Reference

"It's very important to remember that no matter how far I might diverge or find freedom in this format, it only is free insofar as it has reference to the strictness of the original form. And that's what gives it its strength. In other words, there is no freedom except in reference to something."

-- Open Culture points to a documentary about jazz musician Bill Evans.

Powder room

Pulp

Shane Black: "Well, there was a kind of movie I always, a kind of book I always loved growing up. I loved detective stories. I could do those for the rest of my life probably."

-- Talking to Steve Weintraub at Collider about The Nice Guys.

Throw a kiss and say goodbye

Walter Becker: Donald had a house that sat on top of a sand dune with a small room with a piano. From the window, you could see the Pacific in between the other houses. "Crimson Tide" didn't mean anything to us except the exaggerated grandiosity that's bestowed on winners. "Deacon Blues" was the equivalent for the loser in our song.

Donald Fagen: When Walter came over, we started on the music, then started filling in more lyrics to fit the story. At that time, there had been a lineman with the Los Angeles Rams and the San Diego Chargers, Deacon Jones. We weren't serious football fans, but Deacon Jones's name was in the news a lot in the 1960s and early '70s, and we liked how it sounded. It also had two syllables, which was convenient, like "Crimson." The name had nothing to do with Wake Forest's Demon Deacons or any other team with a losing record. The only Deacon I was familiar with in football at the time was Deacon Jones.

(...)

Donald Fagen: The song's fade-out at the end was intentional. We used it to make the end feel like a dream fading off into the night.

Walter Becker: "Deacon Blues" was special for me. It's the only time I remember mixing a record all day and, when the mix was done, feeling like I wanted to hear it over and over again. It was the comprehensive sound of the thing: the song itself, its character, the way the instruments sounded and the way Tom Scott's tight horn arrangement fit in.

Donald Fagen: One thing we did right on "Deacon Blues" and all of our records: We never tried to accommodate the mass market. We worked for ourselves and still do.

-- Donald Fagen and Walter Becker talking to Marc Myers of The Wall Street Journal, 10-9-2015

Falling man

"The work gets slower, that's for sure. This latest book took me nearly four years to write and it's not even 300 pages. It's not a burden, it's just day-to-day. But at some point I realised I'd been sitting there for four years. Why isn't it a bigger book?"

-- Don DeLillo interviewed by Xan Brooks for The Guardian

Quitting

Remember blogging? In the early days of the World Wide Web an Internet user's knowing gaze fell on Wonkette (Ana Marie Cox) and Bookslut (Jessa Crispin). Cox left Wonkette in 2006, after which it wasn't fun; now Crispin has shuttered Bookslut, leaving us with less fun again. Boris Kachka at NYMag.com asked Crispin why she's leaving and her answer shows why we will miss her:

BK: You’re not a fan of the industry.

JC: Part of the reason why I disengaged from it is I just don’t find American literature interesting. I find MFA culture terrible. Everyone is super-cheerful because they’re trying to sell you something, and I find it really repulsive. There seems to be less and less underground. And what it’s replaced by is this very professional, shiny, happy plastic version of literature.

Earlier at NYMag.com, Casey Johnston declared social media unwell:

It's an established fact of social media services that, once they reach enough size that the potential audience for a post becomes nebulous, people shy from posting on them, because they can't predict what reaction they'll get. This — called "context collapse" — is why we've seen group messaging services boom as broader social media ones have flattened; in your Slack or HipChat or GroupMe, you know how your friends or family will react to a link you post. On an open and unfiltered social media feed, the outcome of posting to a public is far too unpredictable.

In 2014 Prince told Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone why he had stopping releasing albums:

Prince famously liberated himself from his record deal with Warner Bros. in 1996, and it apparently took him years to realize that his freedom extended to not releasing music. "I write more than I record now, and I also play live a lot more than I record," he says. "I used to record something every day. I always tease that I have to go to studio rehab.

