Let's be Frank

London is in a roil of Malcolm McLaren reminiscing but as a true measure of the man may I suggest considering how many of the artists McLaren "managed" would be able afford cancer treatment in Switzerland? I'm picking a number between zero and none.

McLaren was the only phone interview I did where I hung up on the subject. After over an hour of his raving I had all I needed and a lot more that I didn't so I literally put the phone down on him in mid-sentence. It was at the time of Waltz Darling, which featured some stellar songs ('Something's Jumping in Your Shirt', 'Deep in Vogue' and the title track). In the same month I got to talk to Neneh Cherry and parrot McLaren's line that she had stolen from him. Which worked, because she jumped and gave me a better interview.

As that old skirt chaser Goethe said, folks, how short life must be if something so fragile can last a lifetime. It all seemed important at the time and if I go back to the music I remember why: Cherry's Raw Like Sushi still sparkles, and her duet with Youssou N'Dour on 'Seven Seconds' (from Man, I think) is one of my top 20 tracks eva. McLaren's 'Buffalo Girls' is fun but consider that the Beastie Boys have pulled the same or better tricks of wit and funk every other year since 1988. He was never that great, but now he's dead, he's perfect. The British press are trying to pull the same trick with Ian Drury and that's not working either. It's a great compliment to appraise someone as a small influence on the world, which McLaren was -- and that's more than many will be.

Obituaries piss me off because they're always too late (sic). I was more pleased to read Manohla Dargis's piece on Dennis Hopper while he is still alive: it's a great warts and all look at someone I will miss far, far more than McLaren. Hopper is dying and has had the grace to let it be known, and what I love about him (although he's far from loveable) is that he's dying in the same way he lived: pissed off and out of control, but at the same time way more in control than is necessary (he's placed a restraining order on his wife and is filing for divorce).

Hopper has been called one of Hollywood's few Republicans, which is saying something. He was a Ripley (not a good one), he made Easy Rider (with a lot of help, based on Terry Southern's great writing) and The Last Movie (which I saw when I was way too small and really, really loved), and he was Frank in Blue Velvet, which I still rate as the best movie ever, period. Hopper played the villain Frank Booth, and Lynch had the idea that the actor, as Frank, would inhale helium before reciting his lines to give him a squeaky, childlike voice. Hopper suggested it would be better if he simply acted as if he was inhaling something - an amyl nitrate like vapour - so Lynch went with that. Good move for the movie.

Like David Lynch, Hopper is an artist with a nailed-down sense of structure, going wide but always covering the basics. Both share a very 1950s sensibility. Hopper's police movie Colors was really only a very big version of Adam 12; The Last Movie is about as deconstructed as, say, a Pink Floyd album (by comparison Zabriskie Point or any given Godard blows it away) -- it sits very happily with Vanishing Point and Rebel Without A Cause. Hopper was 33 years old when he made Easy Rider: not a rebel but a pro.

Here we go again

It's a standing tradition that the day after I send off a manuscript, I start work on the next one.

I don't believe in writing 7/52/365. Stephen King does that and it shows. I'd be happy to if someone was paying me. When I was a child I thought being a writer would be like writing scripts for Star Trek every week: a producer would come in, give you a list of constraints and you'd write a story around it. This is a male thing, apparently: wanting to be helpful. I was never one for scratching it out a word at a time on scrolls of vellum. More green visor, two fingers punching an Olivetti kinda thing. Working class values, basically: writing as a trade.

(Some trade. There's a lovely David Lynch interview in which he talks about George Lucas asking him to direct Return of the Jedi in which Lynch says something like "I do what I love and he's doing what he loves, but what he loves makes about a billion dollars." Couldn't have put it better.)

Anyway, I started work on the next one.

Bedside reading

Talked about her a little bit in my Prima Storia interview. Jane Robertson asked me if I was a fan and I blathered on about Highsmith's lesser known The Tremor of Forgery. Yeah, I'm a fan.

Tell me why everything turned around

Final edit gone, very early this morning. There's always a final edit. Namely the finished version with whatever errors you spotted now corrected. When I worked at Rip It Up the editor Murray Cammick would barely glance at the magazine on the day it arrived from the printer: if he read it closely, all he saw were the mistakes. After I started working there a lot of the mistakes were mine, which made me feel terrible until I started noticing the mistakes other people had made, including errors added to my copy. After that it became a war of attrition.

There's a golden rule in life: if you write something about typing errors, it will contain a typing error.

