I never lend books to coal miners

In an interview at GQ.com Bill Murray explains how he got a green light for his version of Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge:

Back when I wanted to make The Razor's Edge, [Dan Aykroyd] sent me the first twenty-nine pages of Ghostbusters to read. And you know, they were great, even better than what we filmed, so I said, "Okay, okay, gotta do it." And Danny said, "Uummm, okay. Where should we, uh, er, do it?" And I said, "Well, I'm trying to get this movie made over at Columbia [Pictures]." And he said, "All right, well, you tell 'em that they do your movie there and they'll have the GBs." We had a caterer for Razor's Edge in forty-five minutes.

The 1984 version of The Razor's Edge was a failure with critics and audiences. It was the second adaptation of Maugham's novel; the first in 1946 with Tyrone Power didn't go down that well either. (A third version was made in 2005.) Maugham's story is attractive but notoriously challenging to dramatise. The main character, Larry, is off-stage for most of the novel, his actions reported to the reader by third parties, and his journey of enlightenment is internal. This puts any screenwriter two steps away from the tools he needs.

Director John Byrum collaborated with Murray on the screenplay which puts Larry at the center of events while several different worlds collapse around him. In some ways their version is better structured than the source: after seeing the movie and going back to the book you can see Maugham's glissando style for the soft lens that it is.

In The Razor's Edge Larry moves through life's terrible events without being dragged down: he remains cheerful, flip, serenely detached. All Murray had to do to remain true to the character was to be himself, which he did. He couldn't muster the dramatic moments and there are some cute bits in there that didn't work but I still think the 1984 version is a great adaptation of a good book. Theresa Russell pours it on in a bob and there is a wonderful scene when Larry, living in North England and literally working at the coal face, is chided by a fellow miner: 'You've never read The Upanishads? You really don't know anything, do you?'

Author pics

My friend (aka mon ami) Mathieu Bourgois featured in Shooting writers at Toro magazine. That's Mathieu's picture of Colm Toibin above; my pic of Mathieu below when he was taking my pic in Paris for Editions Christian Bourgois. Mathieu had just helped me locate a secondhand Olympus XA so was unable to protest.


The article by Salvatore Difalco discusses photographing authors. Short version: we don't like it. It's difficult for non-authors to understand why. Writing is a draining and private process and by the time it comes to publishing the thing the writer just doesn't give a damn - even when he/she knows that he/she should. This is not arrogance or shyness. Merely exhaustion. Please move on. Nothing to see here.

Now playing

Of everything that stands, etc. The Doors are the soundtrack to the Thing I Never Finish, not that I need an excuse to listen to them. In Paris at Christmas after swinging by Jim's grave at Pere Lachaise (no need to buy a map - just follow the goths and Berliners in silver-decorated stetsons) I felt the pang of travelling without a copy of L.A. Woman and bought a copy at iTunes. Nick Cave is rightly disparaging of the remix which is for little white earphones and not big black stereos like the one I have in storage, but because I'm in transit and on little white earphones most of the time it does me fine.

I can recommend the new Doors documentary When You're Strange if it's out where you are. Narrated by someone called Johnny Depp, it has a getting-things-straight-for-the-record approach and some incredible footage. They were filming each other and being filmed all the time, of course. Jim's mother attended many of his late concerts even after he sang about wanting to fuck her. That showed character.

It's late and I'm scribbling. Or rather I have been, after sleeping all day and getting up around 10pm and thinking alright, let's take another crack at this. Handwritten on yellow legal and slipped into the ring binder: Revisions To Do. Mental in tray. Etc. Into your blue-blue blues.

Now playing

Old bones

Predators is a time travel movie that takes you back to an age when action movies were bloody, the monsters were some guy in a suit and the digital effects were a bit askew. The original moved the action genre forward a step by being two movies in one. Ahnuld's Predator started off like Ahnuld's Commando, giving the neck-and-pec fans all they wanted from the star in the first quarter hour (one liners, exploding ethnic stereotypes, the star lifting a truck with his bare hands). Once the special ops team had done their stuff and it was revealed they themselves were being stalked, only then did the ten little Indians countdown begin. Predator was an Alien rip off that has aged better than its source, partly because sci fi has diversified but largely because of that stylistic shift. No matter how many times you watch it, Predator is a great bait and switch.

