Chad Taylor

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.

Reference

"It's very important to remember that no matter how far I might diverge or find freedom in this format, it only is free insofar as it has reference to the strictness of the original form. And that's what gives it its strength. In other words, there is no freedom except in reference to something."

Earthbound


I bought a secondhand car with a six-CD player but Led Zeppelin Remasters is only two discs: what to choose for the other four? To start I picked up a secondhand copy of Lisa Ekdahl's Back to Earth (1998) with the Peter Nordahl Trio -- quite possibly the exact same one that I'd sold to the store after listening to it in 1999 and deciding that I didn't like it at all. Plus ça change and all that.

When I first heard Back To Earth I found it clockwork but now, 14 years later I like it: I find it clockwork. I remembered her cover of 'Now Or Never' that hits like espresso but forgotten her charming version of Cole Porter's 'Laziest Girl In Town'. And 'Tea for Two', 'I Get a Kick Out of You' and 'Night and Day.' It's like being in a five-star lobby that never closes.

Ekdahl is Swedish, the daughter of a nuclear physicist and a kindergarten teacher. She takes after both parents: her voice is perfect and innocent, precise and untroubled. The band whirl around her like electrons while she glows at the center, neither positive nor negative, on time and in key.

Critics are divided on Lisa Ekdahl, most of them rating her as not very good. Her voice is one you either love or hate, and she makes no excuses for it. As she told Time Out Hong Kong:
I'm aware that I have a tiny voice, and I try to do the best with what I have. So I accept my voice and try not to make it bigger than what it is, because, for me personally, I love when someone naturally has a big beautiful voice, but I don't think it's so interesting when someone with a not very big voice tries to make it sound big. Another thing is that when I record, I'm aware that my voice is tiny, so I want to make a lot of space around my voice, so for me it's very important to work with musicians who naturally leave a lot of space.

Late night


Jazz at the A-Trane, Bleibtreustraße 1. Raphael Beiter on trombone. Amazing vocal performances by Fama M'Boup, Friederline Merz, Zola Mennenech and Anna Marlene. Your host: Andreas C. Schmidt. 

The Fantastic Mr Knox


Daniel Knox is one of my favourite musicians. I first saw him at Jarvis Cocker's Twisted Christmas at the Barbican in 2008. Jarvis 'n' that were good but Mr Knox rocked my socks. I've typed this before but imagine Captain Riker singing Kurt Weill and you pretty much have it.

In these desperate times of Peak Girl*, Knox is all guy: baleful, dark, Orson Welles-baritoned. His songs are in a melancholy drinking key but his lyrical narratives range from deeply romantic to laugh-out-loud funny. Knox came to us via David Lynch (literally –- he composed the soundtrack to Inland Empire) to tell stories from a Warren Zevon / Edward Hopper / Damon Runyon sort of world -- the place where Tom Waits used to hang out before he started clog-dancing with maracas.

Knox has a digital double A-side out: 'To Make You Stay' and 'Blue Car.' They are both pretty wonderful but 'Blue Car' is fantastic. You can get them from Knox's Bandcamp site. My friend tells me that's how all the young people listen to things nowadays.


* More of that later.

(Pic: John Atwood.)

Telegraph cables that sing down the highway


Remember the days when the murderer's flashback played inside the frames of his / her sunglasses? I do. Pictured above: John Cassavetes in Columbo: Étude in Black (1972). Searching for other examples I came across this scene from Columbo: Death Lends a Hand (1971).


Note past errors in Robert Culp's specs... and the score by Gil Mellé, Blue Note jazz saxophonist, band leader and composer. Mellé scored many films and TV shows. Here he is taking things for a cool, brisk walk on the opening credits of Columbo: Short Fuse (1972):


Mellé was an electronic music pioneer who built his own instruments. He played with an all-electronic jazz ensemble at Monterey in 1972 and composed one of the first all-electronic scores for the movie The Andromeda Strain in 1971:


He was also an exhibiting painter whose work appeared as sleeve art for Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Monk, among others. He lived in Malibu, California where he died age 73.

Here's the Gil Mellé Quartet doing a particularly lovely 'Moonlight in Vermont' from Patterns in Jazz (1956):

Hearing things

Ornette Coleman is 81 years old. If he was Amy Winehouse he would have died in 1957. I didn't know what to expect of a musician that age, especially a horn player. But reviews of his appearance London's 2009 Meltdown Festival were good and after checking out some recent concert footage it seemed likely that he would at least be interesting. In the end he was a lot better than that.

