Jeannette Catsoulis's description of Zachary Wigon's movie Sanctuary as "sexual but not sexy" is an accurate characterisation of such relationships.
I usually disagree with best-of lists but New York Magazine's ranking of the Fast & Furious chase sequences is also correct. The plane, the plane. But also the tank.
Marvel's Secret Invasion looks like the X-Files reboot for our times.
In 2023 a writers' strike also means pulling back from online publicity - tweets and posts and all that cal. As With Love creator Gloria Calderón Kellett tells The Los Angeles Times:
"We’re wanting to starve the monster as much as we can starve the monster so that it understands that we nourish it, and it needs us."
Also in the year 2023, amazingly, Michelle Goldberg on book bans in the US:
"What I find most fascinating about the lawsuit ... is the glimpse it offers into how national and state-level political dynamics empower the most fanatical members of a community to impose their will on everyone else."
Watching Florida Man (still into it) sent me back to James W Hall's Bones of Coral (Knopf), a first ed copy of which I picked up in a sale for a few dollars in July 1994. (I date books when I read them – my bookcase is as close as I get to keeping a diary.) I remember it as a good novel; the later ones in the series not so much. After that gets a spin it's probably back to revisit Elmore Leonard – Maximum Bob and Get Shorty in particular. Visual cues are reading cues.
The days of browsing a bookstore and discovering something not-quite-famous feel like they're a long way off. More than half the books on my shelves I found by accident: drifting through the shop, thumbing the first and middle pages and thinking OK, I'll give this a go. I guess most people buy books now based on recommendations or reviews. But I miss the happy accident of experiencing a story before anyone has told me what to think about it or how the author's work should be approached.
Tim Murr at Diabolique Magazine captures why Jim Thompson's writing is an inspiration and his life was a warning:
Fucked up and over at the miserable old age of 70, Jim Thompson died at home ... He got fucked over by Stanley Kubrick, and by Steve McQueen, and by Walter Hill, and yeah, probably by Sam Peckinpah, but certainly by the Writers Guild. Robert Redford may have paid him for a screenplay, but that movie was never filmed. And while the French had discovered Thompson and started providing some sustenance in royalty payments, in America, none of his books were in print at the time that he suffered several strokes from decades of drinking.
Elliot Chaze (Black Wings Has My Angel) ended up the same way if I recall. Jean-Patrick Manchette didn't last very long. Writing is a rotten career career-wise. Nevertheless I refuse to buy in to the idea of the writer-as-victim peddled by so many in the industry. Ibid. that para from Nick Tosches' In The Hand of Dante posted here many times. Your loss is their business model.
Best articles skimmed this month: NYMag.com's Sophie Kemp on white T-shirts:
It does not matter if you are the kind of cool bisexual who goes on a European sex vacation with a they/them who has really tasteful stick-and-poke tattoos, or you really like Fever Ray. It is just corny no matter how you spin it.
Linking to her Twitter there. Asks Slate's Alex Kirshner of Elonville:
Twitter has always been a sewer. The prioritization of paid, right-skewing tweets merely asks what happens if people get tired of swimming in it.
Also reading, as one does, Derrida on cinema:
I have a passion for the cinema; it's a kind of hypnotic fascination, I could remain for hours and hours in a theater, even to watch mediocre things. But I have not the least memory for cinema. It's a culture that leaves no trace in me. It's virtually recorded, I've forgotten nothing, I also have notebooks where I keep reminders of the titles of films from which I don't remember a single image. I am not at all a cinephile in the classical sense of the term. Instead I'm a pathological case.
Full doc (PDF) at Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida by Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, translated by Peggy Kamuf.
WordGrinder is a terminal word processor and I am tempted.
Florida Man fills the Burn Notice shaped hole in my heart. It's basically Out of the Past but funny, with nods to the Coen brothers and Elmore Leonard, and it's terrific so far. Every Netflix series I like is lucky to make it past season two but here's hoping.
The Killing (2007), The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011), Trapped (2015), True Detective: Night Country (2023)
Perry Mason takes place in Fincherland where rooms are dark and exteriors are digitally scrubbed of any distracting details. Season two jumps to 1932. Matthew Rhys' Mason holds the storyline together by falling apart; Juliet Rylance's Della Street (is there a better noir name?) is his better-than-Watson narrator. Chris Chalk and Shea Whigham return as the straightest arrow and the greatest moustache respectively. In some ways the series' actors all do just one thing, very well, all the time but you could say the same of the world's greatest musicians.
Between the tumblers (tumblers!) of rye and choking and smoking the new series has plenty of edge. Because it's TV there is a firm hand on things: flashbacks and framing dialogue sometimes break the mood. But overall the 2020-22 remake of Perry Mason offers some of the better discomforting comfort-viewing in a while.
Speaking of Fincher it's a fun game to imagine what he could have done with the 1940s-set The Black Dahlia instead of weaving that novel's multiple storylines into Zodiac; more fun still to imagine if De Palma had done Zodiac instead of Fincher. Period movies set even in the recent past are permitted all manner of entertaining stylisations. You can't do that anymore except when it's Olden Times.
