Of Vancouver

Everybody shut up because there's a new Destroyer album. Justin Curto at NYMag.com speaks to Dan Bejar and Dan speaks back in quavering rush that overflows the metre like a long-sighted calligrapher trying to fill out a form, probably. "The weight of Destroyer music being just the sound of this one weird voice over decades is a little heavy," he says. The lack of congruence between Destroyer's (lately) smooth and electronic music and how Dan's singing rambles around in it is why we sit down and listen to his albums rather than letting them hum in the background like the functional chillout Spotify wants all bands to become. There's a tension there or at least a folk-borne disconnect or a wait-I-just-thought-of-something painterly quality to Destroyer. It's a weight and a weight-off. And anyway, here's another one.

You started performing as Destroyer 30 years ago this year. How’s that for you to think about?

It’s insane. It’s madness. I mean, I don’t remember being 22. The idea that this is something that has structured my life for that long is pretty weird. But not as weird as the rigmarole of the music industry. Being in the business, like, something that’s quite geared toward youth culture, and still trying to find your place within that, because you’re not famous, but you’re also not a struggling band. You’re just kind of cruising down the middle, doing a thing for decades. Usually people go up or go away. It’s strange to be still in the trenches, but everyone you know is gone.

Is it still just forward from here?

How I do it is so unconscious. I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, I really don’t. I know I’m writing. Slowly, slower than I ever have, but I’m never gonna stop doing that. I still get off on it.

The full interview is here.

Future past, now

Selected paintings by science fiction illustrator Syd Mead are on show in New York. My 1987 interview with Mead is online here.

Now playing: Likely / very unlikely

1. 'Awkward Attraction' – Monstera Black
2. 'Swarm' - MXC
3. 'Rise and Kill' – Makaton
4. 'Slant' - Rizla Ops
5. 'Théo Muller - Fest Ar Brezelourien' – Théo Muller, Unklevon, Ringard, A-Sim

They didn't know

Warner Troyer: Did you know when you first outlined the series in your own mind, the concept that No. 1 was going to turn out to be you, to be No. 6?

Patrick McGoohan: No, I didn't. That's an interesting question.

Troyer: When did you find out?

McGoohan: When it got very close to the last episode and I hadn't written it yet. And I had to sit down this terrible day and write the last episode and I knew it wasn't going to be something out of James Bond, and in the back of my mind there was some parallel with the character Six and the No. 1 and the rest. And then, I didn't even know exactly 'til I was about the third through the script, the last script.

Troyer: How about you colleagues, the other writers. Were they surprised?

McGoohan: Yep..

Troyer: Were they annoyed?

McGoohan: No.

Troyer: Did they decide it was untidy?

McGoohan: No, they used to come along from time to time and say, "Who's No. 1?" you see. And I told them, "It's a secret" until I actually sat down and wrote it - and it was, actually; they didn't know until I handed out the script.

Troyer: But were they disappointed by that...?

McGoohan: No, they liked it. They said they always knew it was going to be him.

Transcript of an interview with the star and co-creator of the series The Prisoner (1967), Patrick McGoohan by Warner Troyer, 1977

Blowout

"Barger independently reviewed the analysis performed by Weiss and Aschkenasy and concluded that their analytical procedures were correct. (57) Barger and the staff at BBN also confirmed that there was a 95 percent chance that at the time of the assassination a noise as loud as a rifle shot was produced at the grassy knoll. When questioned about what could cause such a noise if it were not a shot, Barger noted it had to be something capable of causing a very loud noise--greater than a single firecracker.(58) Further, given the echo patterns obtained, the noise had to have originated at the very spot behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll that had been identified,(59) indicating that it could not have been a backfire from a motorcycle in the motorcade. (60)"

– JFK Assassination Records / Findings

Streambait

As culture became fixated on niche aesthetics, [Spotify] absorbed these ideas into its broader understanding of mood, vibe, and genre. These are all different ways of understanding music, but on Spotify, these types of distinctions blurred into each other. Ultimately, mood, vibe, and genre had all just become different ways of tagging music with descriptive data, different ways of sorting music into buckets that served the necessary functions of streaming curation, which is to say, the function that genre has always played: marketing. They were all just ways to narrow audience segments and influence the pipelines of programming, in hopes something might make someone click "play."

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist - Liz Pelly

"Never play to the gallery. Never work for other people. Always remember that the reason you initially started working is that there was something inside yourself that you felt if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society. I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people's expectations. I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that."

