Update

I disagree with rewriting an author's work for any reason, let alone for the kids. If you're offended by a book, don't read it. The virtue of the printed word is that it's one of the few cultural objects you can avoid easily (good luck getting that shit off your phone). Don't update movies, either. Han shoots first.

Art should always be seen in context. There's a critical fantasy that Great Works (written, painted, whatever – yawn) are universal and transcend cultural boundaries and The Times In Which We Live. This is BS: all creativity is moored in the moment. An idea begins to age from the second it's expressed. The contemporary aspect of art is the audience: it's the reader's experience that brings a book alive.

On a more prosaic level, the task of updating said works would be endless. Removing the racist parts of the James Bond novels would shorten them to almost nothing. Fleming's stories are the jet-age flameout of Kipling and H Rider Haggard. They were old-fashioned before the ink dried. Want a new Bond or Wonka? Go make one. That's what the living writers are for.

74

Party Down is the great I-told-you-so show: turned down by everyone, mishandled and dropped after two series by the network that did pick it up, and now fairly regarded as a classic. Co-creator and show runner John Enbom recalls making the pitch:

"One of the problems we’d been encountering was every executive that we’d be pitching would fill in their version of what the show was. We had such a specific idea for how the characters would be, what the tone of the show was, what it would feel like. And we felt like everywhere we pitched it, they would either like it or dislike it for reasons that were completely unrelated to what we thought it was."

Alan Siegel at The Ringer has compiled an oral history of the show.

Cast member Jane Lynch told The Hollywood Reporter why the series never got its due:

"It was around the time of The Office and Parks and Rec, even though that was later than us, and it was a workplace comedy with really good actors. It might have been because Starz was so new, maybe Starz didn't know what to do with it. I don't think we got bad reviews, I think we just didn't get reviews at all; I think 74 people watched it or something like that."

Party Down is back for a six-part revival. No Lizzy Caplan but as Ryan Hansen put it, "in 12 years, people are going to love Season 3."

Reading, watching, listening

Pro Bono – Seicho Matsumoto (Kodansha USA)

While in Australia I picked up a copy of Matsumoto's Points and Lines reissued now as the more romantic and literary sounding Tokyo Express (Penguin Classics, 2022) with a matte cover of a woman staring out a train window. The 1970 Kodansha International edition – glossy paperback, man in a raincoat – puts the map of Japan at the front of the novel because it's crime; the new edition puts it at the back because it's literature. The 1970 version is correct: a non-Japanese reader requires the map because geography is crucial to the plot. Practicalities aside, do new readers require such framing to appreciate this classic novel? Matsumoto and his contemporaries are well-constructed and good reads – anyone can enjoy. Fedoras off, as always, to the translators. (Pro Bono is translated by Andrew Clare.)

Also re-reading old Delacorta novels, Stanton Samenow's Inside the Criminal Mind, James Bridle's The New Dark Age. 

Poker Face

Liking this very much. Episode two written by Alice Ju was just superb. The series is a homage to 1970s Saturday night mysteries with the same strengths and weaknesses – it tapers off as it goes on, and Charlie's psychic ability causes plot problems, but it's a hell of a lot of fun. Writers for Columbo described that show as one of the most challenging gigs of its day. Creators Richard Levinson and William Link speak about it in depth here. Note that the show's format upset studio executives terribly – they could have noted it to to death – yet audiences didn't seem to mind.

Recently added

Phone says Miles Davis (Agharta), Maribou State, Two Lanes, Harmonia, Westend.

Pattern

"I was invading public space with a mosaic of a small character whose role is to invade ... I had found my thing, like the great artists who found their style": Catherine Porter profiles French street artist Invader for The New York Times (soft paywall) this month, 2023. 

In 2013 Invader was the illustrator (see above) of my Kurt Cobain piece for Mythiq27, an art and literature project about the legendary "club" of artists who died aged 27, curated and edited by Jann Suty.

Previously graffiti and street art were central to my 2009 novel The Church of John Coltrane (Editions Christian Bourgois, translation by Isabelle Chapman). Jann's project tied it all together.

Flesh + blood

Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window is to Blue Hotel what Sunset Boulevard was to Shirker. Shirker was narrated by a dead man; Blue Hotel is about a portrait that comes alive.

Girish Shambu writes about the 1944 noir classic here:

"Returning to the portrait of the woman in the window later in the evening, now augmented by a few drinks, [Edward G Robinson as Wanley] finds a second image alongside the picture: the ghostly reflection of Alice (Joan Bennett) standing next to him. Lang renders this shot in such a moody, hallucinatory manner that it is easy to believe that this is less a woman of flesh and blood than an apparition. Wanley himself does an incredulous double take, signaling that even he believes it’s a dream."

