Bedside reading

Pattern recognition

Writers may not be more self-aware than anyone else but they keep better records. A body of work is the snail's trail of sensibility. But artists are as limited in their capacity for change as anyone else: no matter what they observe they will continue to make the same mistakes. This is one reason why writers tend towards melancholy: they have the data but can do nothing with it.

All by way of saying I've been reading the pulps again and trying not to drive a mental red-pen through words and sections. I finally -- finally -- made it through Dragon Tattoo. I love the images from the book and the film and I'm looking forward to Fincher remake and yes, it's sold a billion copies but boy does it creak. Pointless to rail against it, not least of all because the author is dead, but stroke of luck that the killer mastermind forgot to shut the door... The oversight would not embarrass Henning Mankell, who writes very well about Wallander drinking coffee and eating a sandwich; fairly well about the everyday nature of police investigations and terribly about crimes themselves. But Raymond Chandler's Playback is one of my favourite crime novels and that made no sense at all, so I have to give Mankell a pass... Now I'm back to Richard Price and Lush Life. Clockers was an OCD Adam 12. Maybe Lush Life will be the same. But I'm into it because of its dialogue and detailing.

In between I've been re-watching The Killing. The series has such a great setup that it can only be let down by the resolution. Not unlike the unravelling of a cheery Danish sweater... And dipping back into Twin Peaks, Hitchcock... And Californication. Nothing will be as good as Hank's first season so that's the one I return to. Again. The same decisions, the same mistakes over and over, the accrual of which becomes the author's style.

I took a wrong turn on the astral plane

People are raving about the posthumous Amy Winehouse album but I find it difficult to listen to, and not just because she isn't here any more. The production is too up front for her intimate, sharply sensitive vocalisations. Even if the young singer's performances were physically frail – and lord knows they probably were – it's wrong for the band and producers to take center stage, let alone put a beat box there. Winehouse is played over on 'Girl from Ipanema' and trapped by a snare drum on 'A Song For You.' It's as if everyone's pushing past her for the last piece of the limelight. Bad production, bad karma. Above: Amy in her happier unhappy days. (Update: And here, accompanied in Ireland. Recommended.)

In 2006 Bookslut – my favourite slut – interviewed Lawrence Block about his Hit Man series. The first book in the series is a crime novel I really admire.

Let's start with the new book, Hit Parade. What's next for John Keller?

Morrow will publish Hit Parade on July 4. Like Hit Man and Hit List, the book's an episodic novel, and I don't know to what extent it differs from the earlier books. It seems to me we get a little more background information about Keller, and that he's going through changes and emotional stresses. But he's still Keller.

Does Keller's distant nature lend itself to the episodic format you've employed in the Hitman trilogy?

It seems to. Most of the episodes seem to work as short stories. Playboy will be publishing one sometime this spring.

Does Keller have a conscience?

It seems to me he has both roots and a conscience. They're just a little different from most people, and he's learned to cope with them differently.

Peter Straub said that Keller reminded him of you more than your other characters. Is it hard to keep yourself out of your books?

No, what's hard is keeping myself out of jail.

Full interview is here.

The 47th pancake

Mr. Stratford discusses Distance Looks Our Way. When I worked at the Auckland [City] Art Gallery people always seemed to be referencing it. That, the "cinema of unease" and the Edmonds Cookbook.

You know that feeling when you sit up suddenly and a pull a muscle? I think I just did that to my brain. It's been a long week / month / year.

Meanwhile...

20th Century Fox may have leaked a photo of the space jockey. Mr. Trent Reznor and Mr. Atticus Ross have released a free sampler from the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack. (If you buy the whole three and a half CDs' worth you get their Karen O cover of 'Immigrant Song' free. Full of win!) This is Purity Ring and this is The Brighter Future. And tonight, Matthew, Sienna Miller will be Tippi Hedren. The press announcement is not wrong to describe Hedren as Hitchcock's obsession but he had more than one.

Hearing things

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

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

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

More Lies!

A new German edition of my first novel Lügenspiele (Pack of Lies) is coming out next year. Mana-Verlag will publish the new edition in time for the Frankfurt 2012 book fair, at which New Zealand will be the guest of honour, and hopefully in time for some other literary festivals.

The cover of Lügenspiele may change, not least of all because the novel will be available as an ebook: on black and white screen, the red of the first edition (shown above) would read as black. Or maybe that would work... Either way, I look forward to the German translation becoming available on digital: it's important to keep pace with technology.

Pointe blank

This is my favourite picture in the RCA's Degas and the Ballet exhibition. At 400 x 890mm 'Before the Ballet' (c.1890) is nearly anamorphic in proportion and the field of the empty floor falls away to a void. The real painting is blurry save for the feet of the dancers in the right foreground – the composition presses into the first girl's raised instep. The second dancer's exposed spine as she bends forward is reminiscent of Degas' many bathers, which Francis Bacon admired. You can see Bacon in the way in which the expanses and verticals of Degas' compositions are tensioned by the twisted human figures, and RB Kitaj in the renderings from photographic sources like a dry-brushed identikit.

Gustav Klimt would paint his figures nude and then proceed to cover them with clothes and patterning. Degas renders the dancers' upper bodies and the legs as solid forms but leaves the space between waist to knee as an impressionistic scribble. As sculptural plans his sketches for 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen' are just plain odd: he plans the bronze in two halves and covers up the join with a real lace tutu. Beneath the fabric, the figure's right leg swells to join her stomach like a Henry Moore. The maquettes of nude adult dancers, modelled in wax as studio models and cast in bronze only after the painter's death, are fully detailed.

Many of the later, larger works that have been scaled up from photographs lose their dynamism but the hatchings and striations of his pastel drawings compensate for the magnification. 'Danseuses en bleu' still rocks. But nothing has quite the uncanny silence of 'Before the Ballet' or 'The Rehearsal.' Degas' paintings are sold as pretty, but like his 'Beach Scene' (1868) they are darker than that.

