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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.

To the end

My definition of an artist is someone who gives people permission to do something that they've never done before.

I don't meant the critic's fantasy of violent innovation or breaking ground or breaking the glass ceiling but the tiny shift by degrees that comes from real lovers of the form copying and mimicking their own heroes and repetition (think: the blues) and, as a by product of that, causing the machinery of creation to skip a gear and go slightly out of control.

If the work and the creator survives, everyone else working in the field sees that they can take things a little further, and from that point onwards is faced with the choice of whether or not to develop it.

(There's another very middle-class idea that what makes art great is how much work goes into it. I tend the other way: look how much hasn't.)

Alain Resnais made Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year At Marienbad and after that, film would never be the same. Ever. Ever. Ever.

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)

Threat levels

'Pornography violates the Aesthetic Distance. What does this mean? When we see the scene of simulated sex we can think only of one of two things: 1) Lord, they're really having sex; or 2) No, I can tell they aren't really. Either of the above responses takes us right out of the film. We've been constrained to remove attention from the drama and put it on the stunt.'

-- David Mamet, Make-Believe Town (Little, Brown, 1996)

'I think that one of the functions of Art (both for the artist and for the perceiver, though not necessarily in the same way) is to furnish a false world which is an analogue of at least some of the aspects of the real world and to explore within that new behaviour patterns that might yet be too dangerous or imponderable in a real-life context.'

 -- Brian Eno (Another False World interview by Ian McDonald, NME Dec 3 1977)

'Any sort of upheaval gratified our anarchic instincts. Abnormality we found positively attractive.'

-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life (Libraire Gallimard, 1960)

Been thinking about how many of my favourite things have fallen foul of both official and self-appointed censors. (Including my own work.) Talk is cheap, anger is free and all threats in art are metaphorical.¹

Those threats which one believes can pass from the fictional world and into reality to do real harm (computer games, pornography, modern art, hate speech, fight scenes in movies, Miley Cyrus at the VMAs) tends to be dictated by personal taste rather than empirical evidence.

I could be wrong. The only way to find out is to keep talking about it which, unfortunately, also requires one to keep listening, no matter how much you don't like what you hear. Or watch, or log into, or subscribe to, or buy to read every day, over and over...

(Pics: Existenz (David Cronenburg), Maitresse, Once Upon A Time In America, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny tease Reddit for The X-Files 20th anniversary)

  ^{1. I think Eno said this but I can't find the quote just now. I propose a law that after being interviewed for so many years all quotes can be attributed to Brian Eno.↩}

Johnny is a man and he's bigger than you

And a very interesting thing happens to your brain, which is that any information which is common, after several repetitions, you cease to hear. You reject the common information, rather like if you gaze at something for a long time, you'll cease to really see it. You'll see any aspect of it that's changing, but the static elements you won't see ... The amount of material there is extremely limited, but the amount of activity it triggers in you is very rich and complex.

-- Rob Tannenbaum, "A Meeting of Sound Minds: John Cage and Brian Eno," Musician 83 (Sept. 1985)

All of my heart

"Character in any sense that we can get at it is action, and action is plot... We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are." (Henry James) 

(ABC, Cat People, Night Stalker, Maitresse)

California

Don Van Vliet is a 39-year-old man who lives with his wife Jan in a trailer in the Mojave Desert. They have very little money, so it must be pretty hard on them sometimes, but I've never heard them complain.

"Have you seen Franz Kline lately? You should go over to the Guggenheim and see his 'Number Seven', they have it in such a good place. He's probably closer to my music than any of the painters, because it's just totally speed and emotion that comes out of what he does."

-- Lester Bangs interviews Captain Beefheart for Voice (1980)

In the warm room

Three results from three unrelated image searches. Top to bottom: Beate Bartel of Liaisons Dangereuses (1981), Sex Pistol memorabilia girl Liz Hall by Phil Strongman (1979) and Barbara Eden, I Dream of Jeannie (1965).

