Confusing fucking world ain't it, man?

Robert Hooks is still amazing as the cool fixer in Trouble Man (1972): he's front-facing with a moral code, like Mike Hammer, and the plot is tight. The movie relies less on its soundtrack than writer / producer John DF Black's bookend Shaft (1971); director Ivan Dixon (he was Kinchloe on Hogan's Heroes) shoots in close-ups that keep the characters in your face while danger lurks in the real-life backgrounds. Watching it now – like Straight Time (1978) – the drama is heightened by these documentary details of nooks and crannies now erased from cities, or at least the fictionally-held versions of them. So it is a confusing fucking world, but the action cuts through it.

Recently played

1. 'If You Forget Me' – RAC featuring Liset Alea (EP, 2010)
2. 'Good Girls' – Lany (Lany, 2017)
3. 'Tune Down' – Chris Joss (Sticks, 2015)
4. 'California' – Grimes (Art Angels, 2015)
5. 'Myth' – Beach House (Bloom, 2012)
6. 'Journal of Ardency' – Class Actress (2010)
7. 'Komorebi / Mama's Wisdom' – Catching Flies (2016)
8. 'Higher Ground' – Roland Tings featuring Nylo (2017)
9. 'She's So Untouchable' – Garden City Movement (2017)
10. 'Deep Shelter' – Noveller (A Pink Sunset For No One, 2017)

The Dark Mirror

 

Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror (1946), Bette Davis in Dead Ringer (1964), Silvana Venturelli in The Lickerish Quartet (1970).

Kicks

Haywire (2011) is a farewell reminder that Steven Soderbergh is the guy who made Sex, Lies And Videotape (fuck, 1989...): uneven, impulsive, contrary, but there's definitely something good going on. The experiment doesn't yield the expected results but experiments in art maybe shouldn't. Gina Carano was cast for her fight skills like Roddy Piper in John Carpenter's They Live (1988) and has charm enough to get by in the talking bits (she's a lot better than Channing Tatum). Her success in the role got her Fast & Furious 6 (2013), which cineastes will recall is the one with the tank. Haywire feels like a Bourne riposte but Soderbergh says it's his James Bond/Harry Palmer movie. Like The Ipcress File and Horse Under Water it's a find-who-it-is plot, more 'look out behind you' than a Le Carre. The story and accompanying performances are cool to the point of stasis – you wonder if the director was even interested – but because Carano really can fight she runs hot.

Recently played

1. 'August Twelve' – Khruangbin (The Universe Smiles Upon You, 2015)
2. 'Sad Sack' – Bo Diddley (Bo Diddley, 1962)
3. 'Africa Talks to You' – Sly and the Family Stone (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
4. 'Make 'Em Move' – Sly & Robbie (Language Barrier, 1985)
5. 'Changing of the Seasons' – Two Door Cinema Club (Beacon, 2012)
6. 'Etre assis ou danser' – Liaisons Dangereuses (Liaisons Dangereuses, 1981)
7. 'The End' – PJ Harvey (Uh Huh Her, 2004)
8. 'Colour of Water' – Rose Elinor Dougall (Stellular, 2016)
9. 'Undertow' – Warpaint (The Fool, 2010)
10. 'Highway Patrol Stun Gun' – Youth Lagoon (Savage Hills Ballroom, 2015)
11. 'Line of Fire' – Junip (Junip, 2013)

Springtime for noir

8 Million Ways to Die (1986) directed by Hal Hartley from a script by Oliver Stone and R. Lance Hill, based on the book by Lawrence Block, with Jeff Bridges as Matthew Scudder. The real murderer was the studio but the movie is a beautiful corpse.

It was one of three noirs for The Dude alongside Taylor Hackford's Out of the Past remake Against All Odds (1984) and Sidney Lumet's The Morning After (1986). Lumet's did-she-do-it started out gripping and bloody (the wardrobe!) set in a realistic sunburned LA we hadn't seen before until the plot became melodramatic and the deadly Alex Sternbergen turned out to be Jane Fonda all along.

Hackford's upgrade of Jacques Tourneur's 1947 noir likewise ripples with smug potential. Bridges' Terry is a born victim and the sleaze casting is off the scale: James Woods and Richard Widmark alongside Saul Rubinek (get the way he says "fuck off") and the always disenfranchised Dorian Harewood. The new script recast Jane Greer's femme fatale as a spoiled girl which disempowered the character and robbed the story of its bitter center but Rachel Ward's replicant allure is a counterpoint to the sordidness: by end frame you want to go back and watch the movie again just in case things turn out better next time.

Also in 1986 was John Frankenheimer's 52 Pick-Up, the best Elmore Leonard dramatisation short of Get Shorty. Roy Scheider and Ann-Margret are the real thing, John Glover is a nasty piece of work and Clarence Williams III is the end of times. Grainy stock, fast cars and big guns, no CGI: it was an unhappier time.