Coleman closed the London Jazz Festival at the Royal Festival Hall with three other musicians: Tony Falanga (double bass), Al McDowell (electric bass) and son Denardo on drums. When the band started playing the bass and drums were so lively that I thought Coleman might be resigned to playing along with / on top of his backing in the manner of late Miles Davis, but he soon got stuck in there. Although he had approached the microphone with a stately half-step Coleman's back was straight, and his playing was as sharp. The trio had a boisterous style but he pushed them aside with bright, entertaining solos. His breath is shorter, obviously, but he still has the range. He played for an hour and a half with two encores and the band listening as attentively as the audience.

I'm not a jazz trainspotter but numbers included 'Blues Connotation', a cover of Ellington / Coltrane's 'Angelica' and a Bach mash up: the latter sounded better than that sounds. The quartet finished up with 'Lonely Woman.' Ornette Coleman at 81: more alive than many.

End of days no really

Critics are saying Cowboys & Aliens didn't work, and wondering if the western is dead. Saying the western is dead is like saying the blues or jazz or figurative painting or the novel is dead: some things will always be there, in one form or another. What disappointed me instantly about the film was the aliens: I was expecting a 1950s flying-hubcap saucers vs. cowboys mashup, but I guess Indiana Jones and the Collective Noun of the Crystal Skull put everyone off that. (It nearly worked in Mars Attacks.)

Along the same line, thrillers are back. (THRILLERS! ARE! BACK!) Or rather, we flee to them in a menacing world dada-dada-da-da. As I've said before (somewhere...) I believe readers –broadly – turn to crime / thrillers because the genre commits to telling a story. At a recent literary event a publisher told me she classified a crime novel as being about "something that has already happened" and a thriller as "something that hasn't happened yet."

Screen caps from the Comic-Con trailer for Ridley Scott's Prometheus are up here. I am now officially keen. David Slade has directed S04E03 of Breaking Bad. Collider reviews it here. So that's more viewing to catch up on.

If you watch TV via torrents the New Zealand and UK governments are coming for you. Torrentfreak claims that the consultation process for the UK's Digital Economy Act was a sham and that the decision by then Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson to disconnect downloaders was a foregone conclusion. Exotically, Mandelson supped with Dark Lord Dreamworks founder David Geffen to discuss the matter, a mashup more discombobulating than Cowboys & Aliens / Alien Vs Predator / Frankenstein Vs The Wolfman. (Does Geffen put down the white cat with the diamond collar when he is at table? How does Peter eat with his fingertips touching together?)

New Zealand Sony general manager Andrew Cornwell says the new anti-file sharing / anti-download / You Wouldn't Steal A Car / Hey Kids Stop Tagging law is targeting the muddle:
"You're never going to stop it entirely. There will always be some hard core people who want to take on the system and get a lot of pleasure out of defeating it and proving they're smarter than the next person. The whole thrust of it is aimed at middle New Zealand who might do the occasional download."
So... the industry will be aiming its thrust at the amateurs who don't cost them very much while leaving heavy-duty downloaders to establish a second tier distribution network which will undercut legitimate corporations by supplying what users want, when they want it and at a lower price. Because that is, after all, how the drugs war was won.

But in America – the last country which Americans can't push around – former Google CIO Douglas C Merrill says Limewire was good for artists. And CNET reports album sales are climbing:
Wayne Rosso, the former president of defunct file-sharing network Grokster who now blogs about the music industry, says that the last time the recording industry saw album sales climb was in 2004, when there were a dozen file-sharing services operating, including Grokster, eDonkey and BearShare. Rosso said plenty of studies show file sharing stimulates song sales.
"This minor blip is nothing to get too excited about," Rosso said. "But it really shows it's all about the product...music has to have legs. That's what has been lost in the last decade: quality."
Full story (bar charts, balanced reporting) here.

Break my heart and leave me sad

Recording a track with Amy Winehouse for a duets album, Tony Bennett told her she reminded him of Dinah Washington:
"The minute she heard that, her eyes popped wide open and she said, 'You know that I like Dinah Washington?' I said, 'She was a friend of mine.' She was all excited that I knew Dinah Washington and that was the main inspiration. And from that moment on, the record came out just beautiful...

