Jazz flute 2011

Must get out of the house now...

Where there are daiquiris, there is happiness*

Happy New Year, everyone.

* © Chad Taylor 2008

L*z

"There's a part of me that doesn't want to be a career bitch at all. That wants to raise children and arrange flowers and host bunco nights. I want to grow my nails so long and wear clothes so delicate I can't function without a man. That turns me on. And yet at the same time, I want to do the rock thing."... I hand her the pen. In script that would make Emily Post proud, she writes: "Thank you! I took the best crap!"

I love Liz Phair more every day. This and other things Katy Perry will never say here. Here she is again in a Speakers in Code interview:

Finish this sentence: The hardest thing about being a musician in today's society is...

The same thing that has plagued the artist for centuries. Most people focus on externals, don't place a premium on their inner life, so the artist, whose job it is to nurture that inner life, is subject to undervaluation at the marketplace. Yet if you removed us, the world would quickly feel the absence!

I agree with that view, the exclamation point not so much.

I, Candy

Tron Legacy is incredibly pretty. Fanboys are complaining because it's slow and wordy but so was Tron, so it's keeping with the spirit of the original. I'll write some more about it when my writing muscles have returned... Basically between the light cycles and some average "fight" sequences it's Kubrick's uplit Regency Louis XVI look from the end of 2001 and sparky spacegirls and a nightclub to pill out for, and a pretty fine story, at least thematically – so big ups to the six (ahem) credited writers. I enjoyed it because it was relaxing for the eyes as well as the mind. I was pleased when Quorra turned up, and then Gem arrived and I was even more pleased. If only it wasn't so slow and wordy...

Instant Rothko

Or Rayograph.

You burn me up I'm a cigarette

Daryl Hall is 64. Interviewed in NYMag.com:

As a doo-wop-singing teenager in Philadelphia, he knew future members of the Stylistics and Delfonics. Hall worked with Philly producers Gamble and Huff, and after he teamed up with Oates, they faced the standard challenge of their milieu: crossing over to white people. Releasing classic Philly-soul hits like "She's Gone" years before image ruled pop, Hall & Oates were typically assumed to be African-Americans. After a few years in New York, the image started to change.

"Honestly, we are a New York band," says Oates, calling from his present home in Aspen. "Our roots are in Philadelphia, but our music came from New York." As new transplants, the duo had their first commercial breakthrough when "Sara Smile" crossed over from R&B radio, and, in 1977, their first true pop hit with "Rich Girl." Then Hall & Oates started getting buzzed, morphed, and remixed by one of the most explosive cultural moments in this city's history.

The off-site money quote is from Pitchfork, on how Hall met Robert Fripp:

DH: I met Robert through a friend in about 1974, and we became friends right away. We have a lot of the same interests, and we just got along. I was first starting to spend a lot of time in England then, so I would stay at his house, and he used to stay at my house, and all that. We were really good friends. And then he went away to Gurdjieff Camp, and I was the only person in the outside world he was communicating with.

Pitchfork: Gurdjieff Camp?

DH: Yeah, he decided he was going to follow the teachings of [G. I.] Gurdjieff, which is basically like the boot camp of the mind. And so I was sort of his touch with some form of reality. And after he came through that period, he wanted to reenter the music world, because he had stepped away. And so he and I got together, and we said, let's do some projects. And we got Peter Gabriel and various other people, Pete Hammill, and the Roches-- we had a loose-knit group of people, and I did my album, Sacred Songs, and then we did Exposure, and I'm trying to think what happened after that-- well then he did the Peter Gabriel album [II aka Scratch]. But the Exposure album was the second collaboration with me, and I was supposed to be the singer on that whole album. Because he did my album, I did his album... [But] I was with RCA at the time, and they balked. They wouldn't allow my vocals to be put on his records. All the vocals you hear on Exposure are completely my ideas that were as best as could be done copied by other people, except for two or three songs. And that was really disheartening. That's when I completely fell out of love with the music business.

I bought Exposure – on cassette, FFS, from HMV Oxford Street in 1979. I must have been a fan. Fripp's League of Gentlemen is still a fave. I could never work out the Hall connection.

Now playing

I've made a lot of special modifications myself

I love it when you're into the eleventh hour* of a manuscript and you make one tiny, tiny little change and it's like bolting one of these in.

