June 9, 2010 - Assessment of Self

Hello. My name is Kurt Christenson. I am 33 years old, I grew up on Long Island, and now reside in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. I am a writer.

This blog will be the future site of the alt.lit 'zine I am working on putting together. Right now we have the stories together and are working on the design and more artsy aspects of it. Sub*Text will be a literary magazine that puts forth the type of material that I enjoy, mostly new stuff that's influenced from Beat Poets, Surrealists, 70's Sci-Fi Satire, the DADA Movement, comic books, fantasy...rather than anything that is considered "Literature".

I also would like it to feature different artists, but local or independent artists that are doing it for the love of it, because they are compelled to create, instead of trying to market themselves. Leave the marketing to me guys, I won't steer you wrong. The artists I would first like to promote are Stu Horvath & Andrea Sparacino, a photographer and an illustrator respectively.

If you are a writer or artist, of any shape, form or medium, please let me know. I am always looking for someone else to help promote their work. To that end, I am the designer and co-creator/host of WRITE CLUB! the podcast/blog that showcases a lot of independent creators, from comic books to filmmakers, as well as provide you with interviews and insider tips to the comic book industry.

The site will be expanding in the next few months, when we roll out a new show format and slick new website. In the meantime, we'll keep on posting up interviews and articles that provides a fresh new look at art/writing/comics/movies/theatre/fashion and beyond. We are always looking for contributors as well, so if you you want to geek out on something just let us know.

I'm also in the process of re-imagining our webcomic section, so if there's any suggestions or comments, let me know what would be cool, what you want to read or check out. Right now it should be a good sampling of comic strip, photography, short stories, and sketches.

To help promote the WRITE CLUB! name, and to keep a daily log of the important links that I come across for our audience, I have created the WRITE CLUB! Tumblr. Anything I see that focuses on comic news, superhero movies, tips and tricks for writers, open submissions/contests, Art show gallery information, author interviews, etc. I will post it up on here. There's a lot of information floating around the internet, and this will be a good lightning rod for practical and entertaining goodies.

I also have my own personal Tumblr, AgentFenris, which will be the main outside link to this blog. Any contributor to this site going forward will need their own Tumblr account as well as Twitter. This way Sub*Text will a multi-tiered creator contact site. You can read the print 'zine, go to this blog to read more/current articles, then go to a creator's individual Tumblr where they can get to know them more personally.

In this way I will create a celebrity based hierarchy which is necessary in any self-sustaining system. From this I will form a scene for this new "vibe" we are providing to the stale art/lit world that currently exists. It's us, doing what we want, how we want, having others appreciate it. The masses must be told that this is quality, and we have to learn how to say that to ourselves first. And the only thing that does that is doing something with it.

Success. Each little bit will feed our egos. We will want more.

I three weeks from finishing my first novel, the Tower of Brahma. I started this book (based off a screenplay from college) when I was 26 years old, living as a suburban loser in North Massapequa, Long Island, down the block from my Junior High School. I had no friends, minimal contact with my family, and stuck in a six year relationship that was a strained roommate situation more than anything else.

Over the next seven years of writing it, I moved to NYC, went to Colombia, got a tattoo, climbed a mountain, got blackout drunk, cried, ran amuck, and fell in love with the city streets. I was unemployed, a vagabond, living out of my car, staying with friends, from vegetarian to chain smoker. I had epic romantic one night stands and heart wrenching relationships. I was manic, laughing through the streets of the East Village, bleeding and dragging myself along in Soho.

I spent a week in the psych ward at St. Vincent's, just a few months before they shut down the hospital. I moved to Brooklyn. I ended an engagement. A pop singer's DJ defiled my ex-future wife. I pick up and move on, again. Prepping the books and videos for storage, gearing up to become mobile, San Diego Comicon looming on the horizon, my graveyard shift at Daily News my only stability.

This book contains all of this and more. It's a look inside what was really going on with me when I was daydreaming, sleeping, walking by myself. My real struggle, life lived, is in these words. Reality becomes broken down to symbols and metaphors. I overcome obstacles, which when reduced to words, are easily dismissed. There is a fictional thread, a storyline upon which my daily drama is hung upon.

Charles Crown wrote a book. It was insane, gibberish. It focused on Agent Fenris and Agent Spider, a pupil and master, who were sent to destroy the world utilizing the Tower of Brahma. The tower is comprised of three towers, one with sixty four disks stacked on it, that must be moved one at a time, never a bigger on a smaller one. When this is completed the world comes to an end.

Besides the obvious nod to the 'Nine Billion Names of God' short story that I loved as a kid, the 'Tower of Brahma' is a simple computer program/puzzle that is meant to teach recursive, or ever expanding information, the basis for computer programming. The actual origin was supposed to be based on a Hindu legend, but is really just a fancy story wrapped around a mathematical formula created/discovered by a 19th century mathematician.

What is the Tower?

