Always do what you are afraid to do

"There's a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, something to the effect of: 'if you can't be free, then be as free as you can be'. And I like the arbitrary restrictions that one places on oneself, so that you don't get scatterbrained and don't reach for everything that's available. Keep your focus very narrow: just this and nothing more, and make that absolutely exquisite and don't get sucked into distractions, don't listen to the siren chorus singing across the waves about this keyboard that has a billion sounds in it. I couldn't care less about things like that. They just get in the way. I'm not bragging, but the way I work is that I focus entirely on a small thing and try to milk that for all it's worth, to find everything in it that makes musical sense. A studio gives you the freedom to do that, but it also gives you the freedom to do everything, and to me everything is a tyranny. What's the point? So for me it's a conscious choice to work in a studio when I want and need to, but not to own a studio. It's the same with owning instruments. All I have is an old, worthless Casio 202, which I don't even use any more, and the shakers and bells. I don't even have a piano any more."

-- Harold Budd interviewed by Paul Tingen for Sound on Sound, 1997

We're a long way out to sea

"So you’re standing on the Earth. Let’s assume the Earth is a perfect sphere, because that makes things a lot easier. What does our situation look like?"

The moment you know

Gaga did Bowie. Duncan Jones tweeted:

"overexcited or irrational, typically as a result of infatuation or excessive enthusiasm; mentally confused." Damn it! What IS that word!?

— Duncan Jones (@ManMadeMoon) February 16, 2016

The problem with Bowie tributes is that Bowie left all that stuff behind. He didn't linger when he could or should have: it wasn't the changes but the changing. He left a trail of fans holding moments that were important in their lives, which is what pop does: it marks time like a photograph of summer. But then the seasons shift, and no matter how good they were to recall them is to roll in melancholy.

Bowie himself was never truly melancholy until the goodbye wrench of 'Where are we now' -- his last album, Black Star, is filled with a resolved sadness but it's nothing like the beautiful dejection of that 2013 single. The cover of The Next Day is Heroes, patched with text like an afterthought: the moment when the artist reached back for his Berlin self just for a moment, then let go.

The End

Low

Cut the patch, then cut the hole

I have been taking time off writing to repair and paint the house. I don't like not writing but I get satisfaction from fixing things. And although I am not the best or fastest tradesman, my rates are excellent.

I live in a 60s weatherboard house almost the same age as the one in which I grew up in south Auckland, which was almost the same age as me. I have a lot of memories about how a house like this was put together and what needs to be done to maintain it. This house, like my parents', is woodframe on concrete piles but its hill location and exposure to wind and sun over the decades has hardened the frame like steel. The builders who replaced the roofing were surprised that they didn't have to replace any beams; the technician who installed the fibre connection blunted a drill trying to put a hole through a stud. (You're not a real tradesman until you cut a supporting beam. Being an amateur I got him to drill a hole in a corner of the floorboards instead.)

One of the good things about doing work like this is being taken away from my keyboard. But researching technical matters has reacquainted me with the best of the internet, which is its repository of DIY information, in particular the forums (bulletin boards at their best) and videos. You could characterise the videos as amateurish or funny or sometimes just weird (the one on replacing plasterboard has an art school quality), but I can watch these things for hours.

Spies like us

I wouldn't wish a Bond movie on anybody. Locked in the very early 60s the character and stories have been preserved in aspic. Each element of the branded franchise must be ticked off in the movies like a nursery rhyme we all dimly remember. The Bond movies are panto: look out behind you.

Having said that, my pick for Bond has always been Wesley Snipes by the simple math that of all the younger male movie stars who shared a bill with Sean Connery in the 90s (Costner, Gere, Baldwin, Cage, Lambert etc) Snipes was the only one who held his own. In Rising Sun Snipes could do action, comedy, be vulnerable, be seduced, mess up, shoot straight and look cool as fuck in a suit -- but most of all stop your gaze sliding towards Sean if he so much as coughed. Connery like Michael Caine and Anthony Hopkins is a scene-stealer, but Snipes steals it right back. Idris Elba? Also good. But Snipes should shoot first.

This will not happen. Bond does not need to be updated because the form has been absorbed into a broader matrix, like jazz, westerns and literary novels. But were the character to be retrofitted, steampunk style, with the accoutrements that would enable him to do his job in the syntax of Fleming's original -- a cruel, racist loner who is terrible with women -- a quick mind would cut and paste Peter Quinn from season four of Homeland.

As Quinn Rupert Friend has been a prick from the start, knifing that nice Damien Lewis, killing children, having terrible relationships and not blinking when he shoots a gun. By season four he's the star of the show. The limits of a TV budget makes him more realistic than Matt Damon's Bourne, although again the opening of the third movie of that revived series -- the chase in a London train station observed from all quarters which can be escaped only by use of a cellphone -- is Bond redux: everything that Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ought to be but can't.

