Employee responsibilities

Watching Claude Chabrol movies. As a student in the 1950s Chabrol worked in public relations for 20th Century Fox France who described him as the worst press officer they'd ever seen. The studio fired Chabrol and replaced him with Jean-Luc Godard, who they said was even worse.

Keyboardist Zia McCabe describes what went wrong with The Dandy Warhols' job after their Capitol Records deal:

'That's a part of success especially as artists that you kind of have to face: that it doesn't last forever. And so I was trying to steer, this, you know, manage this phase of our career in a way that we weren't caught by surprise... because we had been so mismanaged by our accountants at the time; we weren't in front of it at all. Our taxes hadn't been paid in four years – that's the worst example. We owed money everywhere and I'm looking at this going, "Oh my god, we're such a cliché – our accountants spent / mismanaged our money and we're in debt all over the place as this is what I've been trying to avoid our whole careers, not be the cliché and the pitfalls of these other bands". And I think really truly had we not been on salary we would have known sooner that that wasn't right. And so if there's any advice moments in this interview, I would say: don't get on a salary.'

The full interview by Tanya Pearson for the Women of Rock Oral History Project is online here. (The above excerpt is around 35:24.)

Now playing: Wood dragon

1. Rozi Plain – 'Agreeing For Two' (Sir Was Remix)
2. Maraschino – 'Angelface'
3. Orion Sun – 'Concrete'
4. Kilig – 'Taking Hold' feat. Wildes
5. Kilig – 'How You Holding Up'

To say

This week I’m being interviewed for the ARTE channel talking about my novels. I am not so great at this. My writing process is so internalised it’s difficult putting it into words so I tend to divert to whatever’s in my head that day which is why in the only interview I did for Blue Hotel I ended up talking about Star Trek. Note to self: stick to the fucking subject.

The modern artist should be laser focused on themselves and themselves only, as on-brand as a Marvel star and as controversial as an accountant, pre-armed with searchable terms, styled, rehearsed, etcetera.

And they must have an object to promote: new work, a streetwear collaboration, a recent arrest, anything. Not that they’re just working on something which is the only thing a novelist is ever doing.

Now playing: Contingencies of the road

1. Brian Jonestown Massacre – ‘Whoever You Are’
2. Khruangbin – ‘A Love International'
3. Yacht – 'Two Heads'
4. The Slow Revolt – 'Never Get Close'
5. Kreidler – 'Diver'

Writers, room

Signal app president Meredith Whittaker on AI's threat to writers:

Those in the C-suite, if we have a story that is believable enough that AI will replace you, that's a really good way to suppress sort of worker wages, or unionization, or simply degrade working conditions. 

And I would point to the Writer's Guild of America as sort of a frontline of some of this. So you have the threat of introducing AI into the writer's room and Hollywood. You have a strike that kind of codified around that set of issues. And who gets to determine where AI fits in this kind of rigidly structured, longtime unionized industry, and what role do writers have in making that decision? 

And what sort of played out through that was an understanding that it doesn't necessarily matter if AI can replace your work. What it can do is serve as a pretext to degrade your work. So you're no longer a writer with health insurance and a full-time job and sort of a writer's room or whatever it is. In the Hollywood case, you are hypothetically an AI editor and you're hired as a contractor to fix a script at the end. 

And of course ChatGPT can't write a compelling script, but you do something to it. It gets on production line and suddenly you've created another category that is much less expensive. Even though there's a huge amount of labor involved, the labor is just displaced into something that is then justified as less valuable.

The podcast and transcript of Whittaker's interview with WSJ's Sam Schechner at Davos is here.

The fourth Khruangbin LP A La Sala is out in April. The press release says it looks "back to their beginnings" of the first album so I am there for it.

Nostalgie de la boeuf

Rewatching Beef. Creator and showrunner Lee Sung Jin discussed the show's harrowing ending:

I've been reading some online reactions of certain people feeling like the show kind of went off the rails, and they're right. The show very clearly does go off the rails, because I think so many times in life, where you start and where you end up, you're just like, how the hell did I get here?