At their best the wide-framed little paintings are surreal arrangements of dead-eyed figures that play off each other but never interact. These rehearsals are have an ashen, spooky quality, from the staring dance masters to the unnatural poses of the girls. The longer you look at them, the more you realise something odd is going on.

November 2011

'Negativity is the enemy to creativity. So if you want more ideas flowing, happiness in the doing, happiness in the doing, happiness in the doing. I love, capital L-O-V-E, building a thing that ultimately has to feel correct before it's finished, and that feeling correct is like a drug. It's like a thing that kicks you and makes you feel so good, You almost pass out. You fall off your feet.'

– David Lynch, to Melena Ryzik of the New York Times

Discreet Machinery: Syd Mead (1987)

Five years after Blade Runner came out in theaters, Syd Mead visited New Zealand to lecture at an Auckland technical institute and I swung an interview, i.e. asked a friend of a friend whose father worked at the polytech if I could talk to Syd and Syd said, sure. The self-described 'visual futurist' turned up dressed like a TV detective in a suit and tie and a crumpled raincoat and indulged my very young person's questions; it was only as the conversation progressed that I realised Philip K Dick's fiction was a much larger part of my life than it was of his. Cult movies really were cult movies, then. I had an ex-rental VHS copy of the first cut of Blade Runner and I don't like to think of how many times I watched it.

Mead's lecture consisted of 35mm film slides of his paintings and drawings on twin Kodak Carousel projectors which he operated manually during his narration. The interview was recorded earlier in the day on a Phillips cassette deck and transcribed on a Sharp QL300 electric typewriter. This version of the story was published in the Melbourne-based magazine Tension, issue #12, December 1987. This week Terence Hogan scanned the pages and emailed them to me as PDFs which I converted to text using a free online OCR service and uploaded to Blogger. Give me a hard copy, right there.

*

The future was once a bright and happy place. Built on the social aspirations of the fifties and sixties and fuelled by seventies technology, Tomorrow was a time when two-car families became two-rocket families and holidaying couples went for picnics on Venus. Designers, writers and illustrators assured us that society would ease into the new frontier without so much as blinking.

A designer named Syd Mead, then working as a 'visual futurist' for US Steel and Ford Motors was – and still is – one of the great optimists. His paintings and drawings depict utopian futures filled with sleek transporters and vast buildings. Cities are slotted into mile-wide space-bound cylinders or, as in one future-projection of San Francisco, constructed as a single piece of "discreet machinery" to complement the size of the surrounding landscape as well as its ecology.

Last year a Tokyo company commissioned Mead to imagine a sport of Tomorrow. He suggested "120-foot high robot racing greyhounds." Another painting shows going to work: a giant Lazy Susan slides down one side of a skyscraper, collects the tenants in their cars and serves them coffee before sling-shooting them to work. And if personal transport becomes impractical in a crowded city, he still envisages the social need for a ceremonial form of transport for, say, a night at the opera. Patrons arrive in gold, wheelless tear-drops that hover inches above the ground and flood with light when opened. It's the designer's version of the American dream a thousand years on: Royal carriages for the Everyman.

"Science fiction," Mead smiles, "concerns itself with the technology of the future, and that's a kind of magic. Isaac Asimov has said that magic is just something beyond immediate belief – it's always been one of society's favourite things to indulge in.

"I call science fiction 'reality ahead of schedule' sometimes. You can perceive a trend and other professional futurists, maybe economists, spot trends Looking into the future and creating these scenarios is exciting because you can try and imagine what would happen if you rearranged the flavours in the cake-mix. This is called modelling. Now with our elaborate computers available, this modelling-prediction technique is being used extensively in all industries. Science fiction's been doing that for decades."

Syd Mead has published two collections of his Future: Sentinel 1 and 2. Chromed and rosy-hued, they catalogue every aspect of a day in the life of Tomorrow. They owe as much to the American tradition of landscape painting as they do to the people-using-a-product renditions of advertising; it's their content that's ahead of schedule, not their attitude. This is Mead's catchphrase idea: a future that's as old as it is new. His Future reflects the present with an almost paternal reassurance. There will be fast cars in 3000 AD, but no war.

It took British director Ridley Scott to darken the vision and bring Mead's ideas to a wider public. Scott was filming Philip K Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, cutting its six-word title down to only two - Blade Runner. The plot of the novel had been likewise reduced (with Dick's full approval) to a tight, simple future-cop tale, Chandler with rocket-fins, and this had placed a special premium on the look of the film. Mead was commissioned to design a flying car and ended up shaping the look of everything else.

Blade Runner is now regarded as a watershed in science fiction and much of that credit goes to Syd Mead's visual influence. It's a wry, mature fantasy of high-tech and low-life backwashed with smoke, rain and neon. The future has never been the same since. But Mead shrugs off the movie's influence, almost bored.

"Maybe I did the lob too well on that one," he suggests. "The reason I got involved is that the first book I had published had just come out then. Ridley Scott had my book and Chris Foss's book and Roger Dean's but he picked my approach really just because of my industrial design background. The machines had little screw-holes and the metal looked like it was split in the right place for doors to open and things like that.

"The original story for the film was Philip K, Dick's and Dick's stories were very dreary anyway. I don't agree with that vision particularly, but I was hired to help Ridley make this as interestingly a dreary picture as possible, which we proceeded to do. We invented a socio-economic theory which would fit the story and then I invented the look of things to go along with that. It was a very classical industrial design approach to movie design, which isn't done that much. I like to design for film on a very logical basis and then mix it up or change the format to fit the dramatic necessities. Starting with a genuine design programme first hopefully gives the end result a more believable look."

Mead and Scott took their task seriously. Although Mead dryly reflects on the film's flying-cars ("It would be a nightmare. allowing the average person access to a three-dimensional traffic matrix") the city depicted in Blade Runner points at what is happening in cities now.