On the beach

Body double

Director Brian De Palma to Rich Juzwiak in 2013:

You know, Body Double is the kind of movie that people always talked to me about. It got massacred by the critics when it came out, but I can't tell you how many people come up to me to this day and talk to me about Body Double. So who knows ... times change.

Peaches, the artist formerly known as Merrill Nisker, to Melissa Leon:

Ugh, I just think it's time for everyone to fucking get naked. What's the point when Miley Cyrus wears two little suspenders or whatever [the outfit Cyrus wore to the VMAs]? "Look, I'm skimpier than you!" Just get fucking naked. Why do we have these problems? Really all we have is our bodies. I'm sorry, designers, I'm sorry you'll be out of a job but why don't we just show ourselves?

Série noire

I am still currently on a Jean-Patrick Manchette jag. It's like finding someone holding the other half of the locket.

Robert Polito writing at Bookforum in 2011 says Manchette sets his Néo-polars "at the convergence of state crimes and individual yearnings":

Manchette crafted a sly rendition of Situationist détournement: a collage of redux plots that emerges as simultaneously a refinement and a travesty of noir ... The situations of the ten books Manchette published during the '70s and '80s, mostly in Gallimard's Série noire, sound so familiar that you're sure you've experienced them already ...

The full article is here.

My noir novella Aurélie is available as a digital edition from Amazon | Smashwords | Kobo | Barnes & Noble and Apple Books.

Into darkness

In an excellent essay on NYMag.com Angelica Jade Bastién asks if the modern noir has "atrophied":

True Detective is the clearest example of the emptiest aspects of modern noir: vengeful, self-centered white men; casual racism; violence without grace or purpose; mistaking the cliché strong female character for something meaningful; lack of levity or humor; labyrinthine plotlines without verve.

Not sure if she's talking True Detective 1, 2 or both; haven't seen the latter, am a fan of the former. Bastién continues:

In the early 1940s, noir began as a movement born of a number of factors: the changing gender and racial landscape of America during and after World War II, the Expressionist influence of European-refugee filmmakers like Billy Wilder, and studio-system economics.

Missing from her list: the novels and short stories on which the movies were based. That's your problem right there: the source material. Look at Michael Winterbottom's version of The Killer Inside Me. Jim Thompson's novel was published in 1952: viewed from this side of the century it's fifty shades of go fuck yourself.

Contrary to any rosy academic spin one might apply now the so-called "classic" noir movies were typically violent, sexist, populated by gender and racial stereotypes, hacked by studios and curdled by portentous public service messages and disclaimers. But they were good because the stories were good, and they remain powerful because their subversive, disturbing messages ring true.

(I'm suspicious of art that tells you how things should be: far more interested in what tells you how things are -- and even better, how bad it can get. There is no rule in the manual that says art should be virtuous.)

If you want to set your tuner to classic film noir pick up a copy of Barry Gifford's The Devil Thumbs A Ride: a film diary by one of my favourite fiction authors.

If you want to see where film noir is going, check out Mr Robot. Show creator Sam Esmail talked to Engadget about his approach to the series:

... I really wanted to do a character piece about one specific character from this world. I wanted to be inside his head as intimately and as close as possible. Then the character of Elliot started to form. Taxi Driver hands down is probably one of the best character pieces in cinema, so of course that was an inspiration. The use of VO (voice over) and the sort of isolation, in terms of the filming and storytelling -- really you're just locked in with this guy.

And if you want the real thing? Go read a book.

(Pic: Jessica Alba in The Killer Inside Me (2010), dir. Michael Winterbottom.)

The devil has the best songs

James Sallis on Jean-Patrick Manchette:

There's much that's quintessentially French about Manchette: his political stance, the stylish hard surface of his prose, his adoption of a "low" or demotic art form to embody abstract ideas. Like any great illusionist, he directs our attention one way as the miraculous happens in another. He tells us a simple story. This occurred. That. But there's bone, there's gristle. Floors give way, and wind heaves its shoulder against the door. His stories of cornered individuals become an indictment of capitalism's excesses, its unchallenged power, its reliance on distraction and spectacle.

-- The New York Review of Books, June 2014 

Artists in the studio

Maxime Schmitt on Kraftwerk's working method:

I was thinking, "Is there a good song coming out of this?" or "will the stuff that I heard be as good in three months?" There was this quest where I wanted to bring back something really strong. I remember I used to go to Düsseldorf and I would listen to the new material, saying "But there you are not doing Kraftwerk anymore, you are doing a sort of Queen!" And they would say, "After all, maybe it's not bad, maybe it can be a new direction." But in fact, they came back very fast to their style. When things went towards new directions, within six months it had become recognisably Kraftwerk again.