*Am actually in penalty time but that would be a third metaphor.

You know the drill

Workingworkingworking. Wouldn't do it if I didn't love it.

The lights are turned way down low

Spirit of the season 'n' that.

Season's Greetings

Daniel Knox - Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas. Recorded live at the Barbican, 2008; a performance I was lucky enough to catch. Think Kurt Weill meets William Riker. Or not.

Merry Christmas, everybody. Hope you get lots of presents.

Snow

December without January

Still suffering from Mad Men withdrawal. N*vel proceeding apace. Nearly finished. I. Think. Or as someone else put it:

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

That's Henry James quoted by Bertolucci quoted by Manohla Dargis in the NYT. And over at NY Magazine Bertolucci dissects scenes from his movies. The director's reminiscences are not easy going – his comments about Last Tango in Paris alone will probably be deemed unacceptable – but they chime with his complaint at the BFI earlier this year about modern cinema not being "menacing" enough.

Where is the real danger nowadays? Sitting in a TX booth over the weekend I had to watch The Human Centipede and really did fall asleep. Then John Carpenter's The Thing came on and freaked everybody out. (I love it when a first-time viewer asks, 'Hey – what's up with the dog?') I wonder if movies like Tango will survive self-appointed corporate censors when distribution goes totally digital.

(Image c/- GQ)

Tattoo of the Month (First Runner-Up)

The judges were impressed with this entry although ultimately it failed due to lack of John Candy. Points were awarded for leaving a space for the next musician to die aged 27: Stefani Germanotta, the ball's in your court.

Having tea there out in the crowd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tattoo of the Month

It was that kind of weekend.

Rock 'n' Roll

How do

I'm not saying I'm perfect. I've done a lot of bad things in my life and there are still a few on the list. However this weekend I will be in Somerset, in winter, and I'm not sure quite what I've done to deserve that. Here's hoping it all turns out well. And if it doesn't and I'm burned alive by the locals, well, you'll all get a kick out of it, right? Laffs all round.

I got nasty habits, I take tea at three

Scan courtesy of the clever Nate & Zoe; poem by Kenneth Koch courtesy of The New Yorker.

In my lucid dreams

Since watching Woody Allen's Celebrity I've had a recurring dream about Famke Janssen running out of the apartment with my manuscript and throwing it into the harbour one page at a time. For a writer this scenario solves a lot of problems. Also: Famke.

'Cause you know I'm not so sure

Both ends burning. Up late adding words instead of cutting them - now there's a trick.

I am not a number

A fan as I am of exploitation cinema the buck stops when it exploits writers. Collider has done a good job of covering the I Am Number Four movie but the skinny comes from New York Magazine's piece on James Frey's young adult fiction factory which originated the work. The terms being offered the writers who work on these pieces are odious. Writes one potiential participant:

The Authors Guild got back to me with serious concerns over the contract... I later spoke to Conrad Rippy, a veteran publishing attorney, who explained that the contract given to me wasn't a book-packaging contract; it was "a collaboration agreement without there being any collaboration." He said he had never seen a contract like this in his sixteen years of negotiation. "It's an agreement that says, 'You're going to write for me. I'm going to own it. I may or may not give you credit. If there is more than one book in the series, you are on the hook to write those too, for the exact same terms, but I don't have to use you. In exchange for this, I'm going to pay you 40 percent of some amount you can't verify—there's no audit provision—and after the deduction of a whole bunch of expenses." He described it as a Hollywood-style work-for-hire contract grafted onto the publishing industry—"although Hollywood writers in a work-for-hire contract are usually paid more than $250."

Read the article - it's all in the fine print. I was cautious about criticising Frey for the Million Little Pieces fiasco because it wasn't clear whether he volunteered to lie about the book's veracity or was coerced into doing it - and also, the man's so far away from me in space and income that I couldn't really bring myself to care. But I've revised my opinion: James Frey is a gold-plated prick. If you boycott one movie this year, make it I Am Number Four.

It's a turned back world with a local girl

Season four of Mad Men is over and I'm missing Dr Miller already. The ending made sense because Don stereotypes women not as objects of affection but its source, and his desire to put his family back together is fundamental to his emotional rehabilitation and - I know, I know - if he had stayed with Faye then everything would have been perfect and there would be no story left to tell. But srsly: dude. As a character Faye Miller was the daughter of Vance Packard and Tippi Hedren: all blonde, all brains. If she's gone the series will lose its most mature and alluring paramour since Don shacked up with Midge. I lent my paperback of The Hidden Persuaders to someone in 1999. Now I feel like I've lost the damn thing twice.

