Tales of madness

Chris Bell has a new collection of short stories out, The Concentrated Essence of Any Number of Ravens. You can read about it here and buy it here. The fifty-odd stories (some of them, very odd) are short and varied and fun. Disclosure: I wrote the foreword, because I like his stories. His other books include The Bumper Book of Lies and Liquidambar.

Authors have been a-Twitter about RJ Ellory using online pseudonyms to praise himself and criticise his 'rivals'. (In a post on his Facebook page, Mark Billingham called it 'the tip of the iceberg.') The scandal reminded me of James Frey being caught out for fabricating his autobiographical A Million Little Pieces. Writing fiction is personal and private and, above all, slow, but the online world advances publicly, 365/24/7, 140 characters at a time. If you're going to turn fiction into a competition, don't be surprised if authors start doping to keep up.

Many of the actors in the trailer for the new movie version of The Sweeney appear to be palsied: slurred speech, facial paralysis, wrecked physiques. The contrast between the actors' stasis while speaking and the action extras is extreme to the point of comedy, like a Steven Seagal flick. The Sweeney is one of a number of recent UK movies that have been produced almost exclusively for local consumption (St Georges Day is another): the sort of drama that no longer finds a natural home on British television.

The trailer preceded David Cronenberg's movie of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis which I enjoyed for the spectacle of a director sublimating all his obsessions to serve an author's voice. Claustrophobic and precise, Cosmopolis felt like a coda to the themes he explored in other films: biomechanical worlds (Videodrome), addiction (Naked Lunch), technological fetishism (Crash) and decay (The Fly, Dead Ringers).

I also finally caught up with A Dangerous Method which, like A History of Violence, is a pretty conventional narrative that suddenly pops with violence and sex before healing over again. A friend of mine remarked that you never worry about Sean Connery in a movie because you know he's really James Bond: when the monastery was burning down in Name of the Rose, you knew he had a jet pack under his cassock. Cronenberg suffers from a similar, if inverted, typecasting: sitting down to watch one of the director's movies you find yourself bracing for the very worst. When the three stern, uniformed nurses manhandled the screaming, muddied Sabina (Keira Knightley) into a room to merely bathe her, the audience slumped with relief.

Bo Ningen

And then sometimes the kids get it right. Last night at The Garage London-based Bo Ningen played support for someone else who doesn't matter because Bo Ningen were the business: not the retro-prog Bo Ningen, or the speed metal 'DaiKasei' (recorded live) but the four piece honed and sharpened into something else entirely: glassy, precise, modern, loud, monotonal, terrific. Lead singer and bassist Taigen camped it up, the drummer (Mon-chan) nailed it down, and Kohhei and Yuki (guitars) went all the way up to eleven. If you miss Nine Inch Nails, Bo Ningen will keep you warm. Recommended.

I feel like I'm clinging to a cloud

Having re-issued my back catalogue as ebooks and being on my way to Frankfurt, logically I should be online all the time now Tweetin' and bloggin' and extending the hand of digital friendship beyond the 6-8 people for whom this blog is intended. That's what writers do now, and artists, and heads of industry: post constantly.

It makes sense if you have minute by minute news, or if you're reporting on it; it makes sense if you have a wild life, and yes, it even makes sense if you work in private, alone, striving to lay some incremental track of the mind that chimes with others on a deep and subtle level. Death, taxes, Facebook. And nobody emails anymore... (Remember when email was the new thing?)

But the more I do it, the more I get that feeling that I'm too old for this, or too slow, or just too old-fashioned.

When I was a kid, everyone wanted to be just like Clint. Maybe that will happen... but not in the way we thought it would.

(Pic: Craig Warga, New York Daily News)

Ein literarisches Roadmovie

In October I will travel to Berlin and Frankfurt where New Zealand is the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2012. There I will be taking part at several events to talk about, among other things, the new German edition of my 1993 novel Lügenspiele (Pack of Lies). The first event will be a reception welcoming New Zealand writers to Germany. More dates TBC.

My German publishers Mana Verlag have subtitled the new edition of Lügenspiele "Ein literarisches Roadmovie" -- I like the sound of that. I like the cover photograph, too, which is by Edinburgh-based artist Jeannie Laub.

HEAVEN (1994) out now on Kindle

My second novel Heaven is out now on Kindle, in a new and revised edition and with a brand new cover by Jonathan King.

First published in 1994, Heaven was later made into a feature film by Miramax, produced by Sue Rogers and directed by Scott Reynolds. The movie starred Martin Donovan (Trust, Boss), Richard Schiff (The West Wing), Joanna Going and a pre-Star Trek, pre-Judge Dredd Karl Urban. I wonder if you could assemble a cast like that for an independent New Zealand movie now.

You can pick up a used copy of Heaven for US$52: the ebook edition is priced at US$2.99 at Amazon.com.

I'd lived with the characters, and I cared about them

Tony Scott discovered Quentin Tarantino in 1991:

Tony Scott: When I was directing The Last Boy Scout, my assistant was hanging out with this quirky guy named Quentin Tarantino, and he'd be around the set. She said, "You gotta read his script."

Quentin Tarantino: When you're a nobody, it's murder to get anyone to read your scripts. The original True Romance script started with a long discussion about cunnilingus. Most people said the script was racist and that the grotesque violence would make people sick. I told Tony, "Read the first three pages. If you don't like it, throw it away."

Scott made True Romance, but changed the ending:

I took True Romance and I took Reservoir Dogs. I'm a very slow reader but I read them straight through. I said, 'I'll do both.' He said, 'No. I'd like you to do True Romance.' He's a brilliant writer, he fully conceives every character, no matter how small they are. Actors came to the set not wanting to change a word, which is unusual. The only thing that I did change was the ending. The original was very different. It ended with Alabama. She puts a gun in her mouth. She doesn't shoot herself, and then she just says, 'Oh fuck it, he isn't worth it.' She throws the gun out of the car window and drives off. Quentin thought it was truer to the character. I was trying to make a commercial film, I wanted a happier ending. I'd lived with the characters really, and I cared about them.

