Slower

Brian Eno on making ambient music:

I always try to keep this balance with ambient pieces between making them and listening to them. If you’re only in maker mode all the time, you put too much in. It was a discovery I made right in the beginning of making this kind of music, where I would make something—I was working on tape then, of course—and find that if I played it back at half-speed, it always improved it dramatically. One reason was because of the change of sonic color that you get; the thing is suddenly mellow. But the other one was that much less was happening per unit of time. That was the lesson I really took. As a maker, you tend to do too much, because you’re there with all the tools and you keep putting things in. As a listener, you’re happy with quite a lot less.

Industry

I revived my social media "presence" but still don't know what to do with it. Although being on Bsky and Instagram theoretically improves my author site's search engine ranking, the site has been live for so long that anyone who wants to find me can do so. Now Shirker is out as an ebook nearly all of my back catalogue is available online. So what are we doing? Building a brand? Don't kid yourself.

Early-aughts muscle memory provokes me to list things I've been reading or listening to.

I still don't like talking about my writing here... If I'm writing about it, I'm not making it. I'll never be into the participatory criticism young authors have to contend with. I don't know how a writer can be that online and still be productive. I can't write with other people's voices in my head.

There's also the question of time. I have less of it. I'm working on a new novel that won't be published while I'm alive. There's a point in an author's career where death is the best move they can make. A line gets drawn under it, someone snaps up the rights, and a bulk re-issue is presented for critical reappraisal, typically a decade down the line. Or not – it doesn't matter.

I used to think I wrote for posterity but really it's because I like writing.

Things I've been reading:

1. Weimar Germany by Eric D Weitz
2. Losing The Signal by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff
3. Plunder by Brendan Ballou
4. The Habsburg Empire by Martyn Rady

Things I've been listening to:

1. Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk
2. Cowboy Junkies - The Trinity Session
3. Kilig - You Are Everywhere
4. Holy Fuck - Free Gloss
5. Dazz Band - Greatest Hits
6. Yellow Magic Orchestra - Naughty Boys
7. Pharoah Sanders - Pharoah

How to make it

Ed Zitron on AI's six-fingered discount:

So far — and this is napkin math — I’d estimate that a total of $200 billion has been spent to get generative AI to this point, in infrastructure, in funding, in energy, in so many different meaningless ways, all to get us to the point that we have a tool that’s really good at generating things that aren’t as good as what a human could make. 

Palm Springs eternal for Desire AKA Megan Louise and recording for Italians Do It Better:

That's my office – my hot tub. I'm just hanging out, and might as well work out there. I do my e-mails, and tend to do a good two hours of work in my hot tub. Why not? My computer is a MacBook Air – what's the worst that can happen?

We don't record on computer. I don't even know what programs we would record with on the computer. Everything is done analog: recording on tape, mixing on ADAT, burn that to CD, and that's it. We still burn CDs, and have a CD player in the car. Glüme came over to record and asked, "Where's the computer?" Johnny said, "We don't need a computer."

It's the way Johnny's always done it since the 90's. It's not that he doesn't want to use a computer – because we talk all the time about how it might be more efficient – but the learning curve for him to know what to do with a computer versus knowing how to manipulate the stuff in his way … he's the team genius.

Michael Callahan on the pulp art of Robert McGinnis:

Much of the public doesn't know Robert McGinnis. But he is one of the most prolific and influential midcentury commercial artists, and his imprimatur on American illustration literally speaks volumes. During the swinging heyday of graphic design, his 1,400-plus paperback covers, along with his movie posters and magazine work, embodied and influenced pop culture's loose, liberated visual style.

In Manhattan in the late 50s a friend introduced McGinnis to an art director at Dell who eventually hired him to do covers (at $200 apiece) for four paperbacks, which had begun to dominate the market. The rest, as they say, is art history. Softcover books, McGinnis explains, "were intended to be read at home or on the train and then thrown away." He had found his calling. "My illustration work went through the roof. I raised three kids on it. A lot of illustrators wouldn't do them—they were considered cheap and low-grade. But I enjoyed doing them. I didn't see anything demeaning about it."

