Never lend books

Shuffle threw up a lyric about "all the books that you read" and it struck me how often pop songs used to be about the printed word. Novels were a name-check: what you treasured, how you rated people, if they were cool. Bands were even named after books. Will we see/hear that again?

In another time an online search would have turned up the The Crucial Three's 'Read It Books' which is the original and best version. But here we are.

1. The Teardrop Explodes - 'Read It In Books'
2. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - 'Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?'
3. The Sundays - 'Here's Where The Story Ends'
4. Lou Reed - 'Doin' The Things That We Want To'

Now playing: Light rain

1. Blawan feat. Monstera Black - 'You Can Build Me'
2. Jlin - 'Paradigm'
3. Pepe - 'HSC'
4. Purelink - '4k Murmurs feat. J'
5. Yaeji - 'Done (Let's Get It)'

What are you, a bellboy? There will be stuff there

I had an unplanned stay at the beach. I didn't have the right clothes so I bought T-shirts at a surf shop. I used my phone camera as a shaving mirror. I read an out-of-print history of Napoleon on my e-reader. I wrote in one of the slim notebooks I'd bought from Muji. I thought about how much I hate being online.

So sad it physically hurts

David Lynch in conversation with David Marchese, 2018:

DL. ...I've been so lucky. I love what I do and I get to work on stuff I want to work on. I wish everybody had that opportunity. Say you're a painter but you need a job to pay your bills: You want a job that probably doesn't require much thinking because you want to be able to think about your painting. You might not make a lot of money in that kind of job and when you finish that job for the day you're tired. That's five days a week. So you've got to get into painting on the weekends and when Saturday afternoon comes around you might not be into it. Then Sunday is a weird day because you feel Monday coming up. It's tough to get the work done.

Smooth palms

The Lincoln Lawyer (2024) is what TV used to be like all the time. The production values are much higher – there's more location work, the clothes and props are better, and a certain automobile company is really getting its money's worth – but the show's basics are a checklist of what fills a medium-sized screen with happiness. It's charming, a little sentimental and the writing's as tight as a drum. The cast is dynamite. The directors and writers do well to tamp down the airport-novel style elements and elevate the more everyday stuff. The threat of violence, imprisonment or extradition in America today is real and present: a modern US crime show doesn't need to add darker aspects.

The show was a David E. Kelley project for CBS before Netflix picked it up. There's a meme circulating about the "rules" Netflix imposes on TV series which I'm too bored and old to read but I would be very surprised if these aren't the "rules" TV writers have followed all along, i.e. preshadowing, using characters' names often so the viewer remembers who they are, recapping the plot, narrating the action and so on. It's not chance that many original TV series started off as radio plays. We listen to TV and watch films. And we don't need a Greek tragedy's worth of plot arc every hour.

The most enjoyment I get from the show is watching familiar sites of California and Los Angeles slide by. I love that place and I pine for it.

Lincoln Lawyer novelist Michael Connelly sees the show as part of the world:

"I draw a correlation between what's going on in this show and what's going on in the world: We've been knocked down by the pandemic and other things for the last couple years, and we're all trying to get our mojo back... The defense attorney is the lone guy against the well-funded and populated police departments and prosecutors. It's a classic underdog story about a guy getting back on his horse and that's what we're doing in society. That makes it the right moment. Did we know that when we were going to make it? No. I think we really got lucky."

Now playing: 23 degrees, sunny

1. Les McCann - Invitation To Openness
2. Les McCann - Layers
3. Sun Ra - Lanquidity
4. Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters
5. The Cure - Songs of A Lost World

Event triggers

When I need to break my freelance habits and get back into long-form writing I follow the Pomodoro technique using my phone's timer. Because iOS defaults to the last tone used on the timer and I don't want to have my writing interrupted by my morning alarm I set out to find a Pomodoro timer without a subscription. There isn't one. All the available apps are synced with fitness trackers or productivity monitors or tranquility apps (an oxymoron if there ever was one).

All I want is a single-use timer that counts down silently to a configurable alert (a single beep, thank you). I built a shortcut which is okay, but it defaults to the last-used tone (the alarm, again). A good website version requires you to enable pop-ups. Another hunt through Reddit etc is forthcoming.

A few nights ago I sat down early in the morning to write with my headphones on and an ambient track playing which a few minutes later stopped and then stopped again. I didn't need to research why because I knew it would be an issue with Apple Music not playing Bandcamp MP3s (the issue is with Bandcamp's encoder, apparently). So I logged back into Bandcamp, downloaded the tracks as FLAC files and reconverted those to AAC... And then I was able to get back to work.

