Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile

Roger Corman wasn't the father of modern Hollywood so much as the fun dad. He made money and made it to 98 which is the definition of a good career. His education included engineering: he knew how to build a movie.

Many moons ago I was invited to a Writers Guild roundtable interview with John Sayles and filled the typically New Zuld awkward opening silence by asking him what it was like working for Roger Corman. Sayles echoed what many have said: that it taught him a huge amount, and Corman advised him as soon as he'd learned it that he ought to be moving on.

Also leaving us recently was Mary Tyler Moore co-creator Allan Burns who got his start in animation. Burns wrote the famous MTM Chuckles episode but the one I loved was 'Better Late...' by Treva Silverman in which Mary and Rhoda, working late to update the station's obituary files, insert jokes into the biography of Minnesota's oldest man. I don't think there has ever been a better set-up.

Joel Gion's memoir is turning out to be very necessary in that it's a history you couldn't access anywhere else. A bigger band would have been chronicled by others and the story wouldn't be as interesting if it was someone smaller.

Recently played: To Live And Die In L.A.

1. Magdalena Bay - 'Head Over Heels'
2. Kreidler - 'Diver'
3. Harrison BDP - 'It's Foggy Outside'
4. Yaya Bey - 'Chasing The Bus'

In the cloud

'On her arm, she has a tattoo of the Apple Notes app': Brock Colyar (of course) interviews Honor Levy… Web search is about to become magical or break entirely… Your first look at Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is here. On YouTube. If you're lucky, there'll be ads.

Version update

Zoom blocked some but the launch for Dark Deeds Down Under 2 is here… AI continues to fail… Netflix's Ripley is pretty good. There have been as many Toms as Bonds and Batmans. Along with The Talented's Matt Damon and Dennis Hopper (The American Friend) Jonathan Kent played him in 1982 for TV: Highsmith called him 'the best Ripley I've seen since Alain Delon' in Plein Soleil (1960). Andrew Wilson's Beautiful Shadow: A Life Of Patricia Highsmith is a thorough well-actually biography of the author.

Smoke

 The New York Times remembers Paul Auster:

“The first thing you hear as you approach an Auster reading, anywhere in the world, is French,” New York magazine observed in 2007. “Merely a best-selling author in these parts, Auster is a rock star in Paris.”

Floppy disks are not back really but they're still pretty good:

Discogs.com shows a healthy 500-plus floppy releases in the 2020 category, which is more than the documented number of floppy music releases in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s altogether. Perhaps it’s because we’ve moved a little closer to their impending extinction. Or maybe they’re perfect reminders of how violently smashing bytes together on a thin, vulnerable plastic / magnet sandwich is still one of the most punk things you can do as a musician and artist. 

Costume designer Cate Adams on dressing Michael Fassbender for David Fincher's movie The Killer:

“Because he’s so calculated, he’s going to walk into a store, he’s going to know his size, he’s going to pick it up, he’s going to buy it, and he’s going to put it on,” Adams says. “There’s no thought about alterations or anything along those lines.” You’ll find that all the brands he wears are pretty basic: His chinos are Dockers, his puffer is Gap, and his zip jacket is from Lululemon. Even his aloha shirt, part of that tourist getup, could potentially be found at a drugstore.

Grass and Poison-type

My copy of In The Jingle Jangle Jungle arrived – a nice hardback edition. Not a signed copy, however. Joel Gion posted that he signed about 5000? Can that be right? Possibly. Kaitlyn Tiffany's book gets better and sometimes worse. I confess I'm skipping over a lot of the actual One Direction stuff but as an illustration of her point the band have found their use. As long as I don't have to listen to them. The Gion book purchase was courtesy of Paper Plus which is interesting. Faster than Fishpond and local... TBD. Also reading Kara Swisher's Burn Book.

My Airpods are dying but not if I kill them first. I'm onto my second pair – it's a sad story.

Current listening includes but is not limited to

1. Cat Power - 'Hey Mr Tambourine Man'*
2. Khruangbin - A La Sala
3. Bill Evans Trio - Sunday At The Village Vanguard
4. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Cool It Down

*Link regrettably opens in YouTube.

After several tracks I'd purchased from iTunes (or is it Apple Music now? I'm too tired to work it out) disappeared I've gone back to the old ways of Bandcamp and CDs and, uh, other means. 