The Camp of Trying To Get It Together: Scritti Politti

Second-to-last article from the archives: Green Gartside, 1988, promoting Provision. After this Green dropped off the map for over a decade before reemerging with a flinty hip-hop album of varying quality, Anomie and Bonhomie in 1999 and then, finally, in 2006, White Bread, Black Beer, a digital bedsit Carl Wilson-tinged collection that at last reconciled the distance he had travelled from North London to New York and back again. It was the second stage of this musical journey which I inexpertly quizzed him about here. OCR'd from the original RIU interview with a lot of my dumb chatter cut out.

"I was disposed not to like pop songs for a while. When I first started out, nine years ago now, I was concerned, in a silly and juvenile way, to be different. I would have hated the kind of songs I play now if you'd played them to me then. I was concerned not to have things that sounded slick, not to have things in 4/4, not to have verse-chorus-bridge. I was concerned with not doing a lot of things, and that all started to look dead-endish to me. When I wrote Songs To Remember I was just coming out of that and had started writing songs; that album sort of has one foot in the camp of Amateurishness As Virtue and one foot on the camp of Trying To Get It Together."

Green Gartside reconciled with pop in 198l with 'The Sweetest Girl'. The bass and drums were milk and honey, and the lyrics struck a balance between sentimentalism and intellectualising. The B-side, 'Lions After Slumber', showed Green getting into a funky frame of mind. After the Songs To Remember LP he split with the other members and took the band name to New York to recruit two new musicians, pianist David Gamson and drummer Fred Maher. Their first single, 'Wood Beez; (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)', was a pumping piece of groovy and a dancefloor hit. Suddenly Scritti Politti had A Sound: focused, simplified, vodka-clear.

So what made Green get it together -- was it the work of Gamson and Maher?

"A lot of it was to do with the decisions made on my part, the aesthetic moves I'd made that pre-existed my meeting David and Fred. But one of the reasons that we worked so well on these last two albums is that we do have a lot in common. They came from the same sort of histories that I'd come from -- listening initially to pop, then to a lot more marginal rock musics and then R'n'B.

"I think that the Scritti Politti sound which people will be familiar with at the moment is a group sound. If I went off now and made a record with someone else, I don't know how much of it would go with me, or how much I'd want to take with me."

ln New York, the hip-hop scene was advancing hand in hand with new technology. Cupid + Psyche '85 used cut-up techniques and sampling, and Green admits a boyish fascination with the gadgets of dance.

"Musical technology, the advances that have been made in the last six years, that's been completely transformatory, what that's enabled me to do. You can get involved with the possibilities and present yourself with far choices than it's healthy to have. If that's a sin, then we're guilty of it! Once you realise that things can be manipulated in all these myriad ways by tiny increments, your head and ears quickly get into that.

"If Cupid + Psyche was an influential record -- and I'm told by a lot of musicians in America that it was -- it wouldn't have been for those reasons. We swiped the whole sampling thing from a lot of other places. It was our approach to arranging the material, on the one hand, which was popular, and we were quite concerned to push the technology we were using to its limits.

"A lot of the arranging ideas come from David Gamson, but we got a lot of it from groups like The System, and Solar Records, people like Shalamar and Leon Sylvers. I was gonna say it's all been done before (laughs), but that's not quite true; it's all been influenced."

Miles Davis plays trumpet on 'Oh Patti'. Others might regard that as a vindication.

"I hadn't thought of it like that. I was as surprised as anybody when Miles covered 'Perfect Way' and he let it be known through friends we have in common that he'd be interested in meeting up. After I'd written 'Oh Patti' it seemed that it would suit him and it would be nice to get him in.

"Were we interested in getting big names to glamourise our project we could have, for whatever reason -- it and still mystifies me a bit -- we could have got an awful lot of well-established Americans to appear on the record. But Roger Troutman and Miles were the only two people that we wanted.

"Miles is a little bit scary and little bit different, but once we got talking to him and met him on subsequent occasions we found him to be quite charming and very nice to us, and very supportive. He does have a very elliptical and peculiar way of going about things but he's not as crazy as people think by any means. He really is straight these days. He doesn't drink or do drugs or do anything else. He drinks his herbal tea and has his injections of lamb hormones or whatever. He's a regular guy."