Robyn Gallagher has written a really good piece on holiday snaps and memory:

The thing is, I can't remember having this photo taken. I can't remember sitting at a table outside the Sydney Opera House and sullenly looking at a camera to provide evidence of having been there. And I can't remember the view from that table, though, having been there a few times since, I can mentally imagine what that would look like.

And while I'm being melancholy about it, Rumi Nealy posted a diary of NZ Fashion Week pics that make me miss home, or at least the rainy downtown.

Cold fingers

Now playing

The Naked Gun

Philip Matthews over at Second Sight likes The American. I did too but there were holes in the story before anyone started shooting. The movie is based on A Very Private Gentlemen, one of Martin Booth's late works. The author describes gunmaking as heavy manual labour, like blacksmithing, and hides his protagonist in an isolated Italian village - which works if Jack is an anonymous craftsman but not if, as in the film, he's a pursued hit man. Being the only American in a village makes you That Guy Everyone Is Looking For; unlike Matt Damon's Bourne, George is too glam to ever be an everyman, Out of Sight notwithstanding. Viewers were told not to worry about this because the movie is an exercise in Style but it did drive me crazy, especially when some of the problems could have been fixed with a few strokes of the pen. Still, The American's heart is in the right place and so is the camera: it's a big, open, chilly movie with more than a few locked-off frames that recall director Anton Corbijn's still work. The setting is new Europe, its generic eateries and phone booths a pleasant contrast to the hills and streams. Cinematographer Martin Ruhe tries to keep things claustrophobic but can't help but be seduced by the open scenery, which is a character all by itself. How nice it is to see mountains in a movie without a fictional battle being waged across them.

George Clooney co-produces with a vision of creating a character different from the type he usually plays, so kudos to him. Silent and staring, his Jack is the anti-George; almost comically so, at moments -- you keep expecting him to crack a joke. Jack is intentionally brooding and solitary but Clooney not talking is a waste of natural resources, like Harrison Ford sitting on his hands -- like the similarly petite Scarlett Johansson, George Clooney is his speaking voice. While the actor's star power frees him to experiment with his performance the production is riddled with the same defensive, let's-underline-this-for-thick-people moments that compromised Up In The Air. I would applaud Rowan Joffe's supermodel-skinny script if the lines that are in it were not so clunky. It's redundant to have someone saying 'Remember last time we spoke?' in reference to a scene which was the last time anyone in the movie said anything.

The movie only gets going in the last few minutes -- or Act as it's signalled -- when Jack dies and George finally comes alive. (If you think that's a spoiler then also be warned that Christmas falls in December.) My favourite sequence, and the most memorable, is the tension-filled exchange of wares in a modern roadside café when Jack meets the person he knows is stalking him. He knows, she knows, we know, but then we don't. Everything is wonderfully quiet, and for a short time The American becomes the terse, godless stand-off it aimed to be - until Joffe's dialogue interrupts, crashing in with a nod and a wink nobody needed. Such a quiet movie: if only it would shut up.

Today's cryptic

Commedia dell'arte

When Stephen Stratford broke from his luxury lifestyle to forward me Mick Hartley's complaint about the Saatchi Gallery I misinterpreted his sarcasm as a recommendation and attended the Newspeak exhibition myself. Entry to the Saatchi Collection is free, and if you get off the tube at Victoria you can enjoy a nice stroll through Knightsbridge past empty, harshly-lit designer outlets that resemble Moscow shops during a 1980s shortage.

My favourites in the exhibition were Robert Fry and Maaike Schoorel and Jonathan Wateridge because I'm an old-fashioned sucker for sticky stuff pushed around on canvas, although I accept that what appears to be aesthetics is just as likely to be conceptual. Artists nowadays swap styles in the way that Japanese teenagers change clothes - rockabillies one day, Goths the next - and I envy them for it. Nor did I need to be warned to avoid the gallery essays, the reading of which inevitably becomes a frustrating game of Spot The Verb.

