Bonne Annee

Off to New Year's in Pigalle, folks. Happy New Year to whoever you are and wherever. Namaste, Buddha, big ups and all that cal. New novel on its way. And no, I'm not going back on Facebook.

A bang on the ear: 3a.m. playlist, Paris 23 Dec 2009

• Roxy Music, 'Street Life'
• Suicide, 'Cheree'
• Animal Collective, 'My Girls'
• Warren Zevon, 'The French Inhaler'
• Siouxsie & The Banshees, 'Kiss them for me'
• Portishead, 'Sour times'
• Brian Eno & David Byrne, 'Mountain of Needles'
• Chet Baker, 'I get along without you very well'
• Norah Jones, 'The Nearness of You'
• Roisin Murphy, 'Let me know'
• Sofa Rockers, 'Sofa surfers'
• David Holmes, '69 Police'
• Lady Gaga, 'I like it rough'
• John Cale, 'All My Friends'
• Damien Rice, 'The Blower's Daughter'
• The Pretenders, 'Brass in Pocket'
• The Sundays, 'Can't Be Sure'
• The Bird and The Bee, 'How Deep is Your Love'
• MGMT, 'The Youth'
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs, 'Skeletons'
• Brian Wilson, 'Our Prayer'
• Tricky, 'Makes me wanna die'
• Tom Petty, 'American Girl'
• Neu!, 'Leb Wohl'
• The National, 'Apartment Story'
• The Modern Lovers, 'Government Center'
• Talking Heads, 'Cities'
• John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman, 'They say it's wonderful'
• Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, 'My little brown book'
• The Doors, 'Hyacinth House'
• The Dandy Warhols, 'Mohammed'
• Captain Beefheart, 'My head is my only home until it rains'
• Beth Orton, 'Galaxy of Emptiness'

About The Blues

Avatar. Oh, so many things. In Paris, working, but in summary, Memo To JC style:

1. Worst voice over ever. Ever. Worse than Terminator 2. Give me half an hour and what you spent on designing one handheld weapon and I'll write you something better.
2. 3-D is of negligible benefit. It is immersive, but I don't want to be immersed in something -- I want you to tell a story, and if I'm distracted looking at something in the background then I'm not being directed.
3. But it's much much better than Titanic. Not as good as T1 or T2, more mature than True Lies... It's buff and self-absorbed, like The Abyss. A big anime Abyss.
4. I don't really care about the animals. There's a big red one and a small one and so on - did this really take four years to invent? Really?
5. The CG is good. Nav'i almost totally believable. Tactile sense is quite amazing: when the Nav'i kiss or touch each other, you can really sense it.
6. The forest at night is amazing. Almost did some of the thematic talking for you.
7. The Marines are boring.
8. What does Unobtanium do? Is it anti-grav or what? Because for a movie that explains everything, you cannot have a McGuffin. If you explain the plants and flowers, you have to explain what the plants and flowers are being killed for, and why.
9. Sigourney Weaver's not really used.
10. Sam Worthington's wasted legs are the most amazing effect of all.
11. Nav'i language very good -- chants and songs Not Silly.
12. Why does Michelle Rodriguez's character turn? I would like to know. (See #8)
13. Why was Sully's brother just gunned down in a mugging? I would have had him die while being trained by Colonel Quaritch -- more motivation for conflict, betrayal, etc, especially if Sully discovered this later on. Just a thought. Would have thrown that in with the voice over.
14. For all the actors and CG-actors, there are really only four or five characters in the movie, so Quaritch has to embody all evil, like the driving instructor in Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky.
15. Shot where real Sully is cradled by real Nav'i Neytiri is the best Cameron ur-mother moment since the sleeping Ripley faded into the curve of the Earth.
16. How can Sully be awake as Sully during the day while at the same time being awake as an avatar during the day? I think you got the timing wrong. The detail bothered me only because you went into such detail about everything else.
17. I'll probably go see it again.
18. Hurry up and make Fantastic Voyage. More your thing.

Addendum: Saw it the second time, and it was better. I'd pre-booked to watch it at the BFI Imax 3-D and would have happily given up my ticket if I'd had someone to give it to, but I didn't, so I went. The projection quality was good when I first saw it but Imax projection made a remarkable difference. For a start, the 3-D composition was clearer, so shots became more dynamic and engaging, which did make parts of the story more exciting. (The slow bits were still slow, and the Pocahontas storyline was unaffected.) The Nav'i worked better as characters because rendered digital animations read better in 3-D than real actors filmed with the same 3-D system. I don't know the technical reasons for this but it seems logical when you think about it. Zoe Saldana's mo-cap performance as Neytiri and Sam Worthington still carry the film. The handheld sequences were hard to take in: without the slo-mo pauses in the Sully-being-chased-by-the-whatever sequence I would have been unable to track what was going on. And the aircraft looked solid in the Imax version: on a smaller screen they seemed greyed out and flat, more like drawings than real physical craft. Ships and craft were, according to this story, "built" (i.e. rendered) by a separate special effects shop, which probably has something to do with it.

Overall, the Imax 3-D experience was a revelation. It did improve the film. So now I'm wondering what happens in reverse: would the movie be proportionally less satisfying on a small TV screen? I suspect it would. This film needs a big screen and 3-D projection to work.

Story's story. Whether it's Breathless or Casino, a great film is a great film whether you see it on a big screen or a TV set. I don't think anyone would make the mistake of putting Avatar in the category of the former. But as a piece of entertainment it relies more on technology than its predecessors -- far more than Cameron's first Terminator movie, for instance. That's an interesting development.

Thank you notes #2: General consumption

1. Marion Cotillard.
2. James Ellroy, Blood's A Rover.
3. Editions Christian Bourgois.
4. Lady Gaga.
5. Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words.
6. Michael Mann, Public Enemies. (Based on the book by Bryan Burrough.)
7. Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna.
8. Bob Woodward's, Plan of Attack, Bush At War and The War Within.
9. Bradley Graham, By His Own Rules.
10. David Bowie, Aladdin Sane.
11. Alan Watts, The Way of Zen.
12. Neu! 75
13. Shunryu Suzuki, Not Always So. "When you do something, you should burn yourself completely like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself."
14. PBS podcast: Shields & Brooks.
15. Garrison Keillor and The Writers Almanac.
16. The Royal Academy of Arts for Kuniyoshi (21 March - 7 June 2009).
17. John & China, Los Angeles, CA.
18. David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and The Birth of Modern Warfare.
19. The International Herald Tribune. Special Merit Dept: Nick Shortz.
20. Jane for tickets to the lectures by Martin Scorsese and Nick Cave. I mean, wtf. Really. Jane. Rlly?
21. Californication, season 2 on a very legal DVD from Shanghai. Thanks: HH.
22. Martin Cruz Smith, Stalin's Ghost.
23. David Howarth, A Brief History of British Sea Power.
24. Wilshire Plaza Hotel, CA.
25. La Fusée, Paris.
26. Monty's, London.
27. iTunes for "stocking" The Velvet Underground & Nico. (Phew.)
28. Muji, for the notebooks.
29. Lapsang souchong, Houjicha, Rioja.
30. Werner Herzog, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans.

The game isn't over until Karen O pours bottled water on her head

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Brixton Academy, Tuesday December 1, 2009

It tickles me that the Brixton touts reduced their calls for tickets to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to simply "the Yeah Yeahs." Three Yeahs is quintessentially American in its cheerleading ("Yeah Yeah Yeah!") whereas two is British and downbeat ("Yeah, yeah -- get over it"). The different readings were a sign. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are more New York and older than their new fans expect. As the grumpy young thing standing in front of me tapped out on her Blackberry: it's all twenties and thirties here I thought it would be the Skins generation. OMG. Whatevs.

Instead of texting my BFFs before the sparkly curtain went up I was listening to the pre-gig DJ set: Suicide's 'Cheree', Eno and Byrne's 'Very, Very Hungry' and after the gig The Normal's 'Warm Leatherette', a track that everybody respects but nobody really loves. (Grace Jones' version: whole different story.) Way to make it hard for yourself, guys.

'Warm Leatherette' sums up the band but not in the way they might think. In their early days the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were cool in the sense that anything that might not have been cool about them had been eliminated, like a pre-vandalised industrial bus stop. Even the band's name seemed calculated: an instruction as to the position the audience should take. I was never a fan before 'Maps' (which the Brits love like Coldplay's 'Yellow' - it's all very singalong) and the album It's Blitz, which is terrific. I haven't interrogated the CD notes but something changed with the new one. They wrote songs, basically, and whatever stopped Karen O smiling kept going. The melancholy was a welcome break and also got Nick Zinner off the hook. He's as cool as fuck but may I be the first to quietly suggest that his guitar playing is not as incredible as the pose. For how could it be? The guy may look like a cross between The Cramps and Liaisons Dangereuses but if he sounded even half that good the universe would have collapsed and exploded years before now.

Karen O was much as I expected: cheerleader and stylestress, a One Note But The Right Note singer, and you can't hang a girl for that. She smiles an awful lot, mainly for the cameras recording a live DVD that will look more spontaneous than it really was, and she holds up the mike all the time (the cheerleading thing again -- third time I've used the word but I'm working dude, I have no time to type this really). There were also Costumes. She swung the microphone like a club (she's not very co-ordinated) but never broke the pose until the last Pretend Ending where she tipped bottled water over her head, the deconstruction of the bowl cut signifying that it was our bedtime.

The big live surprise was Brian Chase who turned out to be as loud and sharp and modern a drummer as Battles' John Stanier. But whereas Stanier looks like he's headed for cardiac arrest Chase flicked off 75 minutes of punchy rock drumming sweatlessly, just like that: he was unbelievably good. For most of the concert what we were really listening to was Brian's kick drum and Karen squawking like a duck while Nick chugged away not unacceptably. I thought they were nice kids except they are pretty old now, and most of the set consisted of It's Blitz. 'Maps' still tears me up. 'Zero's' a ten.

