Now playing: Horoscope

• The Slow Revolt - 'Never Get Close'
• Yacht - 'Second Summer' (RAC mix)
• Blouse - 'Into Black'
• Alice Coltrane feat Pharoah Sanders - 'Journey In Satchidananda'
• Bryan Ferry - 'Raga'

Circular

Word, final

The Ngaio Marsh Awards will be held this Friday at a Word Christchurch event hosted by author and broadcaster Vanda Symon. The awards are the creation of Craig Sisterson whose determined advocacy for the crime genre continues to elevate authors in New Zealand and overseas. My novel Blue Hotel is a finalist in the Best Novel category which is a first for me: many thanks to the judges for recognising the book. To mark the occasion a new ebook edition of Blue Hotel is available in Kindle File Format and epub for the price of a song.

Amazon Apple Everand Kobo Smashwords

Now playing

• Layzi - 'idk'
• Honeymoan - 'Sorry Like You Mean It'
• Munya - 'Un Deux Trois'
• Hella High / Aphex Twin - 'Ageispolis'
• Blackbird Blackbird - 'Tangerine Sky'

Direct

Big, good Deadline interview with Ridley Scott on the eve of people complaining about Napoleon:

I think we are partly responsible for the, how do I call it, the frustration of the younger generation that goes hand in hand with the confusion of politics, and hand in hand with the devices they have at their fingertips where they can play games all day instead of climbing a f*cking tree and go for a swim in the river and even fall out the tree and break a leg occasionally. It’s all internalized entertainment.

Triggered

The Killer opens like a Brian De Palma movie but turns into a David Fincher film pretty quick. Armed with a script like Zodiac or The Social Network, Fincher is one of the best filmmakers alive; the screenplay for The Killer, however, which is based on a graphic novel, can be elevated only to a certain point. I haven't read the comic version and I wonder how it tracked because the defining mechanism of the framed strip is juxtaposing emotions and a hitman story requires few – think Le Samouraï or Point Blank.

As such, The Killer runs efficiently on grim procedural sequences and flashes of the wry humour that lightened The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011). It's a Fincher film in the class of Panic Room or Mank: a mindful workout that tests every aspect of its genre.

The narrative spans multiple international locales but feels appropriately trapped in one place. Apart from one anachronistic mention of "the cloud" it's set pre-iPhone. Much of the action is framed in mid-shot – a true relic of the 1970s. Fassbender's killer tech comprises candy bar phones, modest pursuit vehicles, chain store items, a Dadcore disguise. The narrative devices can also be purchased off-the-shelf. The Killer is standard hardware: it's reliable and it works.

We are programmed just to do anything you want us to

Funny that people say AI will take work away from writers and artists and musicians but not publishing houses or movie producers or record companies. Firstly because if you want to spend billions to earn an author's income, I question your business model. Secondly, if there is one thing token-based "learning" artificial intelligence would be good at, then surely it would be editing copy, or determining the optimal distribution for a finished work, or targeting a movie promotion campaign. AI could do a better job of running Amazon.com than any human. Why are the true creatives the first ones up against the wall? Because we're little people, obviously. AI is an economic model and a legal workaround. Nevertheless... the machines are coming for the suits, is my prediction.

Recently played: Linking is getting harder and fuck Spotify

• Scritti Politti - 'Lions After Slumber' (original 12")
• Prince - 'Forever In My Life'
• Paul Haslinger - 'Rooftop Fireworks'
• Crystal Castles - 'Vietnam' (Alex Zelenka remix)*
• Isley Brothers - 'Spill The Wine'

* Alice Glass has asked people to link to her music post-Crystal Castles, which I recognise. I saw the band at Minehead in 2010 and she was everything good about it. I hope she reclaims her early legacy.

Punctuation Hotline Bling

Songs are getting shorter. In vinyl days they couldn't be long enough. If people liked a tune they wanted more of it and the only way to do that was an extended 12" mix of handclaps, off-beats and echoing vocals pinging between right and left channels. This effects wonderland was limited only by the sampler's memory and the producer's imagination, both of which maxed out at five megabytes.

When CDs extended playing time the music expanded to fill it. Rave mixes last 74 minutes and replay was literally at the press of a button. 

Now artists play less. Because Tiktok has narrowed pop music's purpose to 90 seconds an artist like Ice Spice gets it done in two minutes. These finished compressed song-products can later be assembled into a single performance that satisfies brief attention spans with MC-pauses while its audience shares the brief segments to anyone who wasn't there. This is music that's an advertisement for itself, like movies that are their own trailer. It's seamless commodification.

No complaints here. These songs aren't meant for me. But the journey of the form is becoming more interesting than the music itself. Age means making a shift from listener to spectator.

It is frustrating, however, to see that at the same time that novels are getting longer. Amazon displays word counts with the implication that the more words you get for your dollar, the better the story – right? So very wrong. I miss the pocket paperback days of European fiction: Manchette, Garnier, even slack old Simenon. A good story gets to the point. I want novels to speed up and songs to last forever.

Recently played: Sagittarius Weekly Horoscope

• Jan Hammer Group - 'You Don’t Know' (Jimi Bazzouka edit)
• Letta Mbulu - 'Nomalizo' (Seb Hall Sloppy Disco Edit)
• Ice Spice - 'Deli'
• Jon Hassell - 'Warm Shift'
• Slauson Malone 1 -'Olde Joy'

What’s next

From the LA Times, John Carpenter on living.

