The Big Snatch

On Sunday I caught a screening of Mélodie en sous-sol (1963) released in English as Any Number Can Win and also, wonderfully, The Big Snatch. The print was widescreen (2.35:1) and black & white. YouTube hosts colour snippets that look like a digital treatment but these may have been contemporary. The film is clearly trying to match itself with Hollywood and dipping Alain Delon in what looks like pancake batter might have been part of the effort. Forget them: the monochrome version is better -- gorgeous, in fact, in the way that old & white films are: a holiday for the eye.

Mélodie is a casino heist and much of the action unfolds in sunlight, from the opening shot on a bright morning in Paris Gare du Nord to the poolside dénouement in Cannes, and the intermediate tones are appropriate to the story. It doesn't paint its exotic locales in the sinister velvet-black of, say, Notorious (1946). It's a noir-lite: a large grey. When Francis (Delon) gives up the wheel of his Alfa to his Swedish girlfriend, she drives at a sensible speed.

Critics have noted the similarity between Mélodie en sous-sol and Rififi (1955) -- as if any heist movie could escape the comparison -- but its true antecedent is The Killing (1956), right down to the (spoiler alert) ending. In the final scene of The Killing Kubrick's thieves are undone when the money is blown away on the airport tarmac: in Mélodie the bills float gracefully to the surface. Francis's mentor Charles (Jean Gabin), surrounded by police, can only watch for fear of giving himself away; Francis, shamed, simply turns his back, and the cops rush past, unaware of the thieves right under their noses. The construction of these final moments is stark and modern and genuinely tense-making: as good as anything De Palma or David Fincher has served up.

In between lie the delights of any film older than you are: the glimpses of street scenes, the chugging cigarettes (Francis's mother scolds him for smoking), the measures of drink (for a sunbathing tipple, fill half a tumbler with scotch, add two small ice cubes and serve. Ye gods), the casino dancing girls with real bodies and action sequences without stunt doubles. In one lengthy unbroken shot Delon climbs out of a hatch, runs up a thirty-degree tiled roof and monkey-bars along a crenellated cement facade twenty feet off the ground wearing a tuxedo and leather dress shoes; later he drops ten feet, forgets the bag he is carrying and hops back up to retrieve it, like a gymnast.

Because this is a noir, it's all for naught. The point is not that the heist goes wrong but how, and why, and director Henri Verneuil renders the fatal misstep with the same balletic ease. You truly won't see it coming. Mélodie en sous-sol is far from the greatest noir you could see but then again, noir is not about individual achievement. It's about being part... of... a... team.

Mélodie en sous-sol was based on the novel Once a Thief by John Trinian, who died in 1974. By day Trinian was Zekial Marko, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who worked for shows such as The Rockford Files and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. By night, in the 1960s as Trinian, he published a small, eclectic set of mystery and crime paperbacks including North Beach Girl and Scandal On The Sand. Could one have a cooler obituary?

Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone...

EW reports that fans report that the trailer for Baz Luhrmann's 3D version of The Great Gatsby is misspelled. Specifically, the world famous typing error "The Ziegfeld Follies" is written as "The Zeigfeld Follies". Which is a terrible indictment on our times until you remember that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a famously bad speller. Which is very meta. Which is better than 3D, any day.

(Disclosure: Still not going to see it.)

Words and pictures

Jonathan King and I have a new comic out, City Lights II: Planet of Fear. I wrote it, he drew it. You can read it online along with its predecessor, City Lights at Jonathan's comic blog The Brighter Future.

This project is becoming a fun little series to do. It's cheaper than making films and a break from writing prose: write the characters, action and dialogue, and ping that off / against the images. It would have cost a small fortune to print this in the old days and the night scenes would have gone to black. Now we can play with the whole digital paintbox, for next to nothing.

A white rad ride, so glam it's absurd

Johnny Jewel has at least three bands: The Chromatics, who are really Ruth Radelet, and Desire, who are really Megan Louise, and Glass Candy, who are really Ida No. There's more to it than that, of course, but the vocals are each group's distinguishing feature. Radelet is on edge and Louise is more laid back. Ida No, who with Jewel is (#3) Glass Candy sings in a very high, late-night key like a flipped-out Maria Muldaur and raps like Prince (i.e. badly). 'Beautiful Object' is the one on high-rotate. When asked what she missed most when she was on tour Ida said:

My cat. The smell of the air here. The quietness of the night-time. The wet ground which helps settle my nervous system.

The definitive Chromatics song is probably 'Tick of the Clock' -- a phat, minimal click track in the tradition of Pink Floyd's 'Heart Beat, Pig Meat' and Cabaret Voltaire's 'Sluggin' for Jesus'. My favourite Radelet number is 'I Want Your Love': airy, frail, bumping into things. Girl is wrapped too tight for Vietnam. She is also nervous about singing live:

I am almost never satisfied with my own performance, so it is nice to hear that people are saying good things! In the beginning I was very nervous, because I didn’t have any experience singing in front of people. So, for me, the goal has always been to get to the point where I am completely comfortable on stage, and I am a lot closer to that point now than when we first started playing shows last spring. I don’t think anything we do live is too thought-out. We just try to be ourselves and give our all to the music.

My favourite Desire track is 'Don't Call', not least of all for the lyrics:

You're gone
And babe that's a good thing
I'm still here
And looking for something
To come along.

Writing pop lyrics is like laying bricks: if you do the job right, it looks like it's been there forever. Says Megan:

I was reading on this tour Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho, a love story between a Brazilian prostitute and a French Swiss painter. They discover pure love by not drawing any limits to their romance and letting themselves be free birds. As for music Lionel Richie’s All Night Long has been a theme song for this first European tour! Francoise Hardy always makes me smile and T-Pain, Lil Wayne and Kid Cudi put me in a party mood before shows! As for movies, Marley and Me was the last movie I watched that made me cry because it was real life.

She's from Canada.