Who knows what people will say about Tony Scott now. But I remember reading (would it have been Premiere magazine?) that when the director hired Tarantino to do a script polish for Crimson Tide (1995) for a lot of money and very little work, it was as a thank you for True Romance.

Oxygen

There's a way in which a writer can do too much, over-whelming the reader with so many details that he no longer has any air to breathe. Think of a typical passage in a novel. A character walks into a room. As a writer, how much of that room do you want to talk about? The possibilities are infinite. You can give the color of the curtains, the wallpaper pattern, the objects on the coffee table, the reflection of the light in the mirror. But how much of this is really necessary? Is the novelist's job simply to reproduce physical sensations for their own sake? When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it.

-- Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger (Sun & Moon Press, 1992)

1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?

-- David Mamet, Memo to writers of The Unit, 19 October 2005

Bedside reading

Seriously

The Assange standoff is a fitting coda to Danny Boyle's Olympics ceremony: emotional, crowd-pleasing and illogical. Prosecutors have an ulterior motive. UK diplomats have scored an own goal. Ecuador probably can't get Assange out of the embassy. Ecuador loves freedom of speech. And if there's one thing Britain won't tolerate, it's people sharing other people's private information...

In Russia a punk trio have been jailed for two years for flash-mobbing. How is that different from the two young men who have been jailed for four years in the UK for posting on Facebook?

The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself: new on Kindle

A new edition of my original 1995 short story collection The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself is out now on Amazon Kindle.

The collection features twelve short stories: 'Running Hot and Cold' (deeply offended the publisher. "Breaking her hip? Perhaps if you made it all a dream"), 'Calling Doctor Dollywell' ("A casually menacing story that has something to do with health problems and lesbians" – Steve Braunias),  'The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself', 'Fire in the Hole', 'Archie and Veronica' (S&M on the west coast, and the most popular story, to judge by the many emails I've received over the years), 'No Sun No Rain' (the first appearance of detective Ellerslie Penrose, who went on to helm Shirker), 'Somewhere in the 21st Century' (SF), 'Oilskin' (upset people no end, but some of the students at the Auckland University writing course liked it, and a Waikato student went on to make it as a student film. Kids!), 'John', 'Me and Misspelt' (currently under option as a film),  'From Soup to Nuts' ("Unnecessarily violent" – Graeme Lay, Metro) and 'Another White Gown'.

All here, now, just for you, in the new digital™ format, with brand spanking new cover art by Christchurch artist Ian Dalziel. A snip at US$2.99.

A leaf on the wind

A moving and clear-eyed piece by Peter Carey on the late Robert Hughes:

Nor should anyone doubt the massive affection he felt for his country. When, in the tabloid aftermath of his car accident in 1999, Australia turned on him, it is hard to underestimate the anguish he suffered in private.

Choire Sicha remembers David Rakoff:

The work he leaves behind — both recorded and in the collections Fraud, from 2001, Don't Get Too Comfortable, from 2005, Half Empty, from 2010 — are all ahead-of-their-time documentations of the way we actually do live now. There was no better correspondent from New York City of his time.

At the Shanghai Literary Festival a fellow author leaned across the table and asked me the sort of low voice normally reserved for selling drugs: 'Chad, Do you like... science fiction?' Why yes, I said. And so over the clatter of plates at M on the Bund we yammered on to each other about Firefly. Here is the very emotional Firefly reunion at Comic Con 2012.

Buffalo, girl

I never got the Jesus and Mary Chain. When they played Auckland in dada-dada-whatever someone at the Powerstation told me their static "feedback" came from a tape loop on the sound desk. No biggie; I'm all for synthetic augmentation: The Jesus and Mary Chain's problem is that they were boring. That week at Entertaining The Stars In New Zild Yeah No It's Rilly Strong Here Aye drinks at the record company offices on K Road the shambly ensemble appeared and shuffled through the room with armfuls of CDs -- they'd pounced on Prince's back-catalogue, which made you wonder why they didn't have Prince in the first place. Later that same day, standing in the kitchen, Neil Young wandered in holding a beer, and being New Zealanders we all stared at him saying nothing, not even 'hello' (including the record company people in the entourage. How shy are we?) and after a long, long minute Neil shrugged and left. I have regrets in life, and that moment is one of them.

But I digress.

The Jesus and Mary Chain have exactly half a song, 'Just Like Honey'. Younger readers will know it from Lost In Translation as the song that ruins the film: the soaring paean that never climaxes; the Velvets steal by someone who could only transcribe two of the three chords in 'Femme Fatale'. After this the British indie scene could only go one way (Pete Doherty sounding like a small child trapped in a car) but no, now The Jesus and Mary Chain have appeared on stage with Jessica Paré AKA Megan Draper, and so it begins... again. Jessica is the tall one, with good teeth: the one who could beat the other ones up.

(Pic: NYMag, obv.)

Readers

In 1983 Nobel Prize winner-to-be and Greg Bear fan Doris Lessing wrote a novel under the pen name 'Jane Somers' to test publishers, their readers and critics:

'I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that "nothing succeeds like success," [Lessing] said in a recent telephone conversation from London. 'If the books had come out in my name, they would have sold a lot of copies and reviewers would have said, "Oh, Doris Lessing, how wonderful." As it is, there were almost no reviews, and the books sold about 1,500 copies here and scarcely 3,000 copies each in the United States.'

From The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Could you tell us more about how you put the Jane Somers hoax over on the critical establishment? It strikes me as an incredibly generous thing to do, first of all, to put a pseudonym on two long novels to try to show the way young novelists are treated.