Bedtime stories: Paranormal Activity

It says a lot about my age that I spent much of Paranormal Activity admiring the haunted couple's house and thinking that if I had their two-storey three bedroom in San Diego* I'd make peace with the entity and maybe plant more things in the garden. At the very least, Katie and Micah could change sides on the bed or sleep with the door shut so the nameless thing would have to walk around the bed to get to whichever one of them it's after.

That the pair do not is the fly-on-the-wall POV equivalent of a Halloween teenager going outside at night to see what's making the noise in the pines. Lack of common sense is the basis for good horror movies. Katie and Micah have none but are proficient in the ways of video editing and digital sound enhancement.

In the old days of The Entity or The Exorcist scientific detection of a ghost required calling in experts from a university: even the kids in the first Nightmare On Elm Street had to check into a monitored sleep clinic. Now all victims need to do is go down to Radio Shack, assuming the software didn't come bundled on their PC. The nagging problem with Cloverfield was that no modern camera operator would be using a device without shake correction, let alone cut away from the monster. Paranormal Activity's unblinking hi-def monitoring of the supernatural is not only credible for modern audiences but mandatory.

When Micah does capture the entity's sounds and Katie and her sister regard the technology he is using without comment, I became enjoyably distracted by their technological sophistication. If both characters and audience understand how digital sampling can catch a ghost, will spooks become rationalised to the point when they are never scary again? This in a way is the movie's theme: tech is the protagonist and evil -- as represented by Micah flicking through the pages of a book of woodblocks and engravings of devils -- is the antagonist.

A truly creepy moment in Paranormal Activity is Katie's never-discussed hobby of threading beads to make dream catchers: a buried hint that she may be in communication with the spirit world, or that her family has some connection to playing with such entities and thus "opening the door" to them. Katie's sister has also witnessed to the scary phenomenom, and when the two women sit to have "girl time" they weave dream catchers together - another red light.

These scenes reminded me of The Blair Witch Project when the documentary makers interview a barely coherent local who reports seeing a strangely hirsute stranger, and the folklore of a woman who crossed a running stream with her feet not touching the ground. The images were clues to witch folklore and resonated in our unconscious at a deep level. That the audience had to create them in their own imagination, making up for the fictional and real filmmakers' lack of budget only added to their effectiveness.

Paranormal Activity has a more professional structure than Blair Witch, which makes it less scary overall: because there's none of the wandering we trust the filmmakers to scare us at certain points, which they do. The attractive young couple's lack of friends and neighbours requires suspension of disbelief and as the story progresses and the manifestations become more literal they become less frightening but the movie is still a ripper, particularly when the couple's disharmony literally invites bad things to happen. Simple is scary, but making things scary is not simple. The best technology is always well-buried.

*Nobody knows what it really means.

I want your ugly, I want your disease

I love pop music because it inspires me to lesser things. To wit, the red dwarf of Lady GaGa, neither stellar nor a black hole, and the luxuriously boxed but boxed nevertheless 'Bad Romance' which opens a bit amyl and Gatecrasher but kicks into Wham Vogue and stays there, in French. The French and the catwalk talk will get it into fashion shows and the remarkable video (did anyone think videos would ever be interesting ever again, like, ever?) will sell it on iTunes. She's a worker, a songwriter who deduced that she needed her own brand to make money, and an introvert who disguises herself with the loudest clothes possible. It doesn't matter if it's GaGa under all that digital slap (it is) or if she can play (she can) and as long as her songs can be ProTooled into ringtones they don't need to be beautiful (but they are). GaGa lifted from Roisin Murphy and Miss Mosh, in the same way Roisin lifted from Portishead and Mosh lifted (licked?) Boop and Betty Page, but really Lady GaGa is the pop future Kraftwerk promised us: sexual, detached, romantic, efficient, modular, universal.

Faceless

My 200-plus friends want me to come back to Facebook. I know this because three have emailed me. The rest of my Facebook friends have not. They don't know how to get in touch with me, because I'm not on Facebook.

I joined the social network in 2007 for the same reason I first logged on to the internet in 1994: I like talking to people and discovering how new things work. I never want to be the guy who can't program -- well, I won't say "the VCR" because that technology has come and gone, but you get my drift. I'm a novelist who works from home and the web is indispensable. I have a site, a blog and accounts with Yahoo, Gmail and YouTube. I chat, video conference, bank, book flights and back up my work online. Memes, 4chan: it's all good. If I squint, I can almost see the point of Twitter.

But Facebook? You couldn't drag me back.

I liked it at first. I joined and was quickly "friended" by an ex-colleague, then a real-life friend I hadn't seen in years, and a fan of my novels. I connected with mutual friends, people in media, journalists and other writers. Over the next year I noticed the circle widen as less tech and more "everyday" friends came online. I viewed their holiday snaps and uploaded my own, including scans of the good old days when I would have killed to be this connected.

I didn't "friend" strangers or celebrities. My fan and I enjoyed a single exchange ("When's your new novel coming out?" is a question a writer can only answer every two years) but one of her friends was an editor whom I friended, and suddenly I had placed a short story in his collection. I was making money off this thing.

More old friends joined. Fellow clubbers. Drinkers. Exes. Persons from whom I had become estranged. Sometimes there was a frisson; other times a frank exchange. Working alone in my study I knew that even if my email fell silent there would always be a conversation waiting on Facebook. The more trivial the better. Five Albums That Changed Me! The Lesbian Test! If a conversation became boring, I could come back to it later. I was connected, I was in control.

There were professional issues. To wit, would the photograph of you at the BDSM party negatively affect your future employment prospects? It seemed like a no-brainer to me. Don't post what you don't want people to see. This issue was as old as the Internet itself.

I even remained sanguine during the infamous March 2009 redesign in which Facebook's interface was tweaked to act less like a group of social pages and more like Twitter, the short message network that has been described as "Facebook on crack".

Now, rather than a ruminative tangle of Top Fives, amusing profile images and cryptically funny bulletins, the newly emphasised news feed encouraged users to constantly update their status. Out went the philosophical non-sequiters, in came banal minute-by-minute updates. ("Having a coffee." Who cares?)

In fact, I was relying on Facebook even more. Having moved to the UK I was using it to stay in touch with friends back home and people I was meeting for the first time. Londoners introduce themselves via (in order) their mobile phone, Facebook and (quaintly) their business card. I was using the site to arrange business meetings, social events, email friends and family and publicise my work. Facebook had become indispensable.

At which point, Facebook became totally useless.

There's a difference between staying in touch with your friends, and telling all of them the same thing at once. With my closest friends, I'm totally open. If I'm miserable or angry, they know. But I don't want to communicate that to an ex. And I don't want to talk about them to my new friends, and I don't necessarily want to bore my new friends about my work.

My stepsons were friends, as were my nephews. But I'm meant to be setting some kind of an example to them, and knowing about their social lives was about as appealing as peeping into a stranger's window. As for my editors and readers: I write fiction. The point of novels is to filter out that stuff. Like the movie actress whose skirts fell down on set, I felt like I had lost my mystique.

Facebook isn't socialising: it's broadcasting. Addressing these different groups was like being on a podium. My status updates had become as cautious as press statements. How could I say I'd seen Friend A when he was arguing with Friend B? How could I say I'd been out drinking with Friend C when I'd blown off a date with Friend D? As for professional complaints - forget about it. Add a journalist friend to that mix and you have a prairie fire.

I froze. I became frustrated. I tried using the site less but couldn't because it had become so central. It was all or nothing. I deleted all of my data and closed the account.

After a few weeks, three people wrote me emails saying they missed me. While 200-plus friends couldn't keep me on Facebook, those messages tugged at my conscience. And why wouldn't they? Real friends stay in touch.

-- The Age, September 2009 

Postscript: Parlance's blog on the evolution of language, Words All Around discussed the use of the word "friend" as a verb; Jesse Sommer discussed the article on Small Fried Chips of Thought; Brenda Chillingworth discussed it on her blog about journalism.

For Lowell and Kurt, too late

Long day. I don't like enjoy much about London at the moment but Saturday's pleasure is walking down to Camden to pick up the International Herald Tribune (IHT) and then walking back up to the Lord Palmerston for a big rioja and a slow read to burn off the demons. The IHT is the international (sic) edition of the New York Times and I buy it most days. Especially with the vino.

Today's edition included a review / feature on Kurt Vonnegut. Recommended. Kurt and Mark Twain are my two favourite authors in the whole wide world. Twain I don't read so much now but Vonnegut got me. He wrote short fiction and he was workmanlike, and constantly pissed off, and he loved people even after Dresden. Go figure. In George Plimpton's Truman Capote biography, Kurt talks about Capote coming round to swim in his pool at the height of the author's self-inflicted troubles. Kurt's account is flat as a board and as kind as casting an actress in a low light.

Soundtrack: Willing, by Lowell George. I don't know where I first heard Little Feat or Zappa. I still don't think either are very good, but they were there. Can't hang a man for that.

Lowell is Inara's dad. Inara's a peach. She's half of The Bird and The Bee, shown here covering 'I Can't Go For That' and later covering 'Psycho Killer' in white gloves.

Trip Checker interview (excerpt)

Leaning back in a patterned brown and orange booth of 246, the new space age arcade of Auckland City, New Zealand, Trip Checker enjoys a prawn cocktail and one of the latest drip percolator style coffees as the shoppers stroll beneath us on the ground floor. A week has passed since his discharge from Auckland Hospital: always bony and unshaven, the gentleman drummer is a little paler than usual. But he has kindly consented to keep the agreed appointment with Jazz Dispatch where we are keen to discuss his latest commercial forays plus rumours of a possible Muse Lounge reunion.

