Notable

Q: What are other consequences of fans knowing more about the musicians they love? And also of being able to communicate with them? 

A: Another problem is it's too easy to listen to the opinion of the anonymous basement-dweller, and that's bad for art. Criticism hurts. Hearing someone say that you're a piece of shit or that the song you're insecure about sucks is harmful. And I have a hard time unhearing that stuff, so I really had to learn not pay attention. When I did Pretty Hate Machine, I didn't think anybody was going to hear it. Then suddenly it was, "Hey, X amount of people bought your record and it's time to write a new one." And you're thinking, I wonder what they liked about that other record I made? What if I want to take a detour into free jazz? How is that going to go over? When you're not thinking about the audience, you can make more pure art.

– Trent Reznor interviewed by David Marchese for NYMag.

You're talking about memories

I wanted to find a passage I remembered from a novel I'd read in 1993. I had the book -- first edition, hardbound. I got it down from the shelf and flicked through it for a good 10 minutes but couldn't find the passage. But I could remember a phrase from it, and I had a copy of the book as an epub. So I opened the epub on my Nook, searched for the phrase and found the passage in seconds.

Digital beats paper.

Later that week I wanted to find a newspaper article about a person which I had saved as a PDF but I couldn't remember the person's name. After searching my laptop for every related phrase I could think of I looked in the Moleskine I've kept since 2010, in the last pages where I always put names, and found the person, and was able to locate the article on my hard drive immediately.

Paper beats digital.

It is not dying

Shirley Halperin: Are you worried about artists making a living in the near future?

Trent Reznor: Absolutely I am.

Jimmy Iovine: We all should be.

Reznor: I've dedicated my whole life to this craft, which, for a variety of reasons, is one that people feel we don't need to pay for anymore. And I went through a period of pointing fingers and being the grumpy, old, get-off-my-lawn guy. But then you realize, let's adapt and figure out how to make this better instead of just complain about it.

-- Eddy Cue, Robert Kondrk, Trent Reznor and Jimmy Iovine interviewed by Shirley Halperin of Billboard magazine, June 14 2016

Quitting

Remember blogging? In the early days of the World Wide Web an Internet user's knowing gaze fell on Wonkette (Ana Marie Cox) and Bookslut (Jessa Crispin). Cox left Wonkette in 2006, after which it wasn't fun; now Crispin has shuttered Bookslut, leaving us with less fun again. Boris Kachka at NYMag.com asked Crispin why she's leaving and her answer shows why we will miss her:

BK: You’re not a fan of the industry.

JC: Part of the reason why I disengaged from it is I just don’t find American literature interesting. I find MFA culture terrible. Everyone is super-cheerful because they’re trying to sell you something, and I find it really repulsive. There seems to be less and less underground. And what it’s replaced by is this very professional, shiny, happy plastic version of literature.

Earlier at NYMag.com, Casey Johnston declared social media unwell:

It's an established fact of social media services that, once they reach enough size that the potential audience for a post becomes nebulous, people shy from posting on them, because they can't predict what reaction they'll get. This — called "context collapse" — is why we've seen group messaging services boom as broader social media ones have flattened; in your Slack or HipChat or GroupMe, you know how your friends or family will react to a link you post. On an open and unfiltered social media feed, the outcome of posting to a public is far too unpredictable.

In 2014 Prince told Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone why he had stopping releasing albums:

Prince famously liberated himself from his record deal with Warner Bros. in 1996, and it apparently took him years to realize that his freedom extended to not releasing music. "I write more than I record now, and I also play live a lot more than I record," he says. "I used to record something every day. I always tease that I have to go to studio rehab.

"I'm a very in-the-moment person," he continues. "I do what feels good in the moment. ... I'm not on a schedule, and I don't have any sort of contractual ties. I don't know in history if there's been any musicians that have been self-sufficient like that, not beholden. I have giant bills, large payrolls, so I do have to do tours. ... But there's no need to record anymore." He makes a direct connection between fasting, celibacy and his abstention from recording. "After four days, you don't want food anymore. ... It's like this thing that says, 'Feed me, feed me.' When it realizes it's not going to get fed, it goes away. ... It's the same with music. I had to see what it's like to stop making albums. And then you go, 'Oh, wait a minute, I don't feel the need to do that anymore.'"