LESSING

Well, it wasn't going to be two to begin with! It was meant to be one. What happened was, I wrote the first book and I told the agent that I wanted to sell it as a first novel . . . written by a woman journalist in London. I wanted an identity that was parallel to mine, not too different. So my agent knew, and he sent it off. My two English publishers turned it down. I saw the readers' reports, which were very patronizing. Really astonishingly patronizing! The third publisher, Michael Joseph (the publisher of my first book), was then run by a very clever woman called Phillipa Harrison, who said to my agent, "This reminds me of the early Doris Lessing."

Lessing believes that by the time the novel was published, 'four or five' people knew the secret.

We all expected that when the book came out, everyone would guess. Well, before publication it was sent to all the experts on my work, and none of them guessed. All writers feel terribly caged by these experts — writers become their property.

Jane Somers earned mixed reviews:

A lengthy review of ''If the Old Could. . .'' in The New York Times Book Review last June, for example, said the novel ''fails to achieve greatness.'' But, the reviewer added, ''This is an extremely courageous attempt, and Jane Somers is a courageous writer.''

The Washington Post's reviewer said of ''The Diary of a Good Neighbour'' last year, ''Jane Somers extends one's comprehension of the possibilities life offers, and does it with wit and compassion.''

But The Los Angeles Times's reviewer found ''If the Old Could. . .'' a ''cryptic novel.'' It is, the reviewer said, ''a little like a beautiful sweater made by a woman with arthritis. Through unravelings and dropped stitches, you can make out a lovely pattern, but can't quite figure out what it is.''

Nowadays Lessing's concerns seem quaint. Publishers are more than willing to gamble on unknown writers, and lately they have been betting large:

Gabriel's Inferno and Gabriel's Rapture, popular books that started as Twilight fan fiction, have been acquired by Penguin's Berkley imprint in a "substantial seven-figure deal,” the publisher announced.

Berkley will immediate take over publishing the ebooks from Omnific Publishing. Trade paperbacks will follow in the next few months, with Berkeley planning a 500,000 copy first printing.

I once asked an editor what sort of book sells half a million copies. He smiled: 'Nobody knows.'

UPDATE: speaking of best-selling franchises: Grace Bello interviews Ryan Nerz about ghostwriting Francine Pascal's young-adult series Sweet Valley High:

Nerz: Sweet Valley High is this series that just goes on and on and on. So you're always having to come up with new plots. You're always having to come up with new character arcs. We would just sit around and come up with new ideas. And then they would hire out freelance people, like what I eventually became. You get a one-off amount of money, which is okay. Meanwhile, Francine Pascal sits in a château in France. I'm not even sure if Francine Pascal wrote a single book, which is really funny. She just came up with the idea and the Bible for it.

So the titles that you wrote, did you pitch those ideas?

No; the would-be writers, we would have to do a two-chapter sample, about 30 pages. They have to see that you can match the style and the tone and pull the heartstrings of anonymous 13-year-old girls across the country.

Were there a lot of men writing?

There weren't a whole lot of men. There were few men, predominantly gay, and one other guy, Daniel Ehrenhaft, who now is a fairly successful young-adult writer. Other than that, no. There weren't many men. It was mainly post-college women. That was the main ballgame. There were some dudes. But not a whole lot.

Read the full interview here.

(Pic: Fay Godwin)

Plus ça change

The flags American astronauts planted on the Moon are still standing, and they are probably white, which means they're like a Jasper Johns.

I saw the first Moon landing live on television, on a 12" black and white portable when I was five years old. I was allowed to stay up late to watch it because my older brother and his friend were babysitting: they fell asleep, I stayed up for it. I was crazy for space travel, and a bad sleeper.

This week I've been listening to the Purity Ring album Shrines c/- of a good friend who bought the vinyl and gifted me the free digital download that came with it: big ups. This is what friends are for. My listening habits are becoming increasingly Canadian. Megan James has one of Those Voices, and Corin Roddick is working in the sweet spot of melody and hip-hop that gave us Portishead, The Sneaker Pimps and Stateless before them. Like the Sneaker Pimps circa Becoming X, this is Purity Ring's moment.

Here's the band talking to GQ:

The intersection between that type of music [Soulja Boy], and what you guys are doing is fascinating. And it's different in how intimate it seems. Is it true that Megan draws most of the songwriting from a bunch of diaries she's kept since childhood?

James: Yeah, often I'll play the piano and just write songs straight from the diaries. But I never intended for what's happened to happen. Corin had asked me if I wanted to sing over what he was making. It wasn't that weird to do it. I'll write something down and a lot of the time whatever I've written down happens to fit perfectly over his melodies.

GQ: Is it weird to relive this old personal stuff?

Megan James: No, but I haven't really used anything that is that old. It's kind of the same thing as performing a song that's no longer new. I'm still emotional about it somewhat. I mean, I'm writing a journal and I never expected people to be singing those words, to be on stage and have people singing my journal entries back to me.

Shrines has a beautiful, treated sound: it's a delicate, modern, electronic product. Under the Radar popped the big question to Megan James and received the quintessentially Canadian answer:

How does the Purity Ring sound translate live?

We've found a few ways to translate it well. Corin's built a bunch of lanterns that surround him and he hits them with sticks and they light up and also trigger the melody which is really nice.

Read the full interview here.

Something about this kind of band always grabs me. As I wrote about the Sneaker Pimps in 2003:

The Sneaker Pimps' 'Low Five', from the Splinter LP has great songs but it still fails to grab me like Becoming X, the only album to feature singer / songwriter Kelli Dayton. In the usual sad and confusing chain of events that befalls only albums you love and never the ones you can do without, the Muse Lounge's copy of Becoming X disappeared-- not the original available in Marbecks, as I discovered to my cost, but the limited edition featuring Nellee Hooper's phat version of '6 Underground' (from The Saint), Line of Flight's whirly girl version of 'Spin Spin Sugar', and more.