TRIP CHECKER: Is that thing on?

JANWILLEM DORIN: Yes I believe so. In 1969, you -

CHECKER: It's so damn small.

JD: It's one of the latest Japanese products.

CHECKER: And the mike picks up everything I'm saying?

JD: Yes. I was wondering if we could -

CHECKER: I'm hip.

JD: - if we could talk a little about Montreal.

CHECKER: That's a great town.

JD: Yeah?

CHECKER: It's a sweet gig. Yeah, I mean... we'd all meet up there, not in a planned way, you understand, but we'd meet up there see - I'd say to Clive [Janitor] and Elmore [Holdall] "see you at Montree." That was what we called it.

JD: Montree was your name for Montreal.

CHECKER: Swinging. [indistinct] So we'd be hanging around the tent. There were several tents, actually but the main tent you... [indistinct] ...the desk, right? And one of us would say - Elmore, usually, he'd say "let's do a gig." And we just would.

JD: With no rehearsal.

CHECKER: No, no. No rehearsal. Rehearsal's for squares, man! Rehearsal, I mean, hey, like we're not at school, you know? We're not like in class, this is not a class, man. You have to be there. You have to be there.

JD: But you had some sort of tonal framework, I understand -

CHECKER: No framework.

JD: Nothing? You had a scale worked out or something.

CHECKER: We had nothing, man. Nada.

JD: You just went in there?

CHECKER: You got it.

JD: And what if things didn't go as planned?

CHECKER: How could they? We didn't have any plans.

JD: I mean, what if things went wrong?

CHECKER: Then they went wrong. It's like life, you know? Why should Montree be any different?

JD: I think the danger is that the audience could think you were being indulgent.

CHECKER: We were always being indulgent. The only reason anyone ever heard us in the first place is because we decided to indulge ourselves by becoming a band. Everyone's indulging themselves. This interview's indulging you, I'm indulging myself by talking, you're indulging yourself by listening -

JD: Yes -

CHECKER: I mean, it's all indulgent, you know? We're all indulgent.

JD: OK. So, moving along -

CHECKER: I mean just moving along is indulgent. You dig?

Janwillem Dorin
Jazz Dispatch, 1974
Translated from the original by Kirsty Widdell
(First reproduced | Dec 02, 2002)

I saw her today at the reception

On the edge: Up

The last 3-D film I saw was Jaws 3-D. It required painful eyewear and the sharks were stop-animated to preserve the effect of three dimensions. Fear alas was not one of these, nor was entertainment. For viewers who knew anything about the first Jaws or sharks (or films, for that matter) the experience was heavy going. Think aquarium ornaments wiggling muddily across a red lava lamp and you have the idea. As a result, despite James Cameron and Peter Jackson and Jeffrey Katzenberg loving the 3-D, I've been immune to the prospect of watching movies in stereo. If it's a story, it'll work on plasterboard. Since the cavemen and so on, blah blah.

Pixar may well have faced the same skepticism with their first digital animated features. How could a computer improve on the loveliness of hand-painted animation, let alone original pencils? Even so, I felt a flicker of hesitation (about 12 frames) when a friend invited me to a preview of Pixar's Up. Love to see it. Oh, in 3-D? Should I bring aspirin?

No fear. The new 3-D system works. The eyeglasses are tinted (Polaroid?) lenses. You can read through them like sunglasses. They are Ray Ban shaped and don't make you look like a dork. My host, already burdened by eye wear, simply popped the 3-D glasses over the top and remained completely presentable in the modern Joaquin Phoenix stylee. Everyone in the preview theater, in fact, looked pretty cool.

The film itself also functions. Visually and thematically, Up contrasts precipices with cosy internal spaces: the unknown with the known; flight with stability. The character design for Carl Fredrickson (Ed Asner) was my least favourite; his sidekick Russell (Jordan Nagai) was better. The winners were the animals - the bird and, oh boy oh boy, Dug the talking dog, voiced by Bob Peterson, who also wrote the screenplay. A skit on the talking ape in Michael Crichton's Congo (I am sure), Dug's dog-thoughts are enabled but not educated by a voice-making collar. Blank yet perfectly observed, he soon becomes the star of the film.

The story hangs in two halves: Fredrickson loses his wife, and then goes on an adventure. His loss is the story's premise and his motivation but it's a wobbly fit with the eccentricities of the second half: I couldn't quite reconcile the "reality" of his dilemma with the explorer, his zeppelin, the primate collection, the importance of the bird and the army of - oh, well, you will see. Such wilful fun-ness seemed like a deliberate compensation for the grimness of the first five or ten minutes.

I am wary of watching children's movies in public. I've seen most of Pixar's and tend to break into sniffles. Toy Story 2 was the worst, peaking with Jessie's heart-string lament but there are many other examples. A NYT critic recently noted that the modern trend of infantalising "adult" movies stands in contrast to children's animations which are embracing more substantial themes. I think that's always been the case with children's movies in general -- something dark runs through the Disney canon, often around the two-thirds mark, and there's always Old Yeller. When I realised Up was going to address the subjects of death and loss (hey kids!) I braced, but by the end the mood was very... ah, yes. Now I see.

Wonderful Clouds

Public Enemies is a little short for a Michael Mann film and the ending is satisfying, which threw me. But it runs deep with the qualities that made Heat and Miami Vice resonate and confound. It's shot in digital, and it's beautifully loose. The cross-cutting is Mann's tribute to Godard's A Bout de Souffle (Breathless); the storyline a tip of the hat to Pierrot Le Fou. The big machine gun sounds that jump the cinema's broadcast levels could be a nod to Arthur Penn's infamous sound mix for Bonnie And Clyde but other (real) film critics attribute this to Mann's determination to mix his own movies despite the fact that he's going deaf. And it's true that the dialogue is muffled at key moments but after so many takes on the gangster flick, what is there really left for these characters to say? In a classic New Yorker cartoon a woman proclaims, "I don't care what Socrates thinks: I want to know what he feels!" I'm of the same mind with Mann. Never mind the width: feel the quality.

Public Enemies feels good -- or rather, well. The digital lens picks up skin, wrinkles, make up, faces: you can touch this film better than anything in 3-D. When a lone informant angsts over her betrayal of Dillinger in a crowd, you can pick her out of the line-up. But the lens is also drawn to clouds and fields, and the contrasting aesthetic thus revives Mann's noirish shorthand, giving the movie's characters the stark choice between sweaty proximities and an untouchable, epic landscape. When moviemakers began working with digital I thought it would be the end of cinema. Now I'm thinking it's a beginning: a return to the days when movies were lensed rather than storyboarded, and before the mis en scene got swallowed by the design department.

The story is The Untouchables deconstructed -- or The Black Dahlia put together right. Nobody knows Billy Crudup's Hoover is gay, but the audience does, and Mann's camera catches the white flash of his eyeballs as he greets Christian Bale's Purvis. Bale gets to act and not carry the film, telegraphing George W (Oliver Stone sought him for the biopic role). Depp plays it cool and wins: it's nice to see him dialling it back. Marion Cotillard is luminously pretty and real, surrounded by jugheads and thugs that more than recall Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. The underbelly of James Ellroy and Chinatown is just a stone's throw away.

The references would swamp a lesser filmmaker but Mann keeps them submerged. In the pig-headed manner of Howard Hawks, he mines the prosaic until it becomes flinty poetry. His stated purpose (storytelling, detail) is pursued so obsessively that it becomes romantic folly: more real than real, more cruel than cruel, more beautiful than any of the characters is permitted to acknowledge. This isn't period filmmaking: it's a full stop. A jerky, nouvelle vague watershed -- the feeling man's shoot-em-up. And a great romance, too. Stare at it long enough, you all might notice.

I Love Larry

Curb Your Enthusiasm, the new series from Seinfield co-creator Larry David has the familiarity of a strange, looping dream. Larry David himself was the basis for Seinfield's character of George Costanza, played by Jason Alexander, and both men (or should we say, all three) share the same owlish stare. David is as tall as Kramer and stands with a similar stoop and when he speaks he sounds like Kramer or Jerry. When he shouts, it's impossible not to think of George. When he whines, you can hear Jerry with an Elaine rising.

The similarities between David and his co-creations becomes both the premise and the challenge of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Jason Alexander appears in the debut episode as himself ("a great actor") discussing how audiences still see him as George. "They think I'm the schmuck, the idiot, the jackass!" Alexander smiles, ignoring his mentor's crushed expression. Larry David is hurt, of course, because if the fictional character of George is seen as the schmuck then the real George - Larry himself - must be seen the same way.

The joke is delivered fast, mumbled so quick that you could miss it. Like Seinfield, it's up to you to keep up with the rhythms of neglect, bitterness and insensitivity. David is a writer first and performer second. His best Seinfeld teleplays were simple expressions of complex characters trapped by their own psyche - tragedies, in fact, were they not so funny - and he has an ear for phrases that inspire the giggles. In tonight's episode when his on-screen wife Cheryl Hines dismisses a twittering noise as "a house sound" you're smiling before he picks up on it. "A 'house sound'?" David says with his eyes sparkling. "What's 'a house sound'?" By the time he's finished repeating it over and over, the term is immediately consigned to the lexicon alongside "spongeworthy," "bubble boy" and "close talker."

Curb is produced by HBO, the subscriber network behind The Sopranos and Sex and the City, and the emerging creative force in mainstream television. Tonight's episode kicks off the second season: a third is underway in the States. David is philosophical about its success. "When you're not concerned with succeeding, you can work with complete freedom," he says.

Filmed as a cheap reality show and ad-libbed by its celebrity guests, the show pokes fun at fame and the cruel reality of its passing. The fact that Seinfield has finished and its magic has been dismantled might seem like a good reason to avoid its stars and its co-creator but this depressing grimness is part of the series' bite. Even the show's title - "Curb your enthusiasm, folks!" - is an old stand-up dig at an audience that isn't clapping. Larry knows you're not expecting to enjoy his new show, but this is why you may.