Recently played

1. Texada – Blue (2016)
2. Electric Youth – Innerworld (Deluxe) (2014)
3. Lloyd Cole / Hans-Joachim Roedelius – Selected Studies, Vol. 1 (2013)
4. Jon Hassell – Aka / Darbari / Java: Magic Realism (1983)
5. Nite Jewel – Liquid Cool Remixes EP (2016)

Recently played

1. 'Los Angeles' – The Bird And The Bee (Recreational Love, 2015)
2. 'Here in Heaven 4 & 5' (CFCF remix) – Elite Gymnastics (Ruin 3, 2012)
3. 'Zionsville' – Khuangbin  (The Universe Smiles Upon You, 2015)
4. 'Falling' – Haim (Days Are Gone, 2013)
5. 'Formation' - Beyoncé (Lemonade, 2016)
6. 'Excuses' - Mount Saint (Mount Saint EP, 2015)
7. 'Hard to Find' – The National (Trouble Will Find Me, 2013)
8. 'Somebody Else' – The 1975 (I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it, 2016)
9. 'Work' - Rihanna (Anti, 2016)
10. 'Main Street' - Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band (Night Moves, 1976)
11. 'Empty' - Garbage (Strange Little Birds, 2016)
12. 'Gardenia' – Iggy Pop (Post Pop Depression, 2016)
13. 'Sarah' – Alex G (Trick, 2015) 
14. 'Hands in the Dark' (unreleased 12" version) – Chromatics (2016)
15. 'Driving Me Wild' – Bryan Ferry (Avonmore, 2014)
16. 'City Wrecker' – Moonface (2014)

Gesamtkunstwerk

On the beach

White rabbit

Fred Topel: How do you make a genre film your own?

David Mamet: Well, you can't help but make a distinct movie. If you give yourself up to the form, it's going to be distinctively your own because the form's going to tell you what's needed. That's one of the great things I find about working in drama is you're always learning from the form. You're always getting humbled by it. It's exactly like analyzing a dream. You're trying to analyze your dreams. You say, 'I know what that means; I know exactly what that means; why am I still unsettled?' You say, 'Let me look a little harder at this little thing over here. But that's not important; that's not important; that's not important. The part where I kill the monster – that's the important part, and I know that means my father this and da da da da da. But what about this little part over here about the bunny rabbit? Why is the bunny rabbit hopping across the thing? Oh, that's not important; that's not important.' Making up a drama is almost exactly analogous to analyzing your dreams. That understanding that you cleanse just like the heroes cleanse not from your ability to manipulate the material but from your ability to understand the material. It's really humbling, just like when you finally have to look at what that little bunny means. There's a reason why your mind didn't want to see that. There's a reason why you say, 'Oh, that's just interstitial material. Fuck that. That's nothing, right?' Because that's always where the truth lies, it's going to tell you how to reformulate the puzzle.

– David Mamet interviewed by Fred Topel for Diary of a Screenwriter

Interstitial

Reproductive cycle

Watching Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World (1951). Above: Dr. Carrington attempts to communicate with the monster, with disastrous results; below, in Prometheus (2012), Weyland attempts to communicate with the Engineer, which also ends badly. The Hawks-produced movie based on John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? (1938) is directed by Edward Lasker, or not, depending on who you read. It feels like a Hawks: rammed with characters and jibber-jabber to unintentionally comic effect. There are no close-ups, not even of the alien's disembodied hand which becomes reanimated after it's severed, the surrounding observers (nearly all talking roles) clustered like a Rembrandt:

The movie is more of a western than a sci-fi or horror. The Antarctic base looks like a homestead, there's a posse and a Rio Bravo-like siege. Captain Hendry and his airmen are all guts and thumbs. They use thermite to excavate the frozen spacecraft ("A million years of history are waiting for us in that ice!") which causes it to explode ("Well that's just dandy!"). They attack the alien with kerosene ("Here's where we start cooking!") and set fire to the hut. Hendry opens the door on the thing, closes it fast and everyone shoots at it forgetting they also have men posted on the other side of the wall ("Bob, next time raise the sights a little!"). The movie's Cold War message is not so much clear as embedded: alien invasion or not, our planet is not in good hands.

In between the yammering are the sequences that will inspire the original Alien and John Carpenter's 1982 remake, including a spooky corridor showdown that becomes genuinely dire when Dr Carrington tries to talk the monster down. (Goatee and significantly Russian-looking hat = doomed.) All three movies – the two Things and Alien – take inspiration from HP Lovecraft's equally disastrous trip to the ice At The Mountains of Madness (1931). But how funny to see Ridley Scott's Prometheus in it.

If you close the door the night could last forever

I can pick 'em. Netflix has announced it will cancel Bloodline after season three. Bloodline was easily the best thing Netflix has produced but after seeing what happened to House of Cards maybe it's best to stop at the Ewoks. The show's creators say they had a plan for five or six seasons. Josef Adalian at NYMag says it's a sign that Netflix is changing and that the show cost '$70 million to $85 million for a 10-episode season'. I wonder if the big cost had something to do with Florida's film incentives program. (Netflix says it will film the final series without incentives.)