Tasked with a sequel in the shadow of the truly awful Alien vs Predator mash ups, Nimrod Antal / Robert Rodriguez have made a faithful and loving remake in the plural, Predators, that is less daring than Predator and less tense-making than Predators II. Sticking to a single story line and tone, writers Alex Litvak and Michael Finch move the same pieces around the board to much the same effect. Instead of noble Native American soldier who faces off, knife in hand, with the invisible beastie, Predators has a noble Japanese yakuza with a samurai sword (in a fateful field of long grasses, conjured up by the alien world as surely as a Chaucerian knight's longing for a castle will make same appear around the next corner). Instead of a square-jawed tobacco chewing southern state gatling gunner it has a square jawed Russian gatling gunner. Instead of Elpidia Carrillo's "men of my village" speech it has Alice Braga giving a "men of my village" speech. Stumbling on a bad thing the humans escape the same way as Ahnuld did in 1987, falling through the bushes and into a body of water. (It's a stunt worth repeating: Jake Sulley does the same in Avatar. The sequence matches Predator almost shot-for-shot.)

Instead of Ahnuld Predators has Adrian Brody who does a pretty good job balancing knowingness and 'roid rage. It also has similar continuity problems: the troops break cover long before anyone thinks to look up and notice the alien sky, and the aliens have varying degrees of mortality, but with these lies come the satisfying "gotcha" moments, and a bullet count, and a fun cast and some parts when it's almost scary, thus balancing the filmmakers' goal of getting back to action movie basics while meeting the needs of a modern audience whose idea of mystery is a Tumblr link. Recent movies such as The Hangover change gears five times to keep people watching; if modern cinema is any indication then audiences have not been this restless since the Monkees' Head.

Predators is way more fun than Avatar. The movie has been shot on what looks to be a live set, and looks great: the digital effects are often tacky, and the old soundtrack and sound effects have been retained, to its benefit. I stopped counting the references to the previous Predator movies and Alien because it made me feel old, and because I was having fun watching it. There's a lot wrong with it and a couple of things brilliantly right with it. The irony is that this is how movies used to be before the movie that inspired it came along.

The premise of a human hunter who is himself hunted by an alien was the subject of a 1953 short story 'The Ruum' by American SF writer Arthur Porges. When a game hunter in the Canadian Rockies stumbles on the alien's eerie gallery of life specimens, the ruum pursues him to add to its collection. I read the story when I was 11 in R. Chetwynd Hayes' 1975 anthology Tales of Terror From Outer Space; years later when I first saw Predator I immediately wondered if it had been the movie's inspiration. Porges' alien is also liquid, like a rolling bubble of mercury, and morphs into different tool shapes to pursue its prey, just like James Cameron's T-1000 in Terminator II. Someone owes that writer lunch.

The Green Parrot

Start of the working day. La Perruche makes it.

Work in progress

Back to work on the Manuscript I Never Finish. No idea whether I'll finish it this time. Maybe, or maybe not.

Have you got anything left to say before I shoot myself

The above is poster advertising a book (or 'printed entertainment') as displayed on the London Underground. The book - that's it down there in the corner, see? - is titled Even. I'm guessing Even is a story of revenge, probably starring Agent David Trevellyan who is motivated to seek revenge when someone steals his life. Because Agent David Trevellyan's life is his - not theirs - he's angry but instead of getting angry like you and I might do, Agent David Trevellyan will get even. Sure enough, Even is the title of the book. That's probably Agent David Trevellyan talking in the poster - or rather, quoted, because if he was actually talking you would hear his voice in your ears above The National on your iPod. Agent Dav - oh, look, I can't be bothered typing it again because there are so many letters in it omg it goes on 4eva but Even, it's called and it's about this guy who gets even. Do you follow? If you can't, try reading the poster again. But don't move closer to read it because then you would fall on to the tracks, and that would delay the Northern Line.

I like a thriller as much as the next man but if the people you're selling the book to are truly this hard of understanding then reading the thing will be fucking hard going, unless it has a lot of pictures in it, or the pages are blank.

By contrast, drinkers are approached with this level of sophistication:

You don't need to be smart to drink. Why do you have to be a moron to read a book?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

In a funny kind of way Philip Kaufman is one of my favourite directors. He's made some great adaptations: Rising Sun, Henry and June, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a remake of the B-movie classic. Invasion is such a perfect story that it's become a template for a genre I always think of as the Twilight Zone format: everyday setting, big concept and a tidal current of consequences - sexy, unavoidable, bleak. All this is based on a writer's idea: Jack Finney who wrote the original story as a serial for Collier's magazine. You've never heard of Jack but the idea he had feeds into everything from Close Encounters to The X-Files.

The Black Dahlia

First saw it in France, with subtitles, which is the best way to see a Brian De Palma movie: the text is a constant tap on the shoulder, reminding you that it's a "film" and framing its artifice as, well... artifice. The movie version is monstrously inferior to Ellroy's novel, which in turn runs second to the author's White Jazz and American Tabloid: a seething, self-loathing, tangle that twists towards multiple resolutions, and is the greater for it. If you can survive the first 100 pages you will be hooked and rewarded.