David Bowie

Line returns

Season two of Poker Face is coming… Will Shortz recovers… we're maybe turning the corner on AI… Tony Gilroy is hiding his Star Wars scripts from LLMs.

Now playing: future Wednesday

1. 'New Life' - Depeche Mode
2. 'Last Night The Moon Came Dropping its Clothes in the Street' - Jon Hassell
3. 'Horses in my Dreams' - PJ Harvey
4. 'Fear, Sex' - Magdalena Bay
5. 'King of Snake' - Underworld
6. 'Duel' - Propaganda
7. 'My Jamaican Guy' - Grace Jones
8. 'Prelude' – Miles Davis

Now playing - robots.txt

1. Jlin - Perspective
2. Sonmi451 - AI-13: Nachtmuziek
3. Kenny Dorham - Quiet Kenny
4. Purelink - Signs
5. Sultan + Shepard - Indigo EP

Write, what – y'know...

The White Lotus writer-director Mike White turns an unblinking eye towards his subject:

HBO bought out the entire resort [the Four Seasons Koh Samui] for two months in early 2024. White spent most of the previous year in Thailand scouting locations, studying Thai culture, and observing the kinds of tourists that come to the country...

Full article is here.

Bella

Nicolas Roeg interviewed by Jason Wood:

"Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they're not books, they're not the theatre. It's a completely different discipline, it exists on its own. I would say that the beauty of it is it's not the theatre, it's not done over again. It's done in bits and pieces. Things are happening which you can't get again. I forbid anyone to say "Cut", the soundman, the operator, or whatever. 

"They think something's gone wrong, but in Don't Look Now, for instance, one scene was made by a mistake. It's the scene where Donald Sutherland goes to look for the policeman who's investigating the two women. We had an Italian actor there who couldn't speak any English at all, not even "Hello". Through the interpreter, I told him to say "Hello" when he heard Donald knock on the door. And I saw him walking around the set practising. So when it was time for Donald to knock on the door, the sound operator told the Italian actor, not realising that he didn't speak any English, to stay where he was. So Donald walked down the corridor, knocked on the door and opened the door into an empty room with a big lampshade. Donald hunted around, and the sound operator said "Hello?", and from behind the lampshade came a reply, "Hello!". It was fantastic. Because it was such a tense film, it set the tone - the detective instantly became strange."

Full interview is here.

The black hit of space

Disclaimer: Alien: Romulus is the first instalment in the franchise I didn't see first in a theatre. As someone who paid to sit through the original Alien it's impossible to describe to younger readers the experience of cinema, which was neither grand nor eclectic. You bought a ticket to something based on the poster or what was screening on that session. The lack of explanation and the mystery of what might happen after the titles rolled was an anxiety everyone experienced with any film, let alone horror, let alone a horror that crossed genres.

You're babies now, and movies are babysitting, and the characters in Romulus are likewise babies also, stumbling across discrete parts of the franchise as helpfully labelled as the space station on which it's set.

Alien co-writer and co-creator (with Ronald Shusett) Dan O'Bannon said repeatedly that one of his creative goals for the original was to flip horror's tropes and put the suffering on the male characters. There was an emphasis on the abdominal threat, on invasion of the body, on grotesque helplessness.

It's interesting then how newer instalments in the franchise – including Prometheus and Covenant – have reverted back to the female as the victim. Romulus doubles down on this, then doubles down again.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Horror movies are about terror. The perverse twist is that the female characters' suffering is now a rite of passage: a validation of strength, proof of worth, etcetera, so sticking it to the girls serves everyone.

Which is too dark for this episode. Alien: Romulus is a chocolate box: a ghost ride compared to Prometheus' chill and Covenant's true body horror. I like Covenant more and more as time goes on. I didn't mind Romulus but it wasn't for me. Going from the original to Ridley Scott's last two was the correct arc for his audience: from concealed horror to sharing too much; from freelance space truckers to corporate drivers; from the careless void of space to the sparkly 4K CGI landscape that cradles every space drama.

Romulus is full of invention but burying invention was what made Alien great: the confusion, the obscured visuals, the noisy mix, the jump cuts, the emotional remove. Uncle Ridley was never coming to save you. Trying to capture that now would be like putting lightning in a bottle. It would confuse viewers. It would frighten them.

Pottering

To say that he spent all his time painting would be too glamorous. He spent his time stretching his own canvases, mixing his own paints, arranging cups and bottles to the millimetre, and destroying his own works when they failed to please him. Painting was what he did with the leftover minutes and hours.