"I'm a very in-the-moment person," he continues. "I do what feels good in the moment. ... I'm not on a schedule, and I don't have any sort of contractual ties. I don't know in history if there's been any musicians that have been self-sufficient like that, not beholden. I have giant bills, large payrolls, so I do have to do tours. ... But there's no need to record anymore." He makes a direct connection between fasting, celibacy and his abstention from recording. "After four days, you don't want food anymore. ... It's like this thing that says, 'Feed me, feed me.' When it realizes it's not going to get fed, it goes away. ... It's the same with music. I had to see what it's like to stop making albums. And then you go, 'Oh, wait a minute, I don't feel the need to do that anymore.'"

Up on a hill, as the day dissolves

Why did you take that first sabbatical?

"Well, I was stuck, really... in a funny way. Stuck with more offers to do things than I've ever had before. Some of them were interesting but the momentum problem was going to arise... It would be 'just one more' and then 'just one more' after that.

"The reason for doing it was that I thought I should spend some time alone. I spend nearly all my time with other people... what I'm involved in is a social art, I'm a social kind of person anyway. Yet I find that if I can live through the initial tedium of my own company, which usually lasts about four days, I find it very interesting to be alone. I start thinking in a way that's extremely acute. I'm thinking about different things, I think better and faster, and I'm much more courageous in what I think because as soon as you forget the society that you're part of, it's much easier to move against its norms."

-- Brian Eno interviewed by Richard Williams for Melody Maker, January 12 1980

No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue

"Many people think the noir genre is simply a mood. But there's a lot of elements to it. The noir genre is like the white hope in a world that has lost its hold on the string that ties it to morality and goodness. It's a man in his 40s who knows the ropes and is ethically defined. He has no mother, no father, no wife, no children, no property. He doesn't owe anything to anybody. If the police say, "We're going to put you in jail until you talk," he can go to jail. He doesn't have any kid out there he needs to feed. He doesn't have any wife that's going to find a new boyfriend because he's a damn fool. You know, he can do anything."

-- Walter Mosley in conversation with Thulani Davis for Bomb Magazine

And I was so fucking bored

"Basically, I like hanging out and I don't like writing, and by hanging out I don't mean socially hanging out. I like to soak stuff up. My first four novels were sort of autobiographical, and I was so fucking bored. I mean, what am I going to write about next? What I had for breakfast? I can't write this, I can't read this.

"And then I ran into screenplay work, and screenplay work forced me to get out of myself, because now you're writing about pool hustlers. That's what the story demands. I don't know about pool hustlers. Well, go out and learn about it. And I had to go down to Kentucky and Alabama and places where pool tournaments were, and I discovered that I could learn about the world, and that talent and personal experience are not Siamese twins. You can take your talent and go off and learn something, and then you can write about it as well as if not better than the stuff you know from personal experience. So, I got kind of hooked on going out. Going out. Going out. Whatever you write is autobiography, because every kind of character hits a crossroad and has to make a choice in life, and that choice is informed by your sensibilities and your sensibilities evolved out of your life. So it's sort of writing about yourself without the self-consciousness.

"I have to be a little intimidated by what I'm writing about. I have to feel a little bit like I don't think I can do this, I don't think I can master this, I don't think I can get under the skin of this, because when you're a little scared, you're bringing everything to the table because you're not sure you can do it unless you bust your balls and really, really get into it. Terror keeps you slender. I need a sense of awe. Oh, shit! I can't believe I just saw that! But then what do you do with what you saw? That's the bottom line. That's the novel."

-- Richard Price interviewed by Alec Michod for The Believer, May 2008

I want to keep my place in the old world

Perhaps [Tom Hanks'] most perceptive insight came when an audience member raised the issue of nostalgia. After saying "documentaries kick movies' ass when it comes down to the stuff that's really going on," Hanks explicated that his own reason for repeatedly returning to WWII was because of cell phones -- or, rather, the 1940s' lack of those ubiquitous online-connected devices.