Last night I also had to write what Americans call coverage for the manuscript, or what the British call the blurb. This is more difficult than writing the novel itself because it requires taking a step back from the thing that has consumed you for, in this case, a very intense year, and summarising it in simple terms everyone can understand. Please note that the simple terms cannot include a word that might trigger a negative response. So, if noir is out of fashion at the moment (as is the case, apparently), then it's better not to use that term. Try not to have an attitude about this. Try to make things easy for yourself, just this once. Please step away slowly.

Since the iPad was launched there has been further discussion about (yawn) ebooks and whether or not printed books will disappear. I still write by hand (ink, notebooks, legal pads, Kirby-style chunks of plaster board torn from the ceiling) but so much of my writing and editing is performed on screen now, I wonder if ebooks might be already here as far as authors are concerned. Then again, it's no different from editing a film on a Moviola. But then again...

Likewise "the cloud." I have copies of the ms everywhere: on paper, on my weary Powerbook G4, flash drives, even a Micro SD. But the files least likely to be lost, stolen or incinerated are the ones I've emailed to my various Gmail and Yahoo accounts. I don't trust the idea of cloud computing but it's become part of my process without my even realising it.

It's cloudy today, so the Ms. Zunshine isn't out.

Lolls

The human facility and stuff

Patricia Cohen has a piece in the NYT about evolutionary theory and reading. Expect to be really bored by the subject at a dinner table near you, and soon, although it's a step forward from being lectured about evolutionary theory and the market, or how Monet only painted that way because he had cataracts. Anyways, the Professor of English is fantastically called Lisa Zunshine:

Humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time, Ms. Zunshine said. For example, the proposition “Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate” is not too hard to follow. Add a fourth level, though, and it’s suddenly more difficult. And experiments have shown that at the fifth level understanding drops off by 60 percent, Ms. Zunshine said. Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf are especially challenging because she asks readers to keep up with six different mental states, or what the scholars call levels of intentionality.

Perhaps the human facility with three levels is related to the intrigues of sexual mating, Ms. Zunshine suggested. Do I think he is attracted to her or me? Whatever the root cause, Ms. Zunshine argues, people find the interaction of three minds compelling. “If I have some ideological agenda,” she said, “I would try to construct a narrative that involved a triangularization of minds, because that is something we find particularly satisfying.”

NB: Virginia Woolf is also challenging because she's a bit depressing. Still: Ms. Zunshine.

Treatment bound

So that's the Tokyo film treatment done, which makes it a good Easter. I still have work to do on it - some names and proofing - but then it can go off to the Lucky Bastard D*rector and then, whatever. 4000 words bashed out in the space of two days but I've been turning it over in my head for longer.

I wasn't able to write treatments in the past. If someone asked me to I'd literally stop dead, or get up and leave the room. I could never see a story in those terms: I had to start on the inside and work out. But now for some reason I can write them. Writing a treatment is like doing a crossword: filling in squares so everything has to fit. I don't think I could write a novel that way, though. You have to lose yourself in a novel. It's like painting a bedroom wall. If people don't like the colour, you say no worries -- I'll just paint over it.

Writing is like a metaphor, innit. Using an analogy to describe writing frustrates me as much as it does you but you can't use a system to explain itself. Trust me. You can't.

The days of the second treatment, the Stolichnaya, are numbered. I can't drink anymore. But fuck, I'm making the effort. It's London and I'm alone in a big house with Al Green and the NYT crossword. Aced the weekend version, stalled slightly on Easter Thursday until I realised the clues were back to front and then I was away.

Dead men

Writer Walter Mosley has some good comments at Time.com, among them:

With the original hardboiled detectives, there was an existentialism that entered the genre in the '30s and '40s. There was no connection to the world. No mother, no father, no sister, no brother, no friends, no dog, no regular apartment. If you get arrested, they throw you in jail and you can stay there because you don't have any responsibility outside of the case.
With a person like that, there can't be character development, so you actually give up one of the most important aspects of the novel. And that's problematic. The onus now is, How do I create character while also moving forward the mystery, the plot, the crime, the resolution?

Mosley has identified the problem not so much with crime as crime series. If a character reappears over several titles, should he change? That's the real problem for an author lucky enough to hit on a successful formula.

Money talk

The Economist has told off New Zealand for not being as ecologically "pure" as its advertising claims. The editorial is on the money (the reader comments are good, too) but if we're getting ad hominem about it a green scolding is a new and ironic twist for a newspaper that has been skeptical about global warming until only recently. Its editors also once considered invading Iraq to be a cracking good idea but they have formally reversed themselves on that position too.