Provision is also more of a regular album -- Cupid + Psyche '88 -- but what it lacks in innovation it makes up for in maturity. The most it has in common with the days of the Confidence EP and Songs To Remember are the puns and references. Green is the only lyricist cheeky enough to rhyme "Gaultier pants" with "Immanuelle Kant" but po-faced journalists fail to get the joke. I mean it is a joke, no?

"Oh, of course. I think the lyrics are always tongue-in-cheek. They're meant to be funny. It's not side-splitting humour but there's a lot put in there in the hope that it' ll be appreciated with a wry smile. Not enough people get the joke and realise that Scritti has to send itself up, having arrived at this faintly preposterous position. To be fair, I can get into all that after a few pints. If people want to lead me that way I'll be a bar room theorist with the best of them. But that's certainly not the whole story. I don't read interviews anymore. They're so painful -- they never get right or I never get it right. It never, ever comes out right.

Would Scritti ever leave the dance floor, especially now it's become so crowded?

"British pop has always been indebted to whatever version of R'n'B is current, from the Beatles to the Stones to the Bowies, and it will continue to be so. But you're right; there is a lot more black music in the charts at the moment. Hip-hop is very healthy; it looked a bit jaded about three years ago, for a short while, but it's coming back strong. That's the sort of thing we think about. We thought, should we make a hip-hop album and fairly promptly decided no, even though we all listen to a lot of it. Many hip-hop records are made fairly quickly, cheaply and nastily, and I like a lot of that.

"Having said that, I don't know what's next, and I could well imagine being lured elsewhere."

As well as Miles and Roger Troutman, you've worked with Chaka Khan and Arif Mardin.

"I don't feel proud. I don't ever feel particularly confident about myself or about what I do, and in a way working with people, moving up or across a couple of rungs doesn't exactly impart confidence to you. In a way it makes you a little more worried about your own worth.

"As much as one would be fairly frightened of failing, there's a certain kind of fear attached to the threat of success as well; being able to live up to it, or feel that it's honest or you're worth it. So it hasn't had that effect on me; perhaps if it did I'd be able to work a bit faster, or be a bit bolder."

Provision comes after a break of three years. Green says only two were spent in the studio ("on and off -- more on than off"). In the interim he gave away one song, 'Best Thing Ever', for Madonna to include on the Who's That Girl soundtrack.

"'Best Thing Ever' was recorded between albums, and everybody at Warner Brothers had a copy and Madonna heard it and we were asked if we would mind it being included and I didn't mind at all. I didn't go and see the movie and I've no idea what they did with it. I didn't feel proprietarily interested in its fate; it was just something that I'd done and it was gone and out of my hands.

"As soon as l've finished something I don't want to hear it again. All that I'm concerned with is that the album gets a fair hearing and I know that's an impossible wish but that's the most I could hope for. I'm thrilled with it now. That's all I can say. And I'm through with it now -- make of it what you will."

(1988)

When the sun shines they slip into the shade

Thom Yorke talking to Alec Baldwin (2013):

Thom Yorke: A break is due because what I've found with a break is it can be an incredibly exciting, that thing of thinking of all the stuff you want to do, but you just force yourself not – you just force yourself to wait and get back into just time and space.

It's like anything. You start to go in small circles, so you've got to stop when that happens.

There's a threshold... if you want to shift with your work, if you want to shift. If you're writing, if you're being creative at all, you kind of have to stop to make that shift. Because if you just, "I'm constantly creating, I've got this mountain of brilliant ideas," you're making the basic mistake that you're assuming all your ideas are brilliant.

Brian Eno talking to Lester Bangs (1979):

One or two of the pieces I've made have been attempts to trigger that sort of unnervous stillness where you don't feel that for the world to be interesting you have to be manipulating it all the time. The manipulative thing I think is the American ideal that here's nature, and you somehow subdue and control it and turn it to your own ends. I get steadily more interested in the idea that here's nature, the fabric of things or the ongoing current or whatever, and what you can do is just ride on that system, and the amount of interference you need to make can sometimes be very small.

Barry Gifford talking to Robert Birnbaum (2003):

Let me tell you. One thing I love about writing, serious work, painting. [long pause] This is all subjective. It's not a competitive sport. I was an athlete -- you know that -- I mean the thing is, in a game is to score more points than the other guy, the other team. This is not that way. I prefer to think of it as entirely subjective. "Comparisons are odious" as Gary Snyder once famously said to Jack Kerouac when discussing Buddhism. And I really embrace that philosophy.

