An Opera Sandcastle: Dieter Meier

Conceptual artist, gambler and pop star Dieter Meier is one of my heroes so I was excited to get him on the line from his home in Switzerland when Yello were promoting Flag circa 1988/89. I wrote up a version of the interview for Rip It Up but this the full transcript. I've corrected some of the grammar, but he really did talk like that. 

I'm sure I asked more questions than this but chose to save precious time by not entering them into the RIU computron's floppy disc input panel. The faded dot-matrix printout has been sitting in a box since 1988 waiting for a time when I could photograph it with a pocket digital camera, transfer the images to a pencil-thin SSD laptop and upload them to a OCR translator to be shared online. But now that time has come.  

CT: Hi Dieter.

DIETER MEIER: Hey you sound very close! Ja, we have an incredibly good line. I am in the house and I was about to fall asleep.

CT: Have you had a busy day?

DM: Today? What did I do, well let's see ... we were discussing several things, we are planning a film in Poland , this is a little Yello opera which we are hopefully beginning in Breslau in a big old film studio, and we were getting closer to the beginning of this.

The film is a fantasy-type story, based on music which was written for it about a young man, a young musician who is kidnapped from planet Earth by the underground empire of the Duke of Shadows where he is used to create images of the world with his music. He plays an instrument down there, and playing this instrument creates real opera scenes inside a snowball. This is the title of the whole movie -- and this snowball is a huge opera set.

CT: Are you directing?

DM: Yeah, sure.

CT: It sounds like a very typical Yello idea.

DM: Ja ja, it has a lot to do with Yello. People call us film soundtrack makers and our music is very visual. This time we are fulfilling the visuals with the reality.

CT: Do you draw inspiration from films?

DM: No, I never go to the movies myself. It's more based on fantasies; it's not real movies, but movies for your head, movies of your imagination.

CT: Will you appear in the movie?

DM: Definitely! Boris [Blank] is playing a part, I'm playing a part and [so is] an English actor called Paul McGann. And a lot of Polish actors because the whole thing is basically a Polish production.

CT: Do you think of yourself as an actor rather than a singer?

DM: Ja, that's true, ja. I've said this before. I don't think I'm a typical rock star; as you said, I'm an actor in Boris's sound pictures for your head. I change my part for each song -- always the same actor but with a different part.

CT: The part has seen you travel the world musically.

DM: Yeah of course, but it's intentional to be very open and to use all kinds of musical subjects. It's not intentional to write an African or a south American piece. It's like two kids sitting at the beach, building a castle made of sand: an opera sandcastle -- a South American or African sand piece -- it's not an intentionally based on a technological piece of music. When there is a rhythm you land in certain territories, and not in others. Like Norwegian is not a rhythmical piece.

CT: And you have no fear of the studio.

DM: Ja that's of course all Boris who is responsible for this. I never touch any equipment and Boris touches it every day for ten hours. Our advantage probably is that, starting with little cassette recorders and later a four-track machine, we really grew with the jungle of technology. Boris is at ease with it: it's not an enemy you have to overrun, it's a friend with whom you are talking. I always said that for Boris, all this technology is nothing more and nothing less than a jungle of the 20th century. For him, the whole studio is one big instrument.

CT: Are you comfortable in the 20th century?

DM: Yeah, sure. Well, in classical music I think in the 20s and 30s -- people from the new school -- everything more or less stopped. And the other things that came out of this century after the 30s to me are either endlessly experimenting.

Of course it is very good to have music that experiments but it gets kind of boring, this sort of John Cage approach. It's a historical monument if you are destroying things, if you you are destroying a piano -- if you are fooling around with sounds, that's important -- but I think that nothing really came out of this after a while.

I think pop and rock -- I believe that till the early 60s apart from some examples, this was a very slow movement. Then rock and pop made this incredible step -- early Beatles and Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix -- [they were] just like an explosion, and now you see mainly the last little tiny glowing fires of this explosion. Now there is not much, for me, happening.

If you listen to the English charts for example, it's more and more producers squeezing the last drops of blood out of young musicians; young musicians who bleed for a producer's musical non-impact. It's a very dull moment right now. Of course, there are always exceptions, but basically I think most pop and rock music now is very epigonal.

CT: Yello is an exception.

DM: As I say, I think we were very lucky to grow with all the technology and then I think we were lucky not to come out of a country where the last drops of life have been squeezed out of the rock circus. We truly had to invent ourselves, invent something else. To be to become ourselves, because of course rock music has no tradition at all here [in Switzerland] -- if people and bands are moving in the traditional rock and pop direction they are to me like yodelling Japanese: technically very good, but they are doing something that is not their thing, their spirit, their movement. They become as ridiculous as yodelling Japanese -- they change their style, they listen to that then they do that, it's sort of epigonal fashion.