In 1998 after the success of Becoming X Dayton was asked to leave the Sneaker Pimps, an expression of frustration, perhaps, from the male founders of a band that went on to be defined by its female vocals. I saw her perform a duet with Marc Almond on Later with Jools Holland and she wasn't so great; more recently she teamed up with Bootsy Collins for a single that wasn't so great either. But in the Sneaker Pimps she was more than perfect: she and the band worked in the same key or something, and became a sum greater than their parts. I guess they'll never get back together but the fantasy is tantalising: their dysfunction made them the trip-hop Fleetwood Mac.

Dayton now records under the name Kelli Ali and has a new LP called Tigermouth which doesn't seem to be out yet. She recorded with Marilyn Manson ("We had a great time but when we got the track back it was like 'oh!'") and practises kung fu.

Not writing in restaurants

For a writer reading on holiday is like letting somebody else drive. You try to relax but your foot's hovering on an imaginary brake. Clutching my fists on my knees as the Riviera shot by I saw this, from David Mamet's A Whore's Profession (1985):

When the meaning of the script is unclear in the theater, the actors and director usually assume that the author know what he or she was doing, and they reapply themselves to understanding the script.

In the movies if the meaning and worth of the script is not immediately obvious, everyone assumes the writer has failed.

I've had conversations like that. Nice fire engine: does it have to be so red?

Also on the pile was Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies (2005), the first Auster I've read since... Moon Palace, I think. Here he is pulling his usual stunt:

"What's your name?"
"Tom," Tom said.
"Of course. Tom Wood. I know all about you. In the middle of life's journey, I lost my way in a dark wood. But you're too ignorant to know that. You're one of those little men who can't see the forest for the trees."

This technique breaks a rule, for me. He shows you the thing, then he tells you he's shown you the thing, and he even breaks down the symbolism for you, exposing the already apparent aptronymn (wood = forest = forest for the trees). Look at the red fire engine, it's so red, red like fire, it's a red fire engine.

To me the narrator should be like Kate Moss: never complain, never explain. But Auster's Auster-like first person always explains. I don't mind, however. That's his style.

Tick of the clock

"You only get one chance to make a first impression—and that one chance with a reader lasts only minutes. It's no longer acceptable for a book to "get good on page 40." From your first sentence to the first pages of your novel, it's critical to hook readers immediately—whether that reader is an agent, editor, or patron in a bookstore. Not only do you want to quickly pull readers in with your story, you also need to establish your narrative voice as reliable, believable, talented, and authoritative. So how do you best accomplish this? In this brand new webinar, instructor and literary agent Kate McKean will show you how to catch a reader's eye with your first sentences and pages."

As an old advertisement's headline ran: "Quick -- who has the razor?" The illustration below the headline showed commuters on a railcar, one of whom was black. The African-American wasn't the one holding the razor but your eye was drawn to him first, which was the advertisement's message: first impressions are unreliable.

Kate McKean's pitch looks good, but see if you can spot the razor. It's at the start. Of course there is only one chance to make a first impression: if you had a second chance, the impression would be the second, or later impression. The opening phrase is a truism: the premise is not logical. Pick at things after that and they begin to unravel.

It's no longer acceptable for a book to "get good on page 40."

Kids these days. But when was it ever acceptable for 'a book to "get good on page 40?"' The Bible gets cracking pretty quick. As does Dickens. So do the pulps, so did Mills and Boon. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. If you think about it -- if you allow your mind to wander -- you will realise it's difficult to locate a period when it was ever 'acceptable for a book to "get good on page 40."'

But going with Kate: acceptable to whom?

 whether that reader is an agent, editor, or patron in a bookstore 

Nub ahoy. And note the order: this is not about you. This is about a busy agent looking for product. In Kate's case, "contemporary women's fiction, middle grade and young adult fiction of all stripes, craft, sports, and pop culture." This is not reading; it's shopping.

In my experience the editor reads with a more general view, i.e. how does this fit my list. Sure, they want the book to start well, but they're hardly panicky OMG types. Who knows what they're looking for? Pray you find one who likes your voice. (The other kind of editor -- the sub or copy editor -- is being paid to stay awake.)

As for the patron in a bookstore, their hansom cab waiting on the pavement outside... Really? A lot of people won't pick up a book if they don't like the cover. Many read the first page: just as many flick through. My father's mother would turn immediately to the last chapter, but she was a woman who could take the fun out of anything.

But I digress. Quick, who has the razor?

Writing has to work and it has to last. It drives me insane when people cook up moden lite recipes for the act of writing as if creativity is a commodity to be farmed and groomed and sold in bulk. The movie industry has been starving itself on fad diets like this for decades -- Robert McKee's Story, Syd Field -- and now the same crazes are threatening prose writers, boxing them into the same narrow stalls. Look at the wretched state of the movie business. Is that what you really want your work to be like -- concocted in a blitzkrieg of panic about whether or not it will be instantly liked?

If it is, here is Kate McKean's webinar Awesome First Pages: How to Start Your Story Right.

If not:

A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it. A well-constructed Plot, therefore, cannot either begin or end at any point one likes.

-- Aristotle, Poetics

The cost of living

Wynton Marsalis is playing in town tonight. I thought of going but balked at the price: €100 is too much to pay to hear the blues.

Artistic expression is not means-tested. You don't lose your right to make it above a certain pay rate. And the proposition that art becomes harder to make after one attains financial security is one I'd be glad to test. But speaking as an artiste, one reaches a point -- an age -- when how much the artist earns becomes a factor in what they say. On the day when Picasso could increase the value of a dollar bill by drawing on it, his painting became a whole new game.

Or as a friend of mine once put it: 'I don't need Hollywood to tell me how tough life is.'

An ad hominem argument, but a good one.

Money rarely gets in the way of novels because writers, on average, earn less. The bestseller's reward is Sisyphean: John Grisham has to keep churning out them lawyer thrillers; bonne chance, JK Rowling, with that adult novel. Writers are the writers they always were: sometimes in the moment, one can strike it rich.

Money interferes with music all the time but we accept it, because the stadium experience is part of the aesthetic, and for every dollar Coldplay makes the record company makes 99, and were it not for the looming spectacle of Fat Elvis, what else, having seen a band once, would there be to watch? Led Zeppelin without the excess would be like a train without tracks.