"For Blade Runner we just took all the trends in progress today: in Chicago, New York, areas outside of Paris, all the sections that are going high-rise because of land-use – and accelerated the trends already in place to come up with a sort of peculiar vertical society. We found that you need a second layer of streets for access to and from big buildings, about sixty feet above the real street. And this would produce a basement effect on the real street which would become filled with cabling and so forth.

"It all has to do with land use. If everyone wants to be in one space you have to build the buildings taller both to create more floor space within the same acreage and to handle the loan on the cost of construction. It's all a paper accounting game. One mile away there might be nice flat land and lots of room but nobody wants to build there because it isn't fashionable.

"In LA this is now happening in Westwood which is extremely dense. Visiting there is literally not worth the trouble, unless you drop in by helicopter.

"The grid plans of our cities, in general, are not much use for anything other than keeping track of who owns what property. In Europe, the old Medieval cities began at natural pathways and landmarks. As they grew and grew and try to accommodate street traffic it becomes an absolute nightmare. You try and arrange a traffic-light system there and it's almost impossible. Tokyo's like that – an absolute nightmare. It's high-energy! I love to go there. As long as someone else drives. I was asked repeatedly if I'd copied the high-rise look of the Shinjuku area for Blade Runner but I said no, I hadn't been there since before all the high-rises were built."

*

The Japanese zeal for scientific process appeals to Mead, who regards the Sixties hippies as the last flicker of techno-paranoia.

"The whole techno-chic appreciation of machine intricacy is certainly Japanese — they just love that approach. Their mind–set is different, culturally. They can literally pretend not to be next to someone on a crowded subway. Europeans and Americans and people with that same cultural base don't like that degree of proximity – your 'bubble' is that much larger. It's to their benefit that the Japanese allow that because there is this intense pressure in their lives to tolerate things in their work and living conditions which we wouldn't put up with. It's to their benefit right now economically but it's changing — the world is beginning to flatten out in terms of cultural exchange."

It was cultural exchange that first bought Mead to Tokyo. His work in other films (Aliens, Tron, 2010) had caught the eye of Japanese entrepreneurs who commissioned him to design the other-worldly interior of the Alpha-Turia nightclub. Club patrons can phone home from a moon-module phone box and dance below a shuttle-cockpit DJ booth.

"The idea was to create a science-fiction set where the cast changed every night. It had to have cost millions and millions of dollars to build |n Tokyo, with their land prices. So this disco is a space liner, the front end of a luxury intergalactic space-liner. We have the observation lounge where you can see duplicates of all the instrumentation – an intense, information-exchange lobby, if you will. And we have the disco floor which is to the delight of all the passengers; the place where they can look out the front of the spaceship. The owners took bits and pieces of what I had shown them in sketches and then had a production company translate these vocabularies of ideas into finished wall surfaces and fixtures."

Mead says he had a great time designing the club and dancing in it afterwards; like most of his work it was a combination of dreams and day-to-day employment. More practical patrons have made an effort to keep their commissions on par with Mead's imagination but their requests, in general, are odd.

The US Air Force, commissioned him to paint a recruiting poster depicting the Stealth bomber — a project so secret that it may or may not exist. As a result, Mead was supplied with no models or plans from which to work. He would make some drawings and show them to the Air Force officials and they would say – well, they couldn't say if it resembled the bomber which may or may not exist but could he make the fins a little bigger and move the cockpit forward a little? And he would ask, 'Is that what it looks like?' And they'd say, We can't tell you. The final, full-colour poster was printed in a special edition to meet public demand.

Mead's commissioned work includes designs for customised private airplane interiors. Clients such as King Hussein and King Fahud of Oman enjoy travelling in style and the designer panders unashamedly to their aesthetic lunacies. The interior of one 747 was modelled to resemble an l8th century English manor, complete with marble floors and oak doors. Another 747 sports its own jacuzzi with jewelled star-charts on the ceiling. "It's the upper end of the market," Mead says.

*

The things that will really matter Tomorrow, he insists, are the things about which we're becoming the most blasé: electronics, computers and information.

"The manipulation of information – we haven't been able to do this before on this massive a scale. You can take a computer and produce theoretical designs for industry and then do part-trial breakdown runs, all in theory. You can design a part, run it through its tests in, say, an operating engine and have a very real feeling for how it is going to operate without actually making anything at all. Thirty years ago that would have been magic.

"We tend to live, unfortunately, with all the results of the mistakes of the past to date. You can't get rid of everything at once, short of a natural disaster, so you have to adapt. So you can think up a whole new concept and apply it or you can do a clever lob of retro fitting.

"For instance, maybe people can go to work not by cars but by electronics. Which isn't a new idea but it's becoming more possible because of the way we're organising work. Other than manipulative labour, work is tending to be the processing of information that's available from within a closed network, which is what a corporate system is. You can work from anywhere that you happen to be as long as you have access to that network. So if you have middle-management people working in judgemental positions, they really don't have to go to work. All they have to do is tap into the network and they can do their lot. That, for instance, might also be a way of getting rid of so much traffic."

The thought of a 21st century society still plagued with traffic jams: it's that same blend of past and future again. Syd Mead, 54, leans back in his chair and contemplates the futureworld nine-to-five with relish.

"People have been the same for thousands and thousands of years," he concludes. "They just use different tools. The nice use of technology would be to keep the human side of things a little bit nutty, a little bit random and let machines take care of the drudgery – that would be the most ideal, optimistic track. A writer like Philip K Dick predicts things going wrong, but you really do have to take that chance."

-- December 1987

The egg hatched... and a hundred baby spiders came out

Ridley Scott will direct a Blade Runner sequel. For me this is like hearing Stanley Kubrick has only been playing dead. Intrigued as I am by the Prometheus / Alien rerun, Blade Runner is the world I'd really like him to take a second run at: the one I want to see again.