Jackson Arn on Giorgio Morandi. Full article here.

Write once, read anywhere

CNN's Henry T. Casey on how to read in 2025. Spoiler: there's a lot to plug in. My Kobo is part of my library; I read technical manuals on my laptop and articles on my phone. But the print versions of books – relegated to the last section of the article, as a gesture of kindness – remain the superior technology. Even the cheapest paperback will outlive all of the tech you have in your possession now. In five years every device you're using will be broken or redundant but that book on the shelf? Still working. You won't need to upgrade it. You can lend it to read without a subscription or a login. The printed book thwarts modern tech capitalism as effectively as it once enabled the old kind. We won't lose the wheel, though. The digital space is choking off music and movies and TV. Books will hold out.

Hindsight

Tom Robbins speaking to Linda Richards in January Magazine:

There was an article about me in a Los Angeles newspaper which I didn't read because I don't read articles about me. Nor have I ever visited one of the Web sites about me. But I read the headline and it said, "Robbins: A Man of Mystery," and that warmed the cockles of my heart. 

I loved that. I think too much is known about me already. I think biographical information can get in the way of the reading experience. The interchange between the reader and the work. For example, I know far too much about Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Because I know as much as I do about their personal lives, I can't read their work without this interjecting itself. So if I had it to do over, I'd probably go the way of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. And just stay out of it altogether and let all the focus be on the work itself and not on me.

The full interview is here.

Death and romance

Magdalena Bay's Imaginal Disk is a flex. Matt Lewin and Mica Tenenbaum are two of the strongest songwriters, producers and arrangers working today. On their second studio album they lean into the second two roles, discarding pop hooks into a surf of surging stop-start textures and atmospheres. They're synthpop but they're prog. They're in their prime. This is the moment to enjoy them.

Mica Tenenbaum: I love Genesis, and I'd want Peter Gabriel's voice to be heard at my funeral. "Carpet Crawlers" is a gorgeous song. I'd never really listened to the lyrics so closely, but they actually do seem to be about destruction and rebirth and having to "get in to get out"—which is like life and death. And you get that organ vibe. It's dabbling in those classic funeral sounds without being over-the-top or morose.

Read the full interview with Magdalena Bay by Ryan Dombal at Hearingthings.co.

Small screen

Severance s02 is treading water, and that's fine. The series has earned it. The Prisoner, its nearest companion mapped the arc of near-future mindgames in 17 episodes (confusion, rebellion, realising it was you all along) and still jumped the shark in at least five. A mind-swap episode was written to cover for the star, Patrick McGoohan who was away filming Ice Station Zebra: an entertaining swerve despite a bad career move.

I do worry now Severance has the budget to film outside. TV's about drama, which is people talking and walking in and out of rooms, but once they're out in the wilderness they can avoid each other and the production can fool itself into thinking they're making movies. You do need exteriors in TV shows to show the location, time of day, weather conditions (crucial for crime series) etc. That it's Jerry's apartment is all you need to know about Jerry's apartment. The only other reason for locale is when it's a character, like Mickey Haller's Los Angeles (see previous) or Batman's Gotham. Frank Miller, I think, said that you can't have Batman without Gotham City. It's all about character.

Renewal

I reactivated my subscription to New York Magazine so expect more links to that. I had one several years ago (COVID lockdown-ish) but I was defeated by the app's inscrutibility. As the saying goes, "Fool me twice, OK – sure"... The British government wants Apple to add a catflap to iCloud which is alarming when you consider how data is handled in the UK. This cry (terrorists! children!) goes out every few years until people realise what it's really about (movie piracy). The world is so fucked atm it's possible this is the time, I guess, but people's phones have a lot of money of them now, or at least money that was worth something at the point when it was converted into crypto, so the stakes are higher.

I was loading a new programme I had ordered from a magazine

It cuts me up listening to The Sensual World again after so long: Kate Bush at her confident best vocally, flexible and in total control; the bursts of folk interleaved with layers of padding Fairlight / Peter Gabriel '90s electronica; the single that never leaves your head.

Newer chills courtesy of Blawan, Jlin, Purelink.

Unknown, Unknown, Delaware, Unknown, Unknown

Christopher Walken on careers:

"I don't think I've ever finished a job and knew what the next one was," Walken said. "'Why did you make that choice?' I hear that a lot. And the truth is I don't make choices. I take jobs. I take the next best thing. And that has to do with art, who you're going to be with, sometimes with the location, how much they're going to pay you. All sorts of things. I wish I could make choices."