But in film, in "Hollywood" -- money, that gets in the way.

Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie opens this week, and it's a grim tale. Gotham City has been modelled on Charles Dickens; the hero -- a billionaire -- is in crise; and the villain grew up in a prison with a shiv stashed in his teddy bear. It's layered.

Fascinated with architecture, the filmmaker describes the rises and falls of his characters as if they are elevation points of a blueprint plan...  He presents the trilogy almost as a tale of different levels — the heights of the city, the street level and the underground of caves and sewers. "Dark Knight Rises" presents a story where greed, hypocrisy and false justice bring down the city's bridges, stadium and the houses of government.

"We really wanted a cast of thousands, literally, and all of that for me is trying to represent the world in primarily visual and architectural terms," Nolan said. "So the thematic idea is that the superficial positivity is being eaten away from underneath; we tried to make that quite literal."

So much will be made of images of financial market abuse, politicians behaving badly, a terrorist attack at a professional football game and looting riots.

So much work and effort to make us feel down. A $250 million vision of hell; a comic book built behind 525-ton doors.

"I think my dad put it best when he visited and referred to it as the world's largest toy box," Nolan, back in Los Angeles, said last week with a rare relaxed chuckle.

Bedside reading

Desktop

(Pics: Phantom From Space 1953; Paris Texas; sketch; Wong Kar Wei; Fantastic Four #77, August 1968)

A voice I'm hearing, sweet to my ear

Because lugging around 350 loose pages is hard I saved the Final Draft document as a .rtf, opened it in Calibre, exported it as a .mobi file and dropped it into the Kindle app. Processing the files took less time than it took the phone to sync. And then, hey presto, I was reading my new novel on my iPhone.

It's not perfect. The left hand margin is too wide (Final Draft's default page set-up accommodates punch-holes) and the chapter headings aren't linked, but for proofing purposes, it's ideal.

Every six months formatting ebook has become easier. A lot easier.

Writing -- that's still hard. And publishers, they still have to make money, so tomorrow probably belongs to Mia and her Twitter followers. But remember in BSG when Adam lends President Roslyn his copy of A Murder on Picon? I'm hoping the day after tomorrow will be like that. A little less Dani, a little more Runkle.

Boom! There she was

I have a short story 'Here She Comes Now' in the latest edition of Landfall 223, Fantastic, edited by the poet David Eggleton. Landfall is sometimes hard to find but there is a new dedicated site here.

I've seen David Eggleton perform many times over the years, at rock concerts and live events, and always enjoyed it. If I remember correctly he was at Sweetwaters in the 80s, and maybe something in Myers Park with The Swingers, and his work always held its own. He had a dynamic stage presence and a smart, accessible approach to writing about New Zealand. In the wake of The God Boy and Owls Do Cry you felt like there had to be another way of going about it: Eggleton was one of the people who said yeah, there was.

PS: A nice piece from a crime writer who watches watches too much sport. Put him in the books column.

She's not that indie, you

Your Sister's Sister is the story of a man who having failed to notice that Emily Blunt is in love with him accidentally sleeps with Rosemarie DeWitt. This is unlikely but the acting's good and you get to hear Bluntsky whisper at length in that plummy Surbiton accent while watching Midge Daniels from Mad Men, and Mark Duplass brings shine to what could have been a silly role. Directing and writing -- those truly unlikely bedfellows -- are shared by Lynn Shelton (Mad Men). The ménage à trois and its rustic setting are beyond any human reach (behold the luxurious chill of dawn trickling golden across my ladycabin) but all the more desirable for it. This Nora Ephron for the Nirvana crowd; Sex, Lies and Videotape for people who are too young to know what that is.

And all the earthly things they stop to play

Why Jean-Luc Godard is as cool as fuck. Full interview here.

London transport

Today a dune buggy caught fire on Pankhurst Road in Nag's Head, approximately 65 kilometers away from any dunes. Peoples stopped to film it on their smartphones. A man in an electric wheelchair parked on the edge of the pavement to watch. A young woman standing next to me asked for help: she did not know how to operate the zoom function. 'You pinch the screen, like this,' I said, but her iPhone did not respond. 'No mate, you can't zoom while you're filming,' said a man next to her. He suggested she switch to still mode. She thanked us both. Remaining vehicles that were not on fire continued to maneuver around the vehicle that was. The dune buggy's front tyres exploded. Later as smoke filled the road there came the sound of sirens and the cars that were still moving / not on fire stopped, blocking the one-way street completely. There was a long pause. The flames were now twice the height of the car. 'I hope there's nobody in it,' said a man. I said a dune buggy has no doors or roof. He looked doubtful. After several minutes an ambulance broke through the traffic and drove past the burning dune buggy to the intersection further down the road. 'A woman at the lights had a panic attack,' another woman explained. The fire engine was still stuck several cars back. Some firemen had got out and were shouting at motorists to move. By now the dune buggy was a black wire frame in an orange sheet of flame half the height of the lamp posts and the smoke was so thick it was difficult to take a decent photograph. The cars pulled over and the fire engine began to move forward until an Audi pulled out and stopped at an angle across the lane, blocking it again. The firemen moved the Audi by shouting.  The dune buggy was beginning to die down, now. The tender pulled up and two firemen ran out a hose. People filmed them putting out the fire. 'You'd better watch out, the fuel tank could explode,' said a third woman. Wouldn't that have happened by now? I said. The man in the wheelchair shook his head, reversed, and drove away.

Sunlight on a broken column

The Newsroom. Fucking A.

I believe I'm an Aaron Sorkin fan. Loved Sports Night, hated The West Wing, sneakily attached to Studio 60 (disclosure: dolphin girl), openly admired The Social Network -- greatly; kinda liked Moneyball... Liked The Newsroom. A lot.