While conceding that great movies about the here-and-now are regularly produced, Hanks stated that the existence of cell phones "makes it impossible for you to keep characters apart. Anybody can talk to anybody they want to. These make it impossible for someone to outwardly lie to you, because you can immediately find out whether they're lying or not. And also, these make it possible for you to know any obscure fact that exists in the world. So therefore what disappears? Distance. Communication becomes instantaneous. And the search for a secret, the search for an answer, becomes...[feigns typing]."

-- Tom Hanks in conversation with John Oliver, as reported by Nick Shager at The Daily Beast, 2016

"What year does [The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo] take place in? Well the books are delivered in 2004, so [Stieg Larsson] is probably thinking in terms of 2003, it's not published until 2005, 2007 is the iPhone, so all those apps that would be available to the iPhone are probably something that Salander would have access to 'cause she's a bit of a Mac junkie. So you kind of go, "Well where do we draw the line?" So we just said, look everything has to be pre-iPhone technology, because otherwise they would be sitting there going "Well we just go over here." They would have a compass; they would be able to tell what the weather was like. So there's all that stuff, you just have to make a decision [that's] fairly arbitrary, basically everything in the movie is pre-iPhone."

-- David Fincher interviewed by Steve Weintraub for Collider, 2010

You can't depend on a beginning, you can't depend on an end

Anthony Rainone: But let's talk about The Lost Get Back Boogie, which I think was rejected -- what, 110 times? What was that whole ordeal like? How did you cope with it day in and day out?

James Lee Burke: By the time I was 34, I had published three novels in hardback in New York, and had a fair amount of success, and I was a Bread Loaf Fellow. I thought I was on board. With The Lost Get Back Boogie, I assumed it would be published. But, boy, I went 13 years before I was back in hardback again. And the agency that was handling my works sent everything back. They cut bait. It was pretty depressing.

-- James Lee Burke profiled by Anthony Rainone for January magazine, October 2004.

With The Neon Rain, my first Dave Robicheaux mystery. I'd been out of hardback print for a long time, nearly 13 years. A friend of mine named Rick DeMarinis said, "Why don't you try a crime novel?" I thought about it, and three days later Pearl and I were in San Fran, right down by Ferlinghetti's bookstore City Lights. I bought a yellow legal pad and walked down to this Italian café that's right across from the Catholic Church there on the boulevard. I ordered an espresso, and I sat down and started writing the first chapter of The Neon Rain. That's a fact.

As soon as I started writing, I knew it. I knew it when it started.

-- James Lee Burke to David Langness of Paste, November 18, 2014

So I've got that on him

Bruce DeSilva: Why do you write crime novels?

Robert B Parker: I write them because I know how, and because it never occurred to me not to write them. The process I go through is the same process Faulkner went through. The difference is that Faulkner writes better than I do, not because he is not writing crime novels but simply because he is a greater talent. He's dead, of course, so I've got that on him.

BD: Some people don't take crime fiction seriously. They see even your best books as mere entertainments.

RBP: Writing is either good or it isn't. It's not good because it's about 20th century angst. It's not bad because it's about a private detective. If it's good, it should be taken seriously. There is a misapprehension that it's easier to write a bad novel than a good one. It isn't. You write what you can, and if it comes out good you are lucky.

BD: Why is this such a hard lesson for some people to learn?

RBP: Literature is perceived as what you were taught in college. Professors can't teach books that are not difficult. If students read a book and they all understand it, there's nothing left to talk about in class. The second thing I would say is that most reviewing in this country is not very good. Its main function is not to do something useful but to enhance the reviewer's career. It's easier to review a difficult book because you get to explain it.

BD: Tell me how you work.

RBP: I think up a story and then I outline. The outline isn't terribly long – four or five pages handwritten. Catskill Eagle took me three months to think up. It's the hardest thing to do. I may go two, three weeks with nothing on the notepad, but I am not nervous about it because I know it will come. It always has. When the outline is completed, I write five pages a day.

BD: No matter how long it takes?