-- NZ Herald, 2002

LA Stories

Miles Millar is a British screenwriter working in Hollywood. A poster for Kurosawa's Ran hangs on his office wall. David is a Hollywood agent. A poster for Batman hangs on his.

David says he sold the script for Batman. I'd be interested to know which one since the screenplay went through 10 drafts in as many years before being mostly ad-libbed on a sound stage, but I don't doubt his word. As the Italian saying goes: success has many fathers, but failure is always a bastard.

Writing is a group activity in Hollywood. Everyone does it - or rather would if they weren't so busy doing other things like producing or acting. I think Joan Didion said this - or perhaps it was John Gregory Dunne. Anyway, I'm saying it now in this review – and getting paid for it. See? That's how "writing as a group activity" works.

To receive their credit and a six-figure cheque for Lethal Weapon 4, Miles and his writing partner Al had to arbitrate with the Writer's Guild and pitch over the phone to Mel Gibson. In the premiere press line, the documentary crew ask Mel if he remembers Miles. Mel's handsome forehead jumps. He doesn't remember, and dollars tick behind his eyes as he calculates the time wasted answering the question. Lethal Weapon 4 had more writers than he has children.

Writer Simon Kelton and fellow expatriates play cricket in the Hollywood hills and go hunting, complete with horses and red coats and beagles happily bouncing through the scrub. They aren't hunting an actual fox, Simon smirks -- thus missing the deeper irony that, therefore, they aren't actually hunting.

Simon's is one of four 'LA Stories' in this documentary, and knowing how they end makes it no less enjoyable. Anyone with a working set of eyes will see it coming.

Tina Jenkins' script is about a man who turns into a cat. A newcomer to Venice Beach, she has mastered the language but not the lingo. She says "lorry" and "green-lit" instead of "truck" and "green-lighted". She borrowed £10,000 to come to LA. Guess how well she does.

"Nobody knows who writers are," Miles says gamely. It must be difficult coming up with what he originally describes as "a fresh idea" when your career path is already written for you.

The grim reality is that working Hollywood is as predictable as its product. If you like shouting down the phone, you could be a producer. If you like sitting on the other end of the line, then writing may be the way to go.

There is money in it. Hollywood makes less than 200 scripts into films each year but many thousand more are optioned so someone's getting paid.

Even fewer films are being made about Scottish hairdressers but one, The Big Tease is going into production as LA Stories begins. Co-writers Sacha Gervasi and Craig Ferguson say the film was green-lighted (sic) because of the success of The Full Monty. But don't worry - if it bombs, the credit will be all theirs.

-- NZ Herald, 2001

The Mutual Respect Boat

Star Trek Voyager is the fourth installment in the Star Trek legacy and deserves more success than it has enjoyed. The series boasts the franchise's most romantic theme and its sharpest ship. Trek's traditionally male audience is treated to three original female leads and the crew is journeying through a lush and uncharted region of the galaxy.

Logically, Voyager should be compelling and different but for all the good choices the series' writers have made, they consistently avoid the dynamic. They prefer stories to plot, narrative to intrigue. The characters are fine variations on a theme rather than bold contrasts. Janeway is isolated, B'Elanna Torres is angry and Seven of Nine is very isolated and very angry. Tuvok is detached while the Doctor is detached, fussy, isolated and sometimes angry as well. Paris and Kim are the disenfranchised frat boys Wesley Crusher probably grew up to be. Chakotay is the sex symbol female fans would wish on Janeway but again the writers hold back, directing him instead to meditate.

The crew all talk too much. No stone is left unscanned for traces of nucleogenic particles. We could do with more action and a little more amore, even if the days when a Captain could drop-kick the bad aliens and kiss the pretty ones are well past.

Maybe the writers are confounded by the Trek mythology and the nit-picking fan sites. Maybe their work is being spoiled by TV's many cooks who change the flowers in Janeway's cabin and make teenage passengers appear and disappear from week to week.

Season six of Voyager is making a better start. In the second half of 'Equinox' Janeway finally popped a hatch and tried to hunt down and kill another Federation ship. She had no real reason to do it but at least she was doing something.

This week Seven bumps into some old friends in a grim Borg flashback. The suspenseful story includes a decent reason for Naomi Wildman even if the moral is dispensed with too quickly.

And B'Elanna confronts her Klingon self in the 'Barge of the Dead', a good idea that opens and closes on the right note. The following week the Doctor takes command of the ship for an extremely funny second run at 'The Corbomite Manoeuvre'.

And visually the series is a delight. The crew quarters look better than the apartments on Coruscant. There are probably paper wrappers around the toilet seats and mini-bars loaded with Saurian brandy.

Gene Roddenberry wrote the first draft of Star Trek in 1963 using a manual typewriter and the high-minded premise that humanity would evolve into a better species in order to reach the stars. Voyager is true to that vision. Instead of a bang or a whimper the Trek universe is ending with a luxury, mood-lit cruise.

-- NZ Herald, 2001

1980s: a photo-essay

It was a late afternoon in August and they were strolling towards me along K Road and I recognised them instantly. We'd been clubbing at A Certain Bar and seen Danse Macabre in Parnell and the Screaming Blam Matic review at Mainstreet and sunk martinis at Le Bom. Except that my memories were more than twenty years old and the group of kids filling the sidewalk would have barely been born. They only looked like they were there at the time, with their RayBans and fluoro and small feet and big hair. They were perfect reproductions: they'd just dialled the look up. Mine was a disconsolate double-take. The 1980s were over. The 1980s were back.

So did we not look stupid then? Because the fashions look brilliant now and the rehashed blippy pop sound has saved the dance floor now that rap has wrapped and the oonst has run out. Miami Vice has been remade and Brideshead Revisited has been revisited. The music industry is once again threatened by copying technology (having survived, er, cassette recording). Global warming is poised to destroy the world that the nuclear arms race did not. And now, perfectly, the stock market has once again gone up like the Hindenburg. This isn't a revival of the 1980s: this is a re-enactment.

The 1980s was an era of extremes in that things were either taken too seriously or not seriously enough. Historians point to the era's tumult (Springbok tour, Queen Street riot, political correctness) but my memories are nothing but frivolous (dance mixes, nightclubs, cocktails the size of a lamp). The 1980s were up and funny because ignoring reality was the point.

There was a lot of it to be ignored here. Week nights were boring. Villas were old. City living was for eccentrics. You couldn't buy a drink on a Sunday. But for a moment the aesthetic of wealth was easily faked. Our Pacific locale was chic. Decor that cost a fortune to staple up in Trader Vic's was a bob a penny at Cook Street market. Duran Duran blew millions filming the videos for Rio actually in Rio. Sucked in: we could just hire the Spirit of Auckland. We were close to the sea and credit cards didn't need to be paid back.

I can see why kids are mad for the 1980s. They see it as a time of style, colour, brightness and energy. They are wrong, of course. We had to wait for music to be freighted in while they can download the very same tracks with a click. We queued to flick through month-old copies of the NME in Whitcoulls while they can Google articles for free. Anyone who says victory is sweeter for being harder won never had to secure a postal money order in Sterling to pay for a Rough Trade single. That's all really good music, by the way: the heavy, squarish stuff gathering dust under the bed.

A question, then, for the generation born after Return of the Jedi: will you ever experience such nostalgia? Floating on social networks, with your digital images and your social sites maintaining every moment on artificial life support, your youth has the potential to remain constantly accessible. How will you miss it if it never goes away?

My 1980s have been fading with the media I'd stored it on: Xerox photocopies and mix cassettes. The only moments that were truly preserved were the photographs, which I planned to get around to some day but never did. It was only after my brush with my not-friends shambling along the sidewalk that I realised now might be the time.

Digging out the old negatives and scanning them, I counted three formats (126, 110, 35mm) and four stages of nostalgia:
1. Thinking you were cool.
2. Realising you weren't.
3. Realising you were, kind of, but not for any of the reasons you imagined.
4. Realising it's gone.

I'm currently locked in the fourth quarter. I should be making fun of such easily mocked images but the memories they provoke are paradoxically distant and comforting and more than a little melancholy. I didn't even think I was old but I guess by definition I must be. Damn.

Much later after these images were taken the buildings we lived and partied in would be knocked down and we would peer through the gaps and see, finally, how small and crappy things really were. But that was later. Now, strolling past in the opposite direction, the 1980s look pretty good.

(Sunday magazine, 2008)

The size of thoughts

Ang Lee's Hulk is all about size: the size of atoms and cells; DNA and man; man and his dreams; man and the monster. The director telegraphs this by chopping between shots of mossy rock and entire deserts, literally finding the earth in a grain of sand. Oliver Stone pulled a similar trick in Nixon (1995) by cutting between footage of multiplying cancer cells and bombs dropping on Vietnam, but the visual analogy unbalanced the film: by making his point about life, death and a generation's political and military creep (sic) in two shots, Stone wrapped things up too early.

Arriving as it has within months of the Gulf War, the green monster raging unchallenged in the desert risks being similarly reduced. Hulk really does signpost it, smashing out of a huge American "Victory" flag. But the connection between the rampaging monster and the monster of war is no more specific than that between the radioactive Godzilla and the themes of post-war industrialised Japan. Hulk is a good old monster movie, even if deconstructionists might be distracted the unstoppable man-child who swells and hardens when provoked by men but shrinks to a limp heap when confronted by the woman he loves... in San Francisco. The alabaster Jennifer Connolly tames the jade Eric Bana a couple of times, reinforcing a beauty and the beast theme. The movie borrows images from King Kong (when he is hunted down). The mutant dogs – which should be fierce – hark back to the sad test lab Labradors of The Fly II. The hell hounds are a result of animal experiments by Banner's father (Nick Nolte). In films, cruelty to animals usually signals a lack of empathy that will trip a director up somewhere down the line (e.g. Guy Ritchie). Audiences around the world were non-plussed by the sight of dead humans in Starship Troopers (1997) but booed a dog's death. There are a lot of (variable) reasons for this but it mostly has something to do with a sense of fair play and not whaling on the dumb innocent which - whoops - Hulk is mostly about.