Skeletons

Shirley Manson interviewed in NYMag:

When a major label works at its absolute best, there's no other system like it to push a career into the stratosphere. But that system is not for everybody. There's a whole slew of artists that are making incredible music that just don't enjoy that kind of support because they just can't tolerate the beast on a moral, political [level]. We lose out on what I call the "fragile artists." It's all the strong, genetically well-bred people who rise to the top, even in music. All the freaks and the geeks get thrown into the streets and forgotten about. I look back at all the great artists that I fell in love with, people like Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Patti Smith — all of these people would never have had careers in this kind of climate.

Disclosure: still would.

Something's happened

Jon Spaihts talks about writing (i.e. researching and conceptualising) the script for Prometheus:

I wrote the first draft of that screenplay in three and a half weeks, which is a personal record. And then, I was just in the shoot with Ridley for awhile. I would write a draft, and then I would sit in the room with Ridley Scott and his two lieutenants, at that time, and we would talk about the story for weeks at a time. Ridley was tireless and constantly drawing. He has a fierce visual imagination, and was constantly throwing curve balls at the story that I would then need to adjust to the logic of my universe. We worked through five drafts like that, over many months.

And, also on Collider, Damon Lindelof discusses being hired to rewrite the writing:

I thought it was really cool. It was not at all what I expected it to be. But obviously they were giving it to me for a reason. And this is one of those situations where you're given no advance sense of what they like, what they don't like, you just have to walk out on the plank and say, Here is my fundamental reaction to this thing. So when I finished it I went into my office and I wrote an email. [...] I wrote maybe a four or five paragraph email saying here are all the things I love about it, I think there are some incredible set pieces here, I love the fundamental idea behind the movie, I feel like it's a cool think piece. BUT I think it's relying a bit too heavily on the Alien stuff [...] and I just feel that your idea is so strong and the characters can be made so strong that we don't need any of that stuff. We can present iterations of that stuff in different ways.

The pre-release publicity in for Alien (1979) -- trust me, I remember it so well I can practically quote it verbatim -- was all about the "look" of the film, how things had to look and feel "right." Whereas the pre-release publicity for Prometheus (2012) is almost entirely about story: the characters, the plot, how the script was developed, how it evolved. That's a sea change.

In the 80s there was a lot of talk about "the death of the author." In the 90s and early 00's there was a lot of blather about metafiction. 2012 and the author is still here, and the great medium of the writer, TV, is enjoying a golden age. Maybe movies are catching up.

(Pic: Mr. Kerry Brown)

POSTSCRIPT: We were wrong. We were so wrong.

I keep this film journal largely for myself and to take my mind off, well, writing. I write all day and think about writing all night so it's fun to post instead about pictures or music. But the experience of watching, or rather sitting in front of Prometheus while Prometheus thundered past sent me back to thinking about writing again.

Story was indeed paramount in Prometheus: I counted at least six, cut from different drafts and sprinkled across a canvas as broad as the universe itself. It was a movie from the director of Gladiator: big notes, operatic, visually concise and frigid. Some moments were perfect, others completely off-key. Scott has referred to the beast's final iteration as the deacon: the film was a curate's egg.

All the time I was watching I kept thinking: Alien was a script written by four pairs of good hands: Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who came up with the (Lovecraftian) storyline, title, creature and infestation / chest burster idea; and Walter Hill and David Giler, who stripped the screenplay back to Western-style tough guy dialogue (the last 15 minutes of the film are almost silent) and added the android / corporate bad guy subplot.

Crucially, all that writing was done before the director came on board. For Prometheus, Scott developed the script with the writers working under him. Big difference.

I wonder what else was left squirming on the cutting room floor. I bet there's a movie in there that would pop your socks.

The Fantastic Mr Knox

Daniel Knox is one of my favourite musicians. I first saw him at Jarvis Cocker's Twisted Christmas at the Barbican in 2008. Jarvis 'n' that were good but Mr Knox rocked my socks. I've typed this before but imagine Captain Riker singing Kurt Weill and you pretty much have it.

In these desperate times of Peak Girl*, Knox is all guy: baleful, dark, Orson Welles-baritoned. His songs are in a melancholy drinking key but his lyrical narratives range from deeply romantic to laugh-out-loud funny. Knox came to us via David Lynch (literally –- he composed the soundtrack to Inland Empire) to tell stories from a Warren Zevon / Edward Hopper / Damon Runyon sort of world -- the place where Tom Waits used to hang out before he started clog-dancing with maracas.

Knox has a digital double A-side out: 'To Make You Stay' and 'Blue Car.' They are both pretty wonderful but 'Blue Car' is fantastic. You can get them from Knox's Bandcamp site. My friend tells me that's how all the young people listen to things nowadays.

* More of that later.

(Pic: John Atwood.)

I followed her through the crowd to the corner that had been left empty

Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts.
-- Stephen King

When I was working on The Names I devised a new method -- new to me, anyway. When I finished a paragraph, even a three-line paragraph, I automatically went to a fresh page to start the new paragraph. No crowded pages. This enabled me to see a given set of sentences more clearly. It made rewriting easier and more effective. The white space on the page helped me concentrate more deeply on what I'd written.
-- Don DeLillo

I dig film noir. The great theme of film noir is, You're fucked.
-- James Ellroy

In a lonely place

TextWrangler, my favourite writing-very-fast application, has been improved, with predictable results. The 4.0 version now has features I don't need, runs just that little bit slower and has a bona fide bug: the backspace / delete key sometimes doesn't work (not a hardware problem: I can't reproduce the fault in other applications). How I would like to not be thinking about this, or writing about it, or tooling around the web looking for an old installer for TextWrangler 3.5.3.

Woody Allen still writes on the same typewriter he bought when he was a young man. The 35mm cameras I bought when I was my teens still take better photos than my digital camera or for that matter my phone. I gave up my last Powerbook after a long hard seven years because the screen was so dim it was like typing on a winter night but the machine still works just fine. In fact, the old TextWrangler is on it, so thinking about it, I can simply copy the old software over to the new Mac (MBA 11", a lovely writing machine which I would also be happy to use for the next seven years, or twelve for that matter). Where would I be had I not taken the old man's caution of putting things aside, just in case?