Before he died in 1982 Philip K. Dick saw the movie that would bring his writing to the mainstream:

"All I can say is that the world in BLADE RUNNER is where I really live. That is where I think I am anyway. This world will now be a world that every member of the audience will inhabit... Once the film begins, you are taken from this world into that world and you really are in that world. And I think the most exciting thing is that it is a lived-in world. A world where people actually live. It is not a hygienically pristine space colony which looks like a model seen at the Smithsonian Institute. No, this is a world where people live. And the cars use gas and are dirty and there is kind of a gritty rain falling and its smoggy. It's just terribly convincing when you see it.

"Seeing Rutger Hauer as Batty just scared me to death, because it was exactly as I had pictured Batty, but more so. I could have picked Sean Young out of a hundred different women as Rachael. She has that look.

"Of course Harrison Ford is more like Rick Deckard than I could have even imagined. I mean it is just incredible. It was simply eerie when I first saw the stills of Harrison Ford. I was looking at some stills from the movie and I thought, this character, Deckard, really exists. There was a time that he did not exist, now he actually exists. But he is not the result of any one individual's conception or effort. He is to a very large extent, Harrison Ford's efforts. And there is actually, in some eerie way, a genuine, real, authentic Deckard now."

When the third version of the film was released in 2007 Ridley Scott talked to Wired about creating the future:

The future that I had seen portrayed to that particular point — without being specific or mentioning names, because that means I'm getting really critical — all of the urban films until that moment had been pretty ordinary to not very good. So, it was a challenge to say — it's the same as trying to do a monster movie it's, like, Aliens is a monster movie. Alien is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by it being well done and a great monster. If it hadn't had that great monster, even with a wonderful cast, it wouldn't have been as good, I don't think. So, in this instance, my special effect, behind it all, would be the world. That's why I put together [industrial designer] Syd Mead and people like that who were actually serious futurists, great speculators, great imagination, looking to the future, where the big test is saying, draw me a car in 30 years' time without it looking like bad science fiction. Or draw me an electric iron that will still be pressing shirts in 20 years' time without it looking silly. That's the stretch, that was the target: that I wanted the world to be futuristic and yet felt — not familiar, because it won't be — but feel authentic. I could buy it. One of the hardest sets to design was his kitchen. It's not Tyrell's room, which is easy because we fantasize about a giant super-Egyptianesque, neo-Egyptianesque boardroom. But the idea of saying, what is his bathroom and kitchen like in those particular times — that's tricky.

I interviewed Syd Mead when he came to New Zealand, I think late '80s. Of course I don't have a copy of it now: it's on paper in a stack of publications somewhere.*

The script for Blade Runner was written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Fancher started it:

I guess I was approaching it on my own obscure level, thinking that I was making something commercial. 'This is science fiction--people will flock to see this.' Of course, I had themes I was working with that I loved and I was intrigued with. But still I thought of it as a commercial venture... They hustled my script, my fifth or sixth draft, out to all the studios in Hollywood. And so everybody read it. I mean, important people read it, in terms of studio honchos... I was flavor of the month for about two years.

David Peoples (who also wrote Unforgiven) was bought in without Fancher's consent:

I didn't know about it. That was a secret, because I wasn't cooperating with Ridley... I came back at the end, because they called me. They needed something for the rooftop scene. They just had a couple days to shoot and they wanted me to look at rushes. I came back and I wrote some stuff for them. I hated the dailies. They sold this film down the tubes. It's not gonna work. It's not anything like I wanted.

In 1992 Peoples told the LA Times:

Hampton Fancher was the key writer. He optioned the book and made it happen. Though I like the current director's cut a lot better than the original, I have no proprietary sense about the movie. In fact, I get lost trying to figure out where I am in it.

*UPDATE: Found it! The December 1987 version of my interview with Syd Mead is here.

It took me years to write, will you take a look?

Darragh McManus dusted off his old copy of Shirker for the Guardian's 2011 Halloween Reading List:

Set in New Zealand, this tale of one man cheating death is one of the best crime novels I've ever read. Beautiful artful prose, a great, twisting noir story, and a seriously spooky, sexy atmosphere. You'll feel all sorts of chills running along your spine.

Respect. The news went out on Quote Unquote, Crime Watch and Beattie's Book Blog – hat-tip to Stephen, Craig & Graham and big ups to Darragh. My thanks.

(I remember when I was small listening to the Beatles' 'Paperback Writer' and thinking, what other sort is there?)

Bad writing

Friends from both sides of the Atlantic had been on to me about Breaking Bad. I resisted because I was already following Ronald D Moore's BSG remake, Mad Men and the first three seasons of Burn Notice, which could have been and still might be the new Rockford Files, and three TV series in your life is already too many.

Breaking Bad came out around the same time as another what-would-you-do series, Hung which tailed off (sic) in the first season and I imagined Bad would go the same way. The premise seemed obvious, and cancer storylines are depressing. (1970s TV characters were usually felled by a heart attack which finished things quickly.)

When I finally caved I discovered what I liked most about Breaking Bad was that the premise was obvious. The second thing I loved was the scripts. Series creator Vince Gilligan discussed the writers' approach to the show to Robin Kelly:

"I look for good visual storytelling. We take pride in our dialogue, but TV and movies, this is visual storytelling. It's the difference between a play and a screenplay. A stage play is all about the dialogue, and I've seen and read some wonderful ones, but that's not what we're doing here. We're telling a story through the images. I specifically look for visual writing, which is to say not the dialogue on the page, but the action lines, the scene description. How much is the writer getting across through a look, through a bit of body language, the omission of an action or the action itself? Versus a writer who gets everything across verbally. Because in real life, very often we don't say what we mean; very often we say the opposite, or we don't say anything at all."

Series DOP Michael Slovis talks about the arc to the LA Times' Josh Gajewski:

"The other thing that 'Breaking Bad' has in its favor, which is very interesting to me, is time... There is no need to rush anything in 'Breaking Bad' because it's an ongoing story, so you don't really have to re-explain things visually or storytelling wise, so we have time to actually let people move through spaces, down halls, into homes, in a very sort of European storytelling way."