Ben Sachs discusses how its protagonist's fateful romanticism nudges the film's internal reality:

"[Wanley's] one refuge is his imagination, which the film expresses, eloquently, through his boyish fascination with that silly portrait. He suggests one of the archetypal moviegoers—the single urban professional who showed up for every new pulpy entertainment because that’s what you did when you lived alone in a city. How appropriate that The Woman in the Window—which superficially resembles dozens, if not hundreds of other low-budget noirs in its stark look—should be his nightmare."

Now playing: Your plan renewed

1. Bubble Tea and Cigarettes – 'Santa Monica'
2. Westend – 'The White Lotus' (Westend Edit)
3. French 79 – 'Angel'
4. Slove – 'Ce soir je m'en vais' (Dombrance Remix)
5. Maribou State feat. Khruangbin - 'Feel Good' (Khruangbin's A Well Nice Version)

At the tone, leave your name and message

Rian Johnson's Columbo / Rockford Files remix Poker Face sounds like a great show not least of all for people who've already forgotten Jessica Jones. (I still think Marc Ruffalo's performance as Dave Toschi in Zodiac was a Columbo riff.) I grew up with Columbo and the Saturday night murder mysteries which I loved more than Sherlock Holmes. The Rockford Files title sequence still gives me a thrill. I'm only half-joking when I say Stephen J Cannell's personal credit animation inspired me to be a writer. I seriously got back into Columbo in London in 2010 when its gags seemed fresh all over again. Nothing says "murder mystery" like victim reflected in the killer's sunglasses. 

Other sounds

There will be a Tron 3, so now is a good time to revisit the Daft Punk soundtrack for Tron: Legacy. In the beginning the band received a helping hand from Thomas Bangalter's father, the much-sampled French disco musician Daniel Vangarde:

"When the band started they were in their 20s, so I helped and advised them so that they got total artistic and financial freedom and stayed owners of everything they do. And I'm glad because I think there's too much interference between the time an artist thinks of a project and when it's distributed: it arrives distorted. One of the reasons for Daft Punk's success is that they did exactly what they wanted and it came to the public exactly, unfiltered, from their minds."

The score for the original Tron was by Wendy Carlos, something which seems even more remarkable now. In a 1983 interview with Randall D. Larson, Carlos said the use of synthesised music in film scoring was long overdue:

"Maybe in about five or ten years it'll be very common to see this sort of thing done. It's just a question of time before people develop the same habits and techniques that I've been trying to work on all these years – to know how to use a synthesizer as more than just something that somebody comes in with a little Prophet-5 and sits down and plays a solo line while you're recording the rest of the orchestra – it ain't that, that's for sure, any more than having a bass drum and cymbal in the orchestra and considering it a percussion section. It's only one small tip of the iceberg, of what will become a very exciting family of the orchestra. That's what the percussion section became about a hundred years ago; woodwinds and brass continued to be modified over the years until they've reached a state of development where they don't know how to carry them much beyond that, and now we've going to do the same thing with the electronics. I feel like I'm just part of the growing pains necessary to make the electronic medium be as legitimate a family member of the orchestra as any of the other sounds."

Fame

Lisa Marie Presley's rented mansion:

'In early 2021, Presley sold the Calabasas home where her son shot himself, in a $2 million off-market deal, and moved to a rented mansion in a guard-gated enclave on the semi-remote outer edge of Calabasas. It was here that emergency services were sent after her housekeeper found her unresponsive.'

Nikki Finke's salutary advice to reporters:

“I was saying that I had gotten this great tip and that I had a really reputable first source but not a second,” Ms. Kuczynski said. “And she basically said you call five people, plant a seed in their brain and wait a day for someone else to have heard it.”

John Cale on music and his career:

'I'm sure I could've made things easier for myself, made more money or whatever, but that's not very interesting to me. It's about finding something new at every turn, if you can. I don't see the point of doing something for the sake of ease. That's not for me. I don't necessarily start out with the intention of being contrary, or "challenging," as you put it. I do have to admit I seem to end up there more often than not.'

Watching and reading

The entertainment of Nicolas Winding Refn movies is watching him get away with it. Copenhagen Cowboy is shaping up like the girl who fell to Earth; it also puts me in mind of Leo P Kelley's novel The Earth Tripper. I like seeing someone just do their thing. Steven Soderbergh enjoys similar agency. Both directors hire composer Cliff Martinez for their soundtracks.

Mary Gaitskill's Veronica is the best novel I read last year. I've stalled on Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger although parts of it are excellent. I finally tracked down a paperback edition of Seicho Matsumoto's Points and Lines.