"Everybody just said, 'Oh, I don't know how you're going to handle her,' but I felt completely different. She really loves to perform. Every great artist I ever met, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey, they'd always have the butterflies. And Amy Winehouse was like that, she was always apprehensive of what was going to happen."
Postmortem: sales of the singer's music skyrocket; likelihood of a third album to be released; possibility that Blake Fielder-Civil may be in line to inherit the estate. (Update: or not.)

I hope there is a third album. I'm sure there are parts of one somewhere, which is all a record company needs. Her most recent single was a brilliant workaround; her limitations, we now learn, included emphysema.

Online listeners and critics are already discussing how Amy Winehouse will be remembered. Frank is eclectic but above all observed, like a good student doing her jazz homework. The themes of heartbreak are acquired and the lyrics so neat the arrangements are practically ruled off underneath. It was only with Back to Black (as uneven in texture as many other albums from her UK contemporaries – don't engineers mix any more?) that the artist began to inhabit and embrace the dissolute jazz persona the performer had created.

I still don't buy the title track or 'You Know I'm No Good', with its fifth-form poetry imagery but when she cracked the lyric 'He walks away / The sun goes down' for 'Tears Dry On Their Own' I fell for La Winehouse hook, line and sinker. With that track she put everything she had on the girl group sound and doubled down. Restless, pissed-off and charming, that single was shorthand for a whole lot of music that came before and a hint of what might have been.

Tachism



Camden fox outside the Jazz Café; Bridget Riley wall painting at the National Gallery; not Banksy (but wouldn't it be cool if it was?), Fortess Road.

New favourite bassist

Esperanza Spalding live in Copenhagen. At NPR Music she talks about her decision to play the double bass:
That's like the vein of jazz... It's that ability to immediately be able to communicate with someone that you don't know. And in those first five minutes of this instrument that was completely foreign to me, in a way I touched right upon that vein. I mean, I hit it, I hit that nerve. Now, after nine years, everything I've learned about jazz kind of all comes back to that first realization in that room.
Esperanza's official website is here.

Pardon my French

New review of The Church of John Coltrane at www.lecture-ecriture.com:
Un peu de fumée bleue, quelques notes de musique...

Robert Marling vient de boire le bouillon dans les grandes largeurs – à dire vrai, ce n’est pas la première fois qu’il se fait ainsi plumer au poker -, lorsqu’il apprend la mort de son père, dont la vie l’avait éloigné. Et ce n’est là que le début de... de quoi, au juste?

D’une redécouverte d’un père par son fils, assurément. Alors que Robert liquide tout ce qu’il possède, sa maison, sa voiture, son travail d’architecte, pour venir s’installer dans la petite chambre que son père louait dans un immeuble désaffecté, ou presque, dans un quartier d’Auckland en pleine réhabilitation (comprenez que la spéculation immobilière y fait rage). Dans ce recoin perdu comme hors du monde, mais que les remous du monde atteignent pourtant encore, à peine assourdis, Robert redécouvre la passion de son père pour le jazz, une passion qui l’avait conduit à rassembler "la plus belle collection de disques de jazz de l’hémisphère Sud" (p. 48), et à accumuler une masse invraisemblable de notes en prévision d’un livre - "L’église de John Coltrane" – qu’il n’écrirait jamais: des notes en quantité sur John Coltrane, bien sûr, mais aussi Miles Davis, ou encore Li Jin, une chanteuse de jazz chinoise qui connut son heure de gloire dans l’entre-deux-guerres.

C’est le début d’un cheminement dont on ne sait, en définitive, s’il doit conduire Robert à se perdre ou à se retrouver alors que le hasard tisse sa toile autour de lui, au fil des coïncidences les plus improbables et des rencontres les plus étonnantes: un juriste spécialiste des litiges successoraux et adepte du Sumi-e (ou calligraphie zen), un expert en assurances philosophe, une punkette cachant au fond sous ses piquants une encore très petite fille, un jeune chinois chanceux au jeu mais qui a bien des choses à cacher, et last but not least, une galeriste à la séduction vénéneuse. C’est pour Robert le début d’une errance dans un décor presque irréel – ce quartier pour ainsi dire abandonné et dans l’attente d’une renaissance, proche de la gare d’Auckland -, balancé entre l'effervescence irrationnelle des marchés – marchés de l'art ou immobilier - et la liberté créatrice si intensément vivante qu'incarnait John Coltrane. Une errance dont le lecteur ne conservera, une fois tournée la dernière page, pour seules traces évanescentes qu'un peu de fumée bleue, quelques notes de musique...