Such fundamental inhumanities prevent Hulk ever really leaving the ground. (Although he skips good, the squadron of animators assigned to the running sequences win the day.) It's the paradox of monster movies that no matter who or what they destroy, audiences want the big (read: little) guy to prevail. I suspect the man in suit Godzilla (1954) works because it looks fake: the audience knows Godzilla isn't really getting hurt. Man in suit Godzilla also has a nice smile - just like the T-rex in Jurassic Park (1993) - which shows that he is enjoying himself. It will be interesting to see how Peter Jackson handles it in King Kong. In the original (and subsequent remakes) the ape is adbucted, exploited, hunted down and killed. It's a miserable fate for any animal, and the love of a tiny woman is no consolation. The tiny woman in Hulk is Jennifer Connelly, A Scientist. While Eric Bana is pumped up digitally, Jennifer has morphed by simply not eating. 

Bana's comedy chops show when he's playing the nerd: he always seems to be on the point of making a joke. And there are some other actors in the movie who play characters who chase the Hulk and some guy who oversteps the mark and gets killed and so on. The usual suspects.

The movie ends with the now-standard Marvel / DC showdown between two large computer-generated animations. "They're absorbing ambient energy!" Jennifer gasps, introducing a fascinating concept too late in the movie. What were she and her colleagues scientists of, exactly? They seem to be studying everything on their iMacs: frogs! gamma rays! stuff! -- the world-in-the-grain-of-sand thing again. The original Hulk comics kept it simple: mild guy / bombarded with gamma rays / becomes monster. The stories were about Newtonian cause and effect, and it's no coincidence therefore that the best parts of the film are those when the Hulk hits things and they break. He's digital, as are most of the things he fights: the visceral made real by computer technicians. It's the ultimate revenge of the nerd.

(Muse Lounge, 2003)

The Not Girl

Daniel Clowes has observed that female teenagers are licensed to be emotional in a way that other people aren't. He made this point extremely well in an interview which my friend Ian found in a remaindered magazine, kept, and forwarded to me by surface mail. In turn I read it, noted the passage, tore the interview out and filed it for future reference. I have no idea where it is now. But trust me: he said it, and he was on the money.

The teenage leads in Ghost World are the main reason the eight-issue spin-off eclipsed its parent, Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Although the lives of Enid Coleslaw (an anagram of "Daniel Clowes") and Becky Doppelmeyer are emotional and scattered they were always rendered as calm by the artist's nerveless line and shadow, glumly heroic as they stared slightly to the side of the reader's eyeline. Clowes' drawing style captures details with the sleepy clarity of someone only just waking up to the world he has always known. He's hypnotised by suburbia: bored but unable to take his eyes off it.

The movie version of Ghost World (2001) is pretty fine although it's more gentle, obviously. Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) form the passive links between the many characters. In the same way that their eventual friend Seymour (Steve Buscemi) hoards kitsch memorabilia, the girls and others collect relationships for interest rather than their true value. Even Enid's father (Bob Balaban) asks his girlfriend to move in because she's around the house most of the time anyway.

The movie is far from godless: huge neon signs and franchise outlets surround the girls in almost every shot, the power of their commercial presence mocking pretensions such as books, music and art. Blues Hammer, an all white college blues band, sing idiotic songs about picking cotton; Roberta, Enid's summer school art teacher, promotes the vocabulary of early 20th century art to help her students, who go on to say nothing with it.

Clowes said Hollywood studios considered the project arty but it's an easily understood tale of the suburbs and thwarted romanticism - not unlike Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. Clowes has a working process I really understand. Here he is talking about it:

Usually, after I finish an issue, I sit and do nothing for about a week. I usually plan to take a month off, and then after about five days, I can't stand it any more and I have to get back to work. I have nothing to do and I'm just sitting there all day. I usually have a notebook of ideas that I collect. As I'm working on one issue, I'm sort of thinking about ideas for the next. So I sit down with this giant notebook of ideas, and I cross out all the really stupid ones that seemed brilliant at 4 in the morning 3 months ago and now don't make any sense. Then I take all the decent ones and I try and see if there's any thematic unity to all of them. I tend to write two or three stories at once, and then often I'll realize that two of them are very similar and I can put them together and combine them into something. There's generally some sort of magical process by which they all come together at some point. Then I try to sketch out the entire thing in skeleton in some sort of vague plot line. Then I sit down and draw it page by page and do the writing as I go along. I usually write about two pages in advance - actual dialogue and things like that. I try to keep it relatively spontaneous, without too much advance thought.

You can read more of the interview here.

(Muse Lounge, Apr 09, 2003)

Mundine vs Sullivan, Auckland, Feb 1, 2003

Should boxers avoid being hit? If you are Anthony Mundine, the answer is 'yes'. The Australian ducked and stalled through 12 rounds at the ASB Stadium before being awarded a win by a surprising number of points. A lot of people had turned up to see punches being thrown but apart from a few shots from Sean Sullivan in the early rounds that sent a fine plume of sweat spraying off his opponent's bullet head, not a lot seemed to connect. The fine art of hitting other people, hard, is difficult to judge from ringside: many of what looked like glancing blows would have been enough to stretch a normal person. But on the relative scale of things Sullivan did most of the work, or at least created it for Mundine who seemed to be treating the matter first as an exercise and later as a confusing problem.

Mundine was defending his Pan Asian Boxing Association super middleweight title as part of a lead up to an International Boxing Federation rematch. He needs to prove he can box past the early rounds, so his initial inaction - taking blows, keeping Sullivan in a huddle, dancing around - may have been a strategy to test himself and demonstrate to all interested parties that he has some puff.

In contrast Sullivan brawled into each round after crossing himself at the opening bell, shoving Mundine through the ropes at least three times and once bringing him to his knees with a low blow. Mundine winced in pain as he struggled to collapse in the far corner - the one where the television camera crew was standing. By round 12 Sullivan's nose was bloodied while Mundine smiled and chatted at the referee, copping annoying little poses to amuse the crowd, so his sense of humour was intact. But Sullivan was still on his feet. Sean Sullivan was paid $30,000 for the match: Mundine got an estimated $300,000. If Mundine is 10 times better than Sullivan, why couldn't he get through his gloves?

City life: Gangs of New York

I keep referring to the new Martin Scorsese movie Gangs of New York as Slaves of New York after the Merchant / Ivory production of the Tama Janowitz book. This is a mistake, but I think Slaves will last longer.

I was looking forward to Gangs: the director had telegraphed it as a seminal work and I was even prepared to look beyond Leonardo diCaprio, but it's just not very good. Scorsese's later work has moved into a finely tuned realm of shades and whispers: Gangs is straightforward and boring. Although violence is its subject, the film isn't violent at all in comparison to Raging Bull or even Casino: Miramax have steered the camera away from the icky bits, except where the black actors are concerned. After threatening all manner of mutilations, Daniel Day Lewis leaves Leonardo with a few little cuts and a photogenic burn under his cheekbone - nothing a few time lapse dissolves and Cameron Diaz can't fix.

A lot of research has gone into the film and nobody stops talking about it (much like Minority Report) but the characters are straight from stock. The Celtic soundtrack limits the director to the euphoric instead of the funny / sad / jarring jumps between popular songs that made Goodfellas great. I believe artists get better with age, not worse, but the train jumping the track now and then is part of the process. Gangs of New York reminds me of what Lou Reed did with Magic & Loss or, lately, The Raven: an experiment for him rather than us.

Deluxe and delightful

Roxy Music sounded like they looked, and they looked like nothing on earth. The band debuted when glam rock was the fashion and still managed to stand out against the hedonism and glitter of London in the 1970s. They made albums that lasted beyond the moment and then the decade and now the century. They didn't churn out a new single every Friday like Wizzard, or the same album over and over like T-Rex, and they didn't lurch from image to artifice like Bowie until all their ideas were spent and their credibility sacrificed. Roxy began burning bright, cooled to a lounge lizard mid-career, spun off a brace of solo albums and regrouped for just long enough to cut a languid farewell, Avalon, regarded by even dispassionate listeners as a classic.

Roxy Music stood out because they had taste and wit, chops and moxie. As a music critic once muttered to me ruefully, they were never kids: they arrived fully formed. Even David Bowie, that great planner and schemer, emerged as Ziggy Stardust only after a series of bad fits and false starts. Roxy Music just plain landed.

The circumstances leading up their arrival are the subject of Re-Make Re-Model, a new book by novelist and art critic Michael Bracewell. A pre-history of the years and days leading up to Roxy Music's 1972 debut album, Re-Make Re-model puts the band in context, charting members' histories prior to their 1972 debut.

Roxy Music was founded by singer and keyboardist Bryan Ferry, a Fine Arts graduate from Newcastle who told Melody Maker in 1971 that he wanted to make music "in as civilised a way as possible." He was joined by a oboeist, Andy Mackay, a student of classical music as well as avant garde composers like John Cage. It was Mackay who invited Brian Eno, a Fine Arts graduate who had studied cybernetics, to join them for rehearsals.

"[Andy] said, 'We've got a synth that nobody knows how to play, why don't you try it?'" Eno told Q Magazine in 1990. "So after soundproofing his tiny bedsit in Camberwell, there were six of us in there with all the gear and the noise was fucking staggering."