I haven't been reading The Economist regularly since being in London but I have done most weeks since the mid-1980s. New Zealand would get a tiny mention now and then, usually a brief footnote puzzling why the country has not done better since embracing the free market Just Like We Told It To. (One of life's little mysteries, I guess.) The Economist calls itself a newspaper even though it's in a magazine format, which drives me nuts, and it has the funniest Situations Vacant pages ever. (Director General of the Council of the Baltic Sea States? Where's that CV?) It makes lots of rawk rawk British upper class jokes which sound funny until you are actually in England and realise that they're not joking. If its subs were dryer they would be in sachet form. (When Arnold Schwarzenegger broke his leg skiing the headline ran "Hasta la Piste.") They can spell and shit, and make jokes in Latin, and are great at writing about books and the arts in the way that literary and arts magazines, contrarily, write well about global finance. Also they wouldn't let me get away with mangling a sentence like that, but this is a blog, and come to think of it, I can also remember their editorials predicting that the Internet would never be important either. The Economist is like a professorial but boozy uncle who goes off sometimes. The Christmas edition is especially good. I recommend reading it online to corrupt their business model.

On Monday in a fit of Keeping Up To Date I bought this week's edition of said newspaper, the IHT and the Financial Times. The Economist said the recession was over; the IHT said everything that went wrong and caused the recession still hadn't been fixed so hey, dude, look out; and the Financial Times said there has not been a recession and here is a Rolex ad and a bar chart to prove it. I'm paraphrasing, but only slightly. I had to lie about my age to buy the FT: it makes sense only if your memory goes back no further than 15 years.

Lexi-con

David Bellos, writing in the New York Times, explains how Google Translate works:

Google Translate can work apparent miracles because it has access to the world library of Google Books. That’s presumably why, when asked to translate a famous phrase about love from “Les Misérables” — “On n’a pas d’autre perle à trouver dans les plis ténébreux de la vie” — Google Translate comes up with a very creditable “There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life,” which just happens to be identical to one of the many published translations of that great novel. It’s an impressive trick for a computer, but for a human? All you need to do is get the old paperback from your basement.

Which is interesting not only because the Translator is a Turk, because while an original work may be in the public domain a publisher's translation of same can be copyrighted for separate and much longer terms. In which case, would Google have resort to such translations beyond "fair use?"

I guess it's all too late now, anyway.

Nachtclubbing

I'd be writing this from Berlin if it wasn't for the 100 per cent letting agency surcharge. Twelve months in that city would suit me down to the ground. No phone or TV and I blocked out my next two projects, and the electro / neu-Goth scene is the best: sexy, trim, retro, fun. (The next big thing, imho.) Still waiting on feedback from the ms. London: raining, but it's spring. Which is the equivalent of good cheer in the face of a terminal diagnosis.

Must stop making jokes like that Now That I Am Older.

Another week, another fictional work of non-fiction. Charles Pellegrino's The Last Train From Hiroshima has been revealed to have been fudged a bit. Critic Motoko Rich's article in the New York Times also mentions Margaret Seltzer's faked gang memoir and good old James Frey. It's wrong to market fiction as non-fiction but what this proves in my eyes is that again and again, the facts of the author's existence bear no relation to the degree to which their work can convince a reader, let alone editors. I was raised a modernist: the author should be invisible. And the celebrity author culture that publishers hope will save them, won't. (Unless of course I became one, in which case I would be rowing as fast as possible.)

The electrovamp is Mme Olivia Wilde in Tron: Legacy. More spoilers at Aintitcool.com.

Flourish

 

If I'm brutally honest, Stephen J. Cannell is one of the people who inspired me to become a writer. He wrote for Columbo, The Rockford Files, created the Chandler-quoting Jeff Goldblum vehicle Tenspeed and Brownshoe and most of all had his own title sequence. He also earned nearly half a million dollars a year. So far things have not turned out like that for me. But still. Viddy the screencap, my droogies: burgundy leather Writing Chair™,  Writing Desk™ polished to a mirror like shine, IBM Golfball, pipe, nautical themed decorations.

The European cannon is here

Normal Übertragung wird in Kürze wieder aufgenommen.

Appreciation

Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Christoph Waltz interviewed in Time:

TIME: What is it like to receive all these awards? Does it even matter if you get an Oscar, or is the praise enough?

WALTZ: Praise is nothing that accumulates. Praise is a sequence, especially if you've toiled for a long time. Praise does not pile up. So in a way, you can't get too much. I don't consider it to be a quantity that you can measure by volume. There's a new aspect to the appreciation and the acknowledgment every time, because it's always coming from somewhere else. So I try to take the praise very specifically, because then I really can utilize it as an encouragement. It's like a finger that points in a certain direction. I take praise as not just a reward and a result but also as the beginning of a new process.

