The sound is deep in the dark

Harald Sohlberg, Fisherman’s Cottage (1906); Beate Bartel, photograph by Wolfgang Burat, (1981); Battlezone, Atari (1980)

Goodbye computer

Hell froze: I'm writing and editing on an iPad. No external keyboard, MS Word, backing up to the cloud. It's better than good. I can type without keys and delete a line with a finger swipe. Key sounds are on. Accuracy is close to that of a mechanical keyboard. Apple's iOS 12 has a personality but it's solid, like Mac OS 9. The available screen area in landscape mode is about the same as my old Macintosh Plus. And Word 365 for iOS is Word minus the crap – like getting back Word 5.1a. I might even start liking it. I write mostly in 1Writer but Apple's Pages on touch screen is a revelation: reliable, clicky-feeling, substantial. On a desktop the material design interface feels overly user-friendly but on the Picard-sized device – I bought the iPad 6, Wi-Fi, 128 gb – Pages rocks.

The experience is not unlike using a typewriter again. The format forces me to concentrate on the few lines that are on screen at any time. With only one app running there are no distractions. I do use the split screen feature with Notes. I back up and cut and paste from earlier drafts on iCloud and Dropbox. The workflow requires me to remember where I've put things but that's okay. (Digital work has taught me the habit of keeping fewer folders with more files in each.) I considered getting an external keypad but then the iPad would become a second laptop and I don't need a second laptop, I just need a digital notepad so I don't have to write text twice. There are no any social media apps on it and Facetime has never been enabled. All that's on my phone. My iPad's just for writing. Who woulda thunk? Goodbye computer.

All our yesterdays

The Trek mirror universe is a mire of options. Critics say Star Trek Discovery doesn't know where it's going but Next Generation took five seasons to settle and Enterprise never took off. It's a voyage.

Discovery's Short Treks are the series unburdened by expectations – tone poems circling an established mythology. In other words, they're the Ronald D Moore reboot of Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), alternately sassy, sentimental and funny. They hew to the rule that science fiction is pretty much like now except for one small difference, whereas Millennial Trek runs around trying to be everything to everyone. The narrow focus of the Short Treks is better sci-fi. More, please. Less.

Dime Detective

#HerIndoors

Emily Browning plays the narrative device in Legend not because Frances Shea's role in the story of the Krays adds new perspective so much as Goodfellas is the only gangster movie distributors have ever seen. Tom Hardy plays Reggie and Ron stiffly when they are in the same shot and thrillingly when they are not; the mid-movie dust-up between Tom and Tom is compelling because director-writer Brian Helgeland has made the twins different people rather than the Kemp brothers playing the same bloke. The characterisation lifts Legend above Soho-innit predecessors like Scandal (Shadows track / Morris Oxford / disappointing cameo) if not the period clutter (that's a real cup of tea that is). Knox Harrington looks old. Dr Who looks grounded.

(A barman once told me how the Kray brothers visited his parents' pub in London: 'They stole an ashtray and said, "We'll be back."')

In crowd

Recently played

1. 'Delius' – Kate Bush (Never For Ever, 1980)
2. 'Happiness Missouri' – El Vy (Return to the Moon, 2015)
3. 'Los Angeles' – The Bird and the Bee (Recreational Love, 2015)
4. 'I Feel Love' (12" version) – Donna Summer (1977)
5. 'Desperados Under The Eaves' – Warren Zevon (Warren Zevon, 1976)

Lust for life

The cliffhanger in Paterson is a gift of Japanese stationery; in the last moments of screen time we are truly rooting for Adam Driver to begin writing in it. Woe betide the artist on whom Hollywood fixes, I think Robert Hughes once said; movies about authors more so, their plots confined to writer's block and the anti-car-chase narrative of getting published. High and low – Sunset Boulevard, Betty Blue, Henry and June, The Shining, The Ghost Writer, Barton Fink – the big papery thing tied up with string is rarely more than a MacGuffin. (Special mention: the scene in Wonder Boys in which Grady Tripp rolls a new page into the typewriter, types a three-digit page number, checks the work in progress, sighs, types a fourth.)

In Paterson the story is the actual making of the work, how this image gives rise to that word and so on. The sensitive blend of poems by William Carlos Williams, Ron Padgett and director Jim Jarmusch avoids biopic artifice – no Fred Ward bashing out what you know isn't Tropic of Cancer.