Because we never started as a commercial band, we just did what we had to do to become like this. We had all the freedom and the commerciality of it, at the beginning, was a highly unimportant sideline. It was not something we aimed at because if you aim at becoming an international act then you should be sent to loony home straight away -- it is impossible. So you have nothing to lose, and a lot of time to become yourself, because you don't belong to any traditions. Being alone in a territory without rock and pop in this age was an advantage to us.

CT: A lot of bands that start off sounding different soon fall into traditional forms, yet Yello sound more and more like Yello.

DM: That's true. Of course sometimes people, especially in England, they tell you since the first Yello album, they all sound the same, and I am very proud of this, because if you have found your style, how can you change over the years? When a painter has found his way to dance, to express himself -- how do you call it -- 'on canvas' that is a very slow process, and there is not a dramatic change each year. Only people who have no style change their style every year, because they haven't got one. If you listen to the Cure, it's always the Cure, and if you listen to Mozart, even if you have heard only three pieces from the chap, you can immeditely say, 'Aha! This could be Mozart!' Every strong artistic movement has a style which slowly develops, and does not change like fashion.

CT: You have a lot of other singers on this album -- I'm assuming you don't suffer from ego.

DM: No, I don't suffer from it at all. In fact, I'm the promoter of this idea because Yello really is soundtracks for your head -- movies for your head, and these movies sometimes employ other actors. On the last album we concentrated more on me again, but you can never tell.

CT: How'd you come to use Shirley Bassey?

DM: A friend of mine knows Shirley Bassey very well: and he heard that she kind of likes our music, and she expressed that if we had a track for her, she would be interested in singing it. So we wrote 'The Rhythm Divine' and she liked it and came into the studio. It was very simple. You could get Michael Jackson to come in and sing a few tracks if liked them -- it's not a big trick.

CT: And Billy MacKenzie?

DM: Yeah, he's a friend.

CT: You are known as a performance artist. Do you consider Yello an extension of that?

DM: Well ja somewhere in one way it is, I think. Boris and my performance is always live in the studio -- it is live. People ask me why don't you ever play live, I say, we play live every day.

My role, which in very much that of a painter, is painting life. Painting is always life -- you're not reproducing, you're only producing. You're not like a band which is writing a piece, then rehearsing it and then sometimes bringing it to the studio to reproduce it -- we only go to/the studio to produce. We are a very live band.

CT: Did performance art give you confidence in that process?

DM: No. If you ask me now why did I do this, I can't even tell you. It is to me a very strange wonder how I became a performance artist, how I succeeded in having museum exhibitions and becoming quite known in this area. It was something where I obviously followed a track where I somehow had to go, but I never started with the intention of becoming a conceptual artist or a performance artist -- it just happened to me, like everything. I never planned to become a feature film maker. I always wrote down little ideas and little scripts and someday somebody asked me to direct one of these little ideas, and I said why not? I became a movie director overnight -- I never intended to be one.

CT: You also used to gamble.

DM: Mm-mmm. Not seriously, now. If you do this, you are either a professional or a hobby free-loader. If you do it really you do it like a job, an everyday's work. But that was years ago, I stopped when I was 23.

CT: What's it like as a job?

DM: It's the most complete escape from the world possible. Like being a boxer. I only played poker, and with the very simple idea of standing in the ring to knock down your enemy, the sooner the better, and he wants the same thing. This is such a thrilling but simple parameter of existence that you can consider it an escape from the world. You are living in a hermetical situation, standing in this boxing ring, only when you play poker you can play it 14 hours a day. You can't box 14 hours a day -- well, they did in the 19th century, but this would be crazy. Poker, when you sit at the table, you're given a new hand each few minutes, and you can work with that hand, and you're carrying your fate in your hand, and this thrilling moment is the most total escape: it makes you feel good, it makes you feel important, it gives you immediate sense for those minutes.

CT: Francis Bacon was a gambler, a blackjack man.

DM: That's interesting. I never gambled in casinos -- I was interested only in poker playing. When you're gambling with and against individuals.

CT: Since Dada it's been respectable to draw a direct line between chance at the gambling table and chance on the canvas, in the studio.

DM: Well, it has a lot to do with this. This is, of course, true.

CT: What's in store for Yello's future?

DM: Well, the movie is Yello, you know? The most logical extension of what we've always been doing in our video work, this time, it's a feature story and hopefully strong enough to entertain people for 100 minutes. There has never been anything more Yello than this opera. I think this is gonna be the future, I think we will make more films like this. I'm also planning some other features, more in the thriller area. I hope we will enjoy ourselves, and be good entertainers.