Another source of stress may be the contradiction of a multimillion-dollar production that's telling the viewer how difficult life is.

I found The Bear more harrowing but easier to watch because the characters were on a wage. Also, Ayo Edebiri.

Berlin

Enjoying Berlin on Netflix. Money Heist creator Alex Pina on drama:

We are a country with a major inferiority complex with fiction... Money Heist is crazy because these guys could never be locked inside the Bank of Spain because they would wipe them out, but you have to do something that has other components, with its own internal rules, which have to be coherent, and not with reality, which is contemptible from the point of view of fiction."

Now playing: Larry Vaughn for Mayor

In summer the town where I live is like Amity in Jaws. The streets are jammed with tourists and its harbour inlet is a pupping site for great white sharks. This summer has been about writing, painting the bedroom, getting the flu and reading: Patrick Modiano, Akimitsu Takagi, Tracy Kidder (The Soul of a New Machine), Maurice LeBlanc, Zeke Faux (Number Go Up), Pascal Garnier, Pierre Lemaitre. Music has been all over the place. C'est le vent, Betty.

• Holy Fuck - 'Free Gloss' (feat Nicholas Allbrook) Chloë Remix
• Holy Fuck - 'Luxe' feat. Alexis Taylor
• djDASHPOINT - 'Clan of Xymox' - Stranger
• Orbital - 'Are You Alive?' (feat. Penelope Isles)
• Everything But The Girl - 'Missing' (Todd Terry Club Mix)

Tangency

Northern Exposure is streaming in the US in its original aspect ratio, just waiting for the kids to unwrap it. The show was a charmer. It was TV on a scale that will probably not be produced again: big cast, cool location, throwaway narratives. Like The X-Files, Northern Exposure had whimsy. It wasn't afraid to go off on a tangent.

My new short story The dog is in stores in The Listener and online here:

The Listener

Blue Hotel is available here:

Amazon Apple Books Everand Smashwords Kobo

Hegemony crickets

Maya Phillips on movie superhero fatigue:

As franchises — particularly the M.C.U., fueled by Disney's multibillion-dollar appetite — continue to grow and threaten ever more, ever greater crossovers, it's becoming more difficult to understand what their endgame is (pun intended) when it comes to their fans. Who wants to watch 30 films and 10 TV series to engage with a franchise that continues to spread itself too thin at the expense of quality filmmaking?

Short answer: lots. Nevertheless...

In dreams

My new short story The dog is published in the January 2 edition of The Listener so please enjoy. It features haunting, reckless driving, lots of blood: a typical New Zealand summer.

I'm working on more short stories at the moment even though there are very few outlets for them now. You have to do what you have to do. Links to more individual short stories and collections on this site.

AI is the new kitsch

Aftermath's Chris Person discusses how 4K remastering is marching real-life movies into the uncanny valley:

At times it can look passable in motion, but then you notice something out of the corner of your eye: a thick fold of skin, a framed photo of a child, folders that are too thick at the margins, cheeks that look rendered. It's that familiar dread at the pit of your gut when you spot AI generated imagery, a combination of edges not looking quite right and surfaces that are simultaneously too smooth and too sharp. 

The why is games, I guess. Kids raised on console RPGs expect fully CGI environments and mannequin expressions. AI and digital graphics are bringing what I think of as the Pierre et Gilles aesthetic to cinema. Iconic, kitsch, disturbing.

#BookTok by the numbers

Lindsay Thomas's deep-dive into #BookTok paints a brighter picture of the books and literature community than mainstream critics might expect. To better understand the TikTok channel where "literary criticism – of a particular kind – is currently thriving," Thomas and a colleague analysed content pushed to the For You Page and "top" videos in a "#Booktok" search. Among her observations is that "the physical book, specifically the trade paperback, is the preferred format for reading" on the platform, and there are good reasons why content on a user's For You Page feels so right:

"... TikTok's emphasis on that middle range of popularity in which content is popular enough to have a good shot, statistically, of being liked, but not so popular that it risks feeling generic – speaks to a core aspect of user experience on the platform. Even when watching a popular video, you don't necessarily have the feeling of participating in mass culture, or in something broadly shared."

