Concerning Black Asher

From a Haunt Resident:

Asher Black is rumored to have an alter ego.

Black Asher has the voice of a smoker. Not dry, but a little rough. But his voice is also like the bitterest and smoothest of chocolate, the kind one takes in small bits and toasts over the flame of candle late at night. One sinks slightly into that voice whenever he speaks, without quite being aware of it until one must move to extricate oneself afterward.

He has been called “persuasive”, “resourceful”, “ingenious”, “impetuous” and something of a “miscreant”, but he has a penchant for conspiracy. He has a tendency to teach, even when he doesn’t mean to. His style in everything has the flair of the passionate romantic. He is moody, ranging from delirious comedy to fits of dark brooding.

He is tall, very dark haired, limber, always wears all black, down to his exquisite socks and lacy black wingtips or calf-length black boots. Favors trenchcoats, sometimes but rarely wears a “sam spade” hat. Smokes a pipe – generally black sandblast briar.

He will not say where he is from, and is capable of a variety of strange or foreign accents, and bits of language. His parents, he says, are long dead, and he has no family. It is rumored that he has a secret love. He is also a heretic of several churches.

Familiar with the knife, suggesting a rough background, yet his tastes run to fastidious refinery. He cooks, usually Italian, favors certain wines and liquors but is never drunk, prefers a blend of tobacco that is moist pitch black but not overly sweet laced with spicy turkish and pungent American indian varieties. He tends to look angry or unhappy when he is only thinking, which is most of the time.

Black Asher has certain unusual capabilities or tendencies.

From the First Haunt

Asher, like Count Dracula, thought it best to make the way to his Haunt arduous, the path dangerous, and the distance formidable, so that those who actually arrive are those who are capable of … well… shall we say… withstanding certain rigours….

Old GMR Bio

Asher Black began reading, writing, and getting into trouble when he was very young. His first science fiction story – a satire on one of the young peers who’d been taunting him – received a summary “F” from his teacher and doomed him to be interested in literature from that time forward. Tossing him Tolkien’s books only encouraged him and he was eventually discovered in the library after hours studying Robert’s Graves’ The White Goddess and other such obviously subversive material.

In the couple of decades since then, he’s published poems, articles, editorials, reviews, edited a few minor publications of a similarly “unsavory” nature, and is currently writing short stories.

Any wishing to consort with his ilk can contact him here

Anti-bio

[This bio is compiled from various negative reviews of Asher]

  • I don’t like Asher very much.
  • For one thing, he’s unpatriotic. He thinks we live in an aggressor nation that kills innocent people or something. He seems to like other countries better than ours. He’s always talking about someplace else, when he’s not knocking this country.
  • He doesn’t accept authority. He acts like he doesn’t have to answer to anyone. One of these days, someone’s going to shut him down.
  • He’s judgemental. Everyone has to earn his respect. He has no respect for the average person. He thinks he’s smarter or better than most people. I once asked Asher if he thought he was better than other people, and he said, “Better at what?”
  • He thinks very highly of himself, like he’s special. He acts like he’s above most people. He’s so aloof.
  • He thinks that knowing a lot of words and facts is very important. He never stops thinking, he’s always reading some book, and he always has something to say.
  • He doesn’t concern himself with the results of his ideas before deciding to accept them.
  • He doesn’t weigh the consensus of others against his own opinion before deciding what to believe. He’s opinionated. He almost never agrees with anything other people think, say, or believe. He has to be different.
  • He constantly wounds people’s pride, almost automatically, without trying. He’d be the first to be tossed out of an overcrowded lifeboat. I told him that once, and he said, “The fact that anyone would be tossed, makes me the necessary as well as logical choice.”
  • He’s into all kinds of weird, extreme, alternative things. If it’s unusual, he has to know about it or be involved in it.
  • He has all kinds of unusual theories about how the world works, what people do, and so on. He’s always reading some book about it.
  • He thinks he’s some kind of artist. I don’t understand his writing. He can’t just have a normal job, and that’s probably why he has to write.
  • Probably nobody should like him, but he has weird friends who he’s fooled into actually liking him for all of these things.
  • What a woman could see in him makes no sense. You’d think no woman would ever want him, but he either fools women into liking him or they’re weirdos, too.