Smart move (i): setting it in a newsroom. We expect bored media-savvy types to talk in a media-savvy, bored way about the media. Smart move (ii): setting it all just a little bit in the past. Unlike The West Wing (AKA The Waltons), The Newsroom invites us to examine its narrative churn with the benefit of hindsight. Not a lot of hindsight, because that would be history and require us to work: The Newsroom skates on mid-term memory, perfectly. For example the Gulf oil spill was about BP and Halliburton but, yes, long term, we would all better remember the new iPhone. We are the hollow men, and so forth. You know the drill.

The beautiful victim

Watching A Perfect Murder (1998) again reminded me how much I like it. Written by Patrick Smith Kelly for director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive), the story is based on Frederick Knott's play Dial M For Murder, which Knott adapted for Alfred Hitchcock's film version in 1954. There are a few nods to its heritage, such as the camera in the opening credits spiralling upwards to a loft window with a touch of Vertigo, but the story is its own movie.

A Perfect Murder works because it focusses almost entirely on the triangle of Steven, Emily and David: there's no relief from the mental lock they have on each other, and no rationalisation offered by other characters. The casting is perfect. Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow are believable as wealthy, successful people (because they are) and Viggo Mortensen is just on the right side of smart. He lives in what is now an unbelievable loft, but his boho life is as intrinsic to the plot as the Taylors' wealth: if they didn't live like that, there wouldn't be a story. New York is presented as a village in three parts: the two apartments and Emily's home -- again, mirroring the characters -- and there is no escape either by car, boat or train. No friends, no-one you can trust. Most of all what I like about it is its economy. No set ups, no back story, information rolled out when it serves the story and not before. The technology has dated -- landline telephones, slow trading screens -- but it's credible. This is one of the last pre-smartphone thrillers: once everyone had a handset, killing would change.

What sort of bird are you?

Moonrise Kingdom and Prometheus have a lot in common. Both are made by Kubrick fans: Wes Anderson quotes the camera moves from Full Metal Jacket; Ridley Scott quotes the plot of 2001 and Keir Dullea's old-man makeup. Both movies are set in artificial landscapes and populated by name actors: on first viewing, it's a little hard to work out who the story is really about. And both stories turn on the importance of maps and geographic locations. In Prometheus the key action is laid out in a spooky digital graphic of the alien interior; in Moonrise Kingdom the local geography is described by Bob Balaban.

The ubiquitous Bob Balaban talked to the Onion AV Club about working with Wes:

AVC: There's a succession of shots in the film where you're positioned along the bottom edge of the frame, a technique that only works if you're framed exactly the same in every shot.

BB: Wes planned all that and showed me his various visual experiments before we began. It was a great way of him telling me, without ever saying, "Do what I'm doing, because I'm playing the narrator now." All I could think was, "Oh, I see. I'm not supposed to act very much. I'm just supposed to say what's going on." He never had to tell me that; he just showed it to me. I don't think he did it with any grand plan in mind, other than it's nice for an actor to know where he is in the frame, because it informs you to know those things. But I learned a whole lot more from him.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Anderson discussed the influence of Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma:

"Brian De Palma is one of my favorite directors ever, and has such the most sophisticated visual style of anybody," he observes. "But Brian De Palma is somebody who can take a giant complicated action sequence and say, I know precisely how to execute this. I'm a completely different kind of moviemaker -- and the basic crucial talents of that are precisely what I lack, probably."

I saw Prometheus in 2D but dear God, if there is one living director I would like to see make a movie in 3D, it's Wes Anderson. It would be like a two and a half-hour Viewmaster reel, or one of those craft dioramas you used to make in a shoebox on a rainy day. Please, Hollywood: make it happen.

Crisscross

Philip Matthews has collected images and texts on my favourite David Lynch film, Lost Highway in an effort to trace its origins:

The beautiful-sounding phrase "psychogenic fugue" became the official explanation for the Fred Madison/Pete Dayton switch in Lost Highway but there is another source, one I'd never considered, one which seems obvious now given the timing (a mid-90s production, a 1997 release). The endless road, the car chase and police sirens, the homicidal jealousy, the murdered girl and her shady friends ... this was a rare instance of Lynch topicality, of stories ripped from headlines.

OJ Simpson? I think he's right.

Lost Highway is written by the great, great Barry Gifford who wrote The Sinaloa Story and Perdita Durango. He's also B-movie / noir movie buff and to understand where Lost Highway was coming from it might also help give a sideways glance to his collection of essays on the genre, The Devil Thumbs A Ride. As a fan and a critic Gifford is well aware of the effects of practical limitations on film making -- e.g. censorship, budgeting problems, arguments with studios, problem actors. To me Lost Highway always felt like a compendium of such "mistakes": two films mashed into one; the same role played by two different actors; one actor playing two roles, etc.

Later Lynch would double-down on the one-actor-playing-two-roles trope for Mulholland Drive, to great effect.

Maybe everyone else already knows this... I haven't read around.

Also: Patricia Arquette. Twice.

Gifford was published in the UK by Rebel Inc, an imprint of Canongate Books, so I was introduced to the full range of his work when Canongate were publishing Shirker. After I read The Sinaloa Story and The Wild Life Of Sailor and Lula, my writing changed.

Golden

The scene in The Paperboy in which Nicole Kidman pisses on Zac Efron divided Cannes critics. But in this case even bad reviews are good because a movie getting made means Pete Dexter is getting paid for it: pound for pound, he's my favourite living author. A Michigan-born novelist, newspaper columnist and now screenwriter, Dexter wrote God's Pocket, Deadwood, Paris Trout (which won the the National Book Award for Fiction), Brotherly Love, The Paperboy (won the PEN Literary Award), Train and most recently Spooner, which Chicago Sun-Times critic Mark Athitakis described as "sprawling, funny, deeply frustrating." (Like I said: my favourite.)

Here's Dexter on how he got started:

BB: So, did you want to be a writer when you were growing up?

