GUESS WHO’S BACK: Well, I suppose it’s not much of a riddle since I put it in the title of this post. but, yes, Avery Cates is back in another novella: THE GHOST FLEET. This is part three of what will eventually be the novel THE MACHINES OF WAR (Part One was THE BLACK WAVE, Part Two was THE LAST MILE). Here’s the summary:
Avery Cates and his shrinking number of allies have made it to Cochtopa, the secret installation crammed with enough high-tech murder to trade blows with the ArchAngel — but Cochtopa’s AI security is a digital imprint of none other than Dick Marin, the King Worm himself.
Now it’s a race against time as Marin seeks to snuff out Avery for good and Cates struggles to claim the prize he’s sacrificed so much for. As Avery claws his way to victory, however, he’s reminded that every win comes with a price — a price usually paid by the people around him.
If that ain’t enough to entice you, here’s a teaser trailer, because I am god of my WordPress:
Lord knows I’ve never let failure or obscurity stop me from pushing Somers Thought onto the world. In fact, the more the world obnoxiously ignores Somers Thought, the harder I push it out there in whatever form it takes.
As some of you may know, I occasionally release music under the name The Levon Sobieski Domination, a band with exactly one member (one and a half if you count the program I use to sequence the drums). No one really cares, which is hurtful, but I do it anyway because I firmly believe that if you create something, you should put it out there. Otherwise, what’s the point?
So, The Levon Sobieski Domination keeps on truckin’. I’m about to release their ninth album — it’ll show up on Spotify and elsewhere soon — and to celebrate I went ahead and worked on another futile project no one ever pays attention to: A video constructed entirely from stock clips. Here’s “Blackout Eve” from The Levon Sobieski Domination:
“Blackout Eve” by The Levon Sobieski Domination from the album “The Levon Sobieski Domination IX”
The name Levon Sobieski goes back a long way. If you are actually named Levon Sobieski, I apologize in advance. Back when I was publishing my zine, The Inner Swine, I created a persona for myself which was sort of an alcoholic, shambolic Bond Villain with a dash of Hugh Hefner: Jeff Somers was a tyrannical zine publisher who ran a shadowy global empire. I imagined a cast of bizarre characters who populated the Inner Swine compound, and one of those characters was a guy named Levon Sobieski, an Eastern European man I had kidnapped and forced to work as a custodian. Levon would pop up with commentary from time to time, usually expressing deep unease and befuddlement at my drunken antics.
Yes, this is how a grown man spent his time. What’s your point?
Anyways, a decade or so ago when I started to take guitar playing seriously and formed the totally imaginary band I chose Levon Sobieski in part as a link to that past era of my life, and in part because the idea of a middle-aged custodian fronting a rock band was humorous to me.
I hop y’all enjoy the song and the video, and keep an eye out for The Levon Sobieski Domination IX, coming soon.
LIVING IN THE FUTURE is fantastic. When I was a wee child growing up in the wilds of The Heights neighborhood in Jersey City, my brother Yan and I had outsize ambitions when it came to creativity and self-entertainment. I’ve written about some of our weird childhood projects on this blog before, and what’s amazing about them to Adult Jeff is how much effort they required just for the raw materials. When we constructed elaborate Star Wars-themed photosets complete with captions and blaster shots added via markers, we had to first assemble a world-class collection of Star Wars action figures, then we had to take a few dozen posed photos with them, get those photos developed, add in our ‘special effects’, write the story to go along with the photos, then mount them to paper, then force our poor, beleaguered parents to pretend to care about it, since they were our only audience.
Yan and I had a very slight interest in film-making; we lacked any real drive for it, and the tools were beyond the reach of our allowances. We never had a camera of any kind, or any training, but we always liked the idea of making films or animations. Back then, it was impossible. Today, my friends, we have stock video.
Building a Mystery
I’ve been obsessed with the idea of creating a visual narrative using stock video for years. In fact, I used to make some money off the concept by making book trailers for myself and my fellow authors. I like the challenge of the concept, the constraint. I don’t have direct control over the clips — the lighting, the actors, the style, or even how many there are featuring the same people and places. Trying to create something coherent and interesting with whatever you can find in the stock bins is, frankly, kind of fun.