This week I spent a day fixing those groovy Blogger redirects (see previously) and another few hours cursing Google, which now delivers search results in a way that is thwartingly local. If you're looking up something on Google maps in Indonesia in English, it shows you the map labelled in Thai. But if you're in Australia when you type in a search for something in America, you get Australian site results first, whether you ask for them or not. There is a way around the latter -- utterly unintuitive -- and probably for the former, but how I would like to not be thinking about that as well.

By pressing personalisation "services" on users Google is contributing to what one commentator has called the cableisation of the internet: the reduction of the universal set of content into a localised subset shaped by fear and commercial interest. Goodbye World Wide Web, hello My Little Corner. The concept of a walled garden was once pejorative but now we're filtering on Facebook and burning through the world on Twitter 140 characters at a time like a chain smoker stubbing out half-finished cigarettes the idea seems less threatening, if not attractive.

I don't need the web to find out what I already know. If it's online I'm grown-up enough to look at it. I want my laptop to work like a typewriter and my phone to work like a phone and my camera to have shutter speed and aperture and focus: if I need to get closer to the subject I can walk there. I would just like things to function. And I would like to not be thinking about this. The only reason I am is that there's writing I need to get done. Whatever happened to welcome distractions?

Postscript: TextWrangler 3.5.3 reinstalled. Finally. You can go back to it here.

Special characters

Tonight I went to an evening in celebration of Nobel Prize Laureate Tomas Tranströmer, with the poet himself in attendance. Tranströmer's poems were read in translation by Philip Fox and in the Swedish by Krister Henriksson (Wallander) and the musical performances included Simon Lepper on piano (Frank Bridge's 'At Dawn'), guitarist Nils Klöfver and soprano Hanna Husáhr. Joint was going off.

The poems in the programme which I marked with my thumbnail included 'Klangen' ('Ringing') and 'Romanska Bågar' ('Romanesque Arches'). Another one that struck me was 'C-dur' ('C Major') which Tranströmer discussed in an interview with Tam Lin Neville and Linda Horvath:

Horvath: I was curious about the place of the ego in your poems. I mean I had to read quite a way before I came to an "I."

Tranströmer: Well, this is true of my first book. In the first part, I really was afraid of using "I." But the "I" comes a little more in the second book and it grew and it's one of the differences between earlier poems and later poems—the late ones are full of "I" 's. It doesn't necessarily mean that the earlier poems have less ego in them, just that I was shy to talk about myself. Often I used "he" in my "middle period" (laughs). '"When he came down to the street after the rendezvous, and the air was swirling with snow." ("C Major") The "he" was me of course. But now I don't hesitate to say "I." But that was an ambition I had, that you shouldn't be too visible as a person. But now I think it's more honest to use "I." After all you are writing from your own experience and writing to show that.

(Pic: Krister Henriksson by Jan Düsing)

Those about to die

The Hunger Games is a book or something. I don't need to know what it is because I've seen it before. Death sport on the big screen is at least as old as Ben Hur. My favourite examples are from the 1970s. Punishment Park (1971), a cinema verité showdown between military and the counter-culture that looks disturbingly real from the next century; Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 (1975), as unwatchable and unforgettable as the best Corman fare; and Rollerball (1975), the sine qua non in any discussion of sci-fi futures.

Set in a dull grey Euro-America, Rollerball follows a professional deathsport player as he goes round and round, spiralling upward instead of down. The game is a substitute for war and no man can be greater than the game: the premise is simple. But the resonance of the images and performances is a feast. I love this film for its jump cuts, its soundtrack looping and dropouts, the grainy Medium Cool camera style, and its lack of finish. It's a ballsy, six-cylinder blat, violent and empty, the screenplay relying almost entirely on the mise en scène. For instance, the decadent party in which stoned footballers' wives laser a pine forest at dawn: that's everything you need to know about this world, right there.

Rollerball began -- as is so often the case with good movies -- as prose fiction. William Harrison's short story 'Roller Ball Murder' was published in Esquire magazine in 1973. Harrison adapted it for the screen (those were the days) for director Norman Jewison.

Jewison talked about the movie at The Hollywood Interview:

Rollerball was my first, and only, film about the future, the not too distant future. I tried not to get caught up in the technology too much. I wanted to isolate the areas in which I would work. I found the BMW building in Munich, which was perfect, as our main location. Its design was very ahead of its time. We were the first ones to use identity cards to get into places and all that sort of thing which is quite commonplace today. It was an interesting film to do from a political aspect, because it was a film about a world where political systems had failed and multinational corporations had taken over. It deals with violence used as entertainment for the masses, which goes back to the Circus Maximus. I think when you use violence for entertainment, you're getting pretty low on the human scale. (laughs) I think it turned out to be a pretty interesting film, very stylized, packed a wallop. In Europe it became a cult film, whereas in America a lot of the critics went after it as being exploitative, of just being about a violent game.

Rollerball is contrastingly enigmatic and action-packed. Philip Strick observed that it loses steam when its protagonist, Jonathan, is not playing, but that was part of the point: life without the death sport is boring. The players are prisoners of an existential world. There is no THX 1138 sunscape to run off to and no Logan's Run leafy wilderness. And there is no Soylent Green twist that explains it all, either. When James Caan finally gets to question the computer that runs the city the machine blows bubbles at him and remains silent. Even the Alpha 60 in Alphaville rasped back.

Young viewers should also be warned that the movie contains scenes with John Houseman.

In 1978 Jewison said of the film:

Rollerball looked into the future in which all-powerful corporations provide a murderous sport to let people work off their aggressions. I worry about how much direction we have over our own lives.

This week New York magazine's culture column Vulture ran the numbers on The Hunger Games publicity machine:

Size of production budget: $80 million
Size of marketing budget: $45 million

Soon newspapers and blogs will be trumpeting the box office take, and how the studio income is trending, and thus people like me who know nothing about the movie shall be entertained. Thumbs up or thumbs down? Will the franchise survive or be killed off? Today the death sport is money.

Telegraph cables that sing down the highway

Remember the days when the murderer's flashback played inside the frames of his / her sunglasses? I do. Pictured above: John Cassavetes in Columbo: Étude in Black (1972). Searching for other examples I came across this scene from Columbo: Death Lends a Hand (1971).