Good space

The San Diego Comic Con Star Trek: Strange New Worlds preview is crisp (act one in five minutes and 11 seconds)... Also previewed, Michelle Yeoh as Phillipa Georgiou in the Trek Black Ops show Section 31, a concept I believe Brannon Braga was tossing around at the time of Enterprise...

Psychiatrist Dr Bessel van der Kolk talks about trauma:

"When you get traumatized, you live in a very narrowed reality, and your fear and your rage really determine your reaction to everything," he says. "Psychedelics have the capacity to open up people's minds to live in a much larger reality."

Drift

GQ's Eric Ducker interviews Greg Gonzalez:

The initial concept for Cigarettes After Sex was to create songs with honest lyrics, like Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" or "Chelsea Hotel #2." but with music inspired by new wave and synth pop acts like Erasure, New Order, and early Madonna. Gonzalez's words had more of a bitter edge back then, so he phased out the confessional part and tried to be more poetic. The music got darker and more reverb-y, like the Jesus and Mary Chain. Then in 2012, he had a particularly rough year—a close friend died, he was going through a breakup—and he fell under the spell of the Cowboy Junkies' The Trinity Session album, the one with their cover of "Sweet Jane" on it.

Has anyone not been haunted by the voice of Margo Timmins? Said Sam Usher in Electric:

Dawn was coming up. The light was the colour of cornflour. The traffic sounded like gentle rain. Somewhere between sleeping and waking she had slipped out of the bed and left me alone. Beyond the Chrysler Building the Eiffel Tower was fading in the sun. I was dreaming a lullaby: a girl singing 'Sweet Jane', her faint voice stretching to reach the notes. Na na na na na, sweet Jane. And then it really was a voice.

Also playing this week: M83's mind-blowing performance on KEXB.

We give plastic planes a plastic expansion in space

The fountain pens in Ferrari make a scratching noise that would shame a real fountain pen: the noise is necessary to describe the action. In Toho Studios' excellent Godzilla Minus One a viewfinder Contax fires with the sound of a single lens reflex: the clatter of the mirror and the shutter blind is the same audio effect used by a phone's digital camera, and therefore how all cameras must sound. There were complaints about Ferrari's digital effects in one scene of crash carnage but I'm not sure that's an error. Against the background of Italy and self-conscious art references the melodramatic splay of bodies recalls the bas-relief of Ghiberti's doors. Above all, Ferrari is painting. The speeding races are still. The movie is a machine about a machine, its picturesque landscapes sliced up by roads, its characters crushed. Although it echoes Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism ('beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman') the Ferrari of the story is not Enzo but Laura. Penélope Cruz is the movie's power. 

Performance

Martin Scorsese on Ti West's X trilogy:

[West's] The Innkeepers (2011), was the first West film to catch Scorsese's eye; after seeing it, he told me, "I thought: OK, I want to see everything this guy does." The film reminded him of the work of Val Lewton, who was put in charge of RKO's "horror unit" in the early 1940s and given a simple mandate: The films had to be under $150,000 and 70 minutes, and the studio heads would pick the titles; otherwise he could do what he wanted. The films he oversaw, starting with Cat People in 1942, were atmospheric and psychological, the tonal opposite of the screamy monster movies put out by Universal at the time. The amazing thing about The Innkeepers, Scorsese said, was that "you could eliminate the ghost story and the film would work without it, which echoes the way Val Lewton made his films: He always made sure that the core story had to stand on its own, apart from the supernatural elements."

Róisín Murphy on many things, including guilt:

The last time I cried was at Christmas. I was sick and coughing in the middle of the night and it wouldn't go away. I didn't have cancer, though, just a chest infection. I'm a bit of a hypochondriac. It's a guilt thing. I think to myself, "You can't be having this much fun and not pay some kind of price for it."