Good reading

This is being passed around: Salon's Anne Bauer on why it's a problem that writers don't talk about where their money comes from:

... When an audience member — young, wide-eyed, clearly not clued in — rose to ask [an unnamed author] how he’d managed to spend 10 years writing his current masterpiece — What had he done to sustain himself and his family during that time? — he told her in a serious tone that it had been tough but he’d written a number of magazine articles to get by. I heard a titter pass through the half of the audience that knew the truth. But the author, impassive, moved on and left this woman thinking he’d supported his Manhattan life for a decade with a handful of pieces in the Nation and Salon.

Also being passed around: Vulture's David Marchese talks to Jon Ronson about how we use social media to shame others. Says Ronson:

... We still see ourselves on social media as the hitherto-silenced underdog, yet we have huge power. We are more powerful en masse than NBC... We like to see ourselves as righteous people, but we’re behaving as unforgiving and cold. We’ve sort of tricked ourselves into believing that we’re something online that we’re not, or that we haven’t turned into something that we have.

And Jon Ronson again, on the New York Times, about destroying lives with Twitter:

... In those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

The Shibuya phase

The early days of the internet were like ham radio: a few keen operators who communicated with each other more or less alone in the network. The web stage saw newcomers who actively reached out to each other, building networks. The third stage was a general, off-line population who joined the networks out of curiosity and interest, generally seeking fun. The fourth stage was the capitalisation of said networks; the fifth was the commercial trawl for new users. The sixth was about pushing: consolidating the gold rush, locking users into systems that complimented and became essential to their everyday real-world lives. Everything since then has been competition -- first for "eyeballs", then the remainder of the virtual body.

You don't need to go online to find things now. Now, things find you. People look for you, corporations look for you, products want you to work with them. The new frontier has become the crowded mall, the jammed city. The community is a crowd, the group is a mob.

In theory we could avoid this by going off-line, but in reality that's as practical as disconnecting the plumbing.

So the next stage, I propose will be the stranger in the crowd phase. We know we're out there, we know we're in a public space, we know everything we do online is visible to someone at some point in time. So we'll put up the same front that we do when we're crossing a busy street: yes, this is me, but it's not the real me.

And we won't go online to interact. We'll go online just to be online, knowing that we'll be confronted by in-your-face bots and channels and real people, all of them pan-handling -- because going online is as natural as crossing the street.

But we won't be going online to do anything. We'll simply be online because we have to be there. Having an online presence will become as passive as that phrase. We'll just be there in the crowd. And sometimes you'll find money on the sidewalk, and sometimes strangers' eyes will meet. But mostly it will be crowded and noisy and not carry much meaning beyond the space itself.

Welcome to the rush hour: the strangers in the crowd phase. We're all in Shibuya now.

(Pic: Shibuya by prof.dr.cash c/- Panoramio)

Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this?

Q: Many films based on real-life events are being attacked over accuracy. What responsibility do you have to the facts?

CLOONEY: This is a new thing, by the way. This is all, like, bloggers -- if that existed when Lawrence of Arabia came out, believe me, Lawrence's own autobiography would not hold water. Patton wouldn't. You can go down the list of movies -- Gandhi -- these movies are entertainment. And that's what we have to get back to. A movie like 12 Years a Slave, somebody will go looking for something that doesn't jibe and they'll try to disenfranchise the whole film because of it. Because there's this weird competition thing that's going on now that didn't exist 10 years ago. That happened with us on Argo. It's bullshit because it's got nothing to do with the idea that these are movies. These are not documentaries. You're responsible for basic facts. But who the hell knows what Patton said to his guys in the tent?

-- Actor / writers George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Julie Delpy, Nicole Holofcener, John Ridley, Danny Strong and Jonas Cuaron interviewed by Stephen Galloway and Matthew Belloni The Hollywood Reporter.

I'll ring and see if your friends are home

Author and screenwriter Jonathan Ames talks to Jennifer Vineyard about being a writer on Twitter:

AMES: I don't have any certainty about anything. The reason it's hard for me to tweet is I don't want to pronounce anything, and Twitter is for pronouncing.

VINEYARD: Is that why, after joining a Twitter conversation involving New York's Matt Zoller Seitz regarding the criticism that Girls faces — noting that you had faced it as well, but perhaps not as loudly — you jumped out saying, "Very complicated topic for Twitter"?

AMES: I find it very hard to parse things out. I admire people who are able to do it, actually — it's sort of like reading runes. I quit Twitter at one point, and I lost all my followers. Twitter and Facebook, they were bothering me. I felt like I was only using them to self-promote, and that annoyed me, you know? But it is hard to get the word out on anything if you don't do it, so I thought, Well, I've got this novella about it, I want to tell people about it. I came back on Twitter in October, and but I don't know if my announcing it on there actually does anything. It's weird because it's silly and it feels like a time suck. I find it very constraining, and it's hard to talk about anything sensitive like that.