Bassists came and went, but the drums and wires stayed. Latin-influenced guitarist Phil Manzanera had worked the sound desk for the band's rehearsals and secretly learned all their songs. When he was finally asked to audition, "I could play them all immaculately - which of course seemed amazing."

Drummer Paul Thompson was an apprentice at the Newcastle ship yards who had been playing in bands in working mens' clubs.

"So okay, they were art students, but it didn't really matter," he tells Bracewell in the book. "I haven't got a degree and that, and there is a big intellectual difference between me and the rest of the boys. But that doesn't matter as long as the musical chemistry is right."

If the Velvet Underground were the great art band, Roxy Music were the quintessential art school band. The Velvets had tooled around in a variety of combinations before falling under the promotional wing of Andy Warhol. They were exciting and brilliant but in retrospect they didn't fit with the scattershot events organised by Warhol and his Factory cohorts. Footage of the Velvets' touring show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, looks stiffly 60s now, Edie Sedgewick whooping it up and Malanga cracking his whip while poor young Lou Reed stands there trying to make himself heard. Warhol and the factory were just a phase, really, before the band grew out of it.

But Roxy's founding members Ferry, Mackay and Eno had been taught first-hand by some of the leading British artists of the day. They went to university to find out about art and music with the intention of making it their career. They were educated, but they weren't snobs. Ferry's father managed pit ponies, Eno's was a post man, Mackay's was a gas fitter who played classical piano. They were clever boys who loved art and rock and roll, and they put the two together, and they made it work.

In 1973 Eno described Roxy Music to Sounds as "luxurious decadence. It upsets some people: they expect you to be pigeonholed, fully committed to one type of music like rock and roll. Well, we certainly don't expect to spend the remainder of our musical days driving up and down the M1 in a van, living in rat holes. We plan to do it in style."

"Roxy Music is a glamourisation," says Ferry at the end of the book. "I didn't think my own name was terribly glamorous; and I suppose, all those years ago, I changed my name to Roxy Music."

***

"A product," wrote British pop artist Richard Hamilton "must aim to project an image of desirability as strong as any Hollywood star."

Hamilton had already designed the cover for the Beatles' White Album when he was teaching the young Bryan Ferry at Newcastle University's Fine Art department.

"I was a great party goer in Newcastle," Hamilton tells Bracewell. "I remember [Bryan] always being at the parties, and being terribly good looking..."

It was Pop Art's fascination with Americana that would later inspire Roxy Music's famous cover girls: thematic cheesecake in the retro style of Betty Page and Vargas illustrations. Even if you don't know the band, you may well recognise Jerry Hall arched on the rocks for Siren or the girls standing in the bushes in Country Life. Bold even by 1970s standards, the covers have gone from politically incorrect to right back in fashion.

Roxy Music weren't the first or the last band to put women on the cover but their art school irony made it work. The rawness of the images is still a slap in the face because advertising sex in the 70s meant sex was actually being sold. The women look out of place because they were: beamed in from a fantasy retro-America.

On the band's debut self-titled album Kari Ann Muller bares her teeth in in 1950s pinks and blues while inside the gatefold, the boys are kitted out like an outer space Sha-na-na. On For Your Pleasure shiny disco queen Amanda Lear poses with a panther and a Cadillac before the nocturnal Las Vegas skyline. Even Stranded cover girl Marilyn Cole looks as if she's been washed up on the set of Hawaii Five-O. It wasn't until the fourth album, Country Life that the covers went European.

Ferry contrasted the Country Life magazine photography "where you normally have characters shooting ducks or jumping over fences in top hats" with a night portrait of two healthy German tourists standing against the bushes in a lot of makeup and very little underwear. The girls, Constanze and Eveline, were German tourists Ferry met while "writing lyrics" in Portugal and were, he says, "very keen to do the job" of modelling. It was banned in America for being too explicit - and maybe, one opines, just a bit too self-possessed.

The cover of Roxy's fifth, Siren, marks a retreat to safer ground, with Jerry Hall luring men on to the rocks. This time the joke would be on Ferry: after accepting his engagement proposal, Hall dumped him for Mick Jagger.

"Bryan always seemed to have two sides to him," says Hall in her biography, Tall Tales. "I think Texans and the English have a common bond of eccentricity. They both thrive on it. They love eccentrics and try to be eccentric as they can be. But there's this very straight, uptight side to the English, too. Bryan seemed to have both sides.

"His father was a coal miner in Newcastle. And he'd pulled himself up from that and made a real gentleman out of himself, but that always seemed to make him insecure. There were only certain people he could relax around."

When I got to talk to Bryan Ferry on a phone interview for Rip It Up in 1988 the experience was like very politely pulling teeth. Ferry answered the direct dial call so mildly it took me an awkward minute to work that it was actually him on the other end. I'd expected that he'd sound... different.

"How did you think I'd sound?" he shot back, slightly peeved.

"More Ferry-esque," I said.

He did laugh.

"I get a bit unsure about pushing the personality, y'know," he conceded. "That whole image thing can get in the way of the music so easily. It's a drag - it's very hard to find the right sort of balance for that. In the Roxy days it was much easier: one could hide behind the name, or that very anonymous glamour girl image, which I preferred, quite frankly."

Decades after graduating from art school, the singer-songwriter still used painting as an analogy of how he recorded songs in the studio.

"It's very much like working over the same canvas: you paint over a certain section and stand back from it, come back a few weeks later and try something again - a different colour, a different musician, whatever. The vocal part is the tip of the iceberg."

***

Roxy Music's second album, For Your Pleasure, was one of the first records I ever owned. I bought it late, in 1978, from the Sounds store on Great South Road knowing almost nothing about the group, although I'd heard tracks from their other albums on Barry Jenkins' Sunday night show on Radio Hauraki. I was unsure about the band's Parliament style threads, but the glossy black cover did its job of projecting desirability and then some, and soon I was walking home with it under my arm.

I slipped it on the turntable of the household's fake woodgrain Pye Isotronic and clamped on the headphones. And then, as 'In Every Dream Home a Heartache' goes: it blew my mind. I'd never heard anything like it. And haven't since, despite the many bands who now claim them as an influence. The hammering burlesque of 'Do the Strand'; the liquid, giddy 'Beauty Queen', the hypnotic, lurching 'The Bogus Man.' It was utterly weird and perfectly formed. Where the hell had this come from?

Nearly 30 years later, the book I needed then, is here. Re-Make Re-Model charts almost every connection and influence on Roxy Music, presenting the band as a pure product of London's art, fashion and party culture.Bryan Ferry's manager and co-founder of EG Music, David Enthoven describes the scene:

"The brilliant thing about the latter part of the 60s was that you had that wonderful Pop art movement which had really flourished with [Richard] Hamilton, [Allen] Jones and [Peter] Blake, but then went over to Mary Quant, Biba, Zandra Rhodes. An extraordinary flourishing of fashion, art, music and film - and they were all intermingling. And people were dressing up. It was definitely a period where 20 year olds had kicked over the traces."

Before Roxy Music the "art rock" label meant moody and intellectual. Andy Mackay tells Bracewell how he imagined he would be in a band like UFO or Soft Machine "quietly bent over their instruments.

"Likewise the Velvet Underground were a quiet band - they were all hunched over... I'm never quite sure how Roxy Music ended up being a totally up-front performance band."

The loudness, media commentator Peter York says in the book, came from London's fashion crowd and Ferry's gay friends who pushed him to camp things up:

"Now where did Roxy Music come from? Well, we know where Bryan came from, and it wasn't Earl's Court. Eno - the education system kicked in, and made it right for him. Neither were metropolitans in the first instance - but they wanted to be. And they were not gay. But the huge influence of [designer] Antony Price is there: that he made Bryan be more daring in his gestures, because Bryan didn't want to to be that daring."

"The crucial discovery of Roxy Music would be that you could be serious and have a lot of fun without compromising either," says Mackay. "Other glam rock bands like, say, the Sweet or Slade, went too much for simply being glam rocky - Bowie was somewhere in between - and we would start off expecting to be kind of serious."

"The dressing up was always part of the fun of Roxy," Manzanera told Uncut in 2001. "People tend to overlook the humour that was there. At first, it was just us and Bowie doing it. The more extreme we got, the bigger the reaction. It was a bit of theatre. It gave us something to do to conquer the nerves and feelings of amateurishness before we went on."

"With all the other bands I've been in, when we walked on stage nothing happened," Thompson told Melody Maker in 1972. "With Roxy Music, the audience takes notice right away."

***

It's difficult looking back at the 70s from our interconnected society of Post-Everything-Ism, but the kids are sure trying. After the politically correct 80s and the corporate 90s, the 70s seem like a Dionysian blast. Fast, helmetless, wreathed in smoke and confidence: an Empire Of Fun, fallen now. And okay, it wasn't really like that. But you only have to listen to the music it produced to become sentimental about how great it was. For it's music that we yearn for, trapped in our seamless nightmare of digital Britney-ess: music that comes from a place you can't locate on a spreadsheet. Rap's lost its punch, soul doesn't have any and punk's nothing more than a tie in a mall boutique.

Stopping as it does in 1972, Bracewell's book talks too little about the music and its compelling, vivid kick. At a press conference at London's Savoy Hotel to announce the band's 2001 reunion tour, Manzanera joked with the assembled journalists that Roxy were reforming to be their own tribute band simply because nobody else could. "You can't cover our songs very easily, so we thought we'd better do them ourselves."

Roxy Music's sound was unique. Rock historians draw comparisons with German kraut rock band Can but as writer Duncan Fallowell tells Bracewell: "I think the whole Can scene was a bit far out for Bryan - it unnerved him. We used to take drugs and talk very frankly and strangely about our inner selves. Well, that's not really Bryan, is it?"