Anyway, I'm writing.

Now playing: It's been a while

1. Kim Deal - 'Wish I Was'
2. Book of Love - 'Boy'
3. Frank Ocean - 'Nights'
4. Doerd - 'First Time'
5. Bee Gees - 'Love You Inside Out (Serge Gamesbourg Re-edit)'
6. Sworn Virgins - 'Burning Off My Clothes'

Fr / De

1. Invitation au voyage
2. Stadt Land Kunst: Chad Taylors Neuseeland

Arte TV contributor and filmmaker Corinne Sullivan interviewed me about my novels, with a focus on Blue Hotel, The Church of John Coltrane, Departure Lounge and Shirker.

Assemblage

Having watched several Netflix and Apple+ series to different degrees of completion it seems that a new format is emerging, this being the result of all the parts of a TV show being assembled by people who have never watched TV. There are actors and stories and sets and jokes and running gags and action and a big thing at the end, and each component is as perfectly rendered as it is completely unconnected to anything else in the time it takes to watch it roll past on a screen. Frankentertainment was once a symptom of rushed production. Now it's coalesced into a genre. 

My recent non-fiction reading includes Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent; Why We Remember by Charan Raganath; Cue the Sun! by Emily Nussbaum; Slow Productivity by Cal Newport; Plunder by Brendan Ballou. (I might have mentioned these before.)

I'm listening to M83, Space Biology, Magdalena Bay, Boards of Canada, Rihanna, Nine Inch Nails, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Khruangbin.

I'm writing and I want very little to do with the world.

As seen on TV

Arte.tv interviewed me about my novels set in my hometown of Auckland, in particular Shirker, Departure Lounge, Blue Hotel and The Church of John Coltrane. If you're one of my European readers or have a VPN you can watch the show here.

Now playing: Artificial state

1. Space Biology - 'Diffusion'
2. Warpaint - 'Jubilee' (Andrew Weatherall remix)
3. Frankie Knuckles - 'Your Love'
4. George Clanton - 'You Lost Me There'
5. MF Doom - 'Doomsday' (feat. Pebbles The Invisible Girl)

Dream laboratory

Raymond Ang tracks the imposing hard-to-find film career of Maggie Cheung. Says Irma Vep director Olivier Assayas:

"It's not just that Maggie felt like a movie star, it's more like she felt like the modern version of what a movie star could be—and no one had really tried that." 

The stars of a previous era were characterized by grandness and self-importance, the director suggests, propped up by studios and a network of connections. 

"Maggie was absolutely not like that," Assayas says. "She was the modern world. She was part of what was changing in filmmaking at that time."

The Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh has died so it's time to remember the band's participation in a 1970 psychic experiment in which audiences at a series of Dead concerts in New York were instructed to telepathically transmit visual images to psychic sensitives Malcolm Bessent and Felicia Parise 45 miles away.

For the six-night study, an attempt was made to use a large number of telepathic agents in a situation which would involve some of the emotional intensity which characterizes spontaneous instances of telepathic transmission. The entire audience attending concerts by The Grateful Dead, a rock-and-roll musical group, was instructed to telepathically transmit an art print which was randomly selected just before it was projected on a screen above the musical group while they were performing.

The results, because this was science:

Mr. Bessent's results were statistically significant and Miss Parise's were not... In any event, the fact remains that one of the two subjects in this experiment produced results which were statistically significant.

The PDF of the paper 'An Experiment in Dream Telepathy with "The Grateful Dead"' by Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., Charles Honorton and Montague Ullman Md is available at ResearchGate and of course you will need to rotate the pages.

Play

My 35-year-old Denon CD player finally skipped out. I'd kept my old Sony DVD/CD (and Video-CD, thank you) player stowed in anticipation of this moment. I unplugged the two RCA cables from the Denon unit, plugged them into the Sony, hit play, and it worked. No software upgrade, adaptor or pairing process was required: no validation or permissions had to be set; I didn't need to sign into a supplementary app that scanned the room to adjust the audio balance. I didn't have to set my region or update an online store. Listening to music really did use to be this easy.

