Precarious

Screencapping the architecture in The Night Holds Terror (1955). Any movie older than a decade is real-estate porn but the house-on-a-slope where the kidnappers hole up is doubly so, being light-filled and affordable. The balcony view of Los Angeles stretched out below in the night is echoed in so many noirs, from Get Shorty to Heat. The flickering city could represent the riches the criminals will never have or the information network that brings them down. The film's description of the technology police use to track the culprits makes it a compelling documentary. But Andrew L. Stone's noir is imbalanced. As producer, writer and director, he scores one out of three, and the story hews to real-life details fiction can't sell. 

Boolean operators

Images thrown up in the course of researching the novel this week: Caddy hearse; pulp cover model; Syd Mead visual of Deckard's kitchen; Edward Hopper cityscape.

Penthouse perfection. But what goes on? What to do there? Better pray there

The incredible Mars Perserverance touchdown is the future we looked forward to. After my previous disillusionment with Ronald D. Moore's For All Mankind – another rocky start, you could say – the show picked up and is now regular viewing. (You just know they're going to pull out Project Orion.) The pace of one episode per week is also welcome. Binge viewing is getting old and TV feels like homework: I don't have time to swot up WandaVision. On the other hand, I don't need to. Social media picks it apart for me, along with everything else.

Growing up, I soaked up science fiction and crime fiction – every pulp novel, TV series and B-movie I could get my hands on. In the landscapes of the future, computer screens were always flashing alert: klaxons, sparks, cockpits bathed in red. That part of the prediction turned out to be true. All I see on my monitor(s) now is opprobrium and judgement and panic.

Landscape landscape landscape

Months (years?) into a global pandemic lockdown, wide-open exterior shots are the new pornography but the drama is still on the inside. Good new tracks from The Weather Station, Cassandra Jenkins and the incomparable Fiona Apple.

Cache

Killing my Twitter account would be impractical but every once in a while I wipe it clean. Burn notebooks, trash early drafts, delete anything that isn't essential. Words, too: cut them.

 

Summer 2020 #nowplaying

1. Christine and the Queens – People, I've Been Sad
2. Destroyer – Cue Synthesizer
3. Ela Minus – Dominique
4. Spook feat. Roisin Murphy – Feel Up
5. Jay Electronica – The Neverending Story
6. Fiona Apple - Paper Bag
7. Haim – Summer Girl
8. Dua Lipa – Future Nostalgia (Joe Goddard remix)
9. Caribou – You and I
10. Angel Olsen – Time Bandits
11. Pantha Du Prince – Supernova Space Time Drift
12. Health – Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0
13. Car Seat Headrest - Can't Cool Me Down

Film diary

 

Interiors

 

It was so entertaining when the boogie started to explode

The closing credits for Studio 54 roll up. Where else could they go? We have all seen this before and we all know how it ends. To believe otherwise is foolish but also central to the romance of the now historical disco. Bob Colacello describes the era between the pill and AIDS as "a window". It was, but perhaps not in the way Bob thinks: less of an opening, more of an unsecured space. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager planned Studio 54 as a mainstream spectacle. The celebrities-in-a-flashgun moments captured on film and video were a smaller part of it than we thought. Matt Tyrnauer's documentary requires no narration because all participants are talking heads now: in the future, everyone will be an authority for 15 minutes. People we kind of recognise recall others we definitely don't before the virus scythes through. Even the IRS investigators who sent Rubell and Schrager to jail frame Schrager's crimes as the folly of youth. Studio 54 was a moment. The velvet rope was the finishing line.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

The Blue Dahlia (1945), Avec La Peau Des Autres (1966), Babylon Berlin (2020)

Now playing: New customer message

1. 'Lost' – Boy Harsher (2019)
2. 'The Bomb' – Vandal Moon feat. vverevvolf (2018)
3. 'Stay With Me' – Nouvelle Phenomene (2013)
4. '3NDL3SS' – Pastel Ghost (2018)
5. Minecraft mix – Alice Glass (2020)

Kraftwerk live / Jan 17 2003

Kraftwerk live / Jan 17
| Jan 18, 2003 01:05

We never heard more than three songs each from the first three bands we encountered at the Big Day Out: Pacifier because we were restless; Queens of the Stone Age because their power kept cutting out; and PJ Harvey because some prick scheduled her at the same time as Kraftwerk. Do the kids know Peej? She's been at the BDO before but her core audience is surely a little older; folks who know her before she hired the stylist and hung out with Nick and so on. She found a new audience with her Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea LP and the Flood-produced album before it, but she goes back further and it showed. She towered. She rocked like an indie chick. She sent the boys home.

Pacifier sounded flat to me although 'Home Again' lifted the crowd's spirits. After that number we bailed and went walking through the crowd, a roil of wraparounds, pheremones and sunburn. Forget drugs warnings: kids, use sunblock. People were crisped orange like tandoori chicken. Queens of the Stone Age tried to get serious but the power kept failing. Their songs are very stop / start rock opera anyway, so the stops at first seemed intentional. To duplicate modern American rock, listen to Thin Lizzy while you move your fingers in and out of your ears. Why is rock so slow? Did 'Walk this way' really change the game? It must have, I guess. Then way in the distance the aforementioned Polly came on stage with real songs, a fab little trio and her huge, knifing voice: she was great. But we had to split to catch the men from Dusseldorf.