David Fincher developed the movie version before being replaced by De Palma; I've always considered Fincher's lengthy, multiple-storylined Zodiac to be the modern imprint of how his Dahlia might have been. De Palma reduces the novel's layers to tight, trademark sequences that belie its multiple twists. Josh Friedman's workmanlike script makes a similar mistake, structuring the story with such concision that the main characters' emotional dips and dives - faithful to source - seem irrational and even silly. Josh Hartnett's Bucky is especially undermined, tearing up in almost every scene; Scarlett Johansson's Kay seems spoiled and childish rather than the complex mirror-of-the-Dahlia victim that she and all the other females in the novel become.

Still, even without subtitles I'll go the De Palma version for Scarlett's voice - a menthol woodwind cracking wise - Hillary Swank's ice-cold Madeleine, De Palma's steadicam introduction to the inbred Linscott family, and Fiona Shaw's extra crazy Ramona. For all the movie's (studio trimmed) gore and savagery Shaw provides its most ghastly moment using just her face and two fingers. Aaron Eckhart holds up his end as Lee Blanchard but true to 40s noir the men are redundant: it's the women who drive. Mia Kirshner plays the saddest girl in the world. The movie was much longer before the producers cut it down: it would be a dream to watch the version De Palma intended. Until then The Black Dahlia is a movie that could have been: a beautiful corpse, in pieces.

What do you need, a road map?

The NBR is putting on a happy face by saying Peter Jackson's co-review of the NZ Film Commission "hit the spot" with producers. The lawyerly SPADA press release conspicuously avoided mention of the report's recommendation that the NZFC bypass producers in the early stage of development and instead funds writers directly, a suggestion which the NZ Writers Guild liked very much.

Reading Jackson's report is emotional for any NZ writer who has experienced what is charitably termed "the development process", i.e. bullshit about writing by people who can't. I don't have a dog in that fight (and won't again) but liberating experienced writers will make for better New Zealand films, period.

The Sundays

Douglas Adams called it the long, dark teatime of the soul. I do a lot of work on myself to enjoy Sundays, mostly in the form of actual work. Today it's some legalese and another spelling check. I went for a run in the very early a.m., weaving between kids on their way home and drunks doing the chicken walk, one clutching the side of his face as blood trickled down his elbow. (Stepping between pools of vomit in London is a fitness exercise all in itself.) And shortly I'll get into the tiny, teeny revisions: spell check, some crabbed sentences and tracking down a scene that continues to appear twice, like a ghost in a photograph.

The NYT has a great article on Laurie Anderson's Homeland album. Her working method now features some guy named Lou Reed:

When Ms. Anderson finally began assembling the album, she faced an overwhelming amount of data. "I was staring at like a million sound files, trying to fit together pieces from different songs, different years," she said. "I thought I was going to lose my mind. I was going to give up, and I was kind of crying about it every day. Lou got a little sick of hearing this. So he finally said, "Listen, I'm going to sit with you until you finish it.' " And Mr. Reed did, sitting on the studio couch and helping her make ruthless, don't-look-back decisions.

Commentators are annoyed by NYT commentator David Brooks' comments on the Rolling Stone article on General McChrystal. Brooks has interpreted the magazine's reporting of the Afghanistan commander's statements as a symptom of a 'culture of exposure':

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority... the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

I listen to Brooks and fellow columnist Mark Shields' PBS broadcast every Saturday and always enjoy it. I doubt I'd agree with any of Brooks' politics (he leans towards the neocon) but I'm always interested in what he says. Ditto Rolling Stone, the ultimate wannabee magazine: even its writers who were there write as if they weren't and desperately wish they had been.

The new kid

On Friday I folded and joined the 21st century. My latest compact camera is a Canon Ixus 100 15, which is a model or two shy of the latest available, and it's a honey - very small, not too many features and a simple interface.

Behind the Canon are the two 35mm compacts I've been travelling with - my beloved Olympus XA and my Rollei 35T, which is a more complex relationship. The Rollei is really a small (imitation) Leica, with a louder, less satisfying shutter but it's too bulky to carry around conveniently, especially with the current fashion for narrow jeans and slim jackets. The XA's a honey: fully auto, smoother around the edges, lovely lens, quiet, thumb wheel film advance. Back home in storage are my Minox 35GT and my Olympus Pen half-frame (along with my Nikon FE). The Pen has the best lens of the four compacts and its rudimentary functions (all manual, no meter, no rangefinder) have forced me to take some great photos: set the exposure according to the grid that used to feature on the inside of a 35mm film packet; set the distance - 6' on the click wheel, easily estimated on the basis of your height; and get in close, paying attention to the light and so on. The shutter is very quiet and its dinky appearance threatens no-one. So, a great portrait camera.