But if you want a way in my cheater's tip is to head straight to the fifth floor and look at the artists' photographs for some good old-fashioned stereotyping. Pictures about pictures...

Queen of Horror. And Ingrid Pitt

Ingrid Pitt's resumé is the cult ultimate: from The House That Dripped Blood to The Wicker Man to Smiley's People. But can we pause in our sadness at her passing to recall her in the lavish Jason King? I could say they don't make them like that any more but be honest, you could throw a stone in Soho and hit a dozen like her. Which is precisely why Pitt was so special to British horror - she was a type. Three fingers of Glenlivit and some cheese to you, madam.

The incredible Fran Lebowitz

This interview is so good you could cut and paste the whole thing. It starts with FL talking about her appearances on Law & Order, then moves to Keith Richards...

Have you read the Keith Richards memoir?
I did. I did.

How'd it turn out?
You know, it's good. It's good. I mean first of all, James Fox is a good writer. It's very unusual to choose a writer like that, I think, to do that kind of book [...]

Somebody told me that Keith's book was going to be written by Nick Tosches at one point.
Is that right? He would've been a great choice. He's a great writer. He would've also been a great choice, but he's not English. You know Keith is very English. People forget that, and James Fox is English. Keith is really English in a way that people who are younger are not that strongly their own nationality, you know? Have you read the book?

No. Only excerpts.
When you read the book there's this tremendous connection to being English, especially in that era.

The war era?
Right. Every English person that age, always the first thing they tell you is they talk about rationing and what they're talking about is rationing of candy because they were children. This never leaves them. You would think they were survivors of Auschwitz, you know? "We only got this much candy ever!" I love Nick Tosches as a writer. I think he's a fantastic writer and he would always be a great choice, I think, but he's not English so maybe it's better to have an English person.

... and then only after this does the interviewer ask 'Are you still playing drums?'

Full transcript here at NYMag.com.

The low moon helps me sing

Fingers just flying across the keyboard now. But I still have time for James Ellroy interviewed in 1995:

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

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

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

(Photo c/- The Guardian)

Back to silence back to minus

I'm not one of the people who worship Chuck Palahniuk and I'm not that big a fan of the movie (I started liking David Fincher after Zodiac) but, credit where credit is due. Fight Club gave novels the same happy kick up the ass that Reservoir Dogs gave to movies. Here is Palahniuk talking about source material:

RH: Let me start by saying, and I mean this as a compliment, that you have a very twisted imagination.

CP: I wish it were just mine but it's really all of my friends. About eighty percent of Fight Club (1996) is received information. I can go to parties and say, "How many people have doctored food in the service industry?" and get their stories... people write the books for me; all I've got to do is remember everybody's stories and put them together. So, I can't take credit for most of it.

RH: So how did you first get interested in hearing these stories?

CP: I was always disappointed when I went to read anything. I'd go to the library and I'd pull fifty books off the shelf and none of them were anything I wanted to read. And I always thought, you know, I could do something better. And there's always stories that really stand out that make me laugh out loud when people tell them. People have fantastically funny stories. So I thought, why not collect these things instead of letting them be wasted, letting them go out in thin air. I collect them and put them together somehow and it seems to work.

Today's apropos of nothing

Quincy MD; Band à part; Miss Mosh; Sleepy Hollow. When I was flatting it was a good game to watch Quincy MD and take all the dialogue literally. The ep when Quincy yelled at someone 'Your father was my right arm!' was a particular hit. I'm always thinking Band à part. Miss Mosh who begat GaGa. A lot of Tim Burton's movies get better with age, which is interesting.

OK: day's a wastin'.

The F word

Sopranos creator David Chase interviewed by PBS presenter Jim Lehrer in 2001:

Q: Much is being made about the profanity in The Sopranos. How important is that to its success?

DAVID CHASE: It is important. I can't comment as to whether - how important it is to the success of the show - but it is important. I've heard people say, well, you know, they can do all that swearing on HBO. They can show all that violence; they can show all those bare breasts, and I don't believe those are the reasons that the show is a success. I believe you could do this show on a network. The only place you'd have a problem - because you could do it with less violence if you so chose to - you could probably do it with - you wouldn't need to have the Bing dancers be naked - that's not an absolute requirement, but it would lose something only in language, I think. I think language is important.

Q: So it wouldn't be the same program - wouldn't be the same story?