– Pascal Bussy, Kraftwerk: Man Machine and Music (SAF, 1993)

The best crime writers you've never heard of

There's a lot I like in the novels of French noir author Jean-Patrick Manchette and just as much that I admire. The translations can clunk but the energy sparks and the style references are to die for.

American crime writer James Sallis reviewed Manchette for The Boston Globe:

Much about Manchette seems quintessentially French: the stylish glistening surface of his prose, his objectivist method, his adoption of a "low" art form to embody abstract ideas. This goes far towards explaining why he remains virtually unknown and to this point untranslated in the U.S., while all about Europe, having salvaged the French crime novel from the bog of police procedurals and colorful tales of Pigalle lowlife into which it had sunk, he's a massive figure.
"The crime novel," he claimed, "is the great moral literature of our time" — shortly before he set about proving it.

Sallis is very good also. His mainstream "break" was Drive (2005) which was turned into a movie in 2011. Although the movie did well he tells Oliver Franklin-Wallis not a lot has changed since:

We get so many calls I won't answer the phone. My latest book The Killer Is Dying has had a lot of interest but so far nothing is happening. Certainly I feel more visible. But as a writer, my favourite are emails from readers saying "I loved the film and I immediately went out and bought the book, now I'm reading the four Lew Griffin novels" because it really is leading people to my other work.

CNN called Sallis "the best crime writer you've never heard of." Sallis's other nominations in that category:

J.M. Redmann writes lesbian mysteries which are absolutely wonderful. One of her best titles is The Intersection Of Law And Desire, which are two streets in New Orleans. S.J. Rozan is a great writer and so is Jean-Patrick Manchette, a French writer who nobody knows in the States. I also love George Pelecanos. There's so much exciting crime writing being done now. Something like Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn – what a hell of a novel – would never have been written fifty years ago.

Sallis, talking to Keith Rawson, describes his writing process:

Mostly it’s all on computer nowadays, though each page, each line, gets questioned, revised, rewritten, buffed, trimmed and fileted hundreds of times.

That's how you do it.

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris

Between You & Me is an index of things editors dwell on so that readers don't have to: word gender, the dangling participle, commas, hyphenation. Author Mary Norris is a copy editor at the New Yorker. After an introduction that is easeful even by her employer's standards she introduces the magazine's dictionary of choice, Webster's, which she employs as a prelude to American English, and here the book comes alive ("The best thing ever written about hyphens is..."). Far from "a mean person who enjoys pointing put other people's errors" Norris is tickled pink by her subject. The book is nostalgic in places – New York, mostly ("... her desk facing a wall James Thurber had drawn on in pencil") but her outlook is modern ("I would never disable spell check. That would be hubris"). Grammatical examples are presented as witty mnemonics: it's fun, and you'll learn something.

-- Sunday Star Times, June 2015

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Documentary maker Jon Ronson has assembled an excellent chronicle of individuals who have wreaked real-world damage via social media: Adria, who tweeted a developer's remark at a tech conference, which led to the developer being fired; Justine, who tweeted a joke before getting on a plane and found herself professionally destroyed by the time it landed. Ronson digs up details: the developer was rehired; Adria assailed. Justine, a PR worker, had been targeted by Gawker: "The fact that she was a PR chief made it delicious," said Gawker's Sam Biddle. Another "victim", Max Mosley, survived his public shaming by refusing to be cowed -- and hiring a QC. The meddling facts of each case undermine easy comparison and propel the author in circles. Ronson concludes that social media dehumanises us, but also that society was cruel all along. By book's end his outrage has dimmed, leaving only juicy anecdotes. It would make compelling TV -- his subjects were right to trust print.

-- Sunday Star Times, May 2015

Girl In A Band by Kim Gordon

Girl In A Band's opening chapter detailing Kim Gordon's breakup with Thurston Moore has been chewed over by an online audience that might not normally discuss a woman in terms of her relationship but the memoir in total is judicious and single-minded: a personal narrative of laterally-mobile ambition signposted with appearances by the fashionable and infamous. The author presents herself as a ‏60s art school child who jumped almost directly to the New York 80s gallery scene, bypassing disco and rock. As per the title she has much to say about gender but it's Gordon's adult quality that sets her apart from her morose peers: even while professing fears of inadequacy the narrative focus is intelligent and self-possessed. The chapters on her favourite Sonic Youth tracks make a fine 20 minutes on YouTube and her memories of New York are a paean to an urban culture now priced out of existence.

-- Sunday Star Times, 2015