soothing, minimal and incredibly evocative." A Hudson Street Press editor added: "I find that Travis works the best. You can sort of ignore the lyrics, and the music is soothing."

Another reader had some enthusiastic advice for the action-oriented writers in the audience: "'The Ecstasy of Gold,' from Metallica's album S&M, a collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony -- this song manages to be both hard-driving and melodic, not an easy thing to accomplish. Great music for writing fight scenes! 'All Systems Red,' from Calexico's Garden Ruin album. I listen to a lot of Calexico, but this song in particular offers a combination of pathos and energy that helps me keep the conflict level high. It sounds like a character stretched to his limits and then pushed over the cliff."

Many more music lists after the jump...

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