The Bear's Abby Elliott on being unfunny:

Natalie is the most nuanced character Elliott has ever played. Her scenes involve subtext, a professional first. "My career has been all text," she said. "I've done things where I'm explaining exactly how I'm feeling, like so many times."

Now playing: Apophenia

1. Isabelle Antena - 'Play Back'
2. Pictureplane - 'Sex Mechanism'
3. Dope Lemon - 'Hey You' ( Last Gentleman On Playa Edit)
4. Allie X - 'Truly Dreams'
5. Telefon Tel Aviv - 'Lotus Above Water'

'I remember John Peel futilely calling us at Zossener Straße'

Before Liaisons Dangereuses, Beate Bartel played in Mania D with Karin Luner, Eva Gößling, Gudrun Gut and Bettina Köster. After Luner and Gößling left for America the remaining members formed Malaria! Bartel and Gut talked to Robert Defcon about the early days of Mania D:

Beate Bartel: There is nothing more difficult than controlling a Korg MS20 and a sequencer in a live situation, because the tempi constantly drift apart. So to play a live set, you have to find a setup that works. We had the idea of using 4-track tapes with the most important tracks of our songs on them. I could then start them any time I wanted—basically, it was the analogue precursor of Ableton.

Gudrun Gut: I had drawings of all the patches and controller positions for the MS20, but it still sounds different every time. That’s why most bands went with full playback, because it just wasn’t reproducible. But Beate went onstage and did live mixing. In that, she was far ahead of her time.

Full article by Robert Defcon at Electronic Beats is here. More articles by Defcon at Berlin Experiment.

Malaria! being impossibly cool here.

Pictured: Bartel in 1979.

Neue Deutsche Welle, again

Guys: CHBB's original cassettes are out on Bandcamp. Beate Bartel and Chrislo Hass recorded these tracks before becoming Liaisons Dangereuses in 1981 with vocalist Krishna Goineau.

It's difficult to explain or even visualise now how impossibly hard to find this music was in the day. Meeting someone else who was into it was a secret handshake. These CHBB songs were unobtainable. Listening to them now isn't nostalgia - it's discovery. Behold the architecture of collapsed buildings and all the dance clubs beneath.

I can’t help it

Russell Crowe shaded Dakota Johnson so vale Russell Crowe, I guess. No one survives that... Rewatching House, not because I love it but because it's TV... The Canon printer is now canon; hello Epson. Of course Word responded by added a black border to every page. It won't be practical or easy switching word processing apps but that day will come and it will be a mainstream move given the crap MS are packing... It only takes one single to make you forgive The Dandy Warhols. 'Teutonic Wine' is on-brand.

End of message

Ramin Setoodeh on how we got here:

"The Apprentice is the reason Donald Trump became president. He conducts himself through the lessons that he learned on the show."

The leading AI chatbots are regurgitating Russian misinformation:

"What's really alarming is that hoaxes and propaganda these chatbots repeated so frequently were hardly obscure, nor is the person behind them."

Anouk Aimée on acting:

"A film is always much richer when actors have the confidence not to explain, but just to do; when they feel secure enough to leave things open. That's something Fellini taught me, actually. He hated it - he would actually run off the set - when actors would worry, ask what precisely does this line mean, or how exactly does that gesture fit in."

Disconnect

I considered taking the noir label off my author site. The term's overused, its value diminished. It signifies the cosy and formulaic and I never went into writing to be that. On the other hand, Google. There's no point being online if you don't want to be found.

I killed Instagram and restarted it without syncing contacts. I don't care how it works or doesn't work anymore. I have less to share. I miss Maura Quint and Darth, though.

The AI bubble / narrative is already arcing downwards. What we do know is most things online are fake and the things that aren't make LLMs stronger. Amazon killed publishing once and Google killed it again and here comes Altman and co to put another bullet in it.

