For those of you who liked the Ikea stuff in The Warhol Gang (and maybe for those of you who thought it was too weird), here’s a short film shot in various Ikeas. (Via Consumerist.)

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I’m going to win gold in the Olympics!

I’ll be reading from The Warhol Gang this coming Tuesday at the Brickhouse in Vancouver as part of the Taddle Creek Travelling Series of Happenings. Taddle Creek is the best lil mag to come out of Toronto, so I’m excited to see it travel all the way across the country to Vancouver. Grab yourself a beer after work and give it a big welcome!

Tuesday, August 3, 2010
The Brickhouse Bistro & Bar
730 Main Street
Vancouver
9 P.M.
Readings by Michael Christie, Peter Darbyshire, Lee Henderson, and Marguerite Pigeon.

I swear, I had nothing to do with this.

I’ve been thinking about sci-fi tales that present the idea of consciousness being downloadable and storable — that is, people are able to back up their minds in case something happens to their bodies. Or are able to live in, or at least move around, virtual realms because their minds are able to escape their bodies. (Some call it transcendence, but I call it escape. I’m getting old.) But I can’t think of a single tale that takes this to the next logical step: if your mind can be transformed into data that can be moved around, then surely this data could be merged with other data. That is, if we can back up minds, why can’t we merge minds? Why not upload a hybrid of multiple minds/consciousnesses into a single host — a sort of Borg, but without the silly Star Trek idiocy of the Borg — and approach the narrative from that prismatic perspective. I’m not talking just shared memories and ideas, but a collective mind. The notion of an expanded consciousness defined by plurality rather than singularity, to borrow another sci-fi term, would really challenge contemporary notions of life, the mind, technology and, well, everything in between. Now throw in some Peter Watts alien critters that don’t have sentience in any recognizable form at all, and you’ve got a sci-fi tale that’s more reliant on the science than the fiction. And which is, you know. Interesting. Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case these days. But hey, I’d read it.

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I really do enjoy the sunsets here.

A nice review from Eye Weekly, which also mentioned me earlier in the context of a past life I had working for Harlequin, the romance publisher. Those were the days, let me tell you. Anyway, yeah, I’ll take the film adaptation behind Door No. 3, please.

Another lovely review of The Warhol Gang, this time from the Montreal Gazette. And, I guess, the first review from the Postmedia Network. I have to admit, though, that I have never read any of JG Ballard’s fiction or even seen Crash. Instead, the obsession with accident scenes in the book is based on a news story I read years ago about a guy who pretended to be a first responder and helped people at accidents because… well, I don’t know why he did it. Which is what led me into The Warhol Gang.

I only say this because it’s come up in a couple of reviews and I’m starting to feel sheepish about the gap in my library. I do, however, have a book of JG Ballard quotes that I’m endlessly fascinated by. See also Oscar Wilde.

People sometimes ask me where I get my ideas, and I usually tell them the truth: I get them from spam emails. But every now and then I’m inspired by something in real life. Improv Everywhere just struck again, this time with a subway ride that made a brief stop on a Rebel spaceship taken over by Imperial stormtroopers. In my mind, the resistance group in The Warhol Gang was equal parts Black Bloc and Improv Everywhere, although more this type of mission than the Star Wars one: