Chad Taylor

The end of our elaborate plans, the end


Forbrydelsen (The Killing) III starts off as a mood piece with Sarah Lund too far in the background, crowded out by her male colleagues. Lund has become the formalist instead of the maverick, the passive spectator rather than the active investigator, the weakling. Once she was driven: now she's just upset. The red herrings and interruptions are dispensed professionally to the point of routine. (Does anyone in Lundland ever finish a phone call?) Creator Søren Sveistrup shares the scripting duties this time around, presumably for scheduling reasons. The series feels like he hammered out a synopsis and the other writers fluffed it up. But things get going in the last four episodes, when Forbrydelsen suddenly becomes very good again. Stick it out for Sofie Gråbøl's performance and a tidy wrap up. Spoiler alert: everyone's fucked. Not a happy ending, but a good one.

Sveistrup talked to Holy Moly about creating the series:
When we started there were a lot of episodic crime shows. You know, these 45-minute shows with a heroine who solved the case and caught the killer and started dating the forensic guy, wearing heels. And I thought ‘well we won’t do that and we’ll try to do it more like a novel.’ Television is a great window to the world but it’s often used to do nothing. So I thought if somebody offers me this window, at least I can do my best. I can try not to be a recipe, I can try not to imitate the Americans or the English and try to do something original. Try, try, try.
He wanted Lund to be the strong, silent type:
She doesn't really talk much. She has to have these characters around her to push her into saying anything. The partner role is very important as it generates some pressure on Lund and pushes her in other directions. If she was just alone she would be speechless. And it's to show her annoyance with other people. She is always annoyed when the phone rings and that's part of the game: to annoy Lund.
Sveistrup has compared Lund to Clint Eastwood's Harry Callaghan:
I've always been fond of Clint Eastwood. The parts he plays are so silent, sometimes a bit biblical. If you watch Dirty Harry he's not especially likeable and I like that paradox about a character.
Director Birger Larsen said he modelled Lund on Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name:
"I wanted her to be wearing a poncho like Clint Eastwood and I worked with that for many weeks. But Sofie said that she couldn't draw her gun. I said, 'if Clint Eastwood can do it, then you can do it as well'. But she said, 'no, it's not right'. And she looked so wonderful, so sexy, so good in the poncho. Exactly the Clint Eastwood one. She came along one day and said, 'I've got this sweater, perhaps we should use that'."
There are nods in the final episode to a certain Swedish trilogy. Sveistrup told Holy Moly that his influences also include the Mark Frost / David Lynch series Twin Peaks:
"The first episode of Twin Peaks begins with the discovery of the body of Laura Palmer and the first episode of The Killing ends with the discovery of the body of Nanna Birk Larsen. But I saw a lot of shows before we started writing and shooting. I was a big Twin Peaks fan when it was first shown and week after week I couldn't wait for the episodes, but then I guess I was a bit disappointed when the resolution happened. But today I can see that David Lynch was deconstructing the whole genre, and he was actually making a comedy. And in that sense it's perfect.

"I wanted to see if I could do it with no humour. And especially taking the parents into it, and their grief, I wanted to see if I could portray it in a more realistic way instead. So I think I owe a lot to Twin Peaks but it's an entirely different genre. We couldn't invent things like throwing a stone to decide where the investigation went – which must've been fun to come up with in the writing room – we couldn't do that. We had to stay loyal to the grief and the importance of the investigation."

Safe





Well, it finally comes out that the idea of Harry the Horse and Little Isadore and Spanish John is to get Big Butch to open the coal company's safe and take the pay-roll money out, and they are willing to give him fifty per cent of the money for his bother, taking fifty per cent for themselves for finding the plant, and paying all the overhead, such as the paymaster, out of their bit, which strikes me as a pretty fair sort of deal for Big Butch. But Butch only shakes his head.

'It is old-fashioned stuff,' Butch says. 'Nobody opens pete boxes for a living any more. They make the boxes too good, and they are all wired up with alarms and are a lot of trouble generally. I am in a legitimate business now and going along.'
-- 'Butch Minds the Baby' by Damon Runyon, Furthermore (1938)
Victorian crime literature, official and popular, often seems obsessed with keys, as if nothing else mattered. But in those days, as the master safe-cracker Neddy Sykes said in his trial in 1848, "The key is everything in the lay, the problem and the solution."

We forget how extraordinarily cluttered Victorian rooms were. Innumerable hiding places were provided by the prevailing decor of the period. Furthermore, the Victorians themselves adored secret compartments and concealed spaces; a mid-century writing desk was advertised as "containing 110 compartments, including many most artfully concealed from detection." Even the ornate hearths, found in every room of a house, offered dozens of places to hide an object as small as a key.

Thus, in the mid-Victorian period, information about the location of a key was almost as useful as an actual copy of the key itself.
-- Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery (1975)

Rififi (1954), Thief (1981), Die Hard (1988), The Score (2001)

There was something aboard





"On 16 July mate reported in the morning that one of the crew, Petrofsky, was missing. Could not account for it. Took larboard watch eight bells last night, was relieved by Amramoff, but did not go to bunk. Men more downcast than ever. All said they expected something of the kind, but would not say more than there was SOMETHING aboard."
-- Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)
Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897) The Demeter is the Russian ship that brings Dracula to England. During the voyage the vampire sustains himself on the crew, picking them off one by one until only the captain remains.

Star Trek, 'Where No Man Has Gone Before' (1969) Samuel A. Peeples, Gene Roddenberry. Two crew members become invested with terrifying mental powers. As their abilities grow they lose all human empathy and threaten the crew.

Alien (1979). Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett. An alien infects a crewmember, hatches on board the vessel and infests it, feeding off her crew.

Firefly, 'Our Mrs Reynolds' Joss Whedon: (2002) A stowaway con artist overcomes the captain and crew, betraying the vessel to her cohorts.

The Star Trek and Firefly episodes are two of the most satisfying of their respective series. In each, the antagonist's actions force the protagonists to reveal their character through action. By the end the audience requires no further introduction to the characters: the exposition is an integral part of the drama, and the story is complete.

I got into a self-destructive pattern





I rewrote the character for McQueen. All the sentences had to be short, a character of internal integrity who's not afraid of a fight. -- Alan Trustman
To Catch A Thief (1955), Mélodie en sous-sol (1963), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Ocean's Eleven (2001).

Bedside reading


The great Thomas McGuane. Talking to David Abrams:
I haven't looked at Ninety-Two in the Shade since I wrote it. You know, when I was done with Ninety-Two in the Shade, I felt very complete. I had worked on it so intensely, I could recite the book. I've had no particular inclination to look at it again, however.
Interviewed in The Paris Review:
McGUANE
...I had been successful in creating for myself a sheltered situation in which to function in this very narrow way I felt I wanted to function, which was to be a literary person who was not bothered very much by the outside world. My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely. My nickname during that period was "the White Knight," which suggests a certain level of overkill in my judgment of those around me.

INTERVIEWER
What sorts of things had led you to develop this white-knight image?

McGUANE
Fear of failure. I was afflicted with whatever it takes to get people fanatically devoted to what they're doing. I was a pain in the ass. But I desperately wanted to be a good writer. My friends seem to think that an hour and a half effort a day is all they need to bring to the altar to make things work for them. I couldn't do that. I thought that if you didn't work at least as hard as the guy who runs a gas station then you had no right to hope for achievement. You certainly had to work all day, everyday. I thought that was the deal. I still think that's the deal.
From the New Yorker:
Q: There's something almost cinematic about the way you capture most of a life in a series of very quick scenes from it. Were you thinking of movies when you wrote this?

A: I'm not a moviegoer. I grew up in a town without a cinema and never caught the habit, though I have worked in the movies. I stole this narrative strategy from Muhammad Ali: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." It works if you have to cover ground in limited space. One of the limitations of "dirty realism" is that you can't budge. If you're a genius like Raymond Carver or his precursor Harold Pinter such confinement is an advantage. But, for many of their successors, it's claustrophobic.
Mark Kamine discusses McGuane's work at Believer:
McGuane is one of the rare contemporary American writers whose characters always do things. They run businesses, put up fences, farm, ranch, guide, fish. They are not people on vacations or grants, they are not professors, critics, writers, or artists—or, when they are, they are artists becoming cattle ranchers, as in Keep the Change (1989). In this way issues of class and money arise naturally, between bosses and workers, and the sense of automatic and persistent injustice is apparent and recurrent. The disadvantaged are abundantly aware of this, even when they themselves are acting badly.
The Blue Hammer is one of the best books in the Lew Archer detective series by author Ross Macdonald AKA Kenneth Millar.

Poetics


David Mamet interviewed in 1997 by John Lahr for The Paris Review:
MAMET
Now, there's a certain amount of essential information, without which the play does not make sense...

INTERVIEWER
And how do you fit that information in?

MAMET
As obliquely as possible. You want to give the people information before they know it's been given to them.

INTERVIEWER
So to you a character is...

MAMET
It's action, as Aristotle said. That's all that it is – exactly what the person does. It's not what they "think," because we don't know what they think. It's not what they say. It's what they do, what they're physically trying to accomplish on the stage. Which is exactly the same way we understand a person's character in life – not by what they say, but by what they do.

INTERVIEWER
If you hadn't found the theater, what do you think you might have been?

MAMET
I think it's very likely I would have been a criminal. It seems to me to be another profession that subsumes outsiders, or perhaps more to the point, accepts people with a not very well-formed ego and rewards the ability to improvise.

Noirs that aren't #2: Maîtresse (1975)


I first saw Barbet Schroeder's Maîtresse (1975) in 1983, at the Auckland International Film Festival. This weekend I got to see the fully-restored version on the big screen at the BFI, digitally projected. (It strobed). The graphic sexual scenes may have been eclipsed by what's freely available on the internet but the movie still carries a jolt. Just as striking is the documentary-style treatment of its contemporary locations: Austerlitz Station at dawn; an authentically bohemian apartment in the Marais; quiet restaurants and cafés; country roads without traffic. There's a grisly moment in a city slaughterhouse but the direction is so composed that it's sad rather than shocking.

With the passage of time Maîtresse has revealed itself as what the director intended it to be: a story of amour fou. Olivier (a very young Gerard Depardieu) has already met Ariane (Bulle Ogier) at her front door before he breaks into the downstairs apartment where she keeps her professional dungeon: he ignores her real self to invade her alter-ego. Once she has conceded her secret, Ariane retreats in stages. The dominatrix who starts out riding her clients later struggles to pin them down. As her relationship develops she is reduced to panic, interrupting her sessions and scrambling back up the steps. When Olivier supplants her pimp, she rejects him totally. The dungeon is dismantled and the Maîtresse disappears: her alter-ego is dead.

Olivier rides into the countryside to find Airiane (Depardieu teetering on a scooter) and deliver one last message -- an envelope stuffed with money, marked "I Love You." He has become the anti-client: a man paying Ariane to play the role of who she really is. She temporarily abandons her "real" family to pursue him and they share control of the wheel -- again, something that one could do only in a sports car of the period. They lose control, in the manner of Godard's Weekend, but emerge from the wreckage bloodied but laughing.

So things end happily. Or do they? Ariane has surrendered her mystery and her independence to two men, and it's clear that she and Olivier won't be able to remain together. Her obsessiveness is as apparent as Dixon Steele's: she is In A Lonely Place. And Olivier's wilfulness has ruined everything: homeless and unloved, he is back to where he was at the beginning of the film. The screenplay's mis en scene presents the city as a symbol of the subconscious, money is the characters' only god and sex is an escape. The great theme of film noir is: you're fucked.

What I'm consuming

  • School of Seven Bells 'Secret Days' -- new single from the new EP Put Your Sad Down. They can be catchy to the point of twee but this one is just right: Suicide meets Trent Reznor.  In this 2012 interview Paul de Revere asked SVIIB's Alejandra Deheza about the band's emotional intensity:
    School of Seven Bells' music through your lyrics feels intensely spiritual, romantic, and devotional to me. Where do you pull that intensity from?

    I remember when I was first experimenting with writing, I would never notice that it was any more emotional than, say, something that I'd read or whatever. It wasn't until I would give people [my lyrics] to read, and they'd feel like they walked in on something and they'd be like, "Whoa. Girl, what are you going through?" I wouldn't even think twice about it. I never really noticed that it was more emotional than maybe usual.

    It's kind of hard to say where it comes from because it's just very natural to me. I feel like I've always been like that, for better or for worse. Writing lyrics and melodies is a really good way for me to keep balanced. I tend to feel things really intensely, and I feel like writing kind of evens it out.
  • Cat Power, '3,6,9' and 'Real Life' from the new album Sun. I find Chan Marshall talented but recessive: I never quite remember her until she comes on. I liked The Greatest, especially 'Lived in Bars.' From her 2006 Spin interview with Melissa Maerz:
    You've said you've been drinking since you were very young. What started it?

    People who drink habitually don't realize they're doing it, because it was part of their upbringing. Everybody from my immediate family to my grandparents to my great-grandparents -- there were always severe alcoholic and psychological problems. If your parents gave you fire to play with when you were two, you'd be standing in fire by the time you were an adult. [Before my most recent hospital stay] I was drinking from the time I woke up in the morning until the time I went to bed.

    You recently spent a week at the hospital. What made you decide to check yourself in?

    It wasn't for drinking -- this was for a reaction to drinking. This was the third time I've been in the hospital. I never really connected the dots. I never really thought, "When something bad happens, you go to the bar and turn off your emotions." I never realized that I'd gotten to the point of such depression. So that's why I can't drink anymore. I need to be able to face things.
  • Psychologist Judith Schlesinger has written a book that argues that the "tortured artist" is a myth:
    A persistent belief, fueled by media, is that creative people more often suffer bipolar disorder or other mental illness. In The Insanity Hoax: Exposing the Myth of the Mad Genius, Judith Schlesinger builds a strong argument that there is "no compelling proof that creative people have more psychological problems than members of any other vocation group."

    A musician herself, as well as a psychologist, Schlesinger clearly wants to defend her artistic compatriots from what she views as unfair attacks.

    From her data, "it's just as easy – and much better documented – to view the creative process as healthy and life affirming," and "only one characteristic of personality and orientation to life and work is... present in ALL creative people: motivation." In fact, creative people are ...actually complicated, not crazy; they are disciplined and committed, happy to take on hard projects and work hard at them; and they are intensely focused, with a 'rage to master' their chosen domain."
  • Writer's block, ironically, remains an excellent plot device. This week I saw the 'extended American' cut of The Shining. The differences between that version and the shorter cut are detailed but significant. The screening was a digital 4K print and it strobed. The opening titles rose up jerkily and during the maze scenes there were visible artefacts at the edges of the frame. Do we realise what we've gotten into with digital projection? It's shit.

Noirs that aren't #1: The Howling (1981)


Los Angeles news anchor Karen White (Dee Wallace) uses herself as bait to catch serial killer Eddie Quest (Robert Picardo), arranging to meet him in a downtown porno theater. When Eddie ambushes her the police fire on him but he escapes, leaving Karen traumatised and unable to recall what she has seen. Karen's therapist Dr Waggener (Patrick Macnee) recommends she submits to his treatment at a remote commune called "The Colony," but once Karen arrives, she begins to suspect that Waggener and his followers share a secret, and that Eddie is not far away.

Based on a 1977 novel by Gary Brandner, the shooting script was co-written by John Sayles and directed by Joe Dante. Like An American Werewolf in London, the film is knowing but The Howling has an unseemly, adult quality. It's realistic in the way you don't want a horror to be. The tone is unsettling and the characters are disconsolate. Even the daytime scenes are bleak. When Karen discovers a woods cabin surrounded by ferns she deduces that it once belonged to Eddie, and enters its maze-like corridors in the time-honoured fashion. This is an old trick. Halloween did it in the dark and Alien did it in space but Dante does it in sunlight, and it makes things worse. We don't want Karen to go in there, we know that she will, and we know that we would, too, because it's a sunny day.

Likewise we would trust Patrick Macnee, because he was Steed in The Avengers. We know the Colony, like any cult, is all smiles on the surface. It's a horror movie, right? These are but the tropes. But the laughs are uneasy and the sex is sleazy from both the audience's and the characters' point of view. Elisabeth Brooks as the femme fatale is hard and grubby. The practical special effects, which were at a technical peak in 1981, are explicit and disgusting. When Dante can't film the monsters straight he switches to Dutch angles and silhouettes. He's trying to be funny. It's not.

I respect The Howling because it makes me queasy. Every character is bad and doomed; the atmosphere is horrible, the set up is hokey but the story draws you in. James Ellroy said "the great theme of noir is, you're fucked." For me The Howling's psychological themes, self-destructive protagonist and industrial daylight make it less of a horror and much more of a noir.

Let's be careful out there


Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost has prevailed in a legal argument over film rights. In 2008 film producers MVP Productions negotiated to purchase the rights to Frost's book The Match. A year later, says the The Hollywood Reporter, attorneys representing both parties had made statements in the affirmative:
On April 30, 2009, William Jacobson, the attorney representing MVP, proposed certain terms and stated, "Let me know if this is okay and we'll send paperwork..." Alan Wertheimer, representing Frost, responded, "done....thanks!"
Later, Frost decided he did not want MVP to make the film. ('Allegedly,' says THR, 'Frost felt MVP's execs were "dishonest" about their industry experience.') But in light of their discussions, the production company argued that a deal had been made. Now, after litigation, a California court has ruled that the author was in the right:
According to the latest ruling, it is undisputed that [Frost's attorney] didn't have actual authority to transfer the copyright.. but MVP argued there was a triable issue whether he had "ostensible authority," roughly meaning that appearances were made so as to lead others into believing the presence of a true authority.

But the appeals court says it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is actual authority, which only comes through a writing signed by the copyright owner. 
I think every writer has an interest in stories like this -- particularly that last sentence.

Hollywood writers are typically portrayed as victims but that's less often the case in real life. I recently attended a seminar by Brian Helgeland who roundly trashed the notion that studio executives and writers don't get along. 'Executives are very smart guys,' he said, respectfully. 'Even if they don't get story.'

Cut short


This week I wrote a 27-line piece about Kurt Cobain for Mythiq 27, an anthology of art and stories about 27 musicians who died aged 27. The book will be published in France in 2013, and will be accompanied by an exhibition.

I was also asked to write 150 words about the Frankfurt Book Fair for the New Zealand Book Council.

This was almost short enough to post on Twitter although I have mixed feelings about that. In an article in the New York Times Twitter's Adam Bain described a tweet as an "envelope:" a way of enclosing content and mailing it. I like that metaphor, if only because I have inherited from my grandparents the habit of using old envelopes as notepaper.

(Pic: Frank Micelotta / Getty Images)

Prince of Darkness


October 31 I always think of John Carpenter. Halloween changed horror movies and he went on to shift things a few more times. Even his bad work is stuffed with good ideas, and his "mainstream" efforts are spiky and challenging. But most of all when you look back on his body of work you see an artist with a voice. A John Carpenter movie is as distinctive as a Scorsese or a Kubrick: the same every time but different.

From Soundtrack:
Halloween is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this month, and the score was just re-released, and they had that "other" film come out earlier this year. What are your thoughts on the apparent success of the franchise? Did you ever expect it to have such a following all these years?

You can't beat it! I get a check every time they make one of those movies. I get paid a lump sum of money every time they make a sequel. Debra Hill and the partners and I made an agreement to go ahead and have a mechanism for making sequels, since that's apparently what people wanted. They would use my music, since that's part of the film - and I would stay out of it. It's good for them - they go off and make the movie they want and they don't have me bitching at them.
Den of Geek talked to him about the prescience of his movies:
Escape From LA was a prescient film – it kind of makes more sense now than when it came out...

[laughs] Yeah!

...and the same dynamic seems to apply to They Live. What's your reaction to getting it right, but no-one believing you at the time?

It's the story of my life! [laughs] A lot of my career has been like that. I've made a couple of films that later on, upon reflection, you say 'My God'...I just wrote those things on instinct, so it's not anything I planned out. It's just my view of the world.

It's the same on The Thing, which, three years after release, would have been a trenchant social commentary...

But that's what happens in the movie business – you have to know what's going on when you make a film. I've always been a little bit out of touch with the immediate sense of the audience, I really have. So that's my fault.
One of my favourite John Carpenter movies is Prince of DarknessHalloween had the gag about the killer ducking across the screen behind the victim; Prince of Darkness had the "found footage" of something indistinct and very scary, decades before Paranormal Activity. AICN's Quint also likes the movie:
Quint: Tone is a huge thing with me for your films. One of my favorite movies of yours, and I feel it's really underrated, is PRINCE OF DARKNESS.

John Carpenter: Thank you. You know I've heard that a couple of times recently. I agree with you.

Quint: I've talked to a lot of people and I'm like "Listen, you can look at HALLOWEEN or THE THING or ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and those are all amazing films," but there's a tone that you hit I think in PRINCE OF DARKNESS that gets under my skin more than anything else in your filmography. It's hard for me to actually put a finger on it. It's like watching a Paul Schrader movie. There's something that instantly just in the mix of the visuals, the sound design and the story that kind of gets on to your skin as a film viewer.

John Carpenter: Well, thank you. You know as I recall at the time there was a television interviewer who said PRINCE OF DARKNESS was the worst movie of 1986. Worst movie. Worst.

Quint: Well, they were wrong.

John Carpenter: Well, not necessarily. (laughs) It wasn't at the time so much fun to be the target of that, but I don't care. It was a badge of honor for me.

Traumnovelle


I get into a lot of arguments about Eyes Wide Shut. I'm a Kubrick fan and I like the movie a lot. It stays with you as long as Full Metal Jacket: it's not as pure as that film, or 2001, and I wonder had he lived longer if he would have tightened the edit, as he often did at the last moment  -- the closing glances run longer than usual. But it's a cracker of a story, infuriating and oblique and funny, and it has an undercurrent of real dread. It's the director doing what he loves: rationalising emotion.

Interview magazine has a golden interview with Terry Semel and Tom Cruise about working with Kubrick on the film:
CRUISE: In all matters of the film, he was economical. He needed time to make the film, yes, but he also needed time to think about the film... We had a $65-million budget for Eyes Wide Shut, and everyone thinks we ended up shooting for two years. But it wasn't quite two years. I got there in August and he gave us a month off for Christmas and left about a year and a half later. But we had a lot of vacations in between. Stanley would allow us to break, and that would give him time to evaluate the film and look at the sets... And he was very smart about money. He never went back to Terry and asked for more. He stuck by the budget and did everything it allowed him to do — with the time he needed — to make his film.

SEMEL: I don't think it can be overemphasized how hands-on he was on his projects. He never became the type of filmmaker to direct from a distance.

CRUISE: Earlier on in his career, he would do all the operating. When you look at The Shining, you see that he operated a lot. He did less so on Eyes Wide Shut, but even then, he didn't want many people on the set. He wanted to keep it very contained and very intimate and personal. It was the least amount of crew I've ever had on a movie.
Kubrick's method allowed him to add the little touches:
CRUISE: There was an interesting moment during filming. We were shooting in the backlot of Pinewood Studios and he had built a set to resemble New York. We were working on a scene where I see that a guy is following me. He cast a very distinct-looking actor, a bald guy with a very particular wardrobe. In the shot, this guy walks across the street. We went back and looked at the video playback; we must have spent hours studying it, just to figure out what the behavior of this man should be like crossing the street. Finally, Stanley said, "Listen, when you're crossing the street, please don't stop staring at Tom." It looks like a very simple thing, but behaviorally, it had a tremendous effect.
In a separate interview Nicole Kidman talked to Merle Ginsberg at The Hollywood Reporter about filming Eyes Wide Shut:
There's all the mythology -- but when you got to know [Kubrick], he was practical and logical. Very well-educated... I wasn't scared of him. He could get irritated by people. I was allowed to go in his office and read his books.

On his films, he did everything: fix the sound machine, operate the camera. He even sort of handled the wardrobe -- for all his dressing low-key, Stanley actually loved clothes.

The most important thing to Stanley was time. My approach to the two-year shoot was actually very Zen. Tom and I thought, "We're so lucky, we've gotten to spend two years with the master." Stanley said the film was finished -- but if he had more time, who knows how it would have morphed.

On the road, 2012


Some other authors have blogged about the Frankfurt Book Fair: Robert Sullivan on the opening ceremony and Catherine Robertson on the whole week. I didn't blog because I was travelling without a laptop, which felt like a holiday. I used my iPhone for email. I carried a PDF of my new novel on FileApp Pro, which allowed me to fret over it anywhere, anytime. Caught without an English language version of Pack of Lies at the Mana-Verlag opening, I downloaded a backup ms from Gmail, and read from the phone at the lecturn. Not an ideal experience, but doable.

The practice of hotels charging and arm and a leg for internet access is alive and well in Frankfurt. (In Berlin, like London there is free wifi in most bars and cafés.) In the hotel lobby where the connection was free New Zealanders gathered in the mornings and evenings like smokers on a windy corner, emailing, texting and tweeting. (I've taken Twitter off my phone. It shortens the battery life and my concentration.) Internet access in the rooms was two Euros a day and limited, but at a few dollars a day for up to 25mg on a prepaid SIM, why bother?

For navigation I relied on a paper map of Frankfurt that I bought in Berlin, and for everything else a reporter's notebook and a pencil. Writing things down is still the best way to work -- you remember something better if you write it out by hand, and a pencil will never explode in your pocket.

On the final weekend when I received my Lufthansa flight confirmation I downloaded the boarding pass onto Passport, the iOS6 app. Normally I print out a paper copy of every travel document, just in case, but this time I passed through luggage check in, customs and flight boarding by showing staff the Passport screen or waving the phone across gate scanners. Lufthansa are one of the first airlines to invest in Apple's system and Frankfurt is a modern airport so this went without a hitch. At least half the people in the queue were checking in using smartphones.

The only technology I really missed on the road was a kettle in the hotel room but I knew not to expect that, especially after travelling in France for Les Belles Etrangeres. If you want tea in a European hotel you have to ask for a glass or thermos of hot water at the bar and carry it up to your room in the elevator. Barbaric. But at least then, you have tea. And so on the Wednesday night I sat up on the end of the bed in my room, drinking black tea while reading an ms off an iPhone and scribbling revision notes on a 79 cent notepad.

When all the rainy pavements lead to you


On Friday at the Frankfurt Book Fair (I'm typing this up out of order) Alan Duff, Carl Nixon and I took part in a panel discussion about the urban landscape in New Zealand literature. The subject was in contrast to depictions of the landscape in the pavilion and in other sessions. Alan came right out with it and said we weren't talking about the tourist image of New Zealand, which is why he's good value at things like this. He talked about the violent streets of Once Were Warriors. The panel moderator, Carl's publisher Stefan Weilde, was interested that Alan had renamed Rotorua as Two Lakes; Carl had also renamed the locations in his very Christchurch novel. I suggested that writers need distance from their subject -- life's hot, art's cool -- and that giving a place a different label was a way of objectifying it further, giving the author license to fictionalise. The irony of my novel Lügenspiele (Pack of Lies) is that it's the only novel I've written in which the protagonists try and get away from the city. Although Stefan did say that the hotel reminded him of the Bates Motel in Psycho, "which will give you all some idea of what to expect."

The format was very brisk given the subject matter. Any one of us on the pavilion could have gone on for hours. The allotted time was being counted down on a TV screen in the corner of the stage and the microphones were hand held. By the time it came to other sessions people were better used to it.

PS: Catriona Ferguson at the NZ Book Council blogged about this and other sessions on Friday.

Pic: From a late night train, Berlin.

'Cause I got some weird ideas in my head


Pictured: coming onstage for Sunday's crime panel at the Frankfurt Book Fair with Paul Cleave, Alix Bosco (AKA Greg McGee) and Paddy Richardson, hosted by Wolf Dorn. Paul talked about his Christchurch serial killer novels and writing unsuitable stories at school. Greg talked about how writing a female protagonist gave him the idea of creating a female pseudonym to go with it, as a way of protecting his creation. He thought the critics went much easier on unknown Alix than they would ever would have done on the author of Foreskin's Lament. Paddy talked about writing non-gory crime, and the importance of narrative. She hadn't considered herself a crime writer initially, but came to it later -- something I had a chance to talk to her about when we caught up the next day. Wolf asked me about the influence of film and music on Shirker, which was published in Germany by DTV. All of us (novelist Dorn included) write differently from one another. I said I thought crime-writing was to literature what the blues were to music: a form that has spawned countless variations.

The pavilion was packed, as you can kind of see. That big light in the corner was a lot brighter on stage, but the audience certainly sounded as if they enjoyed what we had to say. Big ups to Wolf for hosting the event.

Bedside reading


Before



This place was good....

A fine Messe

Travelling without a lap top is great but blogging on an iPhone is hard. There are iPads and smart phones aplenty at Frankfurt -- the free wifi grinds to a halt at lunchtime -- but mostly there are books, in huge quantity. If this is what the death of publishing looks like then death is nothing to be afraid of. Things were very different in 2003-2006, people tell me, in the "boom years" but again things seem pretty good. The floors of the main halls are crammed with stalls and reps taking meetings. One publisher told me the point of the Fair is to be seen, "so people know you're still alive."

New Zealand is in two places: in the sales stand in Hall 8, which is as busy as the others, and in the main forum, where stands the pavilion, the events stage and the green room, where the mood is unfailingly upbeat. The locals and publishers I've spoken to like the Pavilion and think we've done well. (Disclosure: I crashed a party that wasn't really for authors. "You must feel like you are in the tank with the sharks," someone said, in a German accent.) There is a lot of talk about hiking; I've had to bluff my way through that. My sessions are today and Sunday. I've had meetings, been interviewed for radio and the Arte tv channel and am taking part in an online event on Saturday. And it's raining, so as an Aucklander I feel right at home. Although my head does hurt this morning for some reason.

Late night


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

Is this thing on?

From the Mana Verlag press reception at the Patio-Restaurantschiff Helgoländer Ufer/ Kirchstraße, Berlin, with Peter Walker, Robert Sullivan and Philip Temple.







Signs

Arts and culture

Baby it's cold outside

Upfront


Looper is very good. I saw it on the recommendation of a colleague -- the trailer didn't attract me at all, and I wondered early on if I was going to like it (the irony of time travel is so much of it has been done before) but then it turned great and, perhaps even more importantly, stopped at just the right moment. I mostly enjoyed it for the things I've been writing about here: a minimum of special effects and a lot of talking for its own sake. And the editing: the memory flashbacks between present and past felt like an old-fashioned movie where the cuts told the story instead of chopping between multiple angles to smooth over preposterous or hard-to-get action.

I've seen a lot of movies with Emily Blunt in them now. Is it me or does she always dress the same?

Anyway... recommended. Can't say more. Will spoil it.

Good indie movies now are becoming what TV used to be: genre, low-budget, heavy on drama and dialogue. It's the new age of talkies.

On the same (4K digital) screen beforehand, a trailer for the Prometheus Blu-ray with spoilers and an additional scenes that made me hope it was going to be good all over again. Because that's what a movie theater has become: a first-look enticement to partake in the real viewing experience -- the high-def home theater drilldown into What You Missed. The deleted scenes on the Prometheus Blu-ray take apart the theatrical cut like it's Last Year At Marienbad. That's the experience audiences pay for now: a deconstruction. In a weird way, they're watching Godard movies.

Ich bin ein Whatever


Christchurch photographer Maja Moritz took portraits of me for the press kit for the Frankfurt Book Fair. This is my favourite.

Directions


In preparation for the Frankfurt Book Fair I downloaded the German + Travel app, which supplies and speaks useful phrases. The sound files are preloaded so there is no wait to play them, and no network traffic charge. And you can play phrases at random to make up robo-conversations: it's the app Kurt Schwitters would have liked.

Since upgrading to iOS6 I've been using the Apple maps app too -- I thought it was fine. Consumer Report rates the app as not that bad. 'Apple’s problem is that is replaced best-in-class with pretty-good.'

There is a new and best Amazon Kindle out. Gizmodo says the Paperwhite is for 'anyone who wants an ereader with a great screen. Which is basically anyone who wants an ereader.'

You may have Sherlock Holmes' on your e-reader, but you will not find his address on any map. The suspiciously well-named Jimmy Stamp deconstructs and reconstructs the mystery of 221B Baker Street:
As a real manifestation of a fiction, the many 221Bs attest to the power of Arthur Conan Doyle's writing. So strongly do the Holmes stories resonate with our culture that we have manifested his home in our own reality, creating shrines and sites of pilgrimage across the world. But these "replicas" also attest to the power of architecture and interior design, which by their very nature make things real.
Gavin Polone at New York Magazine talks about why TV is better than movies. If you're interested in popular culture you should print out this article and nail it to the wall. Almost a coda to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, it does well to explain the most significant shift in mainstream entertainment since the rise of the movie blockbuster in the 1970s.
I would bet that you have noticed that your friends are more excited for new episodes of a favorite show than they are for the release of a super-hyped studio tentpole movie...  [A] malaise has taken hold of the movie audience, which is illustrated by the oft-heard phrase, "There is nothing out worth seeing.".
But why? Polone:
There are too many networks now competing for attention and they don't have the luxury of spending the huge sums movie studios can to cut through the marketing clutter and get the consideration of the potential viewer. So, they have no choice but to make shows that stand out from everything else based on their quality and distinctiveness. That is why, in recent years, you've gotten to watch not only Breaking Bad, but also The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and Homeland. None had pricey CGI, huge stars, or a flashy, unavoidable ad campaign; all they had was terrific writing, acting, and originality that made people want to recommend these shows to their friends.
On the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Graeme McMillan at Time discusses how the series changed pop culture forever:
These days, of course, we're used to the idea of rebooting series and franchises and getting new takes on what had come before, keeping the best bits and discarding what doesn't fit for something that everyone hopes is better. That wasn't the case back in 1987. Back then, translations between media tried their best to faithfully replicate previous iterations, and even oddities like the Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks Dragnet movie that predated The Next Generation by a matter of months tried their hardest to offer affectionate homage to their predecessors, even as they pretended to parody them. Star Trek: The Next Generation may not be a reboot in the common usage of the term today: It takes place in the same continuity as the earlier series, and doesn't seek to replace it or undo anything that came before, but for all intents and purposes it was a reboot for the concept and a chance for Roddenberry and staff to correct whatever mistakes or bad decisions had been forced on the original.
In Hollywood, pitching is everything. TV writer Bill Barol remembers being with Al Franken for the worst meeting in the history of show business:
After a few moments the telephone rang at the host's station, Franken picked up the phone. Here's what I heard him say:

"Hi, honey... No, still having meetings. What? CNN? No, why?" He listened for a long moment, and then I saw all the color drain from his face. And I heard him say: "He's DEAD?"
However a study published in the Journal of Aging and Health has found that creativity predicts a longer life:
A large body of research links neuroticism with poorer health and conscientiousness with superior health. Now openness, which measures cognitive flexibility and the willingness to entertain novel ideas, has emerged as a lifelong protective factor. The linchpin seems to be the creativity associated with the personality trait—creative thinking reduces stress and keeps the brain healthy.

World on a wire


My confirmed schedule for the Frankfurt Book Fair, to date. There are a few more things hovering around, TBC. It's going to be productive and fun to be talking about New Zealand writing to international audiences. So if you're in Frankfurt (or Berlin, earlier), do come. If you're not then there's an app for that.

SUNDAY 7 OCTOBER / 17.00 – 18.00
Presentation of four New Zealand writers from MANA-Verlag: Philip Temple, Peter Walker, Chad Taylor, Robert Sullivan.
Patio-Restaurantschiff Helgoländer Ufer / Kirchstrasse 10557 Berlin.

THURSDAY 11 OCTOBER / 17.00
"Meet the Author"
Frankfurt Book Fair / The MANA stand Venue Halle 3.1 K674

FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER / 13:00 – 13:30
Urban Sprawl (Panel discussion)
The gritty city revealed through contemporary New Zealand fiction writers Alan Duff, Chad Taylor and Carl Nixon in discussion with Stefan Weilde.
Frankfurt Book Fair / Pavilion.

FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER / 14.00
"Meet the Author"
Frankfurt Book Fair / The MANA stand Venue Halle 3.1 K674

SUNDAY 14 OCTOBER / 13.00 – 14.00
A Grisly Lunch ( Panel discussion)
New Zealand Crime Writers Paul Cleave, Alix Bosco (Greg McGee), Chad Taylor and Paddy Richardson in conversation with Wulf Dorn.
Frankfurt Book Fair / Pavilion.

SUNDAY 14 OCTOBER / 14:30
"Meet the Author"
Frankfurt Book Fair / The MANA stand Venue Halle 3.1 K674