PD: No, never. I took two writing classes at the University of South Dakota but it was just because I found out that I didn't want to be a mathematician. I started looking through the student book there and saw Creative Writing and figured if I can't bullshit my way through that then I don't deserve to graduate, even from the University of South Dakota. But I never took it even semi-seriously. I mean I didn't read anything until... it's a true story than when I wrote Deadwood, my brother Tom called me up and said, "You've now written a book longer than any book you've ever read."

Dexter started off as a reporter:

BB: Did you sense yourself building towards a novel while you were writing the column?

PD: No. Nothing like that. I don't have any long-range plans even now. I just always assumed what was going to happen. I'm not a fatalist or anything, but I just assumed things would go some interesting way. And they did. But there was no plan or anything.

BB: So you never felt a desire to be a novelist?

PD: No, not really. I'm sure it went through my head. Like everyone is always saying they want to do that, they sit around bars talking about it, "I'd like to write a novel." I didn't even do too much of that.

I've quoted this on this blog before somewhere, but it bears repeating: Dexter in an interview with NPR's Scott Simon, on story telling:

SIMON: Now that you've had a chance to look back at your work 20 years ago, and more, what makes a good column and a good columnist?

Mr. DEXTER: I think your instinct has to be to confront. If you're the kind of guy that comes to a peaceful lake and you know there's birds floating around on it and it's early morning or something and you're happy just standing there looking at that beautiful sight, then maybe you're a photographer. But you know, if your instinct is to toss a rock in the pond and watch the birds come up and watch what it does to the surface of the water, to me it's that interruption of quiet, which is not just about what column writing is about, but it's about what writing itself is kind of about, when you think about it, you know.

Dexter on screenwriting:

Essentially, a script is 120 pages, most of it white space, and the writing doesn't really matter except the dialogue. That's the opposite of writing a novel. I knew writing the script wasn't going to take as long as writing a book or be as much work.

Again with the Bronx Banter, Dexter -- he doesn't do many interviews -- goes into his writing process:

BB: In the afterward of Spooner you write about how much time you spent cutting stuff out. Was it really hard to you to make those choices and cut it down or was that actually enjoyable?

PD: I didn't dislike the process. Two hundred and fifty pages were cut and most of it was culling sections, cutting them down. There's probably 50 pages I cut from the high school section, and 50 pages out of the Philadelphia section. I guess I did sort of enjoy it because as I was doing it I could see I was making it better, and that's not always the case. There are times I'll spend a whole night re-writing and cutting stuff and the next day I'll go in and look at it and could see I've uh... I might as well of just died a day earlier because this is worthless.

Because writing is a verb, and so is reading. Dexter speaking to the Muholland Times:

I always think about it as meeting the book halfway... You’ve got to be willing to commit yourself to not sitting back and having it happen to you. Reading’s not just a passive act. You gotta bring something to it.

Except when soft rains fall, and drip from leaves

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"

– Kurt Vonnegut

"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward."

– Ernest Hemingway

"I hate writing, I love having written."

– Dorothy Parker

He could have married Anne with the blue silk blouse

Charles Q. Choi on the science of déjà vu:

The researchers found déjà vu most often occurred when new scenes were very similar to previously experienced scenes in terms of their spatial layout but not similar enough that people consciously recognized the resemblance.

"One reason for the jarring sense that accompanies déjà vu may be the contrast between the sense of newness and the simultaneous sense of oldness — something unfamiliar should not also feel familiar... A situation that resembles one in memory may be a particularly good candidate for producing that simultaneous recognition of newness alongside a sense of familiarity."

Chris Lee on how David Bowie is not here and yet still is:

"He has consciously dropped out of sight," says Paul Trynka, author of David Bowie: Starman, considered the definitive biography of the singer. "For someone so consistently vain and self-obsessed, the heart attack—the realization of his mortality—came as a massive psychological blow. But he's someone who has always had a real understanding of how to manipulate the media and saw the dramatic potential of a disappearance in a very Hollywood way. It became a kind of Houdini disappearing act. The fact that it's gone unstated makes it even more mysterious."

Also from Scientific American; why paper won't go away either:

"Your iPad will go blank on you," Barrett said. "But 'Huckleberry Finn' will never go blank on you. Even if you store it in a wet basement and it gets really badly molded, you can dry it out and it'll still be there."

(Pic: Lana Del Ray in Cannes; John Sargent's Madame X)

Dreams of typing

I have finished revising and have things to type up, but I can't – I need a rest first. So in the meantime I have dreams of typists. In these dreams I hand the scrawled manuscript to someone and he/she types it up and gives it back to me and I mark up corrections and he/she types it up again on double carbons. Let's be honest, I'm not visualising Hoffman. He only types with two fingers.

(Pics: All The President's Men, The Big Store, Mad Men, Secretary.)

Intolerable cruelty: Mad Men's Henry Blake moment

[Spoilers] When the writers of M*A*S*H* killed off Henry Blake in 1975 the series was never the same again: the tone became too dark for what had started as a half-hour comedy; McLean Stevenson's replacement was never as good, and viewers stopped trusting the series for pulling the rug out and murdering a blameless and loveable character. I wonder if Mad Men has just made a similar mistake. Jared Harris's Lane Pryce has been one of the stars of the season, the straight man to Don's moral windmilling. When Brian Clemens spoke at the BFI he was emphatic about his distaste for killing off characters in a TV series: "It leaves a bad taste in the mouth [and] it ruins the re-runs for the viewer."

On a more academic note it interests me to observe the writers' challenge of spinning a story out over the length of several seasons while still getting things to add up. TV shows are not novels or even narratives in sequence: they're dramas designed to entertain week by week. Actors come and go, as do the creative staff, and moods and tastes change -- the blips are part of the form. But in this golden age of American cable series such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, and at a time when binge-viewing has become the norm, viewers might reasonably expect more narrative cogency. Mad Men has a tradition of losing characters in the last one or two episodes but up until now those departures have been tragi-comic (the lawnmower) or poignant (Freddy getting fired) rather than depressing. I still miss my favourite blonde. I hope Matthew Weiner has a plan. 