I basically write when inspired. I don't feel it's necessary to write every day. When I start on a project then I go I through to the end. Then I am devoted to it and I stick with it. I don't sit down everyday at the typewriter. I actually write in longhand and then go to manual typewriter. The thing is, I don't feel I have to sit down every day with a blank sheet of paper in front of me and wait for what comes or try to force something. I have never been that way. I try to sneak up on it, I don't know how else to say it. I like to do it without a certain kind of pressure.

Changes

Camino has been discontinued, so I've started using Firefox. Deleted Facebook's iOS app in favour of Facebook Messenger. Because iOS switches between different e-mail accounts if one is slower, I've been nudged to migrate from my original and very first email account at Yahoo to my Gmail, which I initially used as a dead email account. My iPhone is the only thing I make calls on, or Skype on my Air. I've been to a movie theater once in the last five months -- Fast and Furious 6. Although I'm living a house with Sky and Soho, the last TV I watched was repeats of The Sopranos, Columbo and The Wire, and a MP4 of Mad Men. Of the last four books I bought, three were on my Nook -- from Barnes and Noble UK, which is cheaper than New Zealand. The last seven books I sold were on Kindle.

But the last music I bought was secondhand CDs, and I still write with a pencil on a yellow legal pad and still carry a Moleskine notebook / diary.

Update: Confirmed? Twitter for iOS does seem to be a data suck.

I'm just looking / Just looking for a way around

'L'Amour fou was just a phrase and became thirty pages.'

-- Jacques Rivette

(Pics: Miami Vice, Heat, Out of Sight)

WIP

It was always very important to me to be able to get involved in diverse situations. The biggest challenge for an arranger is to be able to deal with different styles and personalities. But it is even more important to make sure that the artist achieves its goals either musically or even commercially. It´s also essential to work with the record company to make sure that they are happy enough to spend good money in promotion for that particular project. It would be a very serious mistake to go against the record company or trying to impose your musical "views" into a project that needs your help and specific work done.

-- Eumir Deodato

Q: Breathless put you at the center of the French New Wave. Were you surprised?

A: I was out of work and needed the money. The producer asked Columbia, which then owned my old Preminger contract, if I was available. He gave Columbia a choice of $12,000 or 50% of the world profits. With great foresight, Columbia took the $12,000. It was shot for $76,000 in five weeks. Most of the time we worked half days. We'd break and sit around in cafes. One day the producer saw us, it was his last card, and he got into a fistfight with Godard because we weren't working.

-- Jean Seberg

Q: When will your next solo release come out and what can we expect from it?

A: I don't know and I don't know.

-- Roisin Murphy

Desktop

(Pics: Phantom From Space 1953; Paris Texas; sketch; Wong Kar Wei; Fantastic Four #77, August 1968)

He could have married Anne with the blue silk blouse

Charles Q. Choi on the science of déjà vu:

The researchers found déjà vu most often occurred when new scenes were very similar to previously experienced scenes in terms of their spatial layout but not similar enough that people consciously recognized the resemblance.

"One reason for the jarring sense that accompanies déjà vu may be the contrast between the sense of newness and the simultaneous sense of oldness — something unfamiliar should not also feel familiar... A situation that resembles one in memory may be a particularly good candidate for producing that simultaneous recognition of newness alongside a sense of familiarity."

Chris Lee on how David Bowie is not here and yet still is:

"He has consciously dropped out of sight," says Paul Trynka, author of David Bowie: Starman, considered the definitive biography of the singer. "For someone so consistently vain and self-obsessed, the heart attack—the realization of his mortality—came as a massive psychological blow. But he's someone who has always had a real understanding of how to manipulate the media and saw the dramatic potential of a disappearance in a very Hollywood way. It became a kind of Houdini disappearing act. The fact that it's gone unstated makes it even more mysterious."