Jazz flute 2011

Must get out of the house now...

Having tea there out in the crowd

I am too old for Bowlie 2. Julian Cope is not; nor is Edwyn Collins; nor are Crystal Castles. Laetitia Sadier is not too old for it, and Mulatu Astatke was bang on. Listening to his set was like flicking through every Acid Jazz compilation and Kid Loco album ever made.

Bowlie 2 was curated by Belle & Sebastian who despite their clever selection of performers, seemed not quite old enough but they were definitely the same age as the audience. The audiences over the weekend were so fucking polite and charming even I started to enjoy myself. If you wanted to go to the front of the stage you just... went there. The Minehead festival tops out at about 5,000 and they all say please and thank you. When Cope finished his set with a hearty protest about student fees ('Before I go I just wanted to say fuck the Tories') the crowd's response was muted, either because the strange old hippie grandmother dressed like a Nazi biker swore or because the kids there know mum and dad will happily pay for their education anyway. Cope has been out there for so long he's not coming back but the point - lost on the young - is that he still sounds like Julian Cope.

Edwyn Collins still sounds like Edwyn Collins when he sings. He sits on stage with a note-perfect band; talking is hard for him, though, and I could only take three songs because I'm sentimental. On my way out I was passed by a barely-twenty couple running inside - 'Hurry!' urged the girl: 'We're missing Edwyn Collins.' My eyes pricked up.

The Go! Team have got older and filled out musically. Franz Ferdinand stayed within everyone's comfort zone, including theirs; the problem with that post-punk Talking Heads / Gang of Four style was always that the songs sound the same. FF are frozen in cleverness. I think they could fix this by doing more covers: since the first LP 'All My Friends' and 'Womaniser' are their only two songs anyone can remember.

The New Pornographers and Dirty Projectors showed the Brits how to do big bands. Enjoyed them both but didn't come out of it humming anything. Laetitia Sadier showed everyone how to be sexy. She sounds like Stereolab unplugged, which I guess she is. Crystal Castles sound like everything plugged in. If Cayce Pollard started a band, Crystal Castles would be it: anonymous, fluid, intense, brainy, fantastic. In the 21st century there is no logical reason to not sound like Crystal Castles. They are right for their age.

Peter Parker were alright. I think the 1900s were good but they might have been someone else. I have notes, somewhere but I'm too busy to write them up as I am working on The F*cking Novel. It's going rather well so I must continue screwing down the lids before any more sunlight escapes. Miss you (all) heaps. Big ups.

PS: Quote of the weekend from an Irish security guard: 'Oh, New Zealand – that's a great tax haven for movies, isn't it?'

The low moon helps me sing

Fingers just flying across the keyboard now. But I still have time for James Ellroy interviewed in 1995:
ELLROY: Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it. This was his comment, I believe, on the 'tea-cozy' genre, and I think that's interesting, and I think that I would like to do that again. You're under a great deal of pressure, if you write crime fiction, which is what I used to write, to create serious characters, so-called sympathetic characters, with which the readers can empathize, so that you can build a readership. Of course, it can kill you because you have to write the same book over and over again. And I think that Chandler, who I have less affection for by the day, spawned an whole number of easy imitators. His style is easy to adapt to the personal prejudices of the individual writers, which is why you now have the gay private eye, the black private eye, the woman private eye, and every other kind of private eye. But I don't think that's the realistic archetype of twentieth century violent intrigue: to me, it's these legbreakers, these guys like Pete Bondurant, corrupt cops like Dave Klein, and I take a great deal of satisfaction out of putting these guys back in history.

Ron Hogan: When I read critics of your work, they often react: "Oh my god, he's writing these horrible homophobic, racist, misogynist, psychopathic books." And I'm thinking: "No, he's not writing from his perspective. He's getting into the heads of these ugly characters." You're not endorsing their world by any means.