Note past errors in Robert Culp's specs... and the score by Gil Mellé, Blue Note jazz saxophonist, band leader and composer. Mellé scored many films and TV shows. Here he is taking things for a cool, brisk walk on the opening credits of Columbo: Short Fuse (1972):

Mellé was an electronic music pioneer who built his own instruments. He played with an all-electronic jazz ensemble at Monterey in 1972 and composed one of the first all-electronic scores for the movie The Andromeda Strain in 1971:

He was also an exhibiting painter whose work appeared as sleeve art for Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Monk, among others. He lived in Malibu, California where he died age 73.

Here's the Gil Mellé Quartet doing a particularly lovely 'Moonlight in Vermont' from Patterns in Jazz (1956):

I see red

John Carter. Miles better than Avatar. Mars is a planet where things are very light; its inhabitants must speak without contractions, and the red-skinned males have the same unfortunate hair that bedevilled the Romans and operatives in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The introduction is slow and a little jerky, and in the darkness of 3D it's difficult to tell whose flying machine is which. But generally, man, it's pulp-scifi great. All the parts you like are there: What Is This Earth Of Which You Speak; stampeding eight-legged armies appearing in dust from a distance; the noble companion (Woola!); the flying machine gate-crashing the big wedding; the shape-shifting grey men... The source material is a compendium of lovely parts. Also: Lynn Collins.

Three fines wines buffs

Tan Brothers Brown Muskrat 2008
Packed with the tempting flavours of blackberry, chocolate, raspberry and fist fighting. Great served with fish, poultry, pasta with tomato sauce, cheese, milk, biscuits, flour, mutton, wine.

Suffer Home Merlot 2005
This wench-bodied zinfandel with a hint of writing desk and rich notes of dark berry jam, hints of chocolate and mocha with a soft nutty playful hands tied to a brass bedstead and a dark fruit finish. Enjoy with beef, lamb, pork, pork and lamb, pork and beef, a Panzer division or David Hamilton.

Chateau Bourdeaux Superierurx 2001x
The Merlot brings soft round summer fruits and the Cabernet Sauvignon and Franc add structure and complexity. The colour is a deep ruby damask with tints of purple and Jason Robards. In the mouth the wine is round and generous with long lasting flavours and blackcurrants and a hint of 1970s convertible on the finish.

Tony Montana Unreserved 2008
An enticingly aromatic wine showing notes of dark cherries and Holdens with the alluring complexity of Indian Clubs. On the palate, alarming, slutty fruit flavours are underpinned by nuances of purposeless, smoky vagina. Good firm tannins give the wine length and weight. Very approachable and enjoyable for the moment, but FFS watch out.

Muscle Bay Merlot 2007
A velvety-soft wine full of stewed fruits like plums and rhubarb and mulberry and blackberry with an unpleasant, lingering finish spiced with cinnamon and clove. Am I clown? Do I fucking amuse you? What do you mean smart, smart how? How am I smart? To be enjoyed with creamy pasta, rice, arrows, Semtex.

The Deep

Last night I attended a screening of Knife in the Water: an unrestored 35mm print complete with scratches, pops, blurry subtitles and mono sound. It was fantastic. The first time I saw Knife in the Water was on TV in the 1970s, on TVNZ's "classic film" slot (remember when TV was like film school?); the second was on VHS in the 1980s. Watching it this time I was struck by how complete it is, structurally and tonally, and the technical achievement of its storytelling. There's a scene where the young man swims out and hides behind a buoy on a calm lake: a conceptual stretch, but the director and DOP completely sell it. The yacht is a tiny physical space but after even a few minutes the dramatic possibilities have already become vast. When the three characters finally sit down inside the cabin around the tiny folding table, they might as well be in a ballroom scene. There's so much going on.

You couldn't make Knife in the Water now. You wouldn't be allowed.

Everything new is old again

Ray Kurzweil interviewed by Damon Lindelof at THR:

Kurzweil: There's an issue in portraying the future, which, if you follow my reasoning, will be very different in every dimension. And as soon as you introduce even a single change, you've got to explain what it is. Spielberg's A.I. had human-level cyborgs, but otherwise it was a 1980s reality: The coffeemaker was 1980s; the cars were no different; there's really no virtual reality to speak of. Nothing changed except he introduced this new concept, and then you had some dramatic tension about people's relationships with this new thing. There's actually a reason for that...

Full interview is here.

Guys and Dolls

'I came to the conclusion long ago that all life is six to five against.' -- Damon Runyon

(John Cassavetes, Columbo: Étude in Black; Marilyn Monroe by George Barris; Ben Gazzara, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; Gaga by Terry Richardson.)

All we'll ever have is now

The French government has moved to seize copyright on books published prior to 2001. From the UK blog Authors Rights:

"The Bibliothèque Nationale de France is to compile a freely accessible online database of all works published in France before 1 January 2001 that are not being commercially distributed by a publisher and are not currently published in print or digital form... Once a book has been listed in the database for more than six months, the right to authorize its reproduction and display in digital form will be transferred to a collective management organisation approved by the Minister of Culture."

The French government has been struggling to control the internet. The Hadopi agency has complained about the workload of tracking pirates (18 million complaints; 10 users charged) and the three-strikes law was suspended in 2011 when the contractor administering the system failed to protect its data.

Four of my novels have been published in France -- Shirker, Electric, Departure Lounge and The Church of John Coltrane -- all after 2001, and all still in print (Coltrane is still French only). It will be interesting to see if the Ministry of Culture initiative reaches a compromise similar to the one made for the Google Library Project.

And Stanza has been crashing on my iPod. Stanza is the e-reader I use when I want to strain my eyes on my very battered iPod touch (iOS 4.3) reading Sherlock Holmes, Aristotle's Poetics, Edgar Allan Poe and other Gutenburg Project favourites. More importantly I used it to teach myself about e-publishing and re-issue some of my early short stories on Kindle.