"I liked what Pink Floyd did in terms of the picturesque, but there was no sense of joy in it,' Ferry says to Bracewell. As a student he had DJ'd at Club A Go Go in Newcastle, watching acts that would all add to the blend. Cream, the Spencer Davis Group, Wilson Pickett, Captain Beefheart.

"I wonder whether Bryan, at the time, was really aware of what he was doing," Mackay told The Guardian. "The band he was in before was basically a soul band; and it's very interesting that as soon as he got the chance to launch his solo career off the back of Roxy, he immediately did covers of all the songs by singers who he admired - which were soul songs. I think he thought he was singing one thing, but because he was English, it came out differently."

***

Eno split acrimoniously from the band in 1973. When the NME asked what he was going to do he said "I'll probably just give up music altogether and become a full-time poseur."

He and his co-founders did anything but. Roxy Music continued until Siren, split for a flurry of solo work, reunited for three more - Manifesto, Flesh and Blood and Avalon and then split again. Eno recorded some remarkable solo albums, produced hits for U2 and Talking Heads and quietly invented ambient music. Ferry's own solo career has been steady but with mixed results. Boys and Girls (1985) and Mamouna (1994) stand alongside Roxy's best: some of the others just lie there.

Nevertheless, Eno's "full-time poseur" remark seems prescient. While Bowie was crash-landing in Berlin with the undercarriage still up, Ferry got himself a proper tailor and a booking at the Ritz for a far more graceful landing. Every rocker of a certain age has picked up on his style, from Eric Clapton to Rod Stewart: a great cut suit, a shaded stare and a sense that the parties are drawing to a close. If a man's career must fade, it might as well be in the cocktail hour.

Avalon, Roxy Music's swan song, featured Ferry's future wife on the cover (again) who would split from him (again), but this time with her back turned to the viewer: an mutual invitation to enjoy the sunset. The single 'More Than This' turned up in Sofia Coppola's movie Lost in Translation, warbled in a karaoke bar by Bill Murray. It was a triple irony: the art house band that had lost its cool and fallen out of fashion was now being name-checked as another art house reference... and thus became classic.

"It's a very hard song to sing," Murray says, "especially after you've had several sakis. But the music on Avalon is some of the most romantic I've ever heard. There's just something about Avalon that shows a possibility about life and about feeling that I want to remind myself of."

And for the eyeblink that constitutes a 21st century trends, at least, the old Roxy Music are back in fashion again, name-checked by bands like Franz Ferdinand and Arcade Fire.

In the 2006 the original members returned to the studio, this time with Eno, and the old tensions were still at work.

"The band hadn't changed one bit in terms of its internal dynamics," Eno told The Guardian. "Just the same chemistry. It made me wonder if people can ever change the chemistry between them. After all that time, the relationships seemed exactly the same."

Human tensions fuel creativity, and like so many fictional inventions, the art of Roxy Music was a compensation for human shortcomings. The cover girls and costumes emboldened the shy Ferry to express himself. With Bowie the image was clearly a mask; Ferry's achievement was to work the image until it became real, stepped back into the frame of the vision he'd created. Speaking down the phone in 1988 he sounded more than a little nostalgic when I asked how those famous 12" LP covers looked reduced to the size of a CD.

"They don't look too bad, in fact," he said. "But I guess it's time to start designing from that other size up. The other things outsell LPs now ? cassettes and CDs. One has great nostalgia for the vinyl version, of course."

Of course.

(Originally published in Sunday magazine, 2008)

The X-Files

Mulder has been abducted by aliens and Scully is mysteriously pregnant and maybe The X-Files is worth watching again. The eighth season (TV2 ran it straight after the seventh) kicked off with a terrific two-parter packed with the stylish illogic that made the series ludicrous and cool at the same time. Scully jogged miles across the Arizona desert at night in high heels. FBI agents in matching shirts, ties and off-road vehicles surrounded a local school but still managed to lose the two children they were chasing. A flying saucer that turned out to be a helicopter turned out to be - hey! - a flying saucer all along.

Inside the ship Mulder was strapped to an alien dental chair and calling for help but neither Scully or Skinner could hear hear because they were standing in the dark arguing.

"This is going to far," snapped Skinner.

"No," said Scully. "The problem is - it hasn't gone far enough."

They could have been talking about the last series. After successfully moving to the big screen in 1998 The X-Files never quite made it back. The tension between Scully and Mulder evaporated: she looked bored and he looked fat. The exceptions were the start and finish of each season - the "mythology" stories that are released on video and link up with the movie to form one long, paranoid conspiracy theory.

Series creator Chris Carter's plan is that the mythology will eventually reveal all: the cigarette-smoking man, Mulder's abducted sister, Scully's alien pregnancies, Skinner's infestation with deadly nano-technology – everything. He has his work cut out for him. After eight years The X-Files has strung together so many ideas it's become a running audit of ghost stories and urban legends. Scully and Mulder are Jungian G-men, endlessly posting field reports on modern America's collective unconscious.

But as the nation's fears multiplied, the work piled up. Now, in response to the latest round of pay negotiations with actor David Duchovny, Agent Mulder has been snatched by aliens and is busy having his face drilled. Mulder's replacement is John Doggett (Robert Patrick), a Marlboro-gargling dead-eye who might not be on Scully's side. His scepticism finally releases her from the one-note line that science can explain everything. She's becoming Mulder, the National Enquirer subscriber who wants to believe.

Which is good, because when a "giant bat-like creature" appeared in the third episode it was very hard to believe. Halfway through Scully wondered if there was a scientific explanation but she changed her mind when it tried to bite her head off. Doggett shot it. Afterwards, they debated science vs. religion with the clarity of an FBI memo.

"Do you believe that thing is still out there and will one day come after us, Agent Doggett?" asked Agent Scully.

"I'm pretty sure I hit it, Agent Scully," said Agent Doggett.

Tonight Scully discovers murder in the rural mid-west, which in this series usually means hillbilly cults and poor cell-phone reception. No guessing which is the greatest fear.

-- NZ Herald, 2006

Translation

I've yet to meet every one of my translators. Strangers assume that the process of having your words swapped into a different language is intimate but I've found it's almost the opposite. The publisher gives the translator the novel and the translator comes back to the author with questions, and even then only sometimes. My French translators have had many questions, the Italians a few and the Germans hardly any. The biggest sticking problems with language have been those between editors in the UK and the US but even these have been merely a matter of a few words or a local phrase. In such cases the most important language becomes that of the printer, "STET" and "COLLOQ" being two useful examples.

Overall the experience of having my work transformed so efficiently and without fuss has been a nice reality check. No matter how much you sweat over a novel, in the end that's all it is: just another book.

My French translators Anouk Neuhoff and Isabelle Chapman speak English as well as I do plus a few other languages besides. I blame them for my dismal French because they are excellent conversationalists and even better hosts. Whenever I've attempted a few phrases in their presence their comments are nothing but kind. Anouk translated Shirker and Electric for Christian Bourgois in Paris, and Isabelle translated Departure Lounge. It's my impression that each has imparted her own style to my work but I don't know what that might be. I do know that in France even readers of popular fiction can pay as much attention to the translator's name as they do to the author's. Which is logical if not sobering.

The effects of translation on a writer's work can of course be radical. A good modern example is the Japanese author Haruki Murakami whose novels lurch in accessibility depending on whether his translator is Jay Rubin or Alfred Birnbaum. Rubin's English language version of Murakami is poetic and calm but Birnbaum's, I'm told, is "more Japanese." If readers of Lugenspiele (Pack of Lies - Aus dem neuseelandischen Englisch von Dietmar Hefendehl) or Fuori dal tempo (Shirker - traduzione di Massimo Ortelio e Annamaria Raffo) are experiencing a similar disjunction I can only be thankful to be in such company.

As a writer I owe a great deal to works in translation. When I was growing up in south Auckland the local cinema screened Italian spaghetti westerns and Hong Kong martial arts pictures in which the overdubbed dialogue or subtitles was an integral part of the viewing experience. Similarly the local library held an oddly comprehensive collection of French and Japanese novels which I enjoyed as much for the clarity of the translator's prose as I did for the stories. There were doubtless gaps in meaning but like scratches in a favourite vinyl LP or reflections in a painting's glazing the disjunctions seemed a natural part of the work.

Subsequently the thought that a novel might be translated has encouraged me to focus not on the details of language so much as the broader story. Even if my words will be changed I know the brute narrative will survive. The first question an author is always asked is "What's it about?" so it helps to be able to say in English or any other language. Travellers to foreign lands know how far they can spin out simple phrases such as "Do you have a table?" and "What time is the ferry?" Authors likewise could do well practicing the sentence beginning "My novel is..." Try it some time. Translating the words is easy: finding them in the first place is hard.

(Sunday Star Times, 2004)

Boxing as a metaphor

The romance between boxers and writers has been going on for a long time. Fighters want to be poets and poets want to be fighters despite the fact that neither party is equipped to deal with their respective aspirations. Fighting is a direct method of problem-solving at odds with the shaded ruminations of literature. Writers don't like being punched in the face.

The messy affair has continued nevertheless. Ernest Hemingway belonged to a boxing generation, making his well-publicised dalliance with the sport less of a cliche than it seems now. In Cannibals and Christians, Norman Mailer - who also fancied himself with the gloves - describes a 1929 bout in which El Papa was knocked down at the end of a round that lasted four minutes instead of three. The nominated time keeper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had become so distracted by the spectacle that he forgot to watch the clock. At least, that's how Norman tells it. Like most boxing anecdotes, the story has probably been jazzed up a little.

The wiry French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus, a contemporary of Hemingway, fought until tuberculosis ended further participation. James Ellroy writes about the sport with almost weary expertise although he's only ever put in hours as a golf caddy, as far as I can tell. Less famous authors, but two of the best to chronicle the experience are Timothy Mo (Sour Sweet) and Pete Dexter (Brotherly Love). When Dexter describes the worn gloves and stinking wraps his prose has the chime of someone who's actually done some fighting instead of just watching it. The author photo also provides a clue: his nose is slightly to the right of where you would expect it to be.