Adalian rubs salt in the wound by going on to describe Bloodline as a 'slow burn' that did not generate a rapturous response. Boo. Slow was the point. Even when it stretched (serial TV is hard and 10 is somehow not a graceful number) the plot was a solid modern noir against a sunny tourist backdrop. It was wrong things happening in the right place: everything was fucked. And tight: this was no 28-episode Danish thing that strung you along with mood. This was story.

Maybe it's better this way. If noir was mainstream happy-clappy stuff it wouldn't be noir. Because for all its gloss Bloodline was about the underbelly and people doing wrong, and if there was a popular audience for that we'd all be stuck with Suicide Squad. Narcos, another supposedly 'dark' Netflix series is supposedly about the bad stuff but it's clear which side the audience is meant to be on. That makes Narcos watchable and renewable for more seasons but it'll never be as fulfilling. Bloodline is genuinely twisted and that's a good thing.

Drama

Close to You which I wrote for Radio New Zealand in 2015 has been nominated for Best Drama in the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) Prizes 2016.

The cast of Close to You is John Wraight, Victoria Gillespie, Rebecca Gumley, Francesca Emms, Mark Atkin, AJ Murtagh, Sebastian Macaulay and Nina Smith. Produced and directed by Adam Macaulay. Recording and sound design by Marc Chesterman. Production assistance and location management by Francesca Emms.

You can stream the production here.

The short story on which the drama is based first appeared in the Listener and is available as part of the collection Here She Comes Now on Kindle, Smashwords amd iTunes.

Misc

Tell me your troubles and doubts

Elliott Chaze's stomping 1953 noir classic Black Wings Has My Angel is available in a new edition from New York Review Books. If you dream of becoming a writer the introduction by Barry Gifford will set you straight.

Chaze was a fairly large man, seventy-two years old when I met him. He was cranky, bitter about having been mostly ignored as a serious writer but making attempts throughout our visit to pretend he didn't really care.

That's one of the brighter bits. But the novel sings. Go buy it. Chaze is very dead so he'll never know it's being rediscovered but that shouldn't deny you the pleasure.

Live it up 'til we crash and there's smoke in the air

If you want to know where technology is headed, imagine your worst fears and double it. So for me that would be the death of hi-fi and having to write fiction on a touchscreen app*. (You're welcome.) But using Dropbox to scan documents as PDFs is my new favourite thing. All those scrawled manuscript pages with their arrows and diagonal slash marks (one slash for moved, two for deleted), their numbered sections (I write 1, 5, 3, 2, 4 in that order. Don't know why), their vertical squiggly lines (vertical in margin = too busy to deal with this now but srsly who wrote this and what were they thinking? Who?) and ticks (ink = updated in ms; pencil in lower right corner = updated in digital ms, discard this page), their diagrams (always the same four transparent boxes with only the beginning of a name in one) are now preserved forever in the cloud until the power cuts and our digital footprint is deleted forever. I used to think it was important to keep things. Now I think it's important to throw them away.

Pic: Thuy An Luu as Alba in Jean-Jacques Beineix's film of Delacorta's Diva (1981). How short life must be if something so fragile can last a lifetime.

*Update. Hell froze. I've been tapping away on my iPad screen to convert my previously published short stories into ebooks which are available at Amazon and Smashwords. Word 2019 on a touchscreen is a revelation. Still working on getting the novels in digital. And on getting the new new novel finished. Developing...

Shut the door, baby

Simon Reynolds: You mentioned the street edge to Suicide, but there's two sides to the songs—on the one hand things like "Frankie Teardrop" or "Harlem" are apocalyptic, and then there are Suicide songs that are almost religious, with hymnal, trance-inducing melodies and this devotional aura of tenderness and grace. Do you have religious or mystical feelings?

Alan Vega: I guess I do. I don't subscribe to any particular religion but, to me, there is some power out there. One day I did have this religious experience—I was staying in this brilliant art critic's home for three months, and I found a 90-page pamphlet on infinity written by this college professor and started reading it. I wasn't stoned or anything, but I suddenly saw those two parallel lines that start out at infinity and meet. I got a picture of the universe and understood what infinity was for one-tenth of a second. And then it was gone. I tried to hold on to it, but it dissolved. I put the book away and then, a day or two later, I wanted to read it again. I looked all over, but it had gone. It was like the book never existed.

-- Simon Reynolds' interview with Alan Vega is one of the best you could read. It's at Pitchfork.com.

You're talking about memories

I wanted to find a passage I remembered from a novel I'd read in 1993. I had the book -- first edition, hardbound. I got it down from the shelf and flicked through it for a good 10 minutes but couldn't find the passage. But I could remember a phrase from it, and I had a copy of the book as an epub. So I opened the epub on my Nook, searched for the phrase and found the passage in seconds.

Digital beats paper.

Later that week I wanted to find a newspaper article about a person which I had saved as a PDF but I couldn't remember the person's name. After searching my laptop for every related phrase I could think of I looked in the Moleskine I've kept since 2010, in the last pages where I always put names, and found the person, and was able to locate the article on my hard drive immediately.

Paper beats digital.