I’m also an amateur musician, and I’ve invented a fake rock band called The Levon Sobieski Domination to release my music through. A few years ago, I tried my hand at creating a music video using a mix of stock and shots I created using my phone at home:
A half-assed music video from Jeff Somers. Because no one asked me to.
Not exactly a cinematic masterpiece, but you get the idea. I came to realize that the mix of slick stock video and my own shaky-cam clips didn’t work, so when I returned to the concept last year, I stuck to stock video:
That turned out better. Recently, I’ve returned to the concept with a vengeance simply because it’s fun for me. I love finding a few dozen stock clips and trying to set a mood or tell a story of some sort with them. Here are three video I made in the last few weeks for songs I’m releasing:
“Rearview” from the album “Seven” by the Levon Sobieski Domination (2020).
This one’s a mood, not a story and was basically inspired when I realized the surprising amount of cinematic stock video there is of ballerinas.
“Day Drank”
A song from the upcoming release, this video tells a pretty loose story that’s entirely on brand, I think. It started with a clip of business folks dancing in their office, and I took it in the most ridiculous direction possible.
“Day Drank” by the Levon Sobieski Domination, from the album “Eight”
“Riding My Own Melt”
This one was a bit more of a challenge; once you go beyond ‘mood’ or incredibly broad narrative like “unhappy workers get day drunk and start dancing” it gets more difficult to tell a story of any kind. But in the end I think this pulled together nicely.
“Riding My Own Melt” by The Levon Sobieski Domination, from the album “Eight”
It’s fun to work on a creative project that has nothing tied to it. Whether anyone watches these videos or listens to these songs doesn’t matter: What matters is I had fun making them. And maybe you had fun watching them! Since science has yet to discover the discouragement that can deter me from unleashing such things on the world, I’ll very likely keep making these. You’ve been warned.
Folks signed up for the newsletter got this link a few days ago, but the time has come to set the tone for your weekend with a brand-new Ask Jeff Anything, in which reader Jon Gawne asks me what might be in a Jeff Somers-themed “Loot Crate” kind of product:
$99 a year seems like quite a bargain, you ask me.
SO, where were you in 1996? I was living in Jersey City, and a few years away from publishing my first novel. My friend and former room-mate Jeof Vita was also in Jersey City, working at Acclaim Comics. It was a primitive time, offering dial-up Internet connections and no such thing as Netflix or HBO GO, and you had to take the science fiction TV series that you got. What we got was Sliders, a show about alternate earth’s and the madcap group of misfits who got trapped into ‘sliding’ between them and having adventures as they struggled to find Earth Prime.
Acclaim Comics had the comic license for the series and was publishing “lost episode” comics, which were supposedly scripts from the show that were too ambitious or expensive to produce. They came up one short, so Jeof suggested we gin up a concept and sell it. And we did! So we wrote the script for what became Sliders: Blood & Splendor which published in January 1997. I got $1600 for it. I spent it all almost immediately on liquor and colourful outfits.
The other day I was thinking about this experience and I imagined an alternate world where Jeof and I became famous because of this comic book. An alternate world where I didn’t have to spend the next decades dancing in clubs for sweaty dollar bills, where Jeof didn’t have to scratch out a living as a rodeo clown. A world that saw our genius and celebrated Blood & Splendor as the work of genius it … well, wasn’t, but could have been if Jeof and I had spent more than a few hours writing it in-between playing video games and ordering take out.
So, I did what anyone would have: I made a documentary about an alternate earth where Sliders: Blood and Splendor was a sort of pop cultural event on par with Thriller. And I got a bunch of people to help me with it, including Jeof Vita himself. And it is hilarious. And you should watch it immediately.
As many of you know, I started a little #gettheblood hashtag recently as part of my increasingly desperate efforts to get everyone in the world to buy a copy of my upcoming novels Fixer and We Are Not Good People. I wrote some essays about scars I’ve gotten, since scars factor in the books, and people sent me some of their own scar stories.
I totally encourage this — email your scar stories to me and I’ll do something with them. Recently I’ve made two videos based on the scar stories folks have sent me. First up was Kent Bunn:
And today I posted a new one inspired by a story told by Matt Handle:
Got a scar story to share? Send it on and we’ll do something creative with it.