Articles I read include Conan O'Brien on The Simpsons' Monorail episode; Mia Sato and James Vincent on AI flooding Google's search algorithm; Jada Jones on Sony's new Walkman; and Phillips P OBrien on rethinking 20th century views of Russian military power.

Solid State Survivor

Killing Twitter made me late to the news about romance novelist Susan Meachen faking her death. I touched on this in an essay for The Spinoff last year: if you are an author, dying is a pretty good move. I feel very cut up about the passing of Yukihiro Takahashi.

Echoes in the building

It's summer in New Zealand and I spent it updating a new digital edition of The Church of John Coltrane. Going back to my previously published work is strange. I fought the temptation to make changes – Han still shoots first – but there were also errors to catch. I see the overlap with other things I've written. I consciously borrowed elements from this novel for Blue Hotel including the drowning disappearance and the mysterious building. (Hardly anyone read Coltrane in English, so I figured why not? Ah, the irony...) But there are also things I return to in my fiction and I see where they come from. In the old days unpacking an author's themes and imagery was the task of interviewers and careful critics. Now writers handle their own luggage.

I had a brother who drowned. I was his replacement: if he hadn't died I wouldn't be here. He would have been about three years older than me; in our infant photos we look identical. My family including my older siblings never discussed his death but his name came up constantly. He was present only in people's minds. As a result I grew up with the feeling that there was always something going on that people weren't telling me (there was) and that there was another life there somewhere – both an alternative existence, and a life that was part of me. (I always loved Philip K Dick's novels, and it struck me very hard to learn later in life that he had a twin sister who died. I wonder if that's what I see in his work.) I also have powerful memories of childhood when I wasn't there, which does not help moor one's psyche. (I don't believe in reincarnation; I do believe not talking about stuff like this really fucks people up.)

I see this experience surfacing in my fiction now: the paranoia, the divergent / parallel realities, the doppelgängers, the blondes (my brother and I were both fair-haired), the amateur detective who does a lot of careful questioning. I write a lot about the unreliability of recording media: tape and computers and film (it was a big part of Departure Lounge). I'm also very comfortable with an open-ended mystery because my experience of loss is that it's not resolved: it's the experience of it which is the magnet.

Anyway.

These elements are at the forefront of The Church of John Coltrane. The novel was first published by Editions Christian Bourgois in 2009, by Christian Bourgois and Dominique Bourgois, who along with Mathieu and Caroline were a lot of fun in Paris, and as publishers showed faith in me as as a writer – I really hold on to that. The original translation was by Isabelle Chapman, who along with Alain De Kim was also fun in Paris, and, ditto, have supported me greatly over time. There is a lot of wanderlust in this novel, and after I finished it I fucked off to London for several years, which may or may not have been a mistake. Blue Hotel brings a lot of this stuff home and I had plans for a sequel that took things out wider again. Who knows where that will end up. Anyway, The Church of John Coltrane is out there now, again: published and buried.

Twilight of the supermodels

So long Tatjana Patitz. Social media is shaping up as a slow goodbye to celebrities and artists who are about my age. Famous people can die at any time, of course – there are plenty who kicked off at twenty-something and just as many who were in the ground before I discovered but never met them. But, still.

When I was a student flatting in a Grafton basement I would leave Italian Vogue lying around open as an aesthetic pick-me-up. Although I lived a weatherboard wall away from the communal wringer washing machine it was good to know that out there someone (probably Fabien Baron) was obsessing over a new tone of blackish grey-black. Fashion magazines themselves were an objet: not art but something that lingered more than mere entertainment. All gone now.

Anyway.

We now return you to your scheduled programme.

Now playing

1. Moonface - 'City Wrecker'
2. Tangerine Dream - 'Guido The Killer Pimp'
3. Le Boom / Innocent Chap Sounds - 'Friday Night (feat AE MAK) - Bang Bang Radio Edit'
4. Triathalon - 'It's You'
5. Disko Knights - ' Groovemasta - Are You Ready To Go'

Profiles

Two great profiles:

Iggy Pop interviewed by David Marchese:

"There was a certain period when I had a mixture of frustration and it turned to anger, and as it turned to anger, the anger — once you give in to that then you’re not yourself anymore. Just like you’ve got to work on your music, you’ve got to work on yourself too. I don’t get a gold medal for anything, but I never gave up on making art. Never gave up that — one bit."

Matt Zoller Seitz on Barbara Walters:

'The late 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer once told me that he thought Walters was one of the most effective interviewers on television because “somehow, after all this time, they never see her coming.”'