Paterson is born and raised in Paterson, a rhyming origin which has destined him to become a poet. The ongoing appearance of different sets of twins in the movie signals his perception of patterns and his inspiration. The director, like Paterson's girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), paints with a trowel: the actors deliver every line like it's a eulogy. But in our age of over-decorated epics and sentimental Uber-dramas the brusqueness is refreshing. Frederick Elmes' camera finds richness and colour. Barry Shabaka Henley reminds us he can play anything. Masatoshi Nagase who brings said notebook starred in Jarmusch's Mystery Train. He is a visitor from a larger world. The director remains happily at home.

Recently played

1. 'Red Lights' – The Jack Moves (Free Money, 2018)
2. 'Street Trash' – Tobacco (Fucked Up Friends, 2008)
3. 'It is Time to Leave When Everyone is Dancing' – Tangerine Dream, (Quantum Gate, 2018)
4. 'Honey' – Robyn (Honey, 2018)
5. 'Don’t Wanna' – Washed Out (2018)

Recently played

1. 'Dreams' – Mark Tierney (2018)
2. 'Excuses' – Mount Saint (2015)
3. 'MT1 tr29r2' – Aphex Twin (2018)
4. 'Tick Tock' – Japanese Television (2018)
5. 'Out Here Under the Falling Rain' – Baby Dayliner (2018)

Recently played

1. 'Bright Air' – Sqürl (Paterson, original score, 2017)
2. 'And Then She Smiles' – A Certain Ratio (Force, 1986) 
3. 'Feel Up' – Atmosfear featuring Roisin Murphy (1999)
4. 'Open All Night' – Bruce Springsteen (Nebraska, 1982)
5. 'Highway Patrol Stun Gun' – Youth Lagoon (Savage Ballroom, 2015)

I am very busy just now, and I desire no distractions

The Alienist (2018) twists Caleb Carr's mega-selling dive into 1896 New York with a boy-murdering serial killer as our guide into a more dramatically engaging story for a narrower audience. It's exec produced for Netflix by Cary Fukunaga, director of True Detective which has some critics suggesting it's a sort-of sequel but that lightning will not be bottled again. Writing duties are shared – John Sayles is in there for three eps. Daniel Bruhl brings enormous sympathy to the Holmes-like coldness of Laszlo Kreisler, Luke Evans is as reliable as his character, John Moore – a crime journalist in the book but remade for TV as a news illustrator, a pleasing conceptual sidestep. Sara Howard is written by Carr as a strapping sort of chap but gains a more ethereal aspect in the onscreen form of Dakota Fanning. Locked in shot against detailed backdrops Daks radiates the same magnetism as Clare Foy in The Crown: it's all in the eyeballs. This is perhaps sly direction: the killer collects them.

Reveal

Judex (1963), Seconds (1966), Mission Impossible III (2006)

Are you alive?

Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Point Blank (1967), Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975)

Recently played

1. 'Cherry' (Main Fix) - Chromatics (2012)
2. 'Lost in the Plot' – The Dears (2004)
3. 'Andy’s Chest' – Lou Reed (Transformer, 1972)
4. 'Kimono' – MNDR (2015)
5. 'Loving the Alien' – David Bowie (Tonight, 1984)

Mornington Crescent

In 2005 I watched Closer (2004) five times during a direct flight from Heathrow to Auckland with one stopover in Singapore, on the screens of the seats in front of me between other passengers' headrests, no sound, and never from the beginning or through to the end. It was better that way. Patrick Marber's dialogue, adapted from His Play, is of the I-come-bearing-gifts school of flashcard repartee and benefited from the shake-up. Even after 20-plus hours in the air it was easy to see where the characters would land. All four speak like a Bond villain, Julia Roberts is less pretty than Jude Law, Natalie Portman cannot fake London chic and Clive Owen has never appeared threatening to anybody. But streaming it now Mike Nichols' vision of the pre-Brexit capital is pure nostalgia: a darker, grittier Notting Hill, pre-Facebook, safe as houses.

Increasingly, the best band in the world

Recently played

1. 'Les automates' – College (Heritage, 2013)
2. 'The Sweetest Pie' – Curve (Cuckoo, 1993)
3. 'Les Demoiselles' – Harmonia (Tracks and Traces, 1976/1997)
4. 'Coachella - Woodstock in My Mind' - Lana Del Rey (Lust for Life, 2017) 
5. 'Lady and Man' - Khruangbin (Con Todo El Mundo, 2018)

Recently played

1. 'Boyish' – Japanese Breakfast (2017)
2. 'Mirror' – Little Dragon (Nabuma Rubberband, 2014)
3. 'Headcage' – Matthew Dear (Headcage, 2011)
4. 'Warm Leatherette' – The Normal (1978)
5. 'Digitale' – Hotel (Room 102, 2018)