I thought the tent would be empty but it was full and tripped out. Kids born after Kraftwerk's last album were pushing up the front to see the band. Maybe they would have crushed for anyone but it was moving. They cheered favourite numbers like 'Autobahn' and bopped to 'Expo 2000' which the band punched up to a garage beat as if to demonstrate their range. The slow melodies of 'Neon Lights' and 'Man Machine' were charming. 'Radioactivity' had been reworked to say "stop radioactivity" which got a big local cheer; 'Autobahn' finished with a graphic with a red "banned" line through it. Kraftwerk were sleek, impressive and sensitive: the audience danced and had a good time. The experience was electronic music as being something clean and futuristic instead of a dirty drug soundtrack. Electronic music has evolved into a background commodity now, like furniture. This was a band controlling the form they had originated, updating it, re-engineering it, drawing a whole new crowd into their neural net. Ralf closed his eyes and dipped to the beat. Florian has a cup holder on the side of his console. He was the first to leave the machines to play at the conclusion of 'Music Non Stop', slamming his lap lid down and leaping off stage. People went nuts. The band never acknowledged them once. 'Boing Boom Tschak' was huge. I'm glad I saw them. They were weird and distant. They were lovely.

Ralf was born in 1946; Florian in 1947. They've been through 12 lineups now and they remain interesting and strange. That's a good example for artists and writers and musicians everywhere, any time.

Now playing: Dream no small dreams

1. 'Legal Tender' – The B-52s (1983)
2. 'Sooner Than Now' – Sin Cos Tan (2012)
3. 'Red Eyes' – The War on Drugs (2014)
4. 'Paper Bag' – Fiona Apple (1999)
5. 'Kiss Them For Me' – Siouxsie And The Banshees (1991)

New short story: End of Night

End of Night is a new short story about a REM sleep-deprived entrepreneur who hires a writer to finish his dreams.

It's available at Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Smashwords (epub, mobi, lrf, pdb, html).

Now playing: New short story coming

1. 'Honest' – San Holo feat. Broods (2020)
2. 'Damn, Gravity' – JABS (2018)
3. 'Fort Greene Park' – Battles (2019)

Now playing: It is what it does

1. 'Feel The Love' – Prins Thomas (2019)
2. '6's to 9's' – Big Wild feat. Rationale (2019)
3. 'Take It In' – MorningMaxwell x Max Glyde feat. Velvet Bloom (2020)
4. 'Dream Steppin' – Two People (2019)
5. 'Magick Power' – Opal (2014)

cls

With Mindhunter s03 on ice (it's not cancelled if you leave Netflix first) Halt and Catch Fire has become my new go-to show. How did I miss it the first time around? It was billed as 'Mad Men in the PC world' which put me off but watching from the prism of 2020 the 2014 AMC series is better than Mad Men: the writing's tighter and the characters are more compelling. And I already have the songs. It's good TV.

There's a killer on the road

The Irishman is Scorsese's car movie. It's all about the vehicle. Who turns, who's behind the wheel, when they have to stop for a break, who's sitting in the back seat and why; who's waiting in it. There are threats against cars: cars are bombed and shot up, cars are pushed into the water. Even the showdown is in Detroit. The one thing Frank Sheeran says he loves is his car. He started off driving a truck, which breaks down: he complains that he can't repair them. He's a mechanic with limited skills. At the end of the road after his friend and the real fixer Russell Buffalino is literally wheeled away, Frank himself starts to break down. Post-modern reading aside, the movie is good. It's long but not epic: Scorsese's Once Upon a Time in America. Pound for pound, Vince Gilligan's El Camino was better.

Fair use

Steeple-fingered extracts from the apparently authorless Review of the Copyright Act 1994: MBIE's approach to policy development, appended:

By 'copyright works' we mean works that copyright subsists in, as opposed to the copyright itself, which transcends all of the works it subsists in. For example, you can legally own a Picasso drawing without owning copyright in the drawing. Here, the copyright work is the drawing.

Also, if you photograph the Picasso drawing, lock it in a safe and then copyright the reproduction, you will have total control over viewing the original work, which is as advantageous as owning its copyright.

Creators may form a close personal bond with their work and view it as an extension of their identity. This sentimental relationship between creator and the work is easily threatened by a lack of control over the works' use by others.

To quantify this "sentimental relationship", rip off a Rolling Stones song and count the number of zeroes in the legal settlement.

While we are mindful of the limitations of copyright policy as a means to financially support creators ... we have concluded that it would not be just or in the spirit of international human rights law to view copyright as concerned with their material interests only so far as is necessary to induce creativity that would not otherwise occur.

So as long as Walt Disney remains creatively induced to continue making movies, it's cool to torrent The Mandalorian.

Creative professionals are quoted in A profile of Creative Professionals on the fulfilment they get from their work, with one of them saying: "I love my work and feel very privileged that I can work at something I love and believe in, even if the rewards are predominantly not monetary."

Nurses and teachers also say that. And journalists. And ...