Contributed by a Haunt Resident

Asher Black is an enigma, but observation *will* reveal certain things about him. For example, on the most basic, surface level, it is evident that mine host is a talker first, and a writer second. In fact, he is currently exploring technology that will turn spoken words into written ones, enabling him to conflate talking and writing. Anyone who has spent any time with him at all knows that he loves to hold forth, and discuss, and discurse, and argue, and incite, and bewilder, and instruct, and persuade, and cajole, both in person and in print. And that he does these things most brilliantly after midnight.

Observed a bit more attentively, Asher reveals further a tendency toward devious thought, and an inclination to the heretical. Moreover, he rather likes these qualities about himself. The latter trait arises, perhaps, from the fact that he will listen as intently as he will hold forth, and if he perceives himself to have been wrong about something, he changes his position immediately to be right. (This, however, is a more speculative observation, and so let us return to the traits of Asher’s that pure attention reveals.) He is unafraid of the dark, can think about and act upon several ideas simultaneously, and smokes, not absent-mindedly or efficiently, but ritually (and please put your Freud away. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. Now, cigars, on the other hand…definitely Freudian. Just think about it.).

Asher was heard to remark recently, “I like my food like most things: delicate yet hearty.” This remark is germaine here because it points to another trait of Asher’s which it is impossible not to observe: he is an epicure of the old school, or at least an assiduous student thereof. In tobacco, food, clothing, and so on and so on, Asher knows what he likes, and what he likes are fine things.

Asher demonstrates an unmistakeable facility in writing, with a tendency toward the Romantic (heretical?). He has written editorials, poems, stories, and other, less easily classified works, some of which he has displayed for the delectation of Haunt residents. A far wider audience is indicated, in the opinion of this humble scrivener.

From the Second Haunt

Asher Black has lived in many places, been and done many things, worn and still simultaneously wears many hats. Asher has also, at times, quite drastically changed his appearance, and (in keeping with his motto) changed organizations, beliefs, and relationships. Certain things, however, have remained constant. Asher is currently:

  • Writer
  • Publisher/Editor
  • Teacher/Speaker

These things seem unlikely to change, since Asher can’t help but do them wherever he goes, in whatever capacity he works or lives, and however he appears. And if one looks closely, Asher has always written, published, or taught, in part, to persuade. So naturally, he has been many times a salesman, business owner, founder and/or leader of enterprises and organizations, and has appeared (on occasion, in one shape or another) before a microphone, in the lens of a camera, and under a public spotlight.

He has sometimes been told to turn off his mind or keep quiet (which, for Asher, are the same thing). But one day, he looked at himself and said (along with Happy Harry Hardon), “So be it.” He has sometimes been called arrogant or foolish for not taking the advice, but Asher long ago found himself unable to be ashamed (again, very much like the Eat me, Beat me Lady). One could even refer to this web site as though it were a nude portrait — “Asher Unashamed”.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

I watched the 2-DVD set of “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” this weekend. What I found most disappointing is that Kevin Smith was basically shaken down by GLADD. They clearly used him for publicity and strong-armed him into paying money. There’s nothing anti-gay about his films. Look at “Chasing Amy”. If any film ever made homosexuality mainstream, that was it. And he shouldn’t have caved. But that’s how films are made in the US. They have to pass GLADD, or they’ll call you a homophobe in public until you pay up. Then, after he made the donation, they acted as if it were an admission of guilt. Basically, they used it to say, ‘This is what one gets for offending GLADD’ and ‘See how GLADD can raise money for gay foundations by targeting even those who’ve demonstrably endorced homosexuality.” It was great publicity for them. I remember explaining how studios are held hostage this way to an associate back in the eighties, and he called me a liar, and suggested that even if I were right, making a point of it wasn’t the right attitude. You remember the eighties. People were scrambling to be intellectually fashionable, or at least above persecution, by choosing which facts to pay attention to. But all such duplicity creates an atmosphere of social, ideological, and economic extortion that is supposedly better than the simple freedom of speech. The film wasn’t even a pimple on “Chasing Amy”, but it was made sordid by the thirty pieces of silver.