DAVID CHASE: It sounds crazy to say that if you can't say the "f" word it'd be different, but all I can say is that would be the one place where I would have trouble. I'd be writing stuff I thought wasn't accurate. And that I think would filter down - that language thing. I guess language is important to people. I think that language thing would filter down to other aspects of the show and kind of a creeping unreality would get into it.

The passage of my life is measured out in shirts

Complaining about a new seven-hour production / reading of The Great Gatsby, Time theater reviewer Joan Marcus mentions in passing that the novel is 49,000 words long. I knew there was a reason I liked it. I first read Gatsby when my brother was doing his first year of English lit at Auckland Uni. His secondhand paperback edition was a tie-in with the 1974 movie version with Robert Redford on the cover so I picked it up because I liked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid*. (My brother is seven years older than me, so I must have been around 12.) Anyway: in; out - bang. And that's the book. Whether or not it dates from that experience, I have always associated the form of the novel with concision. This puts me at odds with almost everyone nowadays but when I look back on my book collection (i.e. visualise it in its Kane / Raiders style storage warehouse) my favourite - or rather my most enjoyed - reads are the shorter ones. Why fuck around? You focus, You get in there, you get out. Travel light, etc.

I'm closing in on the final draft of The New Thing ™ and cutting left and right. Last draft was 90,000; this one is peeking under 75,000. I keep what's been cut in a dump file and review it afterwards; no matter how good it is, it's never good enough.

* Actually I liked Alias Smith & Jones on TV but knew it was a rip-off. Not a bad one, though. I remember watching M*A*S*H* on TV and thinking, 'This would make a really good movie...'

WIP

New draft, nearly there... I've gone into some sort of zone where the only thing I watch is Mad Men and the only things I read are old detective novels and the NYT. This is fairly normal behaviour for creative types; when Irvine Welsh was writing Trainspotting all he watched was Star Wars, over and over, although drugs may have been involved. And David Lynch eats the same thing for lunch every day - broccoli and a tuna sandwich, a quirk which drove Isabella Rosselini from his life. Good company, happy thoughts. Repetition is the mother of invention. When I was writing The Church of John Coltrane I only listened to Coltrane, of course - which drove the neighbours nuts. The soundtrack for the new thing is Sly and the Family Stone, Sticky Fingers... but hey, that's a whole other blog entry.

Bender

I've been taking blogging much too seriously lately, and I swore I'd never do that (again). But man, you need a distraction when you hit a bump. Bump being dealt with. Normal transmission to be resumed, etcetera, etcetera.

The Sweet Smell of Success

The Social Network benefits from a second viewing. Aaron Sorkin's script is so upfront you get all the main points the first time but re-examination turns up all kinds of gems: Eduardo (Andrew Garfield) putting out a fire while he's putting out an actual fire; the champion rowers beginning to lose from the moment they're interrupted in the practice tank; the very Citizen Kane arc of Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) breaking into the frat party virtually, attracting and being surrounded by more and more people until he ends up being crowded out and as isolated as he was in the beginning; the Facebook blue that creeps into the edges of the sky until it's filled.

Sunrise and sunset are as one in this movie - it's on Fincher time - but the tone is very noir, The Social Network is really this generation's The Sweet Smell of Success, filled with talk and sleek urban treachery. Male bonds are more prized than male-female relationships and while there's much mention of money there's little evidence of it. The most direct expressions of wealth are crass and excessive; Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake, a convincing shit) fusses over vintage whiskies in a droning nightclub and drives a humorous mom-mobile. Sex is likewise superfluous - the most fun women (girls) have in the film is with a bong. The real glitter is the chatter of keyboards.

Much has been made of how much Sorkin's Zuckerberg is like the real one. Jesse Eisenburg's performance certainly satisfies the stereotype of today's Asperger Kid (how time flies - it seems like only yesterday that all movie teens were bipolar) but it's more likely that the character has been reverse-engineered from the modern Zuckerberg as he appears in press statements and leaked online gloats. The audience is meant to to be appalled by his lack of empathy but an early scene in which he speedily constructs a site to insult every female on campus is undeniably cool: to object would be like criticising Robert de Niro for stealing in Heat. To be online is to be understanding of, if not actively engaged in, narcissistic stupidity. The character's actions are more of a caution: therebutforthegraceofgod-dot-com.