RBP: Yeah. Sometimes it takes eight or ten hours, but usually it takes no more than two. But I deliberately don't press on because if you do, then you start thinking you should write seven pages a day. It's better just to stop. I type it up in a draft, make a few pencil changes, and someone retypes it for me and sends it in.

-- Robert B Parker talks to Bruce DeSilva in 2011

Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt

In 1963 Michael Peppiatt joined Francis Bacon's circle after interviewing the artist for a student newspaper and later being invited to his Dean Street lair: "... the moment I go in Francis is standing at the top of a very steep flight of stairs, his arms opened out in welcome." A lively relationship of art and drinking ensues, which Peppiatt recreates in vivid detail. The author claims to recall the artist's lengthy monologues so well because Bacon repeated himself often -- a reminder that for all the painter's talk of spontaneity and the unconscious, he relied as much on rehearsal and theatre. Both Bacon and his admirer(s) strive for effect in this substantial memoir which pops with colour. It triangulates agreeably with other Bacon biographies including the ur-text interviews with David Sylvester and is a starry account of the time when the art world spun around a few blocks in Soho.

-- Sunday Star Times, December 2015

School's been blown to pieces

What a great movie. Woody Allen's Irrational Man is small like a Russian short story. Instead of Chekhov's gun it has a pocket torch (although there is a gun, too); in place of the writer-director's often cringemaking sexual reveries the relationships are adult and on-point (although again a scene in which a writer working at home is interrupted by Parker Posey bearing a bottle of whisky is as agreeable a fantasy as one could conjur). Like the mis-en-scene of London finance in Match Point the hermetic world of a New England campus focuses the characters' dilemma. Joaquin Phoenix (paunchy, cold) plays a philosophy professor paralysed between theory and action, Posey (brittle, confident) a scientist with chemistry, and Emma Stone (wide-eyed, smart) a student who learns something. The script lacks the wizardry and magic that spoils every other Woody Allen. There are jokes but the actors ride over them, tamping down the smart-ass observations until they read as self-deprecating mumbling. Phoenix literally kills the humour and the movie soars by staying in the box. It's a solid little masterpiece that locks down its story with broad themes, sly editing and the eloquent style of voiceovers that made Vicky Cristina Barcelona such a good picture to look at.

Adrian Tomine

What's your creative process? For example, do you write the story first, or sort of make it up as you go along?

I do a lot of "pre-work" before I actually start drawing. This involves wandering the streets and thinking, sitting on my couch and thinking, filling up notebooks with ideas, filling up sketchbooks with drawings, etc. When I feel like I've got a pretty good story worked out in my head, I sit down and do what I consider to be the hardest work. I get the scenes all organized, and I write a very rough version of all the dialogue. Then I convert those words into comics form. On a small tablet of graph paper, I break down all the dialogue into panels and pages, tinkering with the dialogue and quickly indicating characters with stick-figures.

Finally, I draw the actual pages that get printed. I often continue to change scenes and dialogue as I draw it because new ideas will emerge as I draw the actual panels. Based on advice from Chris Ware, I try to allow a certain level of spontaneity, even though my process is fairly labored.

How long, on average, does it take you to do a single issue?

It usually takes me a week to draw a final page, but if you factor in the writing process, as well as all the commercial illustration work I do, it can take up to a year for me to complete an issue.

A lot of press compares your writing to 1970s American film and fiction, especially the "realism" of Raymond Carver. Are they acknowledged influences?

A lot of people don't believe me when I tell them this, but here's my story about Raymond Carver. When I started drawing Optic Nerve, I had never even heard of him. After several issues, I started getting letters from people saying that they could see his influence on me. Eventually, my older brother told me more about Carver and recommended one of his collections to me. Of course, when I read his work I instantly fell in love with it, and I'm sure it had a big impact on me, but I think I was already heading in a certain direction before I read him, and his work just reinforced that.