Read the full interview here at NYMag.com.

I am of the pre-Twitter generation that uses a phone to communicate with one person at a time. Pictured: Ray Milland in Alfred Hitchock's version of Dial M For Murder (1954), based on the play by Frederick Knott. In Knott's thriller the personal nature of the telephone call is crucial to the plot. The technology and the premise would later be updated in the too-often-overlooked remake A Perfect Murder (1998).

Frederic Knott worked as a script editor at Hammer Studios before spending 18 months writing the play about a perfect crime gone awry:

"I was always intrigued with the idea that somebody would plan a crime, and then you see that everything doesn't turn out right. You can plan a murder in great detail and then put the plan into action, and invariably something goes wrong and then you have to improvise. And in the improvisation you trip up and make a very big mistake."

The Hitchcock version is the most famous but Knott was still receiving royalties from the play up until his death in 2003. Hold on to those rights.

Cut short

This week I wrote a 27-line piece about Kurt Cobain for Mythiq 27, an anthology of art and stories about 27 musicians who died aged 27. The book will be published in France in 2013, and will be accompanied by an exhibition.

I was also asked to write 150 words about the Frankfurt Book Fair for the New Zealand Book Council.

This was almost short enough to post on Twitter although I have mixed feelings about that. In an article in the New York Times Twitter's Adam Bain described a tweet as an "envelope:" a way of enclosing content and mailing it. I like that metaphor, if only because I have inherited from my grandparents the habit of using old envelopes as notepaper.

(Pic: Frank Micelotta / Getty Images)

Seriously

The Assange standoff is a fitting coda to Danny Boyle's Olympics ceremony: emotional, crowd-pleasing and illogical. Prosecutors have an ulterior motive. UK diplomats have scored an own goal. Ecuador probably can't get Assange out of the embassy. Ecuador loves freedom of speech. And if there's one thing Britain won't tolerate, it's people sharing other people's private information...

In Russia a punk trio have been jailed for two years for flash-mobbing. How is that different from the two young men who have been jailed for four years in the UK for posting on Facebook?

In a lonely place

TextWrangler, my favourite writing-very-fast application, has been improved, with predictable results. The 4.0 version now has features I don't need, runs just that little bit slower and has a bona fide bug: the backspace / delete key sometimes doesn't work (not a hardware problem: I can't reproduce the fault in other applications). How I would like to not be thinking about this, or writing about it, or tooling around the web looking for an old installer for TextWrangler 3.5.3.

Woody Allen still writes on the same typewriter he bought when he was a young man. The 35mm cameras I bought when I was my teens still take better photos than my digital camera or for that matter my phone. I gave up my last Powerbook after a long hard seven years because the screen was so dim it was like typing on a winter night but the machine still works just fine. In fact, the old TextWrangler is on it, so thinking about it, I can simply copy the old software over to the new Mac (MBA 11", a lovely writing machine which I would also be happy to use for the next seven years, or twelve for that matter). Where would I be had I not taken the old man's caution of putting things aside, just in case?

This week I spent a day fixing those groovy Blogger redirects (see previously) and another few hours cursing Google, which now delivers search results in a way that is thwartingly local. If you're looking up something on Google maps in Indonesia in English, it shows you the map labelled in Thai. But if you're in Australia when you type in a search for something in America, you get Australian site results first, whether you ask for them or not. There is a way around the latter -- utterly unintuitive -- and probably for the former, but how I would like to not be thinking about that as well.

By pressing personalisation "services" on users Google is contributing to what one commentator has called the cableisation of the internet: the reduction of the universal set of content into a localised subset shaped by fear and commercial interest. Goodbye World Wide Web, hello My Little Corner. The concept of a walled garden was once pejorative but now we're filtering on Facebook and burning through the world on Twitter 140 characters at a time like a chain smoker stubbing out half-finished cigarettes the idea seems less threatening, if not attractive.

I don't need the web to find out what I already know. If it's online I'm grown-up enough to look at it. I want my laptop to work like a typewriter and my phone to work like a phone and my camera to have shutter speed and aperture and focus: if I need to get closer to the subject I can walk there. I would just like things to function. And I would like to not be thinking about this. The only reason I am is that there's writing I need to get done. Whatever happened to welcome distractions?

Postscript: TextWrangler 3.5.3 reinstalled. Finally. You can go back to it here.