We live in a larger world now, something which Fincher telegraphs by shrinking the rest of it down to size. The Henley Royal Regatta is miniaturised in digital (i.e. faux) tilt-shift so it looks quaint, even petty; Harvard is a series of Roman-looking facades, like faded theater flats; a final decadent Los Angeles party is as squalid and domestic as the fraternity binges at the start of the movie. If TV, as someone once said, is about people walking in and out of rooms, the internet is about them being locked inside. Zuckerberg only physically exits locations a handful of times: trapped in a Last Year at Marienbad loop of opprobrium, he can't even leave his lawyer's office. His fate should be consolation for real people - Fincher compares them all to a caged chicken - but it's not. From the stupid girls to the repulsive boys, the stale arguments to the unsexy sex, The Social Network is a groovy place, and you want to be part of it.

His nibs

I got into clutch pencils late. I'm a fan of the old-fashioned wooden kind (2B) which I enjoy sharpening with a pocket knife (a 60mm Laguiole) or the aluminium-bodied sharpener that my grandfather gave me, which I've carried around the globe several times. When I was in Bali the humidity was so intense that graphite was the only thing that could make a mark on the wilting page but in London both knives and wood shavings are frowned upon so I picked up a plastic-barrelled clutch from Ryman's in Oxford Street and have never looked back. The Staedtler pictured here is aluminium with a plastic cap - 2B, 0.5mm leads. The metal barrel encourages the user to press harder than necessary - it's like holding a scalpel or a dentist's tool - but it has a nice action on newsprint, which is good for the NYT crossword. The Staedtler is also extremely well-balanced, and cylindrical. (With clutch pencils many people go for Pentels which are hexagonal, too short and set with a clip that's too low in the body. Fine for sketching perhaps, but useless for writing.)

The Rotring cartridge fountain pen glides across Moleskine stock as smoothly as a pencil. Rotring's black ink leaves a very satisfying mark but their red is rather wan. This model has a medium fine nib and a beautifully straight cylindrical barrel with no adornments which makes the grip comfortable, although the proportions are slightly wide; if I'm writing for a longer stretch I tend to change to the more slender Aurora. The Rotring is also very reliable. It has never leaked either in heat or an airplane cabin, and the shaft accommodates a spare second cartridge which cleverly balances the pen. It's also excellent for drawing, which can be a distraction. I have two but can identify this one as the going-away present I received when I left the Auckland City Art Gallery because it has a little dent in the cap.

I don't really like ballpoints but they write on anything so you need to have one. This model has obvious appeal because it's from the Royal Plaza on Scotts Singapore but it also has an extremely satisfying click action. Virgin Atlantic also do an excellent complimentary ballpoint although the clip is loose and easily lost. Flashing either sort about gives lazy thinkers the impression that you're richer and more successful than you are. (Disclosure: VA flight attendants on the Heathrow / LAX do a fantastic gin and tonic.) Both are also light enough to tuck behind your ear. I'm right-handed but put pens behind my left ear because I am contrary. (I can also write left-handed: I was very bored as a child.)

My Aurora uses longer Parker refills and tends to leak. It's fitted with a fine nib but with use the tines have spread to the point where it must be a medium now. I used this pen to write most of Shirker and Electric, using green legal pads because I found the colour soothing and it made the pages easy to spot after being inserted in a white-paged ms. (In New Zealand legal pads came in an onion skin finish but in the UK they're called Conference Pads and are scratchy, thick and no fun.) The Aurora's nib benefits from a smoother writing surface; at the moment I'm mostly using it on the Ryman wire bound Shorthand notebook. Because it's old it tends to leak, especially on planes, and the slit admits too much ink for recycled stock. Nevertheless this is the pen I use most - it's mah thinkin' pen. I use it as often as I use the lap top.

My disposable pen of choice is a Pilot V Ball which is the most precise marker on a Moleskine or almost any other stock. If you want to diagram something, it's ideal. But the short moulded barrels are ridged to secure the cap and the moulding digs after a while, which drives me nuts. What's wrong with a smooth shaft, people? The rolling tip also encourages poor penmanship so after half a page I end up writing like a doctor. I use the black one when I need to make notes or doodle during phone calls, the red to correct a typescript and the green to run big diagonal slashes across the page when I'm juggling the black, red ink and pencilled notes.