The instinctive analogy between the closed fist and the moving hand, the fighter's punch and the keyboard's click has survived into the computer age. Writers are attracted to boxing because it is a solitary craft: a vehicle for justice and a release for pent-up frustration. Surveys have shown that writers engage in more useless feuds than professionals working in other creative fields: logically, it would help if they let off steam. Andy Warhol mused about setting up a ring in Madison Square Gardens where Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote could scrap it out. Consider how long the recent Kidman / Grimshaw feud would have lasted if both had consented to some regulated biff. The photos alone would have put some zip into the literary section.

If there is an uppermost reason for non-fighters' fascination with the ring it's that boxing is a source of great stories. The associated corruption only makes it more so. A fixed fight is more exciting than the real thing, as the saying goes, rendering its true moments as plangent glimpses of a greater, ongoing tragedy. The simple bravery of a bout is so apparent that the intrigue piled up around it becomes disproportionately amoral and complex: an ongoing car wreck of greed, shadows and fools. It was not for nothing that Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull portrayed Jake La Motta as Christ-like: bloodied and arms outstretched as the crowd bayed for more. By reversing the image - the saviour as brutalised fighter - Mel Gibson's Passion merely returns the compliment.

Beyond the arts, it is intriguing to contemplate the extent to which boxing is employed as an everyday metaphor. You don't need to be a poet in order to step into the ring, throw in the towel, box clever or roll with the punches. At some time or other we have all taken it on the chin, stood our ground or been saved by the bell. With further conversational effort we might have taken the purse, thrown the fight or retired to the corner. Businessmen in particular love the the metaphor of "one man left standing". Comparing oneself to the winning fighter lends takeover bids and market contests a ruthless, gladitorial flavour.

In boxing, none of these sayings are sayings. They are descriptions of what actually happens. "Taking it on the chin" means a big fist bringing your teeth together so hard that the the conscious self shuts down for measurable seconds. A "knock out punch" is an impact that it shakes the brain in its bone and liquid pouch hard enough to cause permanent damage. Going "out for the count" means the difference between millions and zip. If you are the one man left standing, the other man will be bleeding on the canvas. Actual blood, actual canvas. Boxing is not a metaphor. Boxing is real.

My generation came with Muhammed Ali pre-installed as champion. Growing up square-eyed in the suburbs, I vividly recall two televised events: the 1969 manned moon landing and the 1971 Ali - Frazier World Heavyweight title. Both spectacles were strangely weightless. If contemporary technology struggled to convey the immediacy of the moment with their bobbing, black & white images and rasping commentary, it likewise ordained them as iconic. Armstrong walked on the moon and Ali danced in the ring: they were complimentary, monochrome heroes.

My childhood impression of the Ali - Frazier bout was that it went on forever. As an adult, I realise it lasted somewhat longer. Their first contest went 15 rounds; the 1974 rematch went for 12. The third - "the nasty one", as a boxing friend nicely put it - was stopped in the 14th. Ali opened with a range of combinations early on. Frazier dominated the middle rounds with what one critic called "the most vicious body punches seen in heavyweight history." Ali could barely return to his corner after round 10 but had closed his opponent's left eye by the 13th. In round 14 Frazier's trainer, Eddie Futch, called it off. "Joe would have been hit by a car and he wouldn't quit, so I had to do it for him," Futch said.

That's merely a summary. To watch the fight nowadays is to witness unheralded savagery. Consider also that the Manila fight took place in an absurd heat and that Ali, we now know, had made weight by taking drugs that shed body fluid, including the waters that rimmed his cerebral cavity. Stripped of this protection, the Manila fight was slow murder.

No matter who the fighter, we all know how the story ends. Sugar Ray Robinson: Alzheimer's. Joe Louis: dementia and paranoia. Joe Frazier watches over his North Philly gym through corneal implants. In his professional days his sight was so poor he would memorise eye charts for the pre-fight medical. Equally, we ourselves have become blase about Muhammad Ali's struggle with Parkinson's. When a British journalist commented in a 2000 interview that the ex-champ could tie his shoes unassisted, it was intended as a compliment, not an irony. Seated ringside for a bout starring his daughter Talia, Ali was also able to shut his eyes and turn his head away to avoid the sight of his daughter being hit. As numb gestures go, it said a lot.

The ongoing peril of boxing was highlighted by Beethoven Scottland, an obscure last-minute substitute who stepped into the ring to face a taller, heavier opponent in New York in 2001. As the fight progressed, the imbalance became obvious both to the television commentators and also to Bee's wife, Denise, who screamed from her ringside seat for it ton be stopped. The referee and fight doctors stopped nothing. Bee was not the man left standing. He went down in the tenth. The first attempt to revive him lasted 15 minutes. He died in hospital six days later.

After Scottland's death the calls to reform and regulate the sport grew louder. Journalists suggested a national commissioner to set standards for health and safety; a league and schedule of events. To this day, however, the standards float and the lawyers sting. Each match remains a separate deal. The sanctioning bodies that rate fighters force champions to pay huge sanction fees for the right to defend their titles. Evander Holyfield's bill is conservatively estimated at $20 million.

The sport sees no conflict of interest between managing and promoting a fight. The fatal Scottland bout was promoted - legally - by the opponent's manager. Don King's fighters say they are not permitted to hire their own lawyers or accountants. These legal circumstances are the air and water that has allowed Don King to become the monarch that he is today. His levy is the broadcasters' and fans' pay for view. For newcomers to the sport, King is the guy with the Bride of Frankenstein hair-do grinning at the camera and waving an American flag like a puppeteer trying to entertain a simple child.

The fans are not stupid. They accept the corruption. If you earned four million dollars, you wouldn't need to pull out a calculator to know that you would have to pay tax. By a similar rule, you know most of a champion's purse won't be going to the champ. Mike Tyson has declared bankruptcy. David Tua is filing for what he earned. Anyone who watches boxing, myself included, is party to this bad situation. This is the real reason that fans look for a champion with the primal rage. We are all frustrated and guilty of sins that can only be absolved by someone who can cut through the bullshit and rage at how unfair the sport has become.

This is the real reason for the furore over the ear-biting incident between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield at the MGM Grand Garden in 1997. Holyfield had been dragging on the young street-fighter, trying his patience, wearing him down. Tyson decided - if not planned in his corner - to discourage the clenching by biting his opponent. "A little bit of the ear came rolling over toward us," blinked Showtime analyst Ferdie Pacheco. "It was sick, inhuman, despicable!" But the media's hollering were the cries of an audience hating themselves for getting what they really wanted: a fighter with teeth. We saw the same flash in the eyes when Tua met Hasim Rahman in their equally frustrating 2003 fight. Sensing a win by decision, Rahman raised his gloves in celebration seconds before the final bell. You just don't do that to boys from South Auckland, and Tua went for Rahman like he was going to kill him. Really. To paraphrase what fans said of Sonny Liston, these moments are the difference between boxing and, you know, a fight.

Women also box, now. There are well-regulated Olympic contests with head gear and of short duration, and Sylvester Stallone played a boxer in those movies but frankly - honestly - it's not the same. There is no civilised alternative to two men smashing each other in the face and chest because hitting each other, by definition, is uncivilised. There's simply no polite or fair way to go about it. People cite the Queensbury Rules in the same way that armchair militarists cite the Geneva Convention but if you've ever read the Queensbury Rules pretty much all they say is: two corners, a certain number of rounds, the bell stops the fight, and well, yeah - hit each other all you can. Hit. Hit. Hit. May the best man win, and may you both pee pink for the following week.

In writing this, in the process of digging out all the dirty facts, I have to ask myself why I watch boxing. The easy out is that its fatefulness mirrors humanity's own. Boxing gives you brain damage just as alcohol destroys your liver and smoking causes cancer and driving fast kills: there are just as many "lifestyle choices" that are as dangerous and corrupt. Why, in the Middle East alone, nations are conducting an experiment to test the relationship between civilisation and spilling blood. And there you have it. Even writing it down, the analogy between boxing and larger moral issues is difficult to avoid. You cannot begin to debate the paradoxes of the sport without naturally segueing into a larger debate about violence & culture; the individual & society; the whole shebang. Try it at the dinner table. You'll come to blows in minutes. No, on second thoughts: don't. Leave that to the guys in the ring.

What do the fighters have to say about it? Plenty, most of it practiced in front of a mirror beforehand. Lennox Lewis's power is unquestioned but when he talks about being a "pugilist specialist" the rap is embarrassing and inauthentic. So most of the talking is left up to the writers: the sports hounds, and the poets. This is a poor second. Writers don't write about boxing: they write about watching boxing. Big difference.

When I looked for what boxers have actually written about boxing, I found the piece that moved me most on a Christmas card to Sam Eveland, the 1950s Golden Gloves champion who shared a cell with Sonny Liston in the Missouri State Penitentary. After leaving jail, Liston went on to fight as one of the most convincing champions the world has seen, closing down opponent after opponent with his big hands before falling to Ali's "phantom punch" in 1964. What happened in that fight is a sad story. Sadder, however, are the contents of the card, dated December, 1961. Liston's words to his former cell mate were his own: Sonny Liston. Unschooled, illiterate and a world champion, he had finally learned to sign his own name.

I think if you wanted to nail the character of boxing you have it right there. For the reader, the simplicity of Liston's missive expresses all about the sport that is grave and pathetic; heroic and tragic; sentimental and grave; noble and wasted. Liston, of course, would have found no pathos in it. His name was not a metaphor. Liston was a boxer. He boxed.

(Originally published in the Sunday Star Times, 2004)