The Minox compact is less fun to use, more fiddly, ugly feel to the shutter, and a tricky lens than can catch the light and distort images. But because it's lighter and smaller I found myself using it more often. This demonstrates another rule: the best camera is the one that you have on you. Which is why I now take so many photos on my phone - and even that's set at low res. (I used it to take the blurry pic above.) Now sharing images has become more of a priority, so I've gone digital. Hello connector cords, battery charging, etc.

Old habits die hard. I'm shooting using the Canon's optical viewfinder with the viewer turned off because I like the accidents of parallax and I don't want to review images while I'm taking them - although nowadays, obviously, the camera is the viewer for most people. The Canon has a 3x optical zoom but I never use it. I am a firm believer in Werner Herzog's adage that if you want to get close, then get close. I switched off the flash - good for parties, but after years of shooting film it seems wrong to use flash for fill during anything approaching daylight. And I racked down the image default from 8mb to 2mb, which gives me a staggering 7,000-odd image capacity on the 4 gig SD card, a faster response. I don't plan to ever print images from this camera - but I'm sure that will change. At full resolution the depth of detail is amazing, and I'm enjoying the different feel of digital. I like it in movies, so it's time to enjoy it in stills.

Because I'm in the UK, I will probably be reduced to nerdily carrying around a copy of my rights. The authorities here are hysterical about public photography which has become the new excuse for stopping people and collecting data that will never be analysed or useful. When I was living in East London around the City I would see the same scene four or five times a day: a skinny art student armed with an antique 35mm SLR or a non-English speaking tourist with a video cam standing patiently as a policeman, a trainee policeman or a community policeman took a note of their "details." People do have the right to snap things that are in plain view: buildings, monuments, clouds in the sky. From official UK police statement:

Stop and Search

Section 44 gives officers no specific powers in relation to photography and there is no provision in law for the confiscation of equipment or the destruction of images, either digital or on film.

On the rare occasion where an officer suspects that an individual is taking photographs as part of target reconnaissance for terrorist purposes, then they should be treated as a terrorist suspect and dealt with under Section 43 of the Act. This would ensure that the legal power exists to seize equipment and recover images taken. Section 58A Counter Terrorism Act 2008 provides powers to cover instances where photographs are being taken of police officers who are, or who have been, employed at the front line of counter terrorism operations.

These scenarios will be exceptionally rare events and do not cover instances of photography by rail enthusiasts, tourists or the media.

However the reality at street level is different. Take photos and you will be stopped and asked patronising questions, usually by someone new to the uniform. (Update: just like this...)

One last thing

Ms Fing

A notebook page from Electric. I was sitting up in bed late one night writing the novel ("lemonade" was later changed to "soda") and paused to sketch the cat ignoring me from the corner of the bed. She liked to perch there so she could be as far away from me as possible while I was writing. This only made me like her more.

Alex Kasman from the Department of Mathematics at the College of Charleston in South Carolina has reviewed Electric as part of MathFiction, a blog in which he collects information about significant references to mathematics in fiction. Even if he hadn't reviewed my novel I would still consider this approach to literature to be a very cool idea: a different way of slicing the data.

Film studies

Nothing in something particular

So try not to see something in particular; try not to achieve anything special. You already have everything in your own pure quality. If you understand this fact, there is no fear. There may be some difficulty, of course, but there is no fear.

-- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Weatherhill, 1970)

The Manuscript I Never Finish

'You look different,' she said.
'But I still look like me, right?'
'Kind of.' She tilted her head. 'It’s remarkable, actually, how much difference it makes. You look like you, but you’re not you. You know?'
'I don’t like that idea.'
'It’s only temporary,' she said. 'You’ll be back to your old self soon enough.'

Since finishing my last ms I've gone back to the Manuscript I Never Finish. In the old days this would have been a hairy box of notes and papers but now it's a hairy box of notes and papers and many, many computer files, all carefully dated. The more experimental a work becomes, the more you fall back on traditional methods to keep track of the parts.

I think a lot of novelists have a work they keep coming back to. This one is hard to catch because it's quite light, but as I work on it, it becomes darker and I have to pull back to recapture that original "feel." Normally I don't worry about tone because tone seems naturally born of structure and story, like tin cans tied to the car's bumper. But this one goes back and forth, and it doesn't help that there's a major surreal element that I lose track of.