Full article: BookTok and the Rituals of Recommendation.

Here in the twilight: Netflix and a capella

Critics shocked by Netflix's newly revealed viewing numbers reminds me of the '90s when Neilsen started counting record scans and rock fans had to face up to the hard reality of Garth Brooks. Ignorance is bliss.

The Manhattan Transfer have said goodbye but the disco mixes of 'The Twilight Zone' will be with us forever – almost literally (a small selection below). Growing up and going out the MT's second album (1975) was often playing in the background - they were charming and weird and never landed quite right if you were stuck on the whole genre / hit thing which makes them exactly the sort of band you miss: they were part of the landscape.

• 'The Twilight Zone' – Jason Nevins
• 'The Twilight Zone' – Bart & Baker
• 'The Twilight Zone' – Wolfgang Lohr Extended Remix
• 'The Twilight Zone' – Disconet Mix

Nevertheless

Blue Hotel is on the Spinoff summer reading list and Good Reading's best of 2023 and also here:

Amazon Apple Books Everand Fishpond Gardners Kobo Smashwords Unity Books

Now playing: Friends in the Soundcloud

• ODahl - 'Big Moon'
• Moodblanc -'Good Things In Life' (OHYEAH remix)
• Le Boom -'Friday Night' (Banging Edit)
• Stealing Sheep - 'Not Real' Gwenno remix
• Elemn - 'New Future'

Goodreads review bombs

The Cait Corran review bombing story arrives on the heels of the Elizabeth Gilbert review bombing story earlier this year and all the other review bombing stories before that. This is probably not surprising. The web is filled with fake reviews and there's nothing online that can't be gamed. Manipulating online systems was once an activity reserved for hackers but in recent years it feels like such behaviour has become the principal motivation for even non-technical users. People used to log in to make themselves heard; now they do it to influence the result. Whether it's online polls or user reviews, you hit the button to make a difference.

And AI will make things worse. And that assumes you believe in the wisdom of crowds in the first place, rather than placing your faith in fewer critics whose position you know.

Such controversy around writers feels like a fever that never breaks. However fantastic it must be for readers to have that level of interest in your work, the pace of such fandom is cautionary. The processes around fiction should move ... slowly. The work can be fast. The thinking takes time.

Mubi and the gift of cinema

I received a Mubi subscription for my birthday and it's working out really well. In two weeks I dialled up Ninjababy, Zero Fucks Given, Actual People and Aloners; and the older A Very Curious Girl, Demonlover and Irma Vep. Millennial film good! The school reads like emotionally less certain slacker cinema, with parents. They've made me enjoy movies again. The soundtracks, too, touch on a lot of things in my collection. Harmonia is everywhere. And Olivier Assayas has dated better than one might have expected. His 1996 Irma Vep is a study for the 2022 TV version. But mostly I've enjoyed watching the kids: movies not for me made by people I don't know. It's refreshing. The lower production values are a visual relief.

Updates

I should probably write more about my writing but as I've said in the past, being online is a break from writing for me. I surf for movies and images and music and leave the writing on notebooks and various machines. Nevertheless I have written a great deal about the thing that consumes me on this blog, Marginalia, so it's been moved a little closer to my author site now. Same address, new navigation. My thanks to Klaus Schneider for knocking this up between scuba and hang gliding on the Mount. If you need an IT guy who despises IT, Klaus is your man.

Last month I finished a draft and shelved it in lieu of any, uh, progress on the business side of things. Working on something new. Always working on something new.

I have a new short story coming up in the Listener for Christmas. Spoiler: it's not summery.

A digital edition of Blue Hotel is now available internationally. Links below.

Amazon Apple Books Everand Smashwords Kobo

Scrapbook

Cara DeAngelis - Woman with Roadkill IV; Edward Hopper - Stairway at 48 Rue de Lille, Paris.