The Delta emulator for iOS works great.

So long, Craig Ellwood

Chris Pratt and Katherine Schwarzenegger demolished the Craig Ellwood Zimmerman house. In a 1989 interview the architect said, "Los Angeles was a wonderful place to be in the 1950s. The city was wide open, eager for experiment. The feeling that, finally, we were going to get the chance to create a truly honest architecture was like wine in the air." Now, not so much.

I'm enjoying Kaitlyn Tiffany's book about fandom and the internet, Everything I Need I Get From You. Pop music is the elementary algebra of art and business.

Grimes fucked up at Coachella. Everything Elon touches... Meanwhile, Lana Del Rey did well.

I'm working on something new. Maybe even a kind of sequel.

Outline

My short story 'Vacancy' appears in the new crime fiction anthology Dark Deeds Down Under 2 edited by Craig Sisterson (Clan Destine Press, 2024). You can read more about it in an interview I did with podcaster Felix Shannon.

DDDU2 features stories by Emma Viskic, Malla Nunn, Jack Heath, Charity Norman, Ben Hobson, Natalie Conyer, Peter Papathanasiou, Jennifer Lane, Helen Fitzgerald, Ashley Kalagian Blunt, Robert Gott, Andi C Buchanan, Shelley Burne-Field, Anna Downes, Stephen Johnson, Dani Vee, Michael Botur, Jean Bedford, Dorothy Porter and Peter Corris.

But the roads get so slippery when it rains

Bilge Ebiri on the glum prospects for Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis:

Coppola has been playing a long game right from the start, which is why his risks seem so crazy at first. The world is a better place because Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart and Bram Stoker's Dracula and Youth Without Youth and The Cotton Club are in it.

I never got that people didn't like Bram Stoker's Dracula immediately. It was perfect then and it still is. At one point Auckland's Academy Cinema practically played One From the Heart in a loop. Saw it over and over. Remember movies? But you don't.

Here, of course, is Crystal Gayle and Tom Waits.

Robot fighter

As AI marches on, companies like OpenAI are scraping every site they can find.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that AI companies were running into a wall when it comes to gathering high-quality training data. Today, The New York Times detailed some of the ways companies have dealt with this. Unsurprisingly, it involves doing things that fall into the hazy gray area of AI copyright law.

IP land-grabs like this were always coming. In 2013, Dunner Law wrote about the precedent set by Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc:

As a result of these decisions, it is probable that other companies (e.g. Amazon.com) or library consortiums will seek ways to undertake their own digitization efforts all in the name of enhancing the public good.

It's time to update your site's robots.txt file.

Fighting robots has turned out to be different from what we expected. We were taught it would mean ray guns or fists a la Magnus, Robot Fighter, an extremely plausible comic book hero created by Russ Manning in 1963. Manning's other comics included Gold Key's Tarzan and the Star Wars newspaper strip: Magnus spans elements of both. Manning died aged 52. The Gold Key cover illustrations of his character come alive every time you look at them.

Dream of the '90s

The X-Files creator Chris Carter on his new multimedia art exhibition: "I hope I get to make more art. That's really what I do."

Carter says the proposed remake of the series will be a challenge now conspiracy theories have gone mainstream. "Everything's a conspiracy ...No one knows what the truth is. It's completely subjective and relative now."

The Hunt For Red October's caterpillar drive is now real.

In 1995, New York Magazine published an article on what an earthquake would do to the city.

Historically, two significant earthquakes have rattled New York — one in 1737, another in 1884. Both measured around magnitude (M) 5.0 on the Richter scale. Since both emanated from roughly the same spot in Rockaway, 147 years apart, and it's been 111 years since the last one, you'd have to say there's a pretty decent likelihood of another M5 coming out of Rockaway within the next 50 years.

Like performance art, but not

Sam Altman emerges as the enemy:

OpenAI has launched a charm offensive in Hollywood, holding meetings with major studios including Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros Discovery to showcase its video generation technology Sora and allay fears the artificial intelligence model will harm the movie industry.

I'm going to chase down a hard copy of Joel Gion's memoir In The Jingle Jangle Jungle about his days with The Brian Jonestown Massacre. The book is doubtless about other things but for most of us, just that would be enough. The infamous documentary Dig! lands differently now. Anton Newcombe comes across as someone who needs more help than he's getting, and The Dandy Warhols guitarist Peter Holmström's characterisation of his band as "just lucky" doesn't even come close.