After Amazon bought Lexcycle in 2009 there was chatter on the boards that they had killed the e-reader, one of the best for iOS. But it seems Stanza has been fixed -- if only for iOS 5. Another incentive to upgrade to an iPad, then. Or to just keep reading them on paper.

(Pictured: Alphaville. Still one of the best movies, ever.)

The True Wheel

When work's going well I stop talking and I stop reading. Not entirely, but generally: when your head's good, stay in your head.

I'm writing long on this one. I have to keep reminding myself that novels take longer to write than they do to read. Authors read faster than a bush fire. A lot of the work goes into what's not on the page. The underpinning has to be right but a reader can go a long way into a novel without caring about that.

Brian Eno discussed production to consumption ratios in music with Richard Williams in 1979:

"I have a theory that, as a maker you tend to put in twice as much as you need as a listener. It's the symptom of contemporary production. With the facilities that you have today, you tend to plug every hole.. You're always looking for that charge, so you put more and more in to get it. But as a listener you're much less demanding... you can take things that are much simpler, much more open, and much slower. It's often happened that I've made a piece and ended up slowing it down by as much as half. Discreet Music is an example: that's half the speed at which it was recorded."

Somewhere in the index of Platonic forms there must exist the perfect ratio of writing-to-reading hours. If the time invested in creating a work far exceeds the time it takes to decode, the text becomes a bottleneck: an obstacle to all but the most perservering -- the "important but unread" category. At the other end of the scale would be the pulps -- the real pulps, not the good ones -- that are so light that they offer no challenge and no reward.

I suspect that a prerequisite for book to be a best seller is that the narrative has to be constructed at the same speed at which a reader is prepared to unpack it. Errors and stylistic missteps are irrelevant: in fact, the clunkiness of the prose humanises the narrative. As Johnny Cash said, 'Your style is function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.'

Bedside reading, 1975 #2

I am kind of looking forward to John Carter. "Kind of" because Disney dropped "of Mars" from the title, and the fanboys are grumbling. "Looking forward to" because I read the series when I was very young and liked them a lot. Clive James once said that good books are the ones we feel slightly guilty about reading -- an observation I come back to more and more.

What is striking about John Carter of Mars is how it practically minted a genre. Edgar Rice Burroughs' ideas have become storytelling standards, their components recycled to power Dune, Avatar, Star Wars and many more. Like Edgar Allan Poe or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his pulp fiction is a gift that keeps on giving.

I read Dune later. (As someone else may or may not have once said, the golden age of science fiction is twelve.) I had no time for any of the sequels -- Children of... and all that crap -- but Frank Herbert's original was strange and appealing. I read it at the beach one summer so the images mingle, pleasantly, with sands I saw every day. And I liked the David Lynch movie very much. After Lynch's Dune SF movies had a choice: they could do his version of what scifi looked like, or Ridley Scott's in Bladerunner. Critics and fans hated it, but lately it has been revisited. Writes Andrew Stimpson:

Dune's closest analogue is John Boorman's Excalibur. At the time of its 1981 release a US critic, while denigrating the film as a whole, noted that "the images have a crazy integrity". It was, in effect, a greatest hits collection of Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur: an artfully visualised series of key scenes and epic occurrences that lacked a uniting flow. The same could be said of Lynch's picture and its source novel.

Dune was in development for many years by insane person Alejandro Jodorowsky:

Salvador Dali was cast as the insane Emperor of the Universe, who lived on an artificial planet built from gold and had a robot doppelgänger (actually conceived as a way around the real Dalí's extortionate fiscal demands for appearing in person) to keep people guessing, fearfully, which one they were dealing with. He accepted the part with apparent glee, his only demand being that the Emperor's throne must be a toilet made from intersected dolphins, the tails forming the feet and the mouths to receive piss and shit separately.

Nowadays, of course, that would all be done in CGI.

Jodorowsky's mad-as-fuck version was never made -- all the artists, including writer Dan O'Bannon, ended up working on another little film called Alien -- but you want the flavour of what it would have been like -- and you know you do -- watch Santa Sangre or The Holy Mountain.

PS: Not-a-prequel Prometheus viral marketing starts here. (Milk and cookies keep you awake?)

PPS: The Hollywood Reporter says John Carter is not so bad.

I've paid my dues to make it

Walter Mosley on writing, interviewed by Charles L.P. Silet:

MysteryNet: Obviously you don't see much distinction between what we would describe as genre or crime fiction and straight fiction or literature.

Mosley: No, I don't see any difference in it. Of course, in the genre there are certain kinds of things that you have to do, but it's the same in a coming-of-age novel, somebody has to come of age. So you have to follow the conventions. Good fiction is in the sentence and in the character and in the heart of the writer. If the writer is committed to and in love with what he or she is doing, then that's good fiction.

MysteryNet: Who have you read both in crime fiction and in regular fiction that's had an influence on you?

Mosley: In crime fiction, I've read lots and lots of people. Charles Willeford, I just adore. Every one of his books is so deeply flawed plot-wise, but it matters nothing to me because he's such a wonderful writer. I was reading one of his books the other day about some old guy and his wife; he was seventy-two but looked older and she was sixty-three and looked older than him. It was so funny; just the way he wrote it. My God, this guy is fantastic! Hoke Mosley is a real guy. It's so right. I've read everybody -- Gregory MacDonald -- I've read all the Fletch books. I thought they were wonderful. Parker, of course. Vachss, who I adore, because I think that he is so deeply committed to what he believes in. I feel the heart coming through it, and I compare him to Dickens. Rex Stout. I've read almost everything Simenon ever wrote. The people I love for writing are the French: Malraux, Camus, Gide, for just the style of writing. It is almost the heart of fiction for me. Then the older guys like Proust, and tons of black poets: Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott, Amiri Baraka. It doesn't matter who writes it, no matter their sex or their race or what period of time they lived in.

Raymond Chandler, from Frank MacShane's The Life of Raymond Chandler (1986):

My theory was that readers just thought that they cared about nothing but the action; that really although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The thing they really cared about, and that I care about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description.