In an interview with J.C. Freñán for Slant Gilligan talked about the difference between writing for movies and TV:

Slant: You've worked in both television and feature films. Do you have a preference for either one?

Vince Gilligan: I would have to say television, because once you are on a writing staff, or once you create a television show, for as long as that show exists you know that you're writing, you know that your work will get produced. The same can't be said for writing for features, unfortunately. Write a movie script, you can put your heart and soul into it for months, for years, and peddle it around Hollywood and ultimately it may well go nowhere. I've experienced more heartbreak in the movie business than in the TV business.

Slant: Is there anything about the format of serial television itself that influences the way you write, that you have a preference for? Is it easier to write a one-off film than it is to sustain a season at a time?

VG: They're both hard, but I suppose that the saving grace about writing a television show is that you don't have to wrap up everything plot-wise at the end of every episode, and you can leave certain questions unanswered. You can leave certain emotional issues not quite completely tied up. In a movie, on the other hand, you have to tie up every loose end that you have set for yourself, and you have to wrap things up emotionally in a very satisfactory manner, and you have to complete the plot in that two-hour segment of time that you're allotted. Endings are just very tough for a writer, at least speaking personally.

In 2010 Gilligan talked to Slate's Noel Murray about ending season three:

My writers and I sit around and dream this stuff up and then we see it executed a week or even days later, and it's a wonderful feeling and it's magical. Especially in moments like that one, which was a great example, because I had high hopes for that scene and then seeing what Adam Bernstein the director did with ['Half Measures']... He exceeded my expectations. That moment was thrilling to watch in the editing room for me. I've never had children but it must be akin to the pride you feel watching your children grow or be born or something. I don't know. I don't have that background in my real life. But it's an intense pride. And it's not a pride of "I did this," it's a pride of "we did this," because it really is a group effort. There's no one person doing it all in television or in the movies. It's always a collaborative effort and anyone who tells you otherwise is awfully pumped about their own contributions to the endeavor. But it's a great feeling, a great collaborative feeling, and it's wonderful.

Lock the parents out, cut a rug, twist and shout

Whenever I hear the song 'Santa Baby' I always think 'spider baby,' like that head in John Carpenter's The Thing, i.e.

Spider Baby, slip a sable under the tree for me
Been an awful good girl, Spider Baby
So hurry down the chimney tonight...

And so on, until the authorities are called in with their flame-throwers.

There was a trailer for the Thing remake in the movie theater last night: the kids in the audience kept talking over it and didn't notice. But when Paranormal Activity 3 started they went quiet – no texting – and then they all screamed, a lot. The movie includes one gag specifically from Halloween and some tricks Carpenter employed very effectively in Prince of Darkness (still one of his scariest). The pan-and-scan sequences put me in mind of the long, unblinking cabin shots in Friday the 13th, and there is a nice pay off that improves on The Blair Witch Project, a movie which is now so old that many in the audience would have only seen it on the small screen. It made no difference: the kids were shitting themselves. Paranormal Activity 3 is scary but above all harrowing. Despite the faux-casualness – handheld is the new sprezzatura – it makes you sit and watch. Loved it.

Amy Winehouse died from drinking too much. This is old news but still depressing. Some editorials are trying to paint her music as part of her suffering but it wasn't, which only makes it the more tragic. She didn't suicide: she just didn't cope. Being so physically small can't have helped.

I'm forcing my way through Stieg – a better translation this time, but his obsession with detail undermines his own plot. In contrast to the oddly entertaining details about sponge cakes, sandwiches and coffee – Blomkvist is a man who always knows where the next snack is coming from – it drives me crazy that in twenty years, nobody thought of trying a Bible code. A row of numbers, anywhere, anytime, that's the first thing anyone reaches for either in the real world or fiction. On the other hand the Hedestad sequence with the photos is great – Antonioni's Blow Up via De Palma's rock-and-roll editing suite sequence in Blow Out. Salander is not Pippi, she's Hannibal: the NeXT Lecter. Anyway, I'm making myself finish it this time so I can be up with what the young people are skimming.

Just one last thing

Television, I dare you.

Auckland on air

This Sunday France Culture will broadcast a documentary about Auckland featuring in situ readings from my novels Departure Lounge, Shirker, Electric and The Church of John Coltrane along with interviews with Auckland artists, musicians and general creative types. You can read about the broadcast and the podcast at the France Culture site.

Bedside reading

Woody Harrelson at the BFI

Before Woody Harrelson came on stage for his live interview at the BFI London Film Festival an official reminded the audience not to take their own photos. I respectfully complied while everyone around me snapped pictures on their smartphones and cameras for the next 90 minutes. Some of them even used flash.

It's always interesting to see movie and TV actors in the flesh. Harrelson looks and sounds exactly has he does on screen: crooked smile, Texas drawl (he was raised in Texas and Ohio). It's interesting that such a distinctive actor has had such a varied filmography. He called his career sketchy but it could be compared to Michael Caine's: the same presence tuned to different intensities.

The interview presentation leaned to the political. Harrelson was queried about his roles in The People vs Larry Flynt and Natural Born Killers in terms of their political and social "impact" and the actor responded in kind, saying he had "learned things" from every role and that "we don't have free speech in my country." But the tilt of the questions implied a right and a wrong answer, resulting in some awkward silences. It's only acting, after all, and off someone else's script.

Harrelson majored in theater arts and English at college before moving to New York and landing no parts for two years. His breakthrough role in Cheers came a few months after he landed an agent whom he credited more than once for his success.

He talked about Oliver Stone's "gentle quality" and mimicked Milos Forman's fatalistic gruffness. He cited Marlon Brando's quote that acting is not an art and said now that his kids are at school, "school always wins out" against career decisions. He dropped a good-natured hint (not picked up) about drinking with Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock and is still friends with Larry Flynt. When Harrelson and his wife "were having some trouble" in the past Flynt "helped out" by appealing the actor's wife on his behalf. We don't know what the trouble was or what the publisher of Hustler said to her that helped. Cue another awkward silence.