All we'll ever have is now

The French government has moved to seize copyright on books published prior to 2001. From the UK blog Authors Rights:

"The Bibliothèque Nationale de France is to compile a freely accessible online database of all works published in France before 1 January 2001 that are not being commercially distributed by a publisher and are not currently published in print or digital form... Once a book has been listed in the database for more than six months, the right to authorize its reproduction and display in digital form will be transferred to a collective management organisation approved by the Minister of Culture."

The French government has been struggling to control the internet. The Hadopi agency has complained about the workload of tracking pirates (18 million complaints; 10 users charged) and the three-strikes law was suspended in 2011 when the contractor administering the system failed to protect its data.

Four of my novels have been published in France -- Shirker, Electric, Departure Lounge and The Church of John Coltrane -- all after 2001, and all still in print (Coltrane is still French only). It will be interesting to see if the Ministry of Culture initiative reaches a compromise similar to the one made for the Google Library Project.

And Stanza has been crashing on my iPod. Stanza is the e-reader I use when I want to strain my eyes on my very battered iPod touch (iOS 4.3) reading Sherlock Holmes, Aristotle's Poetics, Edgar Allan Poe and other Gutenburg Project favourites. More importantly I used it to teach myself about e-publishing and re-issue some of my early short stories on Kindle.

After Amazon bought Lexcycle in 2009 there was chatter on the boards that they had killed the e-reader, one of the best for iOS. But it seems Stanza has been fixed -- if only for iOS 5. Another incentive to upgrade to an iPad, then. Or to just keep reading them on paper.

(Pictured: Alphaville. Still one of the best movies, ever.)

You hit me with a flower

One-star reviews such as:

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
"So many other good books... don't waste your time on this one. J.D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed."

...always remind me of the 'Review of Winslow Homer Show at LA County Museum' from Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes, pictured above. (I have a first edition -- Putnam, 1977 -- sitting in storage with the rest of my books.) In addition to his many other talents, Steve Martin may have predicted the internet.

Now, more seriously, Time's Lev Grossman has examined the phenomenon of "it sucks / it rocks" reader reviews in depth:

It's a basic but still weird fact about books that two people's experiences of the same book can be radically different but equally valid. On the face of it it doesn't seem possible. When we read a book and find that it sucks, that doesn't feel like a personal judgment on our part, it feels like an observed fact that everybody else who reads that book should acknowledge — and if they don't acknowledge it, that means that they suck. It goes against our instincts as a reader that two people can have opposite reactions to a book, and that both reactions can be true...

Grossman concludes:

I feel like there should be more talk about the criteria by which we make literary judgments. More and more books are being published every year, but we have less of an idea than ever (what with aesthetics being dead, or at least resting) how to filter and sort and organize and canonize them, or even whether we should.

The full article is here.

Love is the cure for every evil

It's been a good week for lawyers. The Pirate Bay founders were denied appeal. Kim Dotcom was denied bail. US authorities seized file-streaming domains ahead of the Superbowl.

Neil Young says piracy is the new radio. Twitter user @rupertmurdoch says it's stealing and wrong. EMI's Craig Davis calls it a service issue.

If all three share a common point it's that old guard has been scooped. Users want what they want, and now. Traditional distribution can't keep up. Much like a determined journalist who disguises herself as a maid to steal a story from a rival,  the audience has taken an alternative route.

Piracy is not just about theft: it's about who controls the sea lanes. Legislators and enforcers are trying to regain control and steer everyone back into safe water.

In the meantime a record label has used the internet to crowd-source publicity for a new artist and rack up #1 sales in 14 countries and counting. See what happens when we all work together?

(Pic: Judex)

Is the internet killing rhetorical questions?

I feel sometimes that it is. This question may have been asked before but if I Googled it first then I wouldn't be asking it, and it wouldn't be rhetorical. Few people understand quantum physics but everyone understands this paradox. More people would understand quantum physics if they looked it up. It's all online.

My grandfather was fond of saying, everything you need to know is in the library, waiting for you to go find it. The difference is that one's interaction with a book is to read it and learn from the experience. Sure, some scribble in the margins. Others steal the books themselves. But to critique a text line-by-line or to hammer out a lengthy rebuttal would be crazy territory. Only serial killers and Joe Orton did that. Although Orton's boyfriend killed him. I'm sketchy on the facts – I saw the film but did not consult Wikipedia before writing that line.

I have a theory that the web is making fact-checkers of us all. Facts are important except when it comes to fiction or art or music or dance or whatever, when one needs to work without a net. And fly. Not think defensively: not snipe. You can't move forward if you're watching your back.