In 2005 Gion talked about what it is he does on stage:

When I joined [The Brian Jonestown Massacre] I quickly realized I needed to discover my comfort zone in this at-the-time long disregarded role as a "60s" hand percussion player. I looked for what I could add to The BJM’s particular music and that group of people and what I came up with is still what you see. That’s what I do. It’s not to feign some hopefully contagious excitement, I’m more like a middleman to the audience. It’s like performance art but not. What I do each night on stage is to bring a sense of honest self in a way that’s under the radar. People watching won’t be able to articulate what it is but they will know that it’s there because I am honest in my purpose.

New ebook out now: 'Osome'

I have a new old short story out on digital. 'Osome' (2003) was part of a longer work that eventually became my fifth novel, Departure Lounge.

Last year I retrieved the original short story from a hard drive with the intention of publishing it digitally and couldn't resist revising it. After so much time, the changes that I needed to make seemed obvious.

This new version is both similar to the original and completely different. 'Osome' in Japanese can mean 'late' or 'slow' – so the title stayed.

Amazon Kindle Apple Books Rakuten Kobo Barnes & Noble Everand Odilo Smashwords

(FIC022080, FIC024000)

Swiss Mountain Camera

Watching Asteroid City I had a lot of time to think about Jason Schwartzman's camera. It's a prop, but it's gorgeous. Rich Stroffolino figured it out:

That PC sync port isn't right for a Contax III. The rewind knob, characteristically bulbous on the Contax, seemed too short on our "Swiss Mountain Camera." And while I wouldn't put it past the prop master to make changes to give the camera more quirky flair, it made me wonder if we might be dealing with a Soviet clone.

The answer is here.

Comfort viewing

Oh look, Alien. Seeing how much the Romulus trailer rehashes from the original only emphasises how much Ridley Scott's sequels Prometheus and Covenant have left it behind. Ron Cobb's hatch design is as distinctive as the Nike Swoop now.

Roxana Hadadi's review of Top Chef's 2024 premiere is a good example of participatory criticism: a cry to please make it stop.

The only thing a Top Chef premiere needs to do effectively is introduce us to the latest competitors and to their food. But the newly hyperactive and discombobulating visuals in "Chef's Test" actively prevent this.

Shout-out to the Portland season.

Gallimard press kit interview with Patrick Modiano:

G: You poke fun at the supposed omnipotence of the internet, this so-called "infinite memory" that often finds itself incapable of any response.

M: I have often found that the internet cannot respond in any direct way to a question that is too precise, as if it were deliberately taking you for a ride. So, you have to find an indirect way of getting your answer. There are many large gaps in this so-called "Memory of the World."

Lens

Earlier this week I reactivated two of my 35mm compact cameras, the Rollei 35 T and the Olympus XA. Surprisingly, finding film and replacement batteries has gotten easier since the last time I looked. Both cameras appear to be in good working order. The meters function and the lenses aren't fogged. The proof will be running a film through them. The reasonably priced choice at the local photography outlet was Kodak 400ASA. I would have preferred a 100 colour or black-and-white.

The machines still feel great in the hand. I miss that mechanical click. (I recently updated to an Apple Magic Keyboard and am back to pounding it like a typewriter.) It took me a minute to remember how to remove the metal film back on the Rollei. Although I was anxious not to break the Olympus's moulded construction, the plastics have not corroded. You can use a pocket knife, a coin or even your thumbnail to unscrew the battery covers – how's that for right to repair? It took me a moment to recall how film is threaded on the take-up reel. Using the meter to bracket for depth of field came back to me straight away. I can recite Kodak's exposure tables, which is good because they're no longer printed on the back of the film box.

I was thinking about the cameras because film photography is central to a short story I'm working on – 'Osome', first published 2003, which I'm revising and formatting for a new ebook edition.

Printing a proof of the story was as arcane an exercise as refitting the 40-year-old cameras. After hauling the Canon out of cupboard storage (my writing office is space-poor) and locating and plugging in the awkwardly stiff leads, I updated the software (for a new OS) and installed a new ink cartridge (more expensive than a 35mm film roll, less reliable, and stocked by as few stores). Once the device was nursed through its start-up, including unnecessary print head align tests and one paper feed jam, the pages printed on the second attempt.