The best question of the night came from the floor, about working on The Thin Red Line. Harrelson said Terence Malick was an interesting man and "kind of a savant" before raising his voice to a childlike whine and imitating the director standing with his head tilted, pointing at a field of grass saying, I kinda like the way the light falls; let's film that.

Harrelson was at the London Film Festival to promote his new film Rampart, which is based on a James Ellroy story. The clip looked good. Harrelson said the dramatisation differs from the source not least of all because director Oren Moverman has been "making a lot of changes in post," his emphasis implying changes beyond traditional editing. In the clip that was shown Harrelson's crooked smile appeared to tilt the other way and I wondered if the footage had been flipped: the opposite of the man we saw on stage.

Hey Jupiter

The Moon and Jupiter, 2150hrs.

"I spent most of my life trying to humour people"

Hunter S. Thompson talks about The Rum Diaries.

Departure Lounge on air

Someone's just told me that National Radio are re-broadcasting their dramatised reading of Departure Lounge all this week, afternoons at 2:30pm. Not sure if it's available as a podcast. Happy if it was. The radio version is abridged, read by Jed Brophy and features a Fripp & Eno track.

As a child I was introduced to many stories via the radio version. I particularly remember a dramatisation of The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle: it was scary and atmospheric.

Anyway, Departure Lounge is on, or was by the time you've read this. If you're quick you can still catch the ending.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

I reviewed Midnight in Paris in 1985 when it came out as The Purple Rose of Cairo; before that it was, broadly, Play It Again Sam. Paris is Woody in his magical mode, better than its predecessors but not as flip as, say, Scoop, or as sexy as Match Point, and it's not the fizzy slam-dunk of Vicky Cristina Barcelona... but it's still a delight, and a relief. I wish more movies were made this way. The camera is about the lens and the takes are long because he worked out that that way, he can spend less time in the editing suite. The script flows in his own voice; when "Hemingway" talks it jars but when Brody comes on as Dali things lift off.

By setting his late-period movies in Europe Allen has become the great chronicler of the Comfortable American – a five-star Continent of hotels, shopping, tourist strolls – without being seduced by it. Gil (Owen Wilson) is likewise bored. Spirited back to the 1920s, the American writer tells Bunuel about a great idea for a movie about a dinner party. Bunuel doesn't get it ('Why don't they just leave?'); Gil can't stop to explain. Midnight in Paris is an old man's movie: short on time, not fussing over the details.

He churns them out. That's what I like most about Woody Allen. He just goes out and does it, making two a year sometimes, and lets them stand or fall. He's sentimental but doesn't look back; sour but not bitter; captivated by youth, but casts them in great parts. It's a story of magic: it's just another piece of work.

Find Your Ancestors: The Avengers girl

The Cathy Gale role was originally written for a male. When the makers decided to recast the role for a female the studio was too cheap to commission rewrites so Honor Blackman was given the first eight scripts as they were written, dialogue and fight scenes included. Thus the "Avengers girl" was born.

BRIAN CLEMENS: I didn't do Diana a very good service. It made her an international star but I think I could have done more for her as far as the script was concerned. She was rather a stooge to Patrick Macnee's Steed.

JULIE NEWMAR: This is what I get from people when they talk to me about the original Catwoman and compare it to the latter ones. I think people prefer the more humorous one, the lighter one. People seem to complain that the recent ones are too dark in spirit. But that's what reflects what's going on... It was a heck of a lot more fun when Adam West and I did it.

BOB RINGWOOD: We had to justify the catsuit. Where did the Selina character get it? Black, shiny fetish clothing can very easily slip into the sleaze/porn world and this, after all, was a film for family viewing.

Q: How much information did you have on the Catwoman issues before drawing the covers?

ADAM HUGHES: Sometimes I'll get one of Will Pfeiffer's scripts, and sometimes I'll get a synopsis because Will is still writing the script. And then sometimes I'll say, "Can I draw Selina in a pool?" And they'll say, okay.

ALAN MARTIN: During the mid-eighties I was in a band with the then unknown Philip Bond. One of our favourite songs was a track we had written called 'Rocket Girl.' I was studying at Worthing at this time, which is where we met up with Jamie Hewlett. He and Philip hit it off straight away. I was a little put off by Jamie's habit of drawing huge penises on any paper that he came across.

Jamie had drawn a grotty looking girl brandishing an unfeasible firearm. One of our friends was working on a project to design a pair of headphones and was basing his design on the type used by World War II tank driver. His studio was littered with loads of photocopies of combat vehicles. I pinched one of the images and gave it to Jamie who then stuck it behind his grotty girl illustrations and then added a logo which read 'Tank Girl'.

DR: Where you surprised at how popular she became?

AM: It didn't really come as a shock to us.

STIEG LARSSON: I considered Pippi Longstocking. What would she be like today? What would she be like as an adult? What would you call a person like that, a sociopath? Hyperactive? Wrong. She simply sees society in a different light. I'll make her 25 years old and an outcast. She has no friends and is deficient in social skills. That was my original thought.

When we were very Jung

Drive feels like the movie I have been happily watching my whole life: Le Samourai by way of The Driver, Vanishing Point, Medium Cool, 8 Million Ways to Die, 52 Pick-Up, Thief, Heat. The references are indirect: Drive is in the spirit of those films, and the tone. There is not that much driving in it and the violence is overdone and it's a little under budget but these limitations feel right, too, if not appropriate to the genre. That's just Drive's thing: cars, LA and robberies cast in the blue key of existential. For all the darkness, it's a bright, upbeat tale of brooding.