Our dried voices when we whisper together

So I finally got to see The Ides of March and Moneyball. Clooney is not as smart as he thinks he is and Brad Pitt is not as charismatic as he thinks he is. Which is no crime. Clooney is a good director: he knows when to hang back and he really lets the actors speak for themselves. His style reminds me very much of Robert Redford's in Quiz Show: he shuts up and lets the story get on with it, and the drama is character-driven. The weakness is in the script (three credited writers, based on a play) which turns on Ryan Gosling's moral character making an immoral choice. Why he does so isn't set up or explained. Basically the character acts out of character.

The Moneyball screenplay is credited to Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin: a sort of screenwriting supergroup. Liked it a lot, again because the director lets things hang a little, but Sorkin's dialogue tennis is best served fast and Pitt plays it slow. I don't think I've truly enjoyed Pitt in anything: like Alfred Molina, he is likeable, talented and nearly always miscast. He's tremendously physical -- in one scene, tossing a bat aside with the fluidity of a dancer -- but every role he takes involves doing annoying things with his mouth (sucking a spoon, chewing on a sandwich or, in this case, spitting gum into a coffee cup). But when he looks rundown or downcast or subdued, he ages ten years and becomes terrific. Edward James Olmos' line to the DOP was "don't make me look pretty." Pitt could use that.

Both films are about money and the lack of it. I enjoy this as a subject. It's becoming more current.

Neither are as good as The Ghost, which I finally got to see as well. Polanski knows how to build tension. He deploys clichés like a sail, adjusting them gradually. In The Ghost an exiled politician lives by the sea: one shot has his groundsman sweeping the sand off the steps only to have the approaching wind blow it back. At which point I decided: I fucking love this movie. The Ghost is as melodramatic as Ides of March; as esoteric as Moneyball, yet recognisable, spooky, obsessive, human. Square inside a genre, buckling down on character and above all witty. I guess this is what it was like watching Rosemary's Baby when it first came out.

I'm obsessed with 'drama', now. People walking in and out of rooms, talking. It's amazing how much you can do with that.

Pat

Patricia Highsmith interviewed by Gerald Peary in 1988:

She owns no copies of films made from her books, not even Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 version of her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950). "It seems to be entertaining after all these years," she acknowledges. "They keep playing it on American TV, ancient as it is. A few years ago, there were requests to me, 'Can we make this?' I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won't release it for a remake."

Strangers on a Train was sold outright for $7,500, with ten per cent of that to Highsmith's agent. A meager recompense, some would say, but Highsmith disagrees. "That wasn't a bad price for a first book, and my agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment. I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes."

Hitchcock purchased Strangers On A Train through an intermediary so Highsmith's agent wouldn't know who was bidding for it and ask for a larger advance. It's interesting that the author puts so much distance between herself and the director: critics and fans put them hand in glove.

NB: Nice sweater.

You hit me with a flower

One-star reviews such as:

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
"So many other good books... don't waste your time on this one. J.D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed."

...always remind me of the 'Review of Winslow Homer Show at LA County Museum' from Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes, pictured above. (I have a first edition -- Putnam, 1977 -- sitting in storage with the rest of my books.) In addition to his many other talents, Steve Martin may have predicted the internet.

Now, more seriously, Time's Lev Grossman has examined the phenomenon of "it sucks / it rocks" reader reviews in depth:

It's a basic but still weird fact about books that two people's experiences of the same book can be radically different but equally valid. On the face of it it doesn't seem possible. When we read a book and find that it sucks, that doesn't feel like a personal judgment on our part, it feels like an observed fact that everybody else who reads that book should acknowledge — and if they don't acknowledge it, that means that they suck. It goes against our instincts as a reader that two people can have opposite reactions to a book, and that both reactions can be true...

Grossman concludes:

I feel like there should be more talk about the criteria by which we make literary judgments. More and more books are being published every year, but we have less of an idea than ever (what with aesthetics being dead, or at least resting) how to filter and sort and organize and canonize them, or even whether we should.

The full article is here.

Driving down your freeways

James Ellroy in the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

You were away from Los Angeles for twenty-five years. Why'd you come back?

JAMES ELLROY

One reason: Cherchez la femme. I chased women to suburban New York, suburban Connecticut, Kansas City, Carmel, and San Francisco. But I ran out of places, and I ran out of women, so I ended up back here.

INTERVIEWER

Did you miss the city?

ELLROY

While I was away, the Los Angeles of my past accreted in my mind, developing its own power. Early on in my career I believed that in order to write about LA, I had to stay out of it entirely. But when I moved back, I realized that LA then lives in my blood. LA now does not.

Full article is here.

The description of evil through art

East Coast intellectual Simon Grigg has written a great piece on the subject of MegaUpload:

Given that, really, [MegaUpload's] offences seem to be little different in scope to the rogue YouTube, as documented in that Viacom indictment, one wonders why the 'man' is so keen to stomp so visibly and brutally on the founder and face of the site.

Because people are killing music. But remember the days when music was killing America? In 1995 Bob Dole wanted to be the Republican nominee for President and his campaign was searching for ways to distinguish him. Writes Bob Woodward in The Choice (1996):

The plan, as [advisor William] Lacy had proposed in April, was to attack Hollywood directly on the grounds of sex and violence in movies and popular music. [Speechwriter] Mari Will... had spent some time drafting the anti-Hollywood speech... Dole needed to step up in a forceful and direct way if he was going to get and retain attention, particularly with conservative voters.

Dole was to give the speech in Los Angeles. Will had "injected some high voltage rhetoric into the speech" which Dole approved. Later he began to express reservations. Revisions were made and the language softened, but the Senator's doubts persisted. "Maybe it was generational, Dole figured, but he was very uncomfortable with the Hollywood value speech... He considered not giving it."

On the night of the speech Lacy went over it with the candidate word by word, "a diversionary tactic so that Dole wouldn't toss out the entire speech." Dole even wavered once he got up on the podium, improvising an introduction. But eventually he reverted to the words on the teleprompter:

A line has been crossed — not just of taste, but of human dignity and decency. It is crossed every time sexual violence is given a catchy tune. When teen suicide is set to an appealing beat. When Hollywood's dream factories turn out nightmares of depravity.