Moonface live, Shoreditch 29.05.12

Spencer Krug likes playing dress-up. Sometimes he is Wolf Parade and sometimes he is Sunset Rubdown, and now he's Moonface -- "the last moniker I have left to exploit." Throughout he sounds like Spencer Krug: Bowie at his most lofty -- the moh-ho-ha voice Tony Visconti grew like a moth, keeping it in darkness and feeding it with trapped mikes and glam arrangements; a Patrick Wolf style before PW became, well, comfortable. At the ripe old age of 35 (thank fuck: just when I was starting to feel old) Spence sings like he means it and like you're meant to be there in case something new happens or maybe just goes wrong. Tonight he was new and things went perfectly. In fact, they went better than I'd idly wondered. I thought Moonface would be good but dude. Srsly. There are gigs and performances and then there are moments of confluence, where what you like and what is indisputably good music overlaps with the third zone of timing, and this was one of those.

Moonface were remarkable.

Krug stripped down to organ and rhythm box for his first Moonface release. He does vinyl and CD and has a record label -- there are a few tracks for download out there but he dwells not on the Soundcloud, as if holding out for an old-fashioned career. Pavement played Kentish Town a few months back and it was all very college singalong: grown men in skate shoes pogoing to 'Wild Thing' before sloping off for a beer and a curry with nothing risked at all. I saw Jane's Addiction as their own dedicated covers band: forget it. I saw NIN who were great, and spry, but boxed in, ironically. No matter how wildly Trent swung his arms he knew that the keyboard, with one touch of his finger, would generate more clashing white noise than any guitar: his physical gestures were theater. The new bands know it too, and have retreated to the high-timbre, Powerbook-sized tinkle of sentimental pop. Italians do do it better and music has rested there for about 24 months now, sparkling in the sunlight: sugary melodies, bitter themes, Peak Girl... while bubbling under we've had the real boy bands: the East Coast baby prog sound that began with Animal Collective through to MGMT and Washed Out, the sound that someone once described as "Dennis Wilson falling downstairs." (Were they being clever or not? Dennis Wilson always sounded like that, and he fell downstairs all the time.)

But it was all a bit... adolescent. You admired it in the way you admired Sofia Coppola: nice kid, she can do anything she wants. There wasn't much you could get your teeth into or identify with, let alone rock along to. So we settled for the heartlessness of the Dandy Warhols, or the retro-mainstream of The Killers, or who the fuck knows. Pop was dead: there was only indie, and the other stuff; and rock -- that was a collectible up on blocks in the garage. Don't touch dad's things...

When I listened to Moonface online I liked them immediately, but not in a big way. The arrangements were long and plodding but I haven't heard synths march like that since The Associates' Fourth Drawer Down, so we were officially in Yay-Land: the 80s but the good 80s. A deep heat. Earnest monologues that keep up with Ida No (Hey, Ida!)... Sweeping electro landscapes... Trent Reznor pissed-off, Washed Out-loving, MGMT-ironic. When Spence sang 'Talking heads make me miss my friends' he was referencing the band:

Everything is fleeting, baby / Even the sadness that the late summer gave me / Our dreamy memories of the 1980s / First we sing falsetto, and then we sing lazy

So when Krug / Moonface came to London I thought, sure, I'll go see. Cargo in Shoreditch, all very East End; that'll be cool, that'll be fun. The crowd thought the same, all standing very straight. And then the band came on and... lawdy.

Knocked me flat.

A real critic would write the songs down in the proper order. Emotionally it went from (1) this is good to (b) this is, wow, this is really good to (iii) Srsly? this is amazing and am I the only one getting this or am I just very old / high / up for it / all of the above? Structurally the songs were the same as the ones you may or may not be allowed to hear on YouTube: big, simple chordal shifts, textured, with willowy vocals laced on the top -- nothing you can't get your head around. But live, fuck me: Moonface were amazing. So amazing that I kept thinking, well, they can't be that good. But everything I've seen or heard up until now tells me that yes sir, they are. I think this is their moment. Or rather, I think the wave is just starting to rise.

We haven't had pop for so long. We haven't had pop that mattered in the way, say, that New Gold Dream did back then. We haven't had pop for a long time that said anything, and we certainly haven't had pop that felt much, and we sure as fuck haven't had pop that could fill a stadium. But now, suddenly, you think, yup. It's here. And it's that simple.

Moonface (Krug) was playing with Finnish "rock band" Siinai. Technically he's the vocals and they are the band: razor sharp drummer (80s dance, march beat, goth, rat-a-tat-tat post punk), keyboards (head tossing), guitar (present), bass (very), all grinding and restrained... But they overlap, and good luck prying them apart. When they were all playing the one chord they made no apology for it: here it is and, well, yes: over to you. They played most of Heartbreaking Bravery, which is a brilliant album but they made it better than that. Online 'Yesterday's Fire' sounds like another (very good) Placebo single; live, it was Station to Station big. Online 'Headed for the Door' sounds like Alan Rankine finger-banging: live, it was monstrous -- lush, majestic, liquid, cut-throat Reznor. 'Lay Your Cheek On Down' is 18-karat lovely in its digital version but in a space with a ceiling on it, it was post-Spector girlband apocalyptic: everything the Jesus and Mary Chain aspired to but never actually achieved.

After that, it got better. 'Teary Eyes and Bloody Lips' ("make you look like Stevie Nicks"), 'Shitty City'... An hour and ten later the audience were standing around numbed, and the guitarist was looking slightly perturbed, and Krug looked as if he could go for another set, and people shuffled out. 'What did you think of that?' I kept asking people, and they were generally pleased. But I couldn't help shaking the feeling that we'd all just seen something remarkable, whether we were aware of it or not. I think Moonface are the new thing. After several years of pop bands playing around the edges, this is a band with everything it needs to occupy the center. Go feed yourself. Feed them.