JE: I think I know what's behind this, especially some of the views expressed by Mike Davis. These are fully rounded characters, and the racism and homophobia are casual attriubutes, not defining characteristics. These are not lynchers or gaybashers, toadies of the corrupt system. When you have characters that the reader empathizes with, who are carrying the story, saying "nigger" and "faggot" and "spic", it puts people off. Which is fine. I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers. That's what I want. There's part of me that would really like to be one of Dudley Smith's goons and go back and beat up some jazz musicians, and there's part of me that's just appalled.
(Photo c/- The Guardian)

The Horse is dead

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is on now. Impossible to estimate how much I love a Western. I was raised on them by dint of the timeline: there was nothing else on. Five Card Stud was the first movie I ever left feeling depressed, and I wasn't even that old when I saw it. Since then that bad, sad-in-the-belly feeling has been my benchmark for all manner of art. If it's the Five Card Stud feeling then what I saw may not have been bad or good, but it moved me.

Westerns, like jazz and sci-fi, have become absorbed into the mainstream. I never enjoyed western novels, with the begrudging exception of Pete Dexter's Deadwood -- which is no relation to the TV series. But I refer to Westerns again and again, in Electric, in several short stories ('Running Hot & Cold' and 'Oilskin').

I grew up in the age of the counter western: El Topo, the Sergio Leone westerns (which we watched as the real thing and never considered ironic), John Wayne as the old guard -- gunfights as martial arts epic, a genre which my generation also understood. Prose was the stuff in between: the moody contemplation. I'm less certain now. But I still love the pics: the stretch of vistas, the changing climate, the rules.

The Black Dahlia

First saw it in France, with subtitles, which is the best way to see a Brian De Palma movie: the text is a constant tap on the shoulder, reminding you that it's a "film" and framing its artifice as, well... artifice. The movie version is monstrously inferior to Ellroy's novel, which in turn runs second to the author's White Jazz and American Tabloid: a seething, self-loathing, tangle that twists towards multiple resolutions, and is the greater for it. If you can survive the first 100 pages you will be hooked and rewarded.

David Fincher developed the movie version before being replaced by De Palma; I've always considered Fincher's lengthy, multiple-storylined Zodiac to be the modern imprint of how his Dahlia might have been. De Palma reduces the novel's layers to tight, trademark sequences that belie its multiple twists. Josh Friedman's workmanlike script makes a similar mistake, structuring the story with such concision that the main characters' emotional dips and dives - faithful to source - seem irrational and even silly. Josh Hartnett's Bucky is especially undermined, tearing up in almost every scene; Scarlett Johansson's Kay seems spoiled and childish rather than the complex mirror-of-the-Dahlia victim that she and all the other females in the novel become.

Still, even without subtitles I'll go the De Palma version for Scarlett's voice - a menthol woodwind cracking wise - Hillary Swank's ice-cold Madeleine, De Palma's steadicam introduction to the inbred Linscott family, and Fiona Shaw's extra crazy Ramona. For all the movie's (studio trimmed) gore and savagery Shaw provides its most ghastly moment using just her face and two fingers. Aaron Eckhart holds up his end as Lee Blanchard but true to 40s noir the men are redundant: it's the women who drive. Mia Kirshner plays the saddest girl in the world. The movie was much longer before the producers cut it down: it would be a dream to watch the version De Palma intended. Until then The Black Dahlia is a movie that could have been: a beautiful corpse, in pieces.

Gretchen Hooves interview part I

Gretchen Hooves has become quite the recluse in her later years, choosing only to appear on certain club nights, so it is with no little excitement that I welcome the news that she has agreed to be interviewed by me as part of our small collected history of the Muse Lounge. An accomplished flautist in her early teens, Gretchen first met her future husband and creative partner, Cedric Hooves while they were both attending art school in the late 1950s. From there, romance and exciting business was to follow. I go to meet Gretchen in the early afternoon at the Muse Lounge. She appears a long green gown and with one of her now trademark paisley head scarves and joins me for a mai tai and a little conversation.

JANWILLEM DORIN: Tell me about your work at the Delft College of Arts and Sciences. What were you reading there?

GRETCHEN HOOVES: I was working in the field of interpretative ceramics, which was a very progressive school of ceramics in Delft. It's difficult work because you are pushing the materials to their limit. It's also very labour intensive because the completed structures are fragile and need to be rushed into the kiln quickly before their finer points start to sag. The masters of interpretative ceramics actually work with the kiln door open, the fire burning right at their shoulder, the hands of the flames actually waiting to accept the completed ceramic form as it passes from the hands of the master. This is a very exciting thing to see - very emotional, although obviously not for beginners as there are many dangers. It was certainly not an acceptable working environment for a young girl like myself.