It is math. It is the Tower of Babel, an antennae to God, a monument to Mankind's power, civilization's apex. It is the process of stacking disks, swapping them around, the repetitive motion. Where does your mind go when you do something over and over, to the point of automatic reflex, what are you thinking about? A daydream of suicide and newfound religion is what I thought of. A hero's journey into the self, calling out all the symbolic stand-ins for what they really are. My father. My self. My humanity.

Agent Fenris is a kid superspy. He dies when he is younger, and is then resurrected sixty four seconds later. In that time his mind became a blank slate. His only memory from his brief five years alive was a deep seeded connection to dogs, a brush with canine savagery embedded into his instincts. His parents were young, and needed the money, his genetic history and unique mental condition made him perfect. They bonded an early AI chip inside him, allowing him to relearn at an enhanced rate.

He became a kid spy, infiltrating a lair, a villains' scheme, only to be betrayed by his childhood crush, a class rival, Agent Strange. He was decommissioned and made to forget by a chemical concoction made of spiders' venom, Fenris was now Charles Crown again. A simple kid, distanced from all those who knew him, kept at an arm's length. He grew up alone and as an outsider in his own body. Disconnected from reality, half a computer program, half a wounded wolf.

Then he went insane, or rather he began to awaken, when a dormant part of his personality stepped forward through the novel he began to write. Agent Spider was everything he wasn't, the anti-matter ass-kicking reflection of himself. Through the words he wrote, he saw the pattern and knew when it was his time to step forward. He had a purpose. A destiny to end everything that ever was. After all he wasn't emotionally invested. Hadn't they all spurned him?

I hope it reads as part memoir, part pulp, part essay, all told through poetic prose. It has a lot of ideas and plays on words in it. If something doesn't make sense or needs explanation, please let me know. I will begin the process of editing the book a chapter a week after its completion, removing one a week from this site. Where you'll have to buy a final print version from me to ever read again.

I love the idea of removing a free text from the internet, deleting its entire electronic existence, only to have it liberated into paper and ink form. Almost everyone I've ever met in the last seven years is in those pages, and here's your last chance to be involved in the production of my first novel. I hope to print it up with various covers and to stain the pages with tea in order to make it appear to be an old pulp paperback. But after those sixty four copies that I will make, I won't make any more.

On January 1st, 2011 I begin work on the sequel NEW WORLD: ORDER, which I will post up online one chapter a week as I write them. This will show Charles Crown's rise to power, that is if he doesn't die at the end of Tower of Brahma. After all, the ending is not yet written. That will have 100 chapters and I aim to finish it upon the Winter Solstice of 2012. As the Mayan calendar ends, a critical juncture is reached in the history of mankind, I will be there writing about it through these characters.

When that books becomes a smash hit and I get recognition from various writing establishments, I will enter the arena of fiction warriors, other writers all vying for the top spot. This will be the final book in the Agent Fenris trilogy, VALHALLA. Who knows how long that one will be and when I ever finish it. I hope to finally release it by the time I am age sixty, as the sixty year old version of me appears in this book.

The Tower of Brahma is me teaching myself to write. It's about lifting myself out of the abyss with my talent. Hopefully it reaches someone and they can see me for who I really am. I can not connect fully with anyone else, as half my consciousness resides in this story. I find myself having to type such blatant truths such as this in order to show people what I am about. It's a cry for help and a declaration of independence. This is my story.

As for my other work, I will be starting up the LEGEND OF LIQUID FURY blog in the next few weeks, which will show off the final phase of development for my graphic novel that I co-created with Chris Chua. Right now it's been exactly 9 years since we first started it, and it's been a long wild journey. By the ten year mark you will have this book in your hands. In the meantime you can enjoy the sci-fi/fantasy kung fu revenge story of Wulong for yourselves weekly as I post more pages and behind the scenes/influences of the book.

By the fall I will have a new site set up to promote the digital comic POWER PLAY that I am currently working on with Reilly Brown. Can't talk about this too much but this will be awesome. It's New York City/Brooklyn centric and so you'll see the characters interact with the city as it is, as we see it right here, right now. This one will be big. Hollywood Movie, video game tie-in, Saturday Morning Cartoon style. We're both trying to think about why Lee/Kirby's Spider-Man is more relevant to us than the current books and trying to incorporate that into these characters.

Otherwise, I've just begun my screenplay work in earnest. Outlining one script for possible high profile person, as I begin to work on finishing the slasher flick I have half written. Structuring out the three or four other film projects that could be easy to film once my demented sidekick Boston Scott frees himself from the Sunshine State and policework in order to come up here and dominate the film world with me.

A few other ideas are being kicked around, and nothing is being written off. I will try every format and medium, create in them all. If the plan goes correctly I will even be rocking out in a band by mid-summer. With this post I hope to be consistently blogging so as to make a name for myself out here in the Wild West Frontier that folks call the internets.

So stayed tuned for all of that. It's time I started making it happen.

Love.

K