I had to stop making movies for a bit. I had to have some space. You know, I am closer to the end than I was. I think about that now. I think about nothingness; what’s next.

Time's Cady Lang on Julia Fox:

As she enters adolescence, she finds salvation in a heady mix of sex, drugs, and reckless behavior, a formula that brings her both ample adventure and devastation as she comes of age in downtown New York.

I had Fox's picture on my desktop while I was blocking out Blue Hotel. Her defiant quality was something I worked into the main character. Nymag.com's Elizabeth Nicholas puts her finger on what makes Fox's memoir different:

Each of these stories is the kind of harrowing event that could easily become a person’s entire personality. For artists or writers, this can translate into gravitas and the sense of having not only moved on but triumphed. But in her book, Fox refuses to play the good survivor’s game of switching off entire parts of herself... She makes no apologies nor does she make a song and dance of what she was thinking. She is not your survivor.

A new edition of my novella Aurélie is out on the usual digital platforms. The story is still one of my favourites. I always hoped it would come out as a bleak little post-modern noir like a Manchette. There's still time, I guess.

Turn off

My 9th generation iPad is the iPhone I want: big screen, big battery, reliable as. My 13 Mini was a deliberate compromise because I wanted something that fits in my pocket but the phone iOS is trying to do too much. I don't want a torch button. There's a design disparity between the featherlight touch required for screen interactions and the hefty double-click side button that requires me to change hands. More importantly, iTunes cannot for its life accept that I've purchased only one copy of Sly Stone's High On You which it insists on downloading twice. I'm betting this is because the solo album is tagged under both "Sly Stone" and "Sly and the Family Stone" in some database somewhere in the cloud.

The solution is to stream music but that's a tradeoff between emotional wellbeing and a reliable internet connection. I don't want my music tethered to a network provider. I want to carry it with me on a piece of metal and/or silicone, as god intended.

I can feel myself beginning to age out of tech. The promise of disintermediation has been supplanted by bureaucracy. I've gone back to writing in notebooks and listening to CDs. As I type this a robot vacuum cleaner is banging around my study and I scan my notes and share them across devices, and I'll never go back to pure analog - that would be madness. But the love has gone. Digital's a disappointment.

Recently played: Goodbyes

• Angel Olsen - 'Dream Thing'
• Lou Reed & Metallica - 'Junior Dad'
• Orbital - 'Ringa Ringa'
• PVA -'Untethered'

Recently played: OSIRIS-REx

• UNKLE feat. Liela Moss - 'Feel More / With Less' (Rōnin Reconstruction)
• Jerry Harrison - 'Man With A Gun'
• yeule - softscars
• Pharaoh Sanders - 'Love Is Everywhere'
• DJ Crystl - 'Mindgames'

The Grain Of The Voice

Lana Del Rey is still thinking about doing a covers album. 'Lay Lady Lay', please. Hint: Chan Marshall is releasing her remake of Dylan's electric gig. Chan / Cat on why she chose the set:

"I got an offer to play the Royal Albert Hall in London on Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes Night... and I was like 'well if I play there, I only want to do Dylan's songs'. And that was just a no-brainer of which songs I would do. 

I felt pretty alone when I was young - when he was running around being a rockstar and stuff. I wasn't a rockstar, but just knowing that someone was kind of scuzzy, and writing his own shit and saying what he wanted to say and doing his own thing, that was that peer thing he gave people. He narrated and was able to articulate people's points of view during a time of mass confusion and that confusion is the thread of our social constructs."

Michelle Wolf is in Barcelona:

"Spain is like, you guys can make all the money you want but we're going to take these two hours off in the afternoon, get a coffee, and then we're gonna come back and work like a half-hour more, and then we're gonna enjoy a glass of wine and a snack, and then we're gonna take off a month in August to really wind down."

I'm listening to Soshi Takeda's Memory of Humidity.

Recently played: I don't see how we could be pleased with this

• The Cure - 'Other Voices'
• Randy Crawford - 'Street Life'
• Lana Del Rey - 'Change'
• Silver Jews - 'Self Ignition'
• LCD Soundsystem - 'One Touch'

Rallying

John Carpenter is back for six episodes of new TV horror series Suburban Screams which he made at home:

It was filmed in Prague, and I sat on my couch and directed it. It was awesome.

Mashable's Tim Marcin makes a strong case for a MySpace revival:

Regular people are posting less while still checking their feeds. Influencers post a ton, but they're basically just brands. Normal folks want to log in, check things, and log off. We're already doing that with sites not designed for that. That was pretty much MySpace's entire purpose.

Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich says tech monopolies are building a new Gilded Age:

This is not simply Hollywood. This is not just a bunch of writers and actors against some studios. This is the entire American economy and the direction we are going in. This is gigantic high-tech firms that are monopolizing like mad, including the entertainment industry, including streaming videos and games and media platforms. They are mining consumer data and getting even larger.

Metabolism (soothing music)

Now playing: Saturday

• Jasper Tygner - 'Limes'
• Andy Stott - 'New Romantic'
• Vintage & Morelli - 'Daydream'
• Timbaland feat Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake - 'Keep Going Up'
• Mannequin Pussy - 'I Got Heaven'

Recently played: Aller

• Indian Wells - 'Cascades'
• Blackbird Blackbird - 'Tangerine Sky'
• John Coltrane Quartet - 'Impressions'
• Prince and The New Power Generation - 'Daddy Pop'
• Tangerine Dream - 'Diamond Diary'
• The Emotions - 'Best Of My Love'
• Brokenchord - 'Door Shutter'