The Hot Chick

In The Hot Chick Maritza Murray portrays, “Ling-Ling”, a girl who is half African-American, half Korean-American.

After an ebonics-laden exchange of compliments with her African-American friends, she is immediately embarrassed when her Korean mother arrives with her forgotten lunch of kimchi and bulgogi (staple Korean dishes). “Out of all the Korean liquor stores, why did my father have to walk into that one?” Among other troubles, her mother is calling her “Ling Ling” which is a Chinese, not a Korean name. Similarly, the mother is wearing Chinese, not Korean, traditional clothing.

Again, in a shop of African antiques, “Ling Ling” expresses her pride in being an African American but, once again, is immediately ashamed when her Korean mother shows up. The stereotype is reinforced when the mother exclaims that “Ling-Ling” had walked right past the nail shop without stopping to greet her.

In short, the stereotyping, and even truly ignorant stereotyping, makes this otherwise vapid film truly repugnant.

The Hunted

The Hunted is an unforgivably deceptive film. It’s portrayal of events in Serbia is contrary to anything remotely like the facts. No evidence of mass killings on the scale suggested in the opening moments of the film has ever been produced. It is one of the many such examples of a military-industrial propaganda line bolstered by Hollywood. What would be really novel is a few films showing American soldiers slaughtering innocent children as they did in Viet Nam, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Children of Dune

Frank Herbert's Children of Dune
Image via Wikipedia

Children of Dune (British miniseries) was a lot more fun than the two Dune films. Also Neverwhere (British miniseries) was a lot of fun. de Cabaras was especially well performed. Most fun I’ve had at the movies since Fellowship of the Ring.

New GMR Bio

Asher Black is a former Managing Editor, Film Editor, and Senior Writer for The Green Man Review who also managed Layout and served a year as a Proofreader for us. He has also served as an editor of Modern Heresy, is currently Editor-in-Chief of Mytholog, and writes fiction as well as reviews. He is reading the works of Guy Gavriel Kay, Neil Gaiman, Sheri Tepper, and Terri Windling. He can be found lurking about Asher’s Haunt. Asher served at GMR from December 2001 through March 2003.

Tadpole

Cover of "Tadpole"
Cover of Tadpole

Tadpole is wonderful! It’s about a young boy, Oscar, a genius of 15, cultured, studied, multilingual, who is irresistable to women – like Diane (Bebe Neuwirth). And he’s in love with his stepmother, Eve (Sigourney Weaver). He can also tell all about a woman by examining her hands. I liked the premise right off, and liked the film even more. Most of all, I liked the characters. Except for Oscar’s dad (John Ritter), who I can’t stand in anything. There have been quirky, funny treatments of this subject before. Rushmore comes to mind. But this one doesn’t mock the act of love. The passion here is genuine passion, which makes it all the more interesting. It suggests that depth of passion is a thing not of age but of mind. What I don’t like is the origin of the title; “Tadpoling” is a term (obviously meant to ridicule) the trend of older women having much younger male lovers – usually about 10 years younger. Frankly, this “trend” is merely the result of women having financial and social independence and access to the cultural millieu once dominated by men. In contrast, it has rarely been thought unusual for men to have lovers 10 years their younger.

Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor – I refused to see it at the time – is pretty damned awful, all things considered. The tasteless quasi-comedic moments are the worst part. The romance is predictable. All the i’s of diversity are dotted, so one is conscious of being manipulated. But then, the film is one long manipulation anyway. The little speech on “the heart of a volunteer” was wretched. And, of course, it came out at just the right moment, eh?