I think books should be shorter and carry more weight. I like art that does less.

Dot dot dot

How television watches you … Voyager 1 is back  … Blade is in development hell. Just go with the old one, would be my advice.

Recently played: Video plays soon (Skip in 30 seconds)

1. Yellow Magic Orchestra - 'Firecracker'
2. Desire - 'Colorless Sky'
3. Liz Phair - 'Everything Between Us'
4. PJ Harvey - 'This Is Love'
5. Sly Stone - 'My World'

Scale

Seven Samurai is in 4K. Does it need to be? You could project that movie on a sheet and it would still be gripping. Consider how good the last thing you saw would be without high definition or blaring surround sound. The best test of a film is watching it over the shoulder of the passenger sitting in front of you on an airliner. Behold the talky actors placing products. Regard the eye-popping VFX as your mind wanders.

Godzilla Minus One does it right. Harrowing, and it has heart.

Weather report

and

Magdalena Bay - 'Death & Romance'

Khruangbin - A La Sala

Skipless

Waiting for the new Magdalena Bay single 'Death & Romance' to become available on Bandcamp. My iTunes days are over, I think. Syncing issues have become too tiresome.

I am at last getting around to preparing the ebook edition of Shirker. My Word 4 draft was recoverable in BBEdit but is the penultimate version of the ms. The final edition existed only as print in the days when sending a digital copy would have required mailing a disc. The pirates saved me by torrenting a PDF that could be OCR'd with 90% accuracy. I haven't opened the novel since I read from it at the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival. Being interviewed for ARTE about it earlier this year made me decide to bring it back to life – the half-life of e-ink, anyway.

Repairing misreads and line breaks turns out to be surprisingly emotional. As I proof the scans, I discover that I can remember writing every line. Although the temptation to remix is strong, the ebook will preserve the original. I'm not nostalgic for the past but I am protective of it. Who else looks after your work? Nobody.

Same olds

I read the spoilers for Sugar because I'm never going to watch it and felt let down anyway (you just know it was pitched as the detective who fell to Earth). Are there any new ideas out there? Stuff all seems the same. TV is terrible; bookstores are slurries of genre; movies are a recursive loop; music is a soap bubble. I worry I'm ageing out of culture. But I might not be the only one.

Alex Murrell on The Age of Average:

In every corner of pop culture, a smaller number of "blockbusters" is claiming a larger share of the market. What were once creative powerhouses have become factories of the familiar.

Murrell quotes Adam Mastroianni on books, among other things:

It used to be pretty rare for one author to have multiple books in the top 10 in the same year. Since 1990, it's happened almost every year. No author ever had three top 10 books in one year until Danielle Steel did it 1998. In 2011, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, and Stieg Larsson all had two chart-topping books each. We can also look at the percentage of authors in the top 10 were already famous -- say, they had a top 10 book within the past 10 years. That has increased over time, too. In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the top 10 had been there before. These days, it's closer to 75%.

The cat sees everything

Time critic Stephanie Zacharek's Megalopolis review makes a small, big point:

You might want to laugh at Megalopolis; you might be tempted to walk out. And you wouldn’t be wrong to call it self-indulgent. But then, haven’t we had enough movies that are audience-indulgent, seeking only to appease—and never, ever to offend—legions of fanboys and -girls who have very specific ideas about what they want from entertainment? I found myself almost literally leaning closer to the screen during Megalopolis, trying to grasp exactly what Coppola is seeking to communicate. I might have caught about a third of it, at best, but I’ll take a messy, imaginative sprawl over a waxen, tasteful enterprise any day.

Loving Steven Zaillian's Ripley. It's economical, cool and witty. Loving that a new generation is getting into it, even if they don't get it. This series is a product of great thinking.

The only witnesses to Tom are animals and portraits and things that can’t testify. A goat sees something. And the cat. The cat sees everything.