It seems to me that more and more period drama stands not for a genre so much as a division between here and now: a clear signal to the audience to please switch off their mobile phones. I know I did this in my last novel. The S&M in Blue Hotel isn't a theme – it's a date stamp.
As the soundtrack of our lives runs out the needle fades to a scratch. The record will never stop spinning.
Poker Face cinematographer Steve Yedlin on the digital techniques that created the look and feel of that show and others:
Some people assume that a filmed image just inherently looks a certain way, and when I do my thing, I’m altering or faking it. But I’m not. It always has to go through some process, no matter what. Otherwise, it would be like if you shot a film negative and never developed it. There’s always a transformation from the pure digital sensor or film negative data into the rendered photograph. I’m just actually using that leverage point.
It's not a coincidence that Blue Hotel's Blanca Nul shares her surname with Rebecca Nul, the protagonist of André Pieyre de Mandiargues' 1963 novel La Motorcyclette (The Girl on the Motorcycle). Blanca dresses the same as Rebecca and she looks the same; she doesn't ride a motorbike but both characters meet a similar end.
Rebecca Nul's husband in La Motorcyclette is named Raymond. Ray Moody's name doesn't come from there directly – the Ray kinda refers to Raymond Chandler, and was also a contrast to "Moody" (as in "ray of sunshine"). Somewhere in my unconscious the association may have trickled down. But the Rebecca / Blanca "Nul" reference is intentional.
I first read La Motorcyclette in 1991 and it hovers at the edge of my reading awareness in the same way as The Outsider and Story of the Eye do: just one of those things that keeps popping up. The main thing I appreciate about it is its impending mood. From the first page death is approaching and quickly. It's one thing to evoke a sense of doom and quite another to make it come up so fast.
Somehow I possess an English first edition 1966 Calder and Boyars paperback of La Motorcyclette (The Girl on the Motorcycle), translated by Alexander Trocchi, which features a still from movie as its cover. Marianne Faithful starred in the film, overshadowing Alain Delon. The British production tried to be French with predictable success. In Faithfull's words:
"It took three months to make. I was away a lot and Mick visited me on location in Zurich and Heidelberg and the South of France. Alain Delon was the star, and very early on in the film he tried to pull me in the same desultory way that Roy Orbison had. When I turned him down, he became very sullen and nasty and difficult. He was such a pompous ass, in any case, and every time he said that ludicrous line, 'Your body is like a beautiful violin in a velvet case,' while unzipping my leather suit, I would crack up. It was dozens of takes before I could do it with a straight face."
The Girl On the Motorcycle was released in the US as Naked Under Leather. N.U.L. = Nul? Maybe. Maybe not. For me the novel is the better version of the story. The symbolism works in prose: as visuals, it's at best merely erotic.
Mandiargues won the Prix Goncourt for his 1967 novel The Margin but it was La Motorcyclette that made him famous. He was friends with Henri Cartier-Bresson and translated Yukio Mishima. Edward Gauvin writes at Weird Fiction that Mandiargues was associated with the Surrealists and yes, the team is all there:
Mandiargues' personal divinities were André Breton, the founder of Surrealism; Jean Paulhan, the legendary Gallimard editor (of Mandiargues and many other fantasists); and Belgian Henri Michaux, poet, painter, and LSD dilettante. ... Octavio Paz called him "one of the truly original writers to have appeared in France since World War II." At a Caribbean-themed ball, Jean Genet introduced Mandiargues to Sartre, whose path he never crossed again.
'Raingurl' singer Yaeji talks to E. Alex Jung about her new album:
Memories she had suppressed from childhood were beginning to bubble up, things she had been good at keeping down. When she finally sat with them, she felt angry. Although anger may not be completely accurate. Some of her Korean friends suggested maybe it was han, that complex, overused word that has gotten tied to the national character.
Techdirt writer Glyn Moody's review of copyright law touches on the gloomy subject of orphan works:
These are works, typically books, that are still covered by copyright, but unavailable because the original publisher has gone out of business, or simply isn’t interested in keeping them in circulation. Copyright means that unless the current owner can be located – a difficult task for obscure works that were created decades ago – it is against the law for someone else to reprint them. Nobody benefits from this, but attempts to address this situation, like the EU’s Orphan Works Directive have been half-hearted and ineffectual, and the problem remains.
Meanwhile a seven-figure deal with the estate of Michael Crichton demonstrates the value of dead authors even when they're pseudonymous.
"They’ve tricked us into thinking we can’t do it without them. The truth is they can’t do anything of value without us."
– Charlie Kaufman talks at the 2023 Writers Guild Awards.
Ethan Iverson: Well, maybe to finish, Wayne, give me your five movies that you would take to the desert island. What are your top five movies?
Wayne Shorter: The Red Shoes... Lost Horizon, the original one, the Jane Wyatt one with Ronald Colman. The one where Ronald Colman has lost his memory and then Greer Garson... Random Harvest.
EI: What about a science fiction movie? I heard you loved Logan's Run?
WS: Yeah, that's a good one, Logan's Run. But I'd really have to search the science fiction movies to pick only one.
Here is 'Boogie Woogie Waltz' (1973).