You know what I mean. I mean "Natural Born Killers." "True Romance." Films that revel in mindless violence and loveless sex. I'm talking about groups like Cannibal Corpse, Geto Boys and 2 Live Crew. About a culture business that makes money from "music" extolling the pleasures of raping, torturing and mutilating women; from "songs" about killing policemen and rejecting law...

Today Time Warner owns a company called Interscope Records which columnist John Leo called the "cultural equivalent of owning half the world's mustard gas factories." Ice-T of "Cop Killer" fame is one of Time Warner's "stars." I cannot bring myself to repeat the lyrics of some of the "music" Time Warner promotes. But our children do. There is a difference between the description of evil through art, and the marketing of evil through commerce.

The speech was a big hit -- "giant news. The impact was way beyond anything in Dole's entire political history."

Dole hadn't seen the movies he was talking about. Not sure if he'd heard the rap tracks either but "teen suicide set to an appealing beat" has the air of authenticity.

Love is the cure for every evil

It's been a good week for lawyers. The Pirate Bay founders were denied appeal. Kim Dotcom was denied bail. US authorities seized file-streaming domains ahead of the Superbowl.

Neil Young says piracy is the new radio. Twitter user @rupertmurdoch says it's stealing and wrong. EMI's Craig Davis calls it a service issue.

If all three share a common point it's that old guard has been scooped. Users want what they want, and now. Traditional distribution can't keep up. Much like a determined journalist who disguises herself as a maid to steal a story from a rival,  the audience has taken an alternative route.

Piracy is not just about theft: it's about who controls the sea lanes. Legislators and enforcers are trying to regain control and steer everyone back into safe water.

In the meantime a record label has used the internet to crowd-source publicity for a new artist and rack up #1 sales in 14 countries and counting. See what happens when we all work together?

(Pic: Judex)

The cigarettes, the magazines all stacked up in the rain

People have been enjoying City Lights very much. Ta muchly -- it's nice to get nice back from the web. I've written the second part of the story. I just haven't typed it up yet.

Stephen Stratford is writing. You know he will be in the home stretch when he Twitpics bourbon or reaches for an awkward metaphor like "zebra hunting."

In the last month I re-read Woodward and Bernstein's All The President's Men and watched the movie (yet) again. Screenwriter William Goldman is always good on the writing process:

"One of the things I love to do when I work with young writers is to disabuse them of the notion that I know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm writing a script now, and as we are speaking, I am looking at my computer, tearing out my hair, thinking, well, is this horrible, or is this going to work? I don't know. Storytelling is always tricky."

I been reading many comments from authors about their mid-career anxieties -- what's the point, maybe it's all over, etc. Writers feel that every day, even the Nobel Prize winners. Writes Kevin Rabalais of Ernest Hemingway:

Once the 1930s rolled around, many critics believed he had seen his day, and by 1954, the year of the aeroplane crashes and Nobel announcement, he had become, for many, a parody. Following his suicide, Time magazine reported on the life "which led Hemingway himself not only to some mechanical, self-consciously 'Hemingway' writing, but to a self-conscious 'Hemingway' style of life". That life grew increasingly desperate after the crashes from which, writes [biographer Paul] Hendrickson, "he never really recovered in either his body or mind".

Writing is a lonely full-time job that doesn't pay very much. But the solitude of the task is balanced by the way fiction taps into and feeds the continuum. In the New York Times last year Pixar's John Lasseter summed this up in a story about Steve Jobs summing it up:

Steve Jobs and I were very close, and early on when I was making "Toy Story" we started talking and he said, "John, you know at Apple when I make computers, what is the lifespan of this product, two years, three years at the most, and then about five years, they're like a doorstop. But if you do your job right, these films can last forever."

On hiPod-rotate: Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine. In 2005 she explained the four-year break between her second and third albums to Rolling Stone:

"The first couple of years, I didn't have anything left in me to write about. That was a good thing, because it meant I'd done my job on the last batch of songs. I was riding a wave of independence. I wasn't trying to write; I just figured if the songs came to me, they came to me, and if not, 'Oh, well, it's been fun.'"

That's a pretty lovely way of thinking about it.

Good things

The Hollywood Reporter's Borys Kit talks to screenwriter Pablo Fenjves about the ten years it took to get his script Man on a Ledge made into a movie. Says Fenjves:

"I jokingly say that this [movie] is a metaphor for the life of a Hollywood writer... You sell something that everybody is excited about, but the next thing you know they have notes, and they are basically slowly pushing you out onto a ledge. And then they hire other people. And then things happen to the script that you are not to happy about."

I like this story because Fenjves is 58:

"I'm 58 years old... and I don't mind having a movie made now because most guys are still talking about the movie they had made when they were 38... There's an old saying that says in Hollywood things come to those who wait. It's wrong. It's good things come to those who write."

Full story is here.

I've heard a rumour from Ground Control

Jonathan King and I have a new comic out. City Lights is a science-fiction story hosted at Jonathan's tomorrow-themed site The Brighter Future. I wrote the story and scribbled some thumbnails and Jonathan drew and painted all the finished art, breaking it down into frames and making it look just like a bought one. The development process consisted of me liking everything he did, although we did debate moving a word balloon on page five. A tense moment, but it passed.

The story was inspired by astrophysicists Ed Turner and Avi Loeb's proposal to search for alien life by detecting light from cities on other worlds. The idea of discovering aliens living so far away that you can't communicate with them in any normal sense is romantic and strange, and I've always been interested in scientific communities based in exotic locales such as Hawaii (they're featured in Electric). I wrote the script in three acts: a storyboarded intro and outro bracketing a long dialogue sequence. The wordless set up and conclusion meant the story would work better as a visual piece.

City Lights was conceived with Jonathan's previous comics in mind: he contrasts big empty spaces with intimate storytelling details and frames the action in a cinematic way. When he is not drawing strips he is making movies. The above still is a good example of his style. I love the way it's 3D but flattened, naturalistic yet stylised, clean but atmospheric. You can see for yourself here.