Also from Scientific American; why paper won't go away either:

"Your iPad will go blank on you," Barrett said. "But 'Huckleberry Finn' will never go blank on you. Even if you store it in a wet basement and it gets really badly molded, you can dry it out and it'll still be there."

(Pic: Lana Del Ray in Cannes; John Sargent's Madame X)

We float

Ando Hiroshige, Cat looking at fields at Asakusa (1857), from 100 views of Edo.

Desktop images

What I love about images from movies and TV is that somebody wrote them.

Your whole life is just a dream

A series of measurements with ground-penetrating radar mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed a massive deposit of frozen carbon dioxide (CO2) — a Lake Superior's worth of dry ice — buried under a layer of ordinary ice near the Martian south pole. "We knew there was some CO2 at the pole," says Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a report on the discovery in the current issue of Science, "but there's about 30 times more than we thought.

And there's evidence from a number of Mars probes that the planet's atmospheric pressure has increased, even over the short time that we've been visiting. It's barely at the detectable level, says Phillips, "but it could be that we're seeing this effect."

All signs, in other words, point to the fact that Mars' atmosphere could be bulking up even now. Within a few tens of thousands of years, space colonists could be drawing water from Martian ponds — even as they're choking on Martian dust.

Get your ass to Mars.

"People cannot put their finger anymore on what is real and what is not real," observes Paul Verhoeven, the one-time Dutch mathematician who directed Total Recall. "What we find in Dick is an absence of truth and an ambiguous interpretation of reality. Dreams that turn out to be reality, reality that turns out to be a dream. This can only sell when people recognize it, and they can only recognize it when they see it in their own lives."

(From Wired.) Total Recall was co-written by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon. O'Bannon, who passed away in 2009, suffered painfully from Crohn's disease: among his inventions were the Mars rebellion leader Kuato, who grows from a man's stomach, and the chest burster in Alien.

In 1997 O'Bannon discussed the development of the movie Alien to Martin Anderson of Den Of Geek:

... In the movie, the Earth men discover a wrecked, derelict spacecraft. Actually no, that's not correct. In the movie, the men discover a wrecked construction of non-human manufacture and inside of it they find eggs of the monster. In the original script the men find a crashed derelict spacecraft and they enter it; they discover that the alien crew are all dead. They return to their own ship to contemplate what may have killed the alien crew and then they discover a pyramid on the planet which appears to be indigenous and primitive. They enter the pyramid and there they find the eggs. They combined these two elements, they squeezes them together into one sort of uneasy entity.

FF: The idea behind that, I would assume that the dangerous aliens were coming back to spawn or something?

O' Bannon: No, they were two different races. In my script, it was a space going race that landed on the planet and had been wiped out by whatever was there. And now the Earth men come and they endanger themselves in the same way. In the new version it's just sort of a surrealist mystery.

FF: And what ever they find there in the alien construct is the alien menace?

O' Bannon: Yes. So they combined, and they did dome things...and there were some changes that were better. There were some improvements made.

FF: In what direction?

O' Bannon: I think they made some of the characters cuter than they were. Some of the dialogue is definitely snappier than it was in the original draft. I think a lot of the designs that Ridley supervised differed because his visual hand is very strong over the surface of the picture. I think may things like that changed. You asked if it was my film. And i said no. And you said, can you name one of the things that disturbs you, well not every way in which it is different disturbs me.

FF: A lot of them okay?

O' Bannon: Ridley has this lavish, sensual visual style; and I think that Ridley is one of the 'good guys.' I really think that he is – was the final pivot point responsible for the picture coming out good. And so a lot of the visual design and a lot of the mood elements inherent in the camerawork, while they're not what i planned, are great. They're just different. Also, it's not 100% Ridley either. It's Ridley superimposing his vision over the cumulative vision of others, you see. Now this could be such a strong director's picture because Ridley's directorial and visual hand is so strong. There will probably be tendency among critics to refer to it as Ridley Scott's vision of the future. And he did have a vision of the future. But it was everybody else that came before, that's what his vision is.

Ridley Scott's Alien prequel / remake is Prometheus.

Hellcats of the specific

Supplementary / particular images from things I've been thinking / reading / posting about this week. Namaste: Frederick Elms, Tak Fujimoto, Ernest Laszlo, Anon.