Pray that I never finish it. Possibly I already have and I just like going back to the narrative between novels and shoving bits of it around to see what happens. I like the madness of this. Al Pacino starred in a film called The Local Stigmatic that famously never seemed to be finished - a quick click on imbd.com tells me that it's now out on DVD. Stanley Kubrick was always working on Napoleon. I envy people who have the confidence that the world will wait for them no matter how long they take. I've never had believed that. I'm outcome oriented so something that never comes to an end is a meditation.

James James

Obligatory mention of Bloomsday. The LA Times is all over it, Los Angeles being the home of Shakespeare. I find it all a bit... easy. But it gets a writer talked about and turns people onto Joyce, so that's a good thing.

Fuck ebooks: I want to write fiction for the Allosphere:

...a house-sized ball of data viz at that allows researchers to literally get inside their information. Choice AlloSphere projects so far have included examinations of how hydrogen atoms bond together and a giant model of the brain derived from fMRI scans. Up to 30 people can fit on the catwalk, and they get silly-looking glasses and wireless joysticks to mess around with the streaming imagery. Dozens of speakers play sound into the echo-free chamber. The result is psychedelia with research applications.

Doug Liman's new film might be based on the Hiroshi Sakurazaka novel All You Need Is Kill. I don't know if that's Sakurazaka's or the translator's title but shame on the publishing bodysnatchers who have revived the Bond novels for not thinking of it first. The previous post-Fleming Bond novel was called Devil May Care, which sounds like the crawl for a Sex and The City movie.

Eating about books

Over at Big Other Ryan W. Bradley has compiled a list of books to read over lunch. I can't think of how many books I've enjoyed over meals either at my desk or in pizza houses or sushi bars. Currently I'm re-reading Bob Woodward's histories of the Bush administration but before that it was Patricia Highsmith and before that a bunch of random pulp and literary titles purchased from the Oxfam shop for not very much money.

(Secondhand books are still technically illegal, right? You're not allowed to resell them. I wonder if that complaint will ever resurface or go the way of home taping, etc. I'm still careful to not purchase books by authors who are either living or living very well - say, anyone other than a best seller.)

So as a result my book collection is an index of what I was eating or drinking at the time. The stains on the pages are less varied in London than they were in Auckland. They work as a kind of index: there are many dabs Thai curry in the last chapters of Woodward's Plan of Attack. The book is a grim tale of political blandishments and peppered with ironies, such as this one from the hours leading up to the war on Iraq:

When [Bush speechwriter Michael] Gerson was finished with his corrections, he joined the president and the others, who were about 10 minutes into the Mel Gibson film Conspiracy Theory. Bush loudly summarized the plot, and during the rest of the movie made fun of it as fairly predictable.

I am the only person in the world who has not read Kitchen Confidential but I like Anthony Bourdain: if you want to read something good about food, here's his dining out diary for a few days. Suggest you eat before reading it. I've never been comfortable in expensive restaurants, a good thing given my choice of profession. Restaurants are for publishers and producers, or publishers and producers who are making nice.

Just like I always imagined it

Something crabby and middle-aged is happening to Nick Denton's mini-publishing franchise but they're still good for something: Mad Men's Betty Draper on the morning after, as captured by Gawker.

Nighthawks

This is a lovely bit of fun. Courtesy of Jeremiah's Vanishing New York blog: a quest to track down the real site and inspiration for Edward Hopper's Nighthawks:

As the truth becomes clearer, I am finding it difficult to bear this idea that, outside of Hopper's imagination, there was no Nighthawks diner at all.

Says the Art Institute of Chicago catalogue:

Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by "a restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet," but the image, with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative, has a timeless quality that transcends its particular locale... Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon... Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another.

Writes Greg Cook in Visions of Isolation:

At the height of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, Hopper seemed an anachronism, but today he’s clearly part of the American Scene realism that includes documentary photography by Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. And he comes into focus as godfather to the staged photos of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Gregory Crewdson... In Edward Hopper’s world, everyone is lost in an unending rut of office overtime, rattling El trains, cheap fluorescent diners, and bad dates. Everything has fallen tensely quiet. And this anxious, itchy mood haunts even the urban landscapes — perhaps half his work — in which the only person around is you, the viewer. Here every man is an island...Women are the stars, usually in tight outfits or scantily clad, energizing canvases with their sexuality, their vulnerability, their unattainableness. Like the woman in the 1944 Morning in City, they appear alone, exhausted and sad, hardened by life, staring out the open windows of cheap hotel rooms.

What's not to like? It also interests me that the characters in the painting are night hawks - predators - as opposed to night owls. The title is a contemporary colloquialism but the longer I stare at the painting the more the characters resemble perched birds - bright parrots in an aviary, or even vultures.

Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention

1. Cloverfield on TV. Works so much better on the small screen. The child actors are difficult to distinguish - Lizzie Caplan is the only one with any real personality.
2. Yelling at the phone.
3. Yelling at email.
4. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Not working yet (see pts 2-3). The chapter on polishing a tile is especially good.
5. Nona Hendryx, Nona. Still hard to get past 'Transformation' which still ranks as the best I'll Just Listen To That One More Time track ever.
6. Yelling at London.
7. For the first time ever being attracted to the idea of a smart phone, the iPhone 4. Considering buying one and yelling at that as having phone and email in same device would halve yelling time req'd.
8. Thinking that honestly this is the last time I'm doing anyone a favour ever again.
9. Nevertheless have done two massive favours. Karma Deficit: 2.
10. How is it possible to make a tile into a jewel? Or even, a Marlena Diamond?
11. A: It isn't.
12. I relate to Marlena because she is bored, knows no-one at the party, saves someone and then dies.
13. I miss Paul, even for the emails we don't send to each other.
14. I hate poetry, or rather don't understand it. Hence the numbers.
15. 116 is a table number.
16. One one eight seven at Unterwasser.
17. And it's raining.
18. As a background I also recommend Alan Watts, The Way of Zen. In print since 1957 = in print now.
19. I'm working on some short stories.
20. The short stories are turning into a novel.
21. I am polishing a tile.

What's on the slab

The headlines about Richard O'Brien's difficulties in moving to New Zealand contrast with the sporting community's efforts to bring back Sonny Bill. O'Brien's problems are doubtless more to do with the horror (ho ho) of immigration regulations that the nation's attitude to art and culture but, still: I do wonder.

I've seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show once, on Friday night in Avondale in 1978. Once is the exact number of times anyone needs to see it because after a single viewing you can remember every line. The pastiche of horror movies and American rock and roll is so bang on the entire hippocampus lights up in recognition.

To make the show O'Brien and collaborator Jim Sharman plundered American culture. The result is somehow very NZ/Australia, I think because the (mostly British stage) cast are pretending to be American as only a foreigner who worships that culture can. This is one way in which art moves forward: by a series of bald-faced thefts and imitations driven by an inner longing that lifts itself above mere reversioning. It's what I call 12-bar Art, after 12-bar Blues, because it follows exactly the same rhythm as everything before it while at the same time standing out as distinct in itself. Rocky Horror's personality lies in its texture and gradations. It made a jump to the left.

Italian ham

Martin Booth's A Very Private Gentleman was disappointing because it's filled with Authentic Italian Detail. Readers love that sort of thing but to me it renders the authorial voice fussy and uptight. The novel ostensibly concerns a man who makes rifles for assassins but is mostly chatter about prosciutto and muscato and Dante and... oh, fuck, it goes on. The effect is like Tim Gunn doing The Day of The Jackal. It even features a homage / shot by shot copy of the famous "adjusting the sights" target sequence from the 1973 movie. 270pp but the story starts around p.145, or you can wait for the movie, which sounds very post-Bourne.

I love a good thriller and can name about five: the rest are so much dreck. Why (as my late friend Paul Reynolds was fond of saying) should the devil have all the best tunes? I started Hennel Mankell before abandoning it and it's why I've yet to attempt Stieg Larsson. I don't deny readers their fun but it frustrates me to read a book that would come to life if the authors would only shut up.

On page 244 of A Very Private Gentlemen the protagonist orders a grapefruit juice: 'Una spremuta.' Apparently this is risky in Italy because the word sounds similar to the slang for 'blow job.' I learned this from the adventure of an art historian who while travelling in Florence decided to order a grapefruit juice very loudly in a busy street cafe. The waiter's eyebrow went up and the patrons fell silent just long enough for the realisation of what he'd said to sink in, and then everyone exploded.

Hellfire!

The Avengers creator Brian Clemens is speaking at a special BFI screening of 'A Touch of Brimstone' in July. I managed to book over the internet in spite of the internet. The infamous S&M episode was banned in the US but is considered rocking good fun in the UK. The Hellfire Club, Emma Peel waving a snake around, the guy who played Jason King: sometimes London gets it right.

At the contrasting end of the personal liberty spectrum the UK government has passed the Digital Economy Act, which will allow copyright holders to trace and disconnect file-sharers and fuck off everybody else. Commentators are concerned about privacy:

Once the state decides that it has a duty to police the internet to maximise the profits of a few entertainment companies (no matter what the public expense), it sets itself on a path of ever-more-restrictive measures.