Drive is presented as "A Nicolas Refn Film" but is based on a screenplay which is in turn based on a novel so the director is a realisateur rather than an auteur. The blissfully spare screenplay is by Hossein Amini, who also recently adapted Elmore Leonard's Killshot, and is based on the novel by James Sallis.

Sallis was born in Arkansas 1944 and has written 15 novels - seven in the Lew Griffin detective series. He has written SF and worked as an editor and essayist as well as a translator, translating works by Pablo Neruda, Mikhail Lermontov, Pasternak and Pushkin, among others. He's also a musician. Sallis published Drive in 2005, when he was 61.

In an interview with Paul Kane Sallis talked about his Lew Griffin character, and crime as a genre:

Kane: Do you see yourself as primarily a crime writer or simply a writer, period?

Sallis: A quick look at my list of publications should answer that: collections of poetry, books of musicology, a biography, translation, a lot of science fiction, wide literary-magazine publication, a large body of criticism. I'm a writer who writes, among much else, crime fiction.

Did you choose crime fiction or did it choose you?

I came to crime fiction rather late, actually – after many years of involvement with science fiction, then, when that market changed, with "literary" fiction. I was introduced to Chandler and Hammett by Mike Moorcock when I was in London editing New Worlds; this would have been 1968 or so. I read constantly in the field: Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Chester Himes, Ed McBain, Larry Block, Donald Westlake. I didn't turn to writing crime fiction for some years after. The Long-Legged Fly was the beginning.

What can you do in crime fiction that you can't do in a straight literary novel, or in say science-fiction? What possibilities does the genre offer you?

Crime fiction shares with arealist fiction (fantasy and science fiction) a built-in edginess: an alienation, an apartness. It gives access to a straightforward skeleton of plot that's able to hold as little or as much weight as you wish to pack on; and it's connected more directly to the archetypes within us, which can be a source of tremendous power. I should probably add here that one of my agendas as critic has been to tear down as many of these artificial distinctions as possible – crime novel, "literary" novel, commercial novel....

In 1997 Gerald Houghton interviewed Sallis about the Griffin novel Eye of the Cricket:

Q: In Cricket we are told that New Orleans is a city that 'could still be 1940.' The Griffin novels take place over many years and yet seem to exist within the same time - almost out of time. References to beepers and e-mail in the novel leap out.

Sallis: The modern touches are to some extent meant to be jarring. In Cricket for the first time Lew begins to feel that the world has passed him by, that he's on his way to becoming an anachronism. New Orleans, as Lew says again and again, is a kind of island, cut off from mainland American society, timeless in its own peculiar way, filled with people (as well as buildings and social structures) who are anachronisms. Remember, too, that in these novels Lew is looking back on his life, relating it; memory, as it always does, runs things together, blurs them (more poet than reporter). That's pretty much the reason for using the title for The Long-Legged Fly from Yeats. Lew, like the fly in the poem, is sitting up above the stream of time, watching it flow beneath him.

The full interview is here.

Preparedness

Cover art by Mr Ian Dalziel.

Hooked on a feeling

A friend (gracias) scored me a ticket to hear Guillermo Arriaga speak as part of the 2011 BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters' Lecture Series. The Mexican writer / director talked at length about following your heart and not a formula, ignoring the rules, not bothering with research, writing what you know, following a story without knowing how it will end and so on: music to the ears of the budding screenwriters in the audience.

Arriaga started out in partnership with a director, Alejandro González Inárritu, and compared their working relationship to that of the Coen Brothers. Since Babel the two have fallen out, acrimoniously. One got the impression that Arriaga's approach to screenwriting, with its interleaved storylines and non-sequential scenes, must have been an easier sell with a director attached. Still, a lot more fun than Robert McKee.

If I'm jaded about (hearing about) screenwriting it may be because the quality of writing for television is currently going through the roof. All I want to watch is Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Breaking Bad's creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan says he also writes without knowing where things are going, although he does admit to knowing how things will end, and surely that's a plan. Vince worked on a show called the X-Files, which was hot damn wonderful for about two-thirds of its run.

(Pic: Rolling Stone)

Some may sink but we will float

David Mamet on his (terrific) film Redbelt (2008):

Everybody's gotta take their pigs to market. You know? You can be the best chair-maker in the world, but you gotta sell the chairs. And all through history, even today, everyone's kvetching about the middleman; "That guy isn't doing anything, that guy doesn't do anything." Well, if that guy isn't doing anything, you could do it. You have a choice; you don't. Why? Because middlemen are necessary; commerce is necessary. It's not enough to just be great at your craft; one has to engage in commerce in the free market; and nobody likes the middle man because he doesn't partake of the purity of craft. But whether you're a fighter or a chair maker or an auto maker or a dry cleaner, you gotta get down to the market and get involved in commerce. And if you get involved in commerce, whether it's as a fighter or as a filmmaker, at some point you will be abused, disappointed, robbed, betrayed. Because there are such people in the world; that's just the way the world works.

Full interview here.

Honey, we ain't ever goin' home

My third novel Shirker (2000) has been pirated. I came across the torrent link when I was searching for information about one of the German editions (DTV). The novel is one of six German language titles organised alphabetically and compressed as a 53mb RAR file -- about the size of a compressed audio CD -- and so is likely to be one of many published books someone has made available on the internet for free.

Shirker was published internationally and in several non-English editions -- French, German, Italian -- but never as an ebook. The pirated version is a non-flowing-text PDF which would be a chore to convert into MOBI or EPUB format but not impossible. You could also print it out, although the cost of ink and paper would be comparable to the printed book and heavier to carry.

Like the weather, new technology rolls in whether it's welcome or not. A revised edition of my first novel Pack of Lies (1993) has just been published on Kindle (you can find it here); there are plans to put out ebook versions of Heaven and The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself as well. In the meantime someone has left a battered version of Shirker on the digital park bench: anyone can pick it up.

Is the internet killing rhetorical questions?