What you like is in the limo

The Megaupload arrests are doing more to contemporise New Zealand's image than sport ever could. Reports the New York Times:

The Auckland police arrived at Dotcom Mansion on Friday morning... Kim Dotcom... ran inside and activated several electronic locks. When the police "neutralised" those, he barricaded himself in a safe room. Officers cut their way through to nab him.

Repeat: Cut their way through to nab him.

Also in the NYT, Ms Melanie Lynskey:

Melanie Lynskey has playing wacky down cold. She's done it for years on "Two and a Half Men" as Rose, the off-kilter neighbor. And she shines in dramatic parts, as when she played Matt Damon's wife in "The Informant!" Yet job offers are almost always the same: a fifth lead here, the best friend there. She's 34 and was recently cast as Aunt Helen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." Can't she — just once — land the big, meaty, carry-the-movie role?

Does she need it? Since starring with Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures in 1994 Lynskey has gone on to make fewer movies about the Titanic and not married as many directors but her career is arguably the more interesting. (Also: sexier.)

(Pic: Ann Summa / NYTimes)

Short cuts

Joe Brown about his favourite pocket knife:

I check luggage when traveling so I can bring it with me because, for my purposes, it's perfect. You never know when a pocket knife will come in handy. The world is full of things to cut.

My favourite pocket knife was the sort you used to be able to buy at any dairy or tobacconist's: about 1.25" long, single blade. Excellent for peeling apples, cutting string or quietly sawing articles out of newspapers that belonged to other people, it stayed on my keyring until it cracked. It has since been replaced with a 1.75" Laguiole.

Because I also like to watch TV seasons all in one go I was interested to read what Marty McNamara in the LA Times wrote about the effects of binge-viewing on modern TV:

Serialization has served many masters — the Greek gods, Charles Dickens, Wonder Woman — but none so faithfully as television. No other genre, save the comics page, is as eternally open-ended, elastic to the point of incredulity. The beauty of the successful television show is that it uses a finite number of characters to tell a never-ending story or a story that ends only when the audience and occasionally the creator loses interest.

Full article is here.

Do you like my tight sweater?

The Danish Broadcasting Corporation has been hitting it out of the park with crime series like The Killing and, now, Borgen. The dramas are complex and gory, subtitled, made with relatively low budgets and yet have gone on to enjoy international success. How do the Danes do it? It has to do with writers:

[DR's] annual income is an eighth of the BBC's, and slender resources of about £20m a year for drama mean the emphasis is on picking winners. Over the past 20 years, executives, producers and writers have refined that art to develop the classiest, most efficient drama factory in world television.

The rules are straightforward. Commissioners insist on original drama dealing with issues in contemporary society: no remakes, no adaptations. The main requirement is material for the 8pm slot on Sundays, when gripping drama helps Danish audiences through the long winters. Writers have the final say. Hammerich said: "We give them a lot of space and time to develop their story. The vision of the writer is the centre of attention, we call it 'one vision' – meaning everyone works towards fulfilling this one vision, and very few executives are in a position to make final decisions. I believe this is part of the success."

The Killing isn't perfect by any means -- the second series wanders off -- but it has a voice and a tone and a mood, which is all a story really needs for you to fall in love with it. "Trusting the writer" was once the mantra of the BBC: AMC and HBO now chant it every day. Writers, of course, knew this already but now and then a broader industry discovers it, to its profit.

Full article is here.

2012: The Year in Review (WIP)

1. Escape From New York (1981)
2. Die Hard (1988)
3. Fleetwood Mac, 'Over and Over' Tusk (1979)
4. How to check your drinks for roofies. Kind of.
5. William Gibson, Zero History (2011)
6. Richard Price, Lush Life (2008)
7. Quantum reality.
8. The limits of intuition.
9. The far side of the moon.
10. "Accused Picasso Thief Pleads Guilty" Article @ NYTimes. (This will become important later on.)
11. Woody Allen's first version of Midnight in Paris was a 1971 short story. 
12. Modern polling research. 
13. Boss (2011) 
14. Diana Krall, 'Let's Face The Music and Dance,' 1999 (Irving Berlin, 1936)
15. Eve Arnold
16. Janwillem van de Wetering, The Corpse on the Dike (1976) ("I can never hit anything after I have been riding my bicycle; it seems that the vibration of a cycle affects the muscles of my arm." pp. 46-47)
17. 1970 Camaro data. (This will become important later on.)
18. "Alien lights on Pluto" article @ Time magazine. (This will become important later on.) 

(Pic: Oscar Wilde's tomb, Pere Lachaise 2012)

The Zebra Hunter Problem

As a writer I am often asked if I have anything "lying around." Coming from producers this is code for "something to be had for free" and the answer is "no." If the request has come from another writer or artist things get more interesting.

I use a MacBook Air 11" with a solid state drive. It's still amazing to me that so much thinking can fit on a chip the size of a cameo brooch. With the wifi off I can tap away on TextWrangler or Final Draft for up to eight hours so inevitably things accrue. There's the Manuscript I Never Finish which is unlikely to ever see the light of day because I never get around to finishing it. Then there's the novel I finished last year -- the first in a series -- and the novel that comes after that (all going quite well). In between -- lying around -- are some short stories, a stack of anonymous sections of dialogue, a pulp noir and another novel that split like a roux.

The split novel was frustrating. Every now and then I would go back to it and stare and scratch my head. I knew it had gone wrong but couldn't see where, or why, or how to fix it. At the same time I knew that the answer was right in front of me. Wood / trees. Nose / face.

It's what I call the Zebra Hunter Problem. You write 200 pages about a zebra and 200 pages about a zebra hunter and then wonder how to fit the elements together. Any fool looking over your shoulder can say, hey, you know what would work – make the zebra hunter hunt the zebra. And you reply: wouldn't that be far too obvious?

And you go back to staring.

Then one day, much, much later you open the file / legal ringbinder / shoebox / paper sack of Post It notes and locks of her hair and think, hey -- you know what would work?

It's not a eureka moment. It's a zebra moment. So that novel is fixed, now. It's lying around.

(Pic: Nicholas Ray / Burnett Guffy)