I'm doing a lot of research and the research is good: it's full of facts that I'm nailing down like loose floorboards. All the better to coast across when I come to the real writing. At which point I don't want to hear comments, feedback, comeback, chatter, other people's voices -- unless they're singing, and even then only maybe.

I miss unanswered questions and puzzled looks and mystery. There's less of it now the world is at our fingertips. You can leave a book on the shelf, which vexes publishing as an industry, but as an art form, this is invaluable. Books are bottled knowledge, waiting to be uncorked; the internet's a whine-seller.

I have a code

Send assistance. In the meantime: The Bible according to Google Earth. Steve Martin's art forgeries. Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter talks about Twitter. The Tinnitus Research Initiative. Painting on the iPad. The I Ching online. A history of computer operating systems in the movies. John Carpenter talks about the fight scene in They Live. Author Nicholas Carr on the web and concentration.

Pic: Night Nurse (1931)

Nice up the dance

Idiots are remaking Logan's Run. David Lynch has found the missing scenes for Blue Velvet. (This will finally explain the 'Look Down' photo I've always wondered about.) The witty Craig Ferguson interviews the charming Emily Blunt. The comprehensive Phillip Matthews exposes the colourless Black Swan. (Me, I left before it ended.) Totally digging on the new Lady Gaga single.

Nice internet

When Ain't It Cool News failed to load the other day I got this:

And this is how Poet In the City encourages you to load images, because they are poets:

At Hark A Vagrant, Kate Beaton does Nancy Drew, brilliantly: (Click through for the full strip.)

And the polite Gilbert & George do 'Bend It.' When I was living in the East End I used to see them around all the time, but then again everyone does. They've been there since the 1970s.

Sorry to be so short with you but I'm tapped

On the off-chance that you're trying to email or phone me over the next four days, you can't. BT has disconnected my phone line because I didn't request it. I've confirmed three times with them that I didn't request it, and they've confirmed with me that indeed I had not and so the line would not be cut. So naturally it has been, at exactly the time they said it wouldn't.

I knew this would happen. I've seen foreigners in tears over BT. Locals grit their teeth and say it's like that for everybody. I try not to buy into the stereotype of a Certain Sector being so useless that they can't find their ass with both hands but this is the second time BT has done this to me in a year. The first time was in Brick Lane when engineer rang up in the middle of the day to test the number. 'Why?' I wondered, and with paranoid speed thought to ask which one. Not mine: he was installing a new connection and had crossed the line. 'That's okay,' he said, cheerfully. 'I'll put the old one back.'

I knew what was going to happen then, too. There was a click and the line went dead. Not my line - the new line. My line was still working, connected to a different address, so technically there was no fault on it. Explaining that to the call center person was like describing time travel to an elderly relative. BT took a week to fix the problem - a week of robot voice management systems, call backs, SMS updates, order numbers. Worse, BT try to charge users £125 every time they (re)connect them. Only a cynic (or someone with a barrister handy) would suggest that such technical incompetence is a positive factor in the company's revenue stream.

The quickest way to make progress with BT, it turns out, is to bitch about them on Twitter. Which sounds progressive and modern until you realise what BT must have done to have been reduced to that level of damage control. Such incompetence would be funny if it wasn't true - and if it were possible these days to even use the bathroom without checking online first. I need my Telephone Thing for everything, even when I'm not talking to anyone.

Hellfire!

The Avengers creator Brian Clemens is speaking at a special BFI screening of 'A Touch of Brimstone' in July. I managed to book over the internet in spite of the internet. The infamous S&M episode was banned in the US but is considered rocking good fun in the UK. The Hellfire Club, Emma Peel waving a snake around, the guy who played Jason King: sometimes London gets it right.

At the contrasting end of the personal liberty spectrum the UK government has passed the Digital Economy Act, which will allow copyright holders to trace and disconnect file-sharers and fuck off everybody else. Commentators are concerned about privacy:

Once the state decides that it has a duty to police the internet to maximise the profits of a few entertainment companies (no matter what the public expense), it sets itself on a path of ever-more-restrictive measures.

Which is true, but ever-more-restrictive is how they like it (e.g. Emma, above). Users concerned about increasing levels of government control may be reassured by the UK's built-in checks and balances system of officials who lose lap tops, a regular occurrence which has nothing whatsoever to do with also being part of the biggest drinking culture on the planet. The government's "electronic eavesdropping center" recently admitted losing 35 computers containing sensitive information:

A GCHQ spokesperson today said there was no evidence that any of the material on the laptops had "got into wrong hands", but admitted: "Given the state of the records, there is no way of confirming that".

Get some sleep, Pam - you're looking tired.