If this role [in Inglorious Basterds] hadn't come along, would you still be an actor? Would you still believe in the craft?

I probably would still be an actor, because this is what I make a living doing, and I have been making a living with it for so long. To chuck it all in and start something else — it's a bit too late. Would I still believe in the craft? Absolutely, but on my terms, and that's where the difficulty would set in. It would feel like fighting a lost cause. But because I'm so bloody stubborn, I would fight it anyway... But all of a sudden — with the emphasis on sudden — it looks like it's not a lost cause. It looks like I was not traveling on the wrong steamship in the wrong direction. So in a way, after 30-something years, it's more than gratifying, it's more than just an accolade. It's really like a new start.

Shant quit ripping

I thought about Jack the Ripper a lot during The Wolfman, as well as Dracula and that book about girls running across the moors. The first half of the movie (actually the first two-thirds slashed down to span kidult attention) is classic Hammer Horror meets steampunk, as prescribed by the Rules of Bram: the tourist train twisting deep into the foreign land; letters from Mina -- sorry, Gwen (Emily Blunt); the Character Actor Pub; the handsome Jonathan Harker -- again, sorry, Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro); the asylum; the pseudo science; the address to a tiered medical audience. It's all lifted in solemn and direct tribute to Francis Ford Coppola's maligned-at-the-time Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). (Which I always considered near-perfect - is it finally getting the respect it deserves?)

I enjoyed The Wolfman's lifting, and the pastiche, and the flickering candle camp of the start of the film. The story's told in a hell of a rush, though so the filmmakers (sorry #3: the producers) can rush to the Big Face Off: a showdown between werewolves. This is where the movie stopped being a tribute to things I enjoy and suddenly became Wolverine. All movies have to have a Big Face Off now so that children will pay to see them and thus cover the overheads it took to computer generate said sequence, but even as the first half (two thirds) of the movie howled past I was hoping for a trade off, namely that director Joe Johnston (or someone - even old guy editor Walter Murch) - would ape not only the look and feel of classic Hammer films but also the structure. The structure being: very, very slow build up to The Terrible Thing (as per the first para: Stoker / steampunk / Victoriana rules etc); flash of psychosis and/or nudity somewhere along the line; lots of shadows and finally, only at the very end, The Terrible Thing Revealed. Mike Nichols followed this rule pretty closely with Wolf (1994) and it worked great. In fact, it worked as recently as From Hell (2001). But thanks to franchise fucking, nerves, big studios, The Kids, whatever, The Wolfman went all X-Men in the end.

It's a shame. The cast is fantastic, the sets and locations perfect, the acting just right. Anthony Hopkins is a gold-plated prick, Ms Blunt is distressed and lovely, and Benicio is the ill-fated outsider. There's an incredible movie in here waiting to bust out. Director's cut, maybe...

Bedside reading #2

Lots to write about this. One of the better author biographies I've read, but it's gloomy: his friends and family really did drop like flies. I had the good fortune to attend the recent Complicite production of Endgame which I had mixed feelings about -- I enjoyed it but began to wonder if the author's estate's control over the work was limiting its interpretation. Mostly however, watching Endgame I was struck not by the intellectual play but the human source of its deathly abstractions, in particular the death of his brother, Frank. Prior to that he was grieving for his father's early death and his Parisian comrades who died in the French resistance; after the war, first his mother passed and then the luminous Ethna MacCarthy. Once you take that into account along with his own health problems, the immobile creature in the chair with the kerchief draped over his face seems less of a stylisation. Beckett's was a rough life but it was brightened by his artistic contacts with James Joyce, Nancy Cunard, Marcel Duchamp and others. Knowlson's book includes mention of a time when Beckett and Duchamp whiled away their Occupation days playing chess - can you imagine? Such a scene seems incredible - a layered tableaux.

I'm the one on the left

From the 2010 Christian Bourgois catalogue. Writing is hard work but some days you get something nice in the mail and the wind at your back.