JWD: Why was that?

GH: [laughs] The official reason was that because we girls were all wearing our hair very long then, in the bohemian style, that there was some concern that it would catch fire.

JWD: But you wore safety equipment, working with the kilns like that, surely.

GH: Oh, but of course. There was a big hood that you wore with a face plate - a very heavy thing, my goodness, with shoulder pads that would catch on your clothes. I don't know how many sweaters I ruined putting it on and taking it off. But no, of course, safety was not the reason at all. Although the field of ceramics has attracted many women - some of the greatest ceramics designers in the Netherlands have been women - the field of interpretative ceramics was very male dominated, like the Beats - they didn't like women. We were ornaments to them, a little, I think.

JWD: And yet you were attracting to what sounds like a difficult and perhaps dangerous working method.

GH: It wasn't too difficult. As long as one worked honestly, and with feeling - that was the main thing. We all got very muddy of course, because you work with a very wet clay, especially for the last stage of a work, but that was part of the fun, I think. There was a system of mechanical arms for lifting the finished pieces into the furnace, so that made that part of the job easier.

JWD: So the machines freed you to work.

GH: They did the lifting, yes, although they didn't do the thinking for you of course. We called them robot arms but really they were a system of pulleys and weights with only rudimentary electronic component to record and repeat movements. The switches were sound operated. When your piece was finished you would step back and clap your gloves over your head - because the safety hood muffled your normal speech - and the pulley arms would lower and pick up your wet sculpture and lift it into the furnace. We girls of course, thought this was fantastic.

JWD: And of course, the sound switch -

GH: Yes! The sound switch was always breaking down. The mechanism was very crude technology. The person who could fix it was Cedric. He was quite the audiophile even back then.

JWD: Was that significant?

GH: At the time it was very brave. There was a lot of union opposition to this sort of automation. People felt it would cost jobs in the ceramics industry if the furnace blasting process was controlled by machines. It's a big industry in the Netherlands - interpretative ceramics was very far to the left of that of course, but there was concern that these very bourgeois concepts and experiments would leech into the lifeblood of the industry and poison it for others.

-- Janwillem Dorin
Jazz Dispatch March 2002
(First reproduced | Mar 29, 2003)

I should be proofing the ms about now

Some people the other night were praising Banksy's guerrilla art. I like Banksy too but he has a hard-working and very protective agent and licenses his works, neither of which is that guerrilla. The London guerrilla artist I really like is Slinkachu, who makes tiny street art. I've also discovered the work of W. Eugene Smith, who took photographs only from the window of his New York apartment. He also secretly recorded jazz greats. I wish I'd known about Smith years ago -- it would have saved me making up stories in that vein.

The article on Smith is online at the New York Times, which plans to charge for content. It's the one online paper (sic) I'd probably pay for although I will always pick up the print version. (Sometimes I think newspapers are really nothing more than a crossword delivery platform.) The NYT announcement is thought to chime with Apple announcing what Gizmodo calls the Jesus Tablet. If what blogs are saying about an Apple tablet is true then it will be good for print journalism but I still can't see it working for novelists, at least not directly.

The issues around e-books are so complex I could write a couple of thousand words on the subject, which I don't have time for -- I have an actual novel sitting in paper form (pictured) that I really need to proof, and typing this bl*g is not getting that done. But in short, it is the hope of the publishing industry that e-books will shore up their business. This plan is a paradox because it aims to use disruptive technology to preserve the status quo.

Mr Paul Reynolds' blog introduced me to a New Zealand project, 1000 Great New Zealand E-books. I refer to slide two of the project presentation, under the heading "Market focused aims": authors are the second to last priority, readers the last. Not to criticise the project per se, but this highlights the above paradox. MP3s and file sharing were a consumer-led disruption of the status quo, the piracy creating a new business model which forced change on the establishment. With e-books, book publishers are hoping to let the genie out of the bottle a little bit at a time.