Unplugged

The Greta Thunberg vs whatshisname spat seems like the right note to end the year on: teenage girl sass trumping a wealthy man most of us would otherwise not know and who is subsequently arrested having unwittingly exposed himself to the panopticon that is modern police surveillance. The moral is that we are all very tired, and the endgames are obvious, and the internet is a pointless waste of time with terrible real-world consequences but also funny but also not funny, and we are all very tired. Can we continue like this? No. Sarah Frier thinks now is the time we get out of the pool:

"This year, social media mostly stopped offering a window into the lives of our loved ones. It turns out that the social part of social media, which helped shape human behavior online and off for more than a decade, is proving to be something of a fad. It's withering in the sad, slow way that internet habits do; eventually, the people who send public birthday messages on Facebook will be as rare as the ones who still have AOL email addresses.

"In 2022, even the social media companies gave up on salvaging friend-related content. The networks rely on having enough in people's feeds to keep them entertained during a scroll, so they can slot in ads between every few posts and make money. And there just isn't much of that personal posting happening anymore."

Full article is here.

Automatic writing, in fact

NME's Ian MacDonald on how Brian Eno constructed his second solo album Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy:

Back home in London, Eno began to go through hundreds of taped fragments he'd amassed over the previous ten years.

"I called up Phil (Manzanera) and asked him over to help. What actually happened was that I'd have loads of little bits and pieces lying around which I'd give to him to work out what key they were in, etc., and then he'd come back to me and say 'Well, this bit might fit onto the end of that bit', you know? He helped a lot by plastering it together - and also by co-writing 'The True Wheel' which contains the fragment about The 801.

"As soon as I'd made up the shape of the song, I made a plan of it on paper, sketching out all the spaces where I wanted words, and began running through it, just singing whatever came into my head. And every time I hit on a phrase I liked, I'd write it down in its particular place in the framework.

"And gradually I'd arrive at a kind of 'found' document made up of half-obscured fragments -and all I then had to do was fill in the blanks by reconstructing what I thought each lyric was about. Automatic writing, in fact."

Full article is here.

Live with us in forests of azure

I'm ageing out of IP. I'm more interested reading about the frame rate technology of Avatar than seeing the sequel. Marvel is homework. I can only concentrate on so much TV. I hate being told what to read. My favourite writers are dead or impossible to find. Ditto music. (Exclusive to Soundcloud? I'm in.) My mental bookcase is stacked with things I either know everything about or nothing about, and nothing in between.

Killing Twitter was an end of year gift. I don't miss getting up to feed a billionaire's algorithm. Social media was never about people. The show now is watching Elon's tamagotchi turn into a ghost and a headstone. It's Survivor in real time and just as formulaic. As a kid I was hooked Sunday night wrestling – the villain cheating and always coming back. That seems to be the only storyline writers can come up with for our current reality.

Awake to violence

 

Kind of incredible that Mike Hodges directed Get Carter and Flash Gordon *and* The Terminal Man. A director could build a career on any one of those. I doubt most people could name him. They'd recognise the titles of the first two.

The Terminal Man is from that precious gasp when sci-fi hovered between desirable and horror (Rollerball, Logan's Run, Bladerunner) – when what we'd kill for would kill us. Hodges understood the dream moment, and the moment of waking. People are rousted from their slumbers, or worse. It's a bad sign when the Goldberg Variations kick in.

To file Flash Gordon under 'camp' belies its potency. It's balls-out Italian cinema – Giallo sci-fi. Think Blood and Black Lace in space. And as with Mario Bava (and Dario Argento), when there's that much blood and sex on screen nobody cares if you can see the wires.

Get Carter likewise is not really dad viewing. It's a nasty little film. From dropping black ball speed on the train to Michael Caine looming over patrons in the real-life chiaroscuro Newcastle pub to the shootout in a literal slag-heap, there is never a fun moment. It takes real skill to rub a viewer's nose in that without making them look away.

Flip the page

I'm participating in the Smashwords end of year sale so a number of my short stories and novels are available at discount over the next few weeks, including my new short stories Dream Machine Winona and Invisible (see previous post).

My recent experience of having my seventh novel Blue Hotel published commercially highlighted how ebooks are now firmly part of the reading experience. Because the paperback edition of the novel is only available to order online many people elect to buy the digital version – some have told me they even prefer it. Artists adapt.

So do readers. There was an outcry when iOS 16 removed the page flip from Apple Books. Five years ago a change to a phone's UI would have been an obscure note in a tech publication. Now it's a mainstream concern.

Personally I hope Apple brings back the flip. I enjoy thumbing through a book no matter what the format. Digital distribution has brought me all manner of titles I could never find on bookstore shelves, like George Simenon's romans durs.