CT: Is it a musical or a written idea?

DM: We did have a verbal idea, which was then turned into music which is now turned back into a movie, with a lot of verbal ideas.

I hope to make it sooner or later to your most beautiful country. A cousin of mine was there for two months, and everyone says it is one of the last resorts. Is that true?

CT: "The last resort"... yes.

DM: A very famous Austrian painter, Hundtertwasser lives there, keeps a big farm in new Zealand. The only problem is there's a lot of work here and it takes a long time to travel.

(1989)

The Rules According to Ice T (1988)

Digging through paper I discovered some articles I wrote for Rip It Up, including this interview with Ice-T at the Regent Hotel in Auckland in 1988. He was in New Zealand to promote the Power LP and play the Box. Photo by Darryl Ward. 

Darlene says 'Hi darlin" as you come in the room. And Ice T opens his mouth.

"Man, I've been doing 38,000 interviews. I been waiting on yours, though. I been doing so many interviews for the past year and stuff. I'm just used to it. I don't mind talking, that's why I'm here.

"My style of rap is a very opinionated rap, a rap that isn't set for everybody but for a certain group of people who have a certain opinion about certain things. And of course it's gonna get people uptight because we're very blatant, my rap just says 'Yup, this is how I feel'. So whoever disagrees is gonna be uptight about it, but I think that's what makes it sport.

"To me being an artist is being opinionated. It's saying what you feel and not trying to go down the middle of the road. It's too easy to do that. Radio can't deal with it because radio has to deal with what they call a safe format, they don't what to end up getting anybody mad so they end up playing Tiffany, bubblegum. Nobody SAYS anything on a record anymore.

"Rap came to music with the DJs in New York playing the breaks in the record. Islam was my producer, and he explained to me that it came to the point where the break on the record was what everybody was waiting for. He'd say, 'Here comes the break, here's where I do my best moves and move in on the girls' and all that kinda stuff. So the DJs said, why play the rest of the record? The break was perfect for talking over, and the DJ would give the MC a mike and say 'Tell everybody how great I am'. Notice the early raps, the Furious Five and the Grandmaster Flash, the raps were always about the DJ. And the kids would dance to the breaks in the music -- that's where breakdancing came from.

"You'd get young, 16, l7 year old kids telling sexual stories or stories about how much power they had. But you gotta remember you're dealing with street kids, and that's the only sorta thing that's gonna hold their attention. So you'd have to sneak a message in, like 'I was with this girl, she was real fly, man and she said -- come on, let's get high, but I don't do do that, 'cause I don't need dope' -- they slipped that message in. But the main point of the rap was how wild could you talk.

"The sampling brings it almost back to the original sound. When they first did it they had no drum machines, so they would cut records with music, with a bassline. So the sampling brings you the actual feel of a record being cut. You listen to the samples coming in and say, 'Hey remember we used to rap off that?' When Run DMC cut 'Walk This Way', that was a break people used to rap off.

"Now people are begging for an original form of rap music, saying can you do it from scratch, but it's not really the point of it. The point of it is to take something tha's yours, and make it mine -- not steal it, but take it and flip it and make the funkiest thing.

"And the kids don't know where it came from; the joke is, 'Look how funky I made something you didn't know was funky.' That's what it's all about.

"Also radio programmers are susceptible to playing something with a musical content they can remember. One of the funniest stories is when I made 'I'm Your Pusher' I was down South in the States and some old guy said, 'I don't like rap but once I heard that Curtis Mayfield singing on your record I thought, if it's okay for Curtis then it's okay for me.'

"Now you get rap at all these different levels. Public Enemy is more like war politics, Black awareness. I'm more street politics. I deal with the police level, I don't take you any higher into govennent.

"Run DMC have unwantonly shot themselves to a full commercial level, marketing themselves to the point where they can no longer be street, they're on the Michael Jacksons Of Rap trip. Then you have the hardcore rap, like the Circle Jerks or the Black Flag of rap -- people like Easy E and NWA who just don't give a fuck about nothing. They're just saying fuck everybody, fuck the police, fuck life, I'll kill you. Which is another form.

"Then you get people like Tone-Loc who are getting dropped in as superstars, who haven't found where they are, don't have a rap base anywhere, and are kind of being loved by the pop audience.

