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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

Moving

The dialogue in Furious 7 is epic to the point of non-sequitur. The rap video T&A is equal opportunity: Rodriguez kicks ass; the Rock wears a singlet in the office. Fights are Hong Kong phooey and the laws of physics pushed out as far as a rocket-propelled coyote on a granite ledge. But the series works because at its heart – and it has a lot of heart – it's about chivalry. The central theme is family – not military. Furious 7 never winks at the audience. For all its stunts, the filmmakers play fair with the viewer: the movie believes in itself, and the audience believes back.

The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

Murakami's The Strange Library appears designed for younger readers but few of them would recognise a library as it's depicted: borrowing cards, inked date stamps, stacks of books teetering over the door. The book is designed by Suzanne Dean, whose credit is tucked at the foot of the credits. An endpaper note explains that many of the illustrations have been sourced from The London Library and visually the enterprise has the charm of an English storybook but the story, translated by Ted Goossen, is less attractive. A boy researching the Ottoman Empire becomes imprisoned by a extremely threatening old man; his fellow inmates are a girl who speaks with her hands, and a sheep man – a recurring Murakami character who appears in Dance Dance Dance. The combination of inventive design and lurching narrative renders the experience either more frustrating or engaging, depending on your tastes. The final effect is subversive: looks like a children's book, freaks you out.

-- Sunday Star Times, 2014

Good reading

This is being passed around: Salon's Anne Bauer on why it's a problem that writers don't talk about where their money comes from:

... When an audience member — young, wide-eyed, clearly not clued in — rose to ask [an unnamed author] how he’d managed to spend 10 years writing his current masterpiece — What had he done to sustain himself and his family during that time? — he told her in a serious tone that it had been tough but he’d written a number of magazine articles to get by. I heard a titter pass through the half of the audience that knew the truth. But the author, impassive, moved on and left this woman thinking he’d supported his Manhattan life for a decade with a handful of pieces in the Nation and Salon.

Also being passed around: Vulture's David Marchese talks to Jon Ronson about how we use social media to shame others. Says Ronson:

... We still see ourselves on social media as the hitherto-silenced underdog, yet we have huge power. We are more powerful en masse than NBC... We like to see ourselves as righteous people, but we’re behaving as unforgiving and cold. We’ve sort of tricked ourselves into believing that we’re something online that we’re not, or that we haven’t turned into something that we have.

And Jon Ronson again, on the New York Times, about destroying lives with Twitter:

... In those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

Features fuse like shattered glass

Now I watch movies while saying over and over again, 'They could never make this now.' You couldn't be this clear and cold and dissolute; this adult. Literally: the teenage children of the couple would be enabled as the heroes, their wealth signified by product placement and a contemporary soundtrack. And the heroine would not be wetting the bed.

Reversal of Fortune: Directed by Barbet Schroeder (More, Maitresse). Written by Nicholas Kazan (At Close Range).

Blogging via a Twitter feed: Mike Nichols

 
Reading a tweet about someone you like. (beat) Realising the tweet is because they're dead.

Anyway: WOLF. Jack Nicholson's fantastic portrayal of line-editing a manuscript.

And Anne Bancroft, obv.

After THE GRADUATE swimming pools in movies were never the same.

Prior to that a swimming pool was CAT PEOPLE or just the edge with someone climbing out of it.

Anyway. Mrs Robinson was the pool.

He couldn't stay down there forever.

This was back in the day when movies had a subtext.

(Subtext)

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

Flash Boys opens in late 2008 on Spread Networks laying the straightest possible fibre optic cable between Chicago and New Jersey in an effort to reduce the trading time between two stock exchanges by five milliseconds. The connection will earn Spread $2.8 billion in rentals from traders who will use its advantage of five thousandths of a second to execute "flash" trades: to buy and sell shares in the time it takes traders on slower networks to press a key.

The numbers are dazzling but the principle is rock simple: if a trader is faster, he can beat others in the queue. As computers and software have improved in speed, the physical distance between exchanges has become the last mile. Flash trades rely on dedicated software (often adapted from open source) and hardware like Spread Networks' "Gold Route" to close the gap. It also helps that the majority of flash trades are made in exotically named "dark pools" -- exchanges where the transactions remain essentially secret. Whether high-speed trading is fair or not is part of a larger argument, especially if you employ Wall Street's tortured, relativistic language. But does the notion of secret exchanges give anyone pause? Isn't secrecy the weapon of capitalism's modern villain? The Enron? The terrible Madoff?

Lewis's most remarkable feat is to cut through the obfuscation and euphemism surrounding his subject and emerge firmly on the fence. While a lay-reader might call angry bullshit on the whole enterprise Lewis sees the debate as an opportunity to examine the market along capitalist principles. He uses the tools of fiction to describe lead "characters" (real people both named and anonymous) who believe a line can be drawn, not between but across the exchanges: a boundary that will regulate trading speed and ensure fair play. An honest working trader who cannot understand why his trades are blocked. A Russian programmer with an exceptional talent for designing financial software while himself having no interest in money. A financier who decides to set up a new stock exchange that blocks high speed trading. His youthful heroes come straight from the good-guy deck. Their fair-play solution? In part, coiling a length of fiber optic into a box to slow the signal down.

Many of the individuals' stories in Flash Boys turn on the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Is the author testifying to their patriotism or implying that, having survived one disaster, America is headed for another? Lewis's blindingly intelligent and well-written exposé ends with him contemplating the microwave technology that might outpace the Gold Route, but he stays mum about where it's taking us. Only the markets can decide.

-- Sunday Star Times, June 2014