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

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

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

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

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

Re-make / Re-model: Pack of Lies (1993) now on Kindle

My first published novel Pack of Lies (1993) has been reissued on Kindle and is out now.

Perhaps appropriately, Pack of Lies has always been hard to find. The courier lost the printer's typescript, the edition appeared late and mainstream booksellers resisted the format. Unity Books stocked it and everyone else got theirs from the library. I often see copies of the first edition floating around on TradeMe for a few dollars; international readers can buy a secondhand copy on Amazon UK for £19.76 + £2.80 delivery, a price that would seem less outrageous if I was getting a cut.

So it's a rare bird, this 35,000 word tale told by the lying and unreliable teenage Catrina. My expectations for the new version are set low. As with the individual stories, the goal of this digitisation is about making the work available to readers, and having a bit of fun. I always thought when the technology came along it would be great to add a soundtrack or something; now digital's here, all I care about are the words. They work by themselves.

The Kindle edition of Pack of Lies has been revised, particularly in the opening chapters. I hadn't planned to touch it but as I was formatting the text some things just nagged. The revision process was instinctive. I was editing in plain text (for HTML) and found myself skimming the prose in the same way I'd read a site or text on my laptop screen. On digital a change is a keystroke away.

Writers write and read off their computers all the time so why then do so many of us cling to the idea of a paper book? Directors edit in a digital suite to create a projected film. Musicians press digital samples to vinyl. When David Hockney exhibited 'A Bigger Splash' he had gallery technicians aim a spotlight directly at the splash to supplement the painted effect. Artists play in the gaps between media.

As noted previously my work's not on Smashwords due to a shortage of time and patience. Like I said, Pack of Lies was always hard to find...

Do your thing

In a sure-to-be-discussed-everywhere article Kim Wright asks why so many literary writers are shifting to genre:

The good ship Literary Fiction has run aground and the survivors are frantically paddling toward the islands of genre. Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but there does seem to be a definite trend of literary/mainstream writers turning to romance, thrillers, fantasy, mystery, and YA.

The evidence may not be empirical but this does seem to be a trend. If it is I would answer the question by saying that literary authors were always writing in a genre in the first place. John Birmingham and I stumbled towards saying this at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2003:

"Big L" literature, as they describe it [says John Birmingham] no longer connects to the real world. It's left to "small L" literature writers, the journalists, crime writers and drug scribes, to get their fingers dirty and get the meaty stories out there." 

"I really love literature, you need it like you need vegetables," said Taylor. "But it's become this timid thing."

Strolling around a big bookstore (because I find less in them to stop and read, let alone buy) this timidity becomes apparent. From subject to tone to style to title and packaging, "literature" follows as many rules as "romance" or "historical."

David Mamet spotted the "trend" in 2000:

For the past 30 years the greatest novelists writing in English have been genre writers: John le Carré, George Higgins and Patrick O'Brian. 

Each year, of course, found the press discovering some writer whose style, provenance and choice of theme it found endearing. These usually trig, slim tomes shared a wistful and self-commendatory confusion at the multiplicity of life and stank of Art. But the genre writers wrote without sentimentality; their prose was concise and perceptive; in it the reader sees the life of which they wrote, rather than the writer's "technique."

O'Brian wrote the Master and Commander novels, of which Our Mr Reynolds was a great fan. He was always pressing them on me. I didn't like them so much but we found common ground in Le Carré – the early ones, at least.

Maybe lit's still good. There's crap in the genre shelves as well. The Clean said it best: Great Sounds Great, Good Sounds Good, So-So Sounds So-So, Bad Sounds Bad, Rotten Sounds Rotten.

Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night

(Red laser, L'Avventura, Crash, Breaking Bad)

Many happy returns

I write longhand and type it up on a computer. When I'm typing I'm really word-processing but I think of it as typing: I write in chunks which I then print out and revise and print out again. I work the same way I first worked on a typewriter. I like watching the pages build up in a stack and no matter how much technology advances there is no mechanism more useful than changing the order of the pieces of paper and flicking through them to see how the text reads. If something's no good I put a line through it; if the page is revised I score a diagonal from upper right to lower left corner; if my revisions become too dense I change ink colours, from black to red to green; if I run out of space I draw an arrow with "PTO" next to it and write on the back of the page in case, re-reading the page, my other self forgets to turn it over. (My revising self consistently underestimates my writing self.) I have doctor's handwriting: a draft ms can be tachiste.

I use a lot of notebooks and when the novel is finished go back through them, fillet any pages that might prove useful and throw the rest out. Raymond Chandler kept an exemplary notebook – there's at least one copy in stacks in the Auckland Library – as did Patricia Highsmith: her cahiers, she called them. I collect things on my laptop: text grabs, PDFs and images, so in terms of research my computer notebook is my real notebook.

But the finished novel is created on a computer so it matters to me how they work. New iterations of the Mac OS are doing away with the "Save" feature. Instead of entering a command to save a document, the system will back it up automatically. This is logical, Jim, because it's a computer but when I first heard about it I felt a twitch. Saving a document is the writer's late 20th / early 21st century equivalent of hitting a typewriter's carriage return: a self-confirmation that yes, you wanted to keep the words (data) you've just typed (entered). Says Michael Gartenburg at Computerworld:

I've long argued that we must get past the need to use a save command. This vestigial remnant of the early days of computing has caused more than one user to lose hours of work as penalty for not saving often enough. Next thing you know, the power fails or you inadvertently close an application thinking your work has been saved. Auto Save eliminates that problem, and it also helps make Versions a great new feature. With Versions, you can "go back in time" (à la Time Machine) to see older versions of any document.

Do writers want to go back in time? If I'm making a major revision to a digital manuscript I save a draft and go to work on the new one. The drafts are numbered in case I need to go back, but I never do. The early drafts are the same as my notebooks: I spot a few useful things here and there – a few pages' worth – and dump the rest. Not that one needs to dump digital drafts. A life's work will fit on a cell phone, with enough room spare for a movie.