Which is true, but ever-more-restrictive is how they like it (e.g. Emma, above). Users concerned about increasing levels of government control may be reassured by the UK's built-in checks and balances system of officials who lose lap tops, a regular occurrence which has nothing whatsoever to do with also being part of the biggest drinking culture on the planet. The government's "electronic eavesdropping center" recently admitted losing 35 computers containing sensitive information:

A GCHQ spokesperson today said there was no evidence that any of the material on the laptops had "got into wrong hands", but admitted: "Given the state of the records, there is no way of confirming that".

Get some sleep, Pam - you're looking tired.

The American Friend

I think it was genetics. I think it was luck. I think it was attitude that got me through a lot of it. I believe in miracles. It’s a miracle that I’m still here.

The late Dennis Hopper interviewed by Alex Simon.

Addendum: Paul Thomas writes about Hopper, Easy Rider and Terry Southern, and I agree with every word. Southern wrote Easy Rider and never got the credit he deserved. His champion drinking habits doubtless had more than a little to do with it but overall, yes, that is the way of Hollywood. Southern once said that all you had to do to write a novel was write a page a day, then at the end of a year, send it in. Pity the editor.

The Universal

There is no-one at the stadium at the French Open. Fuck, I'll go. Really - the seats are four-fifths empty. Men's singles, 4th round, there are more pigeons than people. Including the green seats. The green seats must be worth extra, right? Was Gwen Stefani busy?

I know nothing about sports. I like boxing - it takes way more guts than spear-tackling - and I can understand tennis, finally. Which means the third act of the movie of Strangers on a Train makes more sense to me now than it did when I first saw it, but that's it. Oh, and running. Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was a great book. But yes, hitting people and Russian girls collapsing in emotion, that's about my range. Fuck that team shit.

Long, long weekend. Getting longer.

Abl wz i

An early example of celebrity tweeting from Adam Zamoyski's Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon & The Congress of Vienna:

On 15 July [1815], fearing capture by French forces loyal to the Bourbons, [Napoleon] went aboard the Bellerophon... the idea of holding him on the British mainland appeared less attractive soon after the Bellerophon dropped anchor in Plymouth Sound. Thousands sailed or rowed out to catch a glimpse of the fallen ogre, and local boatmen made fortunes towing visitors from as far afield as London round the man-of-war. Napoleon would observe them through his eyeglass and raise his hat to the ladies, to their intense delight. Tired of being hailed and asked what he was doing when he was not on deck, the crew took to hanging out a board on which they would chalk 'At Breakfast', 'In Cabin with Captain', 'Writing with his Officers' and so on.

That new familiar feeling

Whitcoulls have launched the Kobo ebook reader and software platform in NZ. The tech has been reviewed in Engadget:

Kobo... doesn't plan on making a big splash in the actual e-reader market, since it's primarily about building branded software and delivering branded e-book stores for others, including manufacturers.., and booksellers...

As far as software and capabilities, the device is utterly barebones, but at least it keeps its aesthetics throughout, and everything seems responsive and intuitive. There's no 3G onboard (you sync your e-pub titles with a desktop app over USB), no specific word on storage (our guess is in the 1GB to 4GB range), and there don't seem to be any other activities available to reading books.

As an author I have many questions and so turned (clicked) to the Whitcoulls site FAQ. And got:

Why do I not feel optimistic?

DRM free copies of your favourite New Zealand novels now available at secondhand bookstores throughout the country, at less than $12-17.

Update: Apparently Kobo books don't reside on your hard / flash drive but rather stay "in the cloud." Fail. Have no interest in paying a cell phone company's wireless data fees every time I want to read. iPod Kobo app = gone.

And this is the punchline: Paul Reynolds

It's been said that no man in his last hours ever wished he'd spent more time at the office but Paul Reynolds might have been the exception. He had been through a lot but being a Scot he put it into labour. Watching him work so hard was difficult for his loved ones but engaged in a task he was as happy as a sandboy. He liked complex problems, the big picture and silly little distractions. He was always willing to suffer fools because he believed in giving people second chances. He'd been given a few himself: picked himself up, dusted himself off, got to work. I always admired that about him.

I met Paul when he was reading for publishers, writing reviews, living on the slope in Parnell. He read my first (unpublished) novel and recommended my second; as a broadcaster, he gave me my first good review. When I first connected to the internet in 1994(? - squealing modem, etc) he was, ridiculously, the first person to email me. (He contacted me - I had no idea how to work the thing.) We met for coffee in Vulcan Lane and talked about novels and drinking and London and music. Since then we've had a lot of coffees and dinners and conversations, and I worked with him for a time, and I did a lot of happy listening. Paul liked to tell long, rambling stories daisy-chained together one after the other and then, just at the point where they were about to go off completely, reel them back by in saying, '...And this is the punchline.' Because of all the places he'd been to in the meantime, the punchline was never as good.