-- Adrian Tomine interviewed by Andrew Duncan

Guitar, heroes

Robert Fripp's God Save the Queen / Under Heavy Manners. I used to own this on vinyl: it has never been released on CD. But someone has been good enough to rip and post it on YouTube. It's still wonderful: unsentimental and surprising. Re-issue it, Mr Fripp, and I can stack it dustily alongside The League of Gentlemen, The Equatorial Stars, No Pussyfooting and Evening Star. I still have Exposure somewhere which I bought on cassette from the Virgin Megastore in Oxford Street for about £2.99 back in 1979 when home taping was killing music but my only player is in the car.

The last album I bought on iTunes didn't sync to my phone because a prior software upgrade sneakily toggled off automatic downloads for purchases. I could have streamed it at whatever rate my carrier charges for data but that would be about as practical as having it on cassette.

Your dad's data.

Speaking of dads: the Frank Miller Dark Knight version of Batman that kids wanted to see in 1986 has finally made it to theatres in the form of Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: dark, gritty, paunchy, heavy hangs the crown sort of thing. Alas the kids in 2016 want bright and sociable superheroes who just get along, which is why TV's Supergirl is owning it.

Death in Venice

For people like me who watched Flaked and wondered what was going on Hollywood Reporter critic Daniel Fienberg does a good job of breaking it down. TV's stream-and-binge zeitgeist is challenging writers and directors and the results while far from consistent interest me more than movies because the results are far from consistent. Flaked failed on a number of levels -- there were just plain gaps in it -- but the first five episodes were watchable because they weren't going anywhere. Remember when stories dawdled? Some of the best tales of the modern everyday are in the comics of Adrian Tomine.

Before the morning comes, the story's told

JESSE PEARSON: I've heard a lot of writers say that sometimes novels take on a life of their own, and I've heard other writers say that that's just bullshit and that doesn't happen and you're always in control.

PETE DEXTER: It's not bullshit. I don't ever feel like I'm in control.

JP: I love that thought, but I'm trying to understand how it works.

PD: It's like you're writing and you get to a place or an event and you sit back and think about who the guy is and how he reacts to it. You don't know what that reaction is going to be until you actually think about the guy, put yourself in the guy, and then think about the circumstance. And then you see, and the choice he makes there leads to all his other choices. In that way, it's kind of like life. Now, the opposite of this is these guys who plot their books in the beginning. I couldn't write a book like that. It would bore me to death. This is a problem in screenwriting too.

JP: That's been made into this weird algebraic thing, where it's like, "Three minutes in, this has to happen. Twenty-seven minutes in, this has to happen."

PD: You get 12 guys around a table, eight of whom are afraid that they're losing their jobs, and they're looking at a script and they start doing what you're talking about. "There's got to be more x, y, or z here." They want to plug all these things in even though they don't fit, and that's why you see so many movies that look like other movies.

JP: Right.

PD: Because eight guys are worried about losing their jobs. But I've got no idea how you'd maintain any kind of spontaneity, even within the personalities of the characters, if you had the whole thing plotted out ahead of time. If it's any kind of a story at all, it grows as you write it. The characters grow in ways that I can't possibly anticipate at the beginning of things. As well as I know the story of my stepdad and me, if you'd asked me four years ago, before this book really got going, what it would be about and I had to guess, I promise you that three-fourths of the stuff I guessed would be wrong.

JP: So you have to let the narrative guide you as you write it.

PD: If you can anticipate to the end in any way beyond, you know, the feeling, then I think you're kind of cheating yourself as a writer. Things happen that ought to be allowed to happen.

JP: It also seems more courageous and maybe pure to write like that.

PD: To me, it's more economical. When you follow the story, as opposed to leading it, you're less likely to make huge mistakes. You used a good word when you said "pure" because, if you follow the story, the things that you write will be purely of the story and of the characters. Even if today you look at yesterday's work and can't use it, there are still going to be things in there—if you followed the rules—that are useful to you.

-- Pete Dexter interviewed by Jesse Pearson for Vice, 2009

Play

(Eyes Wide Shut, Amanda Warner AKA MNDR, The Cage / Nona Hendryx)