I bought the Rollei and the Olympus about 10 years ago for almost nothing, from camera stores in London. Both were cheap because the technology was on the way out but they've held up a lot better than my 24-month-old printer, not to mention all those old digital devices bumping around in the drawers.

Here comes the quiet life again

Enjoyed Wim Wenders' new movie Perfect Days. Shot on video in Tokyo in a little over two weeks, it shares many elements with Paris, Texas: a broken family, confined spaces, a silent man, the resonance of daily rituals.

The director acknowledges the film's minimalist vibe is not only about the fictional character:

"There's too much of anything [now] and you cannot handle it. All the books I buy, all the colours and paints I buy… because I always wanted to paint a little bit again… I can open a paint store! And I have too much of everything in my own life – like everybody else I know – and not enough time. And Hirayama was the man I have inside me who has enough of everything and he doesn't need more. He never has the feeling he misses anything."

I'm also enjoying Tarjei Vesaas' novel The Birds which I picked up at random in a book store in Singapore. The author's brightly painted study with its combination writing desk and bed can be admired here.

Recently played: Stars

1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - 'Lovebomb'
2. David Byrne and Brian Eno - 'Help Me Somebody'
3. Kreidler - 'Hopscotch'
4. Martina Topley Bird - 'Lying'
5. Studio - 'Life's A Beach' (Todd Terje Mix)
6. Soshi Takeda - 'Water Reverberation'

Moving image

Writing and reading. Not watching movies so much. Not watching TV, at least very little TV produced in English, and I find myself unable to sit through new movies because they all seem so old. I'm sick of foreshadowing. I am sick of arcs, beats, character development, protagonists, antagonists, tropes, genre, needle drops, backstory, prequels, secondary characters, breaking the fourth wall, critics that use the word 'titular', press junkets, stans, TikTok, artificial intelligence, people that talk about Chekhov's gun but have never read or seen Chekhov, fight sequences, CGI, actors looking into the camera, actors who can't smoke, $200 million movies showing how tough life is, product placement, cameos, callbacks, retrocons, reboots, fan service, autoplay, subscriptions, upselling, apps, battery life, notifications, viral campaigns, hot takes.

Bedside reading

If there was a snap test on Elon Musk I would probably do alright at it. The man is a subject of so many articles and podcasts that stepping in stories about him is unavoidable. Nevertheless, I was pleased to add to my knowledge Zoë Schiffer's comprehensive account of Musk's Twitter purchase, Extremely Hardcore (Portfolio / Penguin), a crisp timeline of short chapters not entirely unlike the articles Schiffer has written for The Verge and others.

Even more forensic detail would have been welcome -- we would kill to know what Apple CEO Tim Cook said in his November 2022 meeting with Musk that calmed him down after their "misunderstanding" -- and only so much logic can be applied to people who are not operating on much. It's a slow-motion car crash told very fast, and the car is driving itself.

I also recommend Kyle Chayka's Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened The Internet (Heligo Books) which tallies strongly with my opinions of the internet in 2024. The author makes sharp observations about the statistics about book publishing and music in our decade, and our learned dependency as consumers on what is served up to us by menus on retail sites like Netflix and Amazon.

'The need to corral an audience in advance by succeeding on social media can be explained by the useful phrase "content capital". Established by the scholar Kate Eichhorn in her 2022 monograph Content, it describes the Internet-era state in which "one's ability to engage in work as an artist or as a writer is increasingly contingent on one's content capital; that is, one's ability to produce content not about one's work but about one's status as an artist, writer, or performer." In other words, the emphasis is not on the thing itself but the aura that surrounds it ... If Roland Barthes's 1967 essay predicted "the death of the author," the author's personal brand is now all that matters; it's the work itself that is dead.'

Shout-out to Jaron Lanier who is one of the blurbs on Filterworld and not online so will never read this. Lanier wrote the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts, and all 10 were solid, but Chayka's unpicking of the banality of our reliance on numeric expressions of corporate policy is somehow more motivating. Chayka quotes scholar and critic Gayatri Spivak: "Globalisation takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control."

(For short-form news about oncoming internet shittiness, see Gita Jackson's article 'AI Video is a scam'.)

Also read / reading: Nevada, by Imogen Binnie (Picador); Maria Golia's biography Ornette Coleman: The Territory And The Adventure (Reaktion); Pascal Garnier.