Meaningful stairs

Last time I was in Paris I walked around the corner and slap bang into a set of steps I had seen before. It took me a moment to spot where: I was standing in the square which became the final scene in Brian DePalma's Femme Fatale, one of those movies I shouldn't love but do. I snapped the photos on my Olympus XA 35mm and stitched the panorama together in Photoshop. Here is DePalma talking about noir and dreams:

I had this idea to do a noir movie, but I felt that noir only works in a surrealistic way. Which meant that I had to create a dream, and put the noir story in the dream. If you look at these old black and white movies, with their sort of fatalistic storylines and very stylized way of shooting, I thought the dream device would be the best way to re-imagine it in a contemporary setting. So I put the noir melodrama in the brackets of her dream sequence and I used a lot of things that sort of happen when you have a dream. Certain things you experience reappear in your dream in kind of strange juxtapositions, and that's why the noir story appears the way it does. It doesn't seem that many of the people who have written about it have quite seen that. Somehow they don't see where the brackets of the dream are, so they write about the movie like it's a straightforward, realistic noir melodrama, but in reality it's a kind of surrealistic rethinking of the noir form. There are things that don't make sense until you think about them later, much like in a dream. You have all of these images that you have to ponder later: "why was that there" but the driving sense of it is essentially pretty simple, you know, she steals the diamonds, these guys are after her, and they're going to kill her. All the things that happen, are more or less consistent with that very simplistic, fatalistic storyline.

The Morning After

My desk the day after finishing the ms. The breakfast items are new.

Ok: actually finished now.

Actually finished. Proofed, revised, revisions proofed, spelling checked, third party proof read and ready to go. Emailed to agents tomorrow AM. Off to see The Wolfman tonight.

Ask me anything

what's the best beverage you ever had at Celebre/Box?

The 84, which was a double 42, although the ginger wine during flu periods was also appreciated. Thinking about it now, the 84 was really just a third of a bottle of Stolichnaya. I was younger then, and everything I said was clever.

c/- Formspring

Sunday morning (The Green Parrot)

Friday afternoon

Friday afternoon

Friday 9am

Thursday

What proofreading looks like

Or do I mean "proof reading"? Anyway, this is it. Because "finishing" a manuscript really means "not having to think up any more stuff, but still having to check what's in it." And by "checking" I mean, "checking that it's in the right place" and "saying the right thing." And by "saying the right thing" I mean, sometimes having to rewrite that. Or make up something new to go where the wrong thing was. Which is different from originating material. Honest.

In movie productions it's called "shooting pick ups." Which is different from shooting at flat bed trucks, but about as much fun, because you're improving on the work you've "finished" rather than going through the whole Oh God Is It Any Good palaver. I promised the ms would be ready at the end of January but it will be the end of February now. Still, only a month late - that's not too bad. And it was finished at the end of January insofar as it was "finished."

Did Jacques Derrida ever use air quotes? That would have been "funny."

Next big thing #2

Bye bye, Twitter...

Next big thing #1

Yeasayer who hail from NY, I think. They sound Ladyflash-ish / post-Merriweather Animal Collective.

Still proofing. Nips and tucks.

Allo

Smokin'

There has been some debate in the Muse Lounge about the new anti-smoking laws. Basically Gretchen and Cedric still smoke like chimneys and none of the bar staff are going to be telling them to put it out. Recreational drugs tend to find their way into the Muse Lounge regardless of external fashions for or against. This permissive attitude is a natural product of the Hooves' European heritage and has caused problems in the past, most famously with the Lounge's accountant, Hugo Galvis. Cedric himself hired Hugo to work on the business's books after a two-day night on the town in the early 90s. Tellingly, even after 48 hours of socialising and hijinks the older Cedric remained unaware that Hugo came from San Cristobel let alone spoke not one word of English. "The time we spend together, she had flown by," Hugo told translators. "The old man - he see a little of himself in me, I think, with the fire in the eyes." In another piece of bad news, Hugo's luck with numbers has turned out to be inversely proportional to his success with the ladies, resulting in the Inland Revenue imposing full tax audits on the Muse Lounge following the break-ups of his first and second marriages. His third - to controversial Italian women's hockey star Annamaria Raffo - has seemed to take, however, and projections for the second half of 2003 are looking good, delivered as always in Hugo's crabbed handwriting on chunks of plasterboard borrowed from the painters and workmen permanently renovating the couple's ninth-floor Herne Bay apartment. "Annamarie, she is life to me," Hugo explained, wiping the sweat from his face. "Aiyee - see how my face burns? Hayfever all the time from your stinking Pacific island - hayfever! I leave you all one day!" His departure however has been delayed by inquiries from various United States agencies and a late night telephone caller identifying himself only as "El pez grande".

– Apr 19, 2003

Things I said

Mark Broatch interviewed me for the Sunday Star Times and the Q&A is now online at www.stuff.co.nz. In the interview I say things like:

I have way too few other interests. I'm lucky to be able to write and feel that anything that takes me away from it is abusing the privilege. In reality I am more fun than that, especially if you catch me in the hating myself / seeking distraction period.

You can read the rest of it here.

Bedside reading #1