I can't find the Sony remote. I went searching for it in the lounge drawer where we keep old tech. It wasn't there but I did find a retired iPod touch and an equally redundant Apple TV, two working but antiquated digital cameras and a dozen cables that have fallen out of standard, along with countless little plastic and metal adapters purchased at additional cost as connection workarounds. Maybe one day I will recondition my iPod Nano, which functions but has no battery life. Or maybe I'll join the ranks of millennials allegedly reviving old tech. It's also possible I'll discover these items are useful 48 hours after I've thrown them out. More realistically they'll gather dust until we need space in the drawer.

Recently played: Arrival / return

1. Cortex - 'I Heard A Sigh'
2. Peter White - 'City of Lights'
3. Kaeto - 'Trust'
4. Magdalena Bay - 'Angel on a Satellite'
5. Boards of Canada - 'Aquarius'

Relax

Body Double is coming out on 4k. Writes Bilge Ebiri:

Body Double is the kind of movie that could only work with the unique mix of formal charge and playful self-awareness that De Palma brought to it. It’s a thoroughly transfixing thriller, filled with elaborately choreographed set pieces in service of an absurd story.

Brian De Palma on the movie that couldn't be made now:

What I find interesting when you see contemporary people watch these movies is they’re shocked by the nudity. They go, “Oh my God.” I’m thinking, What, are we living in the Victorian Age here? You know, they have these things on YouTube where they have two people watching a movie and reacting as they watch it? I saw two people watching the opening of Carrie. I thought they were going to have a heart attack! I was like, What has happened to this next generation? They seem to have gotten very Victorian.

Good talk

Jon Winokur's site Advice to Writers is an extension of his book published in 1999. He estimates that in the following years he has collected some 10,000 quotations on the subject. Jon very kindly approached me to talk about my working methods and the interview is here.

If I'd added one thing to my answers it would be a reinforcement of the above: that one of the best ways to learn is to read interviews with artists you admire or even ones that you don't. How writers and painters and musicians work is illuminating, not always in the way you expect.

Another fine edition of you

Gallimard's parent company Madrigall has purchased Christian Bourgois Editions and will take over the publishing company's catalogue which includes The Lord of the Rings, The Satanic Verses and authors such as Toni Morrison, Fernando Pessoa and Jim Morrison. Christian Bourgois also published the French language editions of my novels Shirker, Electric, Departure Lounge and The Church of John Coltrane. Gallimard and CB were technically competitors but it's good to see the catalogue go to this new respectful home. Christian died in 2007. He and Dominique Bourgois were very generous to my writing, and two of the best things about Paris. The stories they told were fantastic.

Now playing: Saved photo

1. Hydroplane - 'New Monotonic FM'
2. Blue Canopy - 'Motovun'
3. Francos Pain - 'Telephone'
4. Jennifer Vanilla - 'Jennifer Pastoral (Love Injection Remix)'
5. Klein Zage & Joey G ii - 'Folks Not Guys'

New York, London, Paris, Munich

Brock Colyar profiling Charli XCX is the sort of pop energy fans pay for:

"I was like, 'I'm going to make a record that you guys think has no commercial hits on it. Or big songs. Or radio songs. Or streaming songs or whatever,'" she recalls. "'But you need to realize that that doesn't fucking matter. We don't live in that world anymore, and I'm not that artist.'" She doesn't care, she tells me several times, about what she considers the old rules of pop stardom: streaming (except her Spotify numbers are pretty solid), magazine profiles (like this one), talk-show appearances (she was on Seth Meyers with Sivan in April), or awards. But she "wouldn't mind" a Grammy, she admits.

Magdalena Bay's Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin cite Suspiria (1977) as one of several influences on their new album Imaginal Disk:

Tenenbaum: Just the visual and musical mood that comes across. More recently, we’ve been into movies like that. The mood that is conveyed in that movie is very strong through the lighting and through everything about it, so it’s very cool.

Lewin: The music is also funny in that movie. I think it was made by this prog band. But it’s this crazy synth-rock with wailing vocals and this drum thing that just keeps going... I don’t know.

(The soundtrack to the Dario Argento movie is of course by Goblin AKA Back to the Goblin, New Goblin, Goblin Rebirth, the Goblin Keys, the Goblins, and Claudio Simonetti's Goblin.)

Microsoft Control Panel is also having a retro moment:

What's incredible about some of the Control Panels at this point is how far back some of their designs go. You're never more than a double-click away from some piece of UI that has been essentially exactly the same since 1996's Windows NT 4.0, when Microsoft's more-stable NT operating system was refreshed with the same user interface as Windows 95 (modern Windows versions descend from NT, and not 95 or 98). The Control Panel idea is even older, dating all the way back to Windows 1.0 in 1985.