To wit, some are trying new things, such as giving away e-books for free.
Neither Amazon nor other e-book retailers make any money on these giveaways either. But it is a way of luring customers to their e-reading devices. Free e-books are also a way of distinguishing a less-well-known author from the marketing juggernauts of the most popular books.
Publishers -- and record companies -- have always given away free samples, but what is new about it this time is that they are doing so to attract subscribers to a device and network rather than readers to an author:
Book publishers, who rail against the dominance of Amazon and its insistence on discounting new releases to $9.99, are now playing the tech titans against each other.
In the process, they may be rushing from the clutches of one tenacious chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, into the arms of another, Steven P. Jobs, whose obstinacy over pricing has given the music industry similar paroxysms of anxiety.
“Will Kindle pricing trump Apple sex appeal? Isn’t that the question, really?” said Richard Charkin, executive director of Bloomsbury Publishing in London, who has been watching developments in e-book sales with keen interest. “I haven’t the faintest idea. All I would say is, great. The more people that are out there marketing books in digital or any other format, the better.”
All the publishing notes from the above are from the IHT / NY Times but I read them in the print version first.

Mike W Hall interview

For almost 25 years now Mike W. Hall has been supplying tropical fish to the glitterati of Auckland. Here today in this interview he speaks with Jazz Dispatch editor Janwillem Dorin about his personalised work for the Muse Lounge before and after its move to the Whyte Tower.

JANWILLEM DORIN: How long have you been dealing with fish?

MIKE W. HALL: My father imported tropical fish in the 60s. He and my mother were naturalists - nudists, actually - and he himself was very active in promoting bio-filtration to New Zealand breeders and fish enthusiasts.

JD: By bio-filtration, you mean using plants to clean the tank water.

MH: Yes. It creates a more natural environment for the fish and of course it doesn't waste power. My father despised undergravel filters - I remember accompanying him on a protest march once outside one of the major tropical fish dealers. He and his friends were campaigning for better pet environments in general and the machine filter suppliers were getting pretty annoyed. It was a close thing actually. Anyway, I took over the business after my father retired and it looks like my son will be running it too, someday. He has a real knack.

JD: You of course are very well known for your work with the fish tanks at the Muse Lounge, both at its first and second venues...

MH: That's right. I had met Gretchen at a nudist beach near Opotoki and we had a long conversation about tropical fish. She had been standing out waist-deep in the water bending over trying to spot tropical fish through her swimming goggles, and of course she hadn't seen any, and she was very disappointed. I remember her hair was up in these sort of plaits and her eyes were red - I thought from crying but it was just the seawater. I had to explain to her that New Zealand isn't a tropical country - she was surprised by that, I think Cedric had misrepresented it to her slightly when they came out here.

JD: So Gretchen was the tropical fish enthusiast of the two of them?

MH: They were both keen on it, if I remember rightly. I checked out the club when I was back in Auckland - it was very hard to find then, in a very odd place - and Gretchen introduced me to Cedric. He was a little slurred, from the drinking and everything - I mean, I don't know what else was going on there, I'm a pretty straight arrow. Anyway, I said I dealt in tropical fish and he was immediately very excited about it, and said he wanted to turn all the walls into fish tanks.

JD: For the first venue?

MH: Yes, that's it. We didn't do that of course, because the weight alone would have gone through the floor. But we set up the big tank by the lift entrance with mostly anabantids. We needed a good community fish and that was a good place to start. We had Dwarf Gourami and some bubble nesters -

JD: But then came the second venue.

MH: Yeah, yeah, and that's when Cedric went for a grander scheme, with the big oval windows and the uplighting and the big tanks surrounding the couches at the north end - three giant walls of tank with the water and the fish.

JD: And the girl?

MH: Yes. Yeah, Tania - she was in the tank on some nights.

JD: Swimming and performing for the guests with the music and so forth.

MH: I don't know how it came about. It certainly wasn't my idea because the perspiration off a human body alone is raising the urea levels in the water, let alone the vibration. And a large body - anything larger than a fish, I mean - is stirring up the temperature layers that naturally settle around the plants in the tank, and that's not good. Apart from that the tank size worked well. Bio-filtration really comes into its own in the larger tanks because it works with the natural currents and movement of the fish.

JD: How did Tania actually get into the tank?

MH: I think she fell in.

JD: Really? She was intoxicated?

MH: Oh, probably. She slipped - she had these very high platforms on one night and she was leaning on the tank talking to someone and she leaned back a little further and she just... slid under. The water was very warm. We ran the tanks at about 27 degrees to support the fish's immune systems. Tania, of course, thought we kept them like that just for her.

Janwillem Dorin
Jazz Dispatch 1997
translated by Kirsty Widdell
(First reproduced | Dec 06, 2002)