When I was back in town last year I stayed at his apartment, minded the cat and attempted to work the mind numbingly complex PC / web TV set up he'd basically strung together for the sole purpose of streaming The Archers. There was also whiskey in the cabinet, he noted, and the Bourne trilogy on DVD, and would I please help myself to both. What I liked about Paul was that he was a fan of Derrida and Patrick O'Brian. On one birthday when I clumsily gifted him a John le Carré title which he already had in his bookcase he replied without irony, 'One can never have too many.' He was always giving me things to read and ideas I never would have thought of. His opinion meant more to me than almost anyone's.

I knew things had not been good over for him over the last while and I was braced for bad news. Now it's here it's only just sinking in. Now I don't know who I'll turn to next time when I have an irrational complaint and need someone to say agreeably, 'Well, this is true.' People die and things change but sometimes you wish they didn't, or at least that they would hold back and the world would stop turning just for a while. But that would mean that there was no longer work to be done. Paul was clever and funny and moody and brisk, and he left early. He had things to do.

Bedside reading

The LaPorte Dreamworks bio is straightforward but good. About 40 pages of chapter notes and quote attributions because the author has written about Disney and Michael Ovitz and David Geffen. More and more I find myself admiring works not so much for what they are but what they had to get through - the lawyering over the book must have been incredible. Significantly it has no photos, I assume because the subjects wouldn't grant permission. So, well done, Ms LaPorte, and adios.

The Booth novel will be a George Clooney movie soon; I can see why. J.D. Salinger - he's pretty good.

Summer has finally hit London and the city is pale and reeling. It's all 1940s dresses and aviator shades and Doc Martens up north - and the women are dressing up, as well. The Enforcer was on late. Refrigerator moment this morning with the ms: realised something, scribbled two new pages but can't face typing them up. Too much time in front of the screen. Sunday, maybe. Tres fatigue and every time I get up to speed there's some shit message from the old country to bring me right back down. So off drinking, then. And no, not warm beer, and I don't know anything much about wine - I'm vin de table and voddy right down the line. My mother once said (= yelled) that you can't have champagne tastes on a beer income, and both the statement and its rhythm stuck.

Mystery Machine

Tres fatigue, bad news all round and all that. A random dip into articles I bookmarked this week:

This just in from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm:

New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia.

Any author could have told you.

The painting that used to hang in Michael Crichton's bedroom sold for US$29million. It's a Jasper Johns; what I like about this story is that a writer got to own it. Here's Crichton talking to Janet Berliner:

Starting around the early Eighties, I began to realize that people’s perceptions of me were very different from how I perceived myself. There was this sense that I was a kind of stainless steel, high-tech person, who would be really interested in lecturing on the subject of robots, or something. I found myself saying to people that I didn’t have those interests, and that caused a lot of surprise. I began to feel that what had happened, because I had so much early attention for books like The Andromeda Strain – which I really feel were misunderstood, though they were very popular–perceptions of me were of some twenty-six-year-old techie whiz kid. Meanwhile, the experiences of my life had gone in another direction, had been going in that direction for many, many years.

It's a good interview about writing, public- and self-perception.

As a teen I very much admired the blurry work of photographer Anton Corbijn. He's since graduated (or regressed) to the moving image: his interesting blog for his new project The American is here:

Wish it was raining, makes it so much easier to go into the darkness of the edit suite. I'm going to look at the ending of the film and make sure it is understood by more people. No way i'm going to let you in on the actual ending so you will have to wait and see. Or wait longer and go and see the sequel, in 3D of course.

I killed my Twitter account yonks ago but the positive, funny tweets of director David Lynch make me happy.

NY Magazine has a feature on dining with Bill Murray:

If you are a lady, he will stand up when you take your seat and remain standing until you pull your chair in. He will do this for every female at his table. You soon will start making an effort to sit down and stand up faster.

A recent survey of British consumers found that:

Two-thirds want hard copies of photographs and music, 75 per cent want their films to come with packaging, and 90 per cent want their books to stay as books... And it's not just the oldies. Almost 40 per cent of 16-34 age groups still buy CDs and DVDs alongside digital formats.

Scooby Doo (above) was created by Hanna Barbera artist Iwao Takamoto. During World War II the American-born Takamoto was interned in the Manzanar camp in California. After 1945 he went on to work for Disney; at Hanna Barbera he created Scooby, Muttley, Astro and Penelope Pitstop. There's a lesson in there somewhere. A detailed interview with the funny man is here.

World: turning. Things not so good.