"My environment is being reflected all over the world at different levels, though. You don't have gangs like LA, but you have gangs here. People can listen to my music and I can take you to a trip to Los Angeles. I'm like a motion picture, people are interested. Hip hop is universal, hip hop is gonna get in here where RnB can't. We sell more records than Bobby Brown and Al B Shure in Australia, sneaking in through a different route, through the kids. Kids out here don't care if it's white or it's black. Pretty soon you're gonna have a big rap scene here.

"The bottom line is that music doesn't have a colour, people give it a colour. Rock 'n' roll was always followed by white and black kids together. There will always be a racist out there saying, 'I don't like white girls screaming for Little Richard, I don't like white boys pumping their hands to Ice-T' but the kids aren't dealing with the politics of the world, they' re just dealing with what they like. That's some real healthy shit.

"Gangs in LA. are double, triple times as bad as what you saw in Colors. Now you've got cocaine in there. You got 16, 17 year-old kids making half a million dollars a week. Now to tell them to stop, it's like me taking a couple of Columbian drug dealers up to a hotel in Vegas and saying, 'Hey, now why don't you guys quit?' Now they're dealing in the capitalist system, where the ends justifies the means. I can try and get some of them out alive. It's like genocide out there.

"You used to watch the old gangster movies? When the people saw Colors they saw the drive by shootings and got scared. But the Crips and the Bloods didn't invent drive-by shoootings, I used to watch those in old Al Capone movies. It's gang warfare.

"As long as the world is corrupt and people are kept down in certain areas, people are going to join gangs, they're gonna say, 'Hey, we can't get employed -- fuck the system.'

"If we're all working, we're okay. That's why New Zealand and everybody else has be concerned that everyone has a job. Why are they breaking the law? It's because you ain't giving them a job. That's what's going on In Los Angeles.

"You can't manufacture cocaine in the United States. You can't manufacture it in New Zealand. Somebody is letting it in here. LETTING it in here -- that's the enemy. It's above the police.

"It's deep man. I wear a peace symbol round my neck because every year the president takes my money and says he spends it on peace. To me that would be making jobs, opening schools. But they just spend it on weapons.

"The sad thing about me is that people will say, you're just pessimistic. But I don't feel that. I'm a realist. There's never been peace in the world since the beginning of time. It's always been global. But what you gotta do is stay out of the system, don't become a piece of firewood while the big guys are making all the money. The world is so uptight right now, who knows, they might even give Ollie North a sentence. But the day they put Ollie North into jail, the same people that jail him will move a hundred tons of cocaine into the United States.

"People have to learn to discipline themselves, and that's the bottom line. Everybody in the end is only in control of their own actions. Like Angel Dust was big in the States until kids said, it ain't hip. And that's what'll happen with crack. People like me say it ain't hip, and kids will say, yeah, I don't want it. Rap is slowing it down, to an extent. But if there wasn't rap saying that, who would tell them? You haven't heard any RnB records sayin' it. The only person you've heard is Nancy Reagan, and she looks like she's on dope. We're the only music that really spends time talking about the situation."

Ice-T shuts his mouth.

© Chad Taylor 1988

Snapshots

Needle and the damage done

Sunday was the wrap for REALITi. Director Jonathan King finished the principal shoot and pickups with a reshoot of the first scene, going in tighter / darker / better. Big ups to actors, crew and our location hosts for the day, Chow Wellington. After thirty non-sequential days of shooting the micro-budget has brought out the best in everyone.

Now all there is to do is the editing, some digital trickery, ADR, sound mix, colour timing, score...

When the sun shines they slip into the shade

Thom Yorke talking to Alec Baldwin (2013):

Thom Yorke: A break is due because what I've found with a break is it can be an incredibly exciting, that thing of thinking of all the stuff you want to do, but you just force yourself not – you just force yourself to wait and get back into just time and space.

It's like anything. You start to go in small circles, so you've got to stop when that happens.

There's a threshold... if you want to shift with your work, if you want to shift. If you're writing, if you're being creative at all, you kind of have to stop to make that shift. Because if you just, "I'm constantly creating, I've got this mountain of brilliant ideas," you're making the basic mistake that you're assuming all your ideas are brilliant.

Brian Eno talking to Lester Bangs (1979):

One or two of the pieces I've made have been attempts to trigger that sort of unnervous stillness where you don't feel that for the world to be interesting you have to be manipulating it all the time. The manipulative thing I think is the American ideal that here's nature, and you somehow subdue and control it and turn it to your own ends. I get steadily more interested in the idea that here's nature, the fabric of things or the ongoing current or whatever, and what you can do is just ride on that system, and the amount of interference you need to make can sometimes be very small.

Barry Gifford talking to Robert Birnbaum (2003):

Let me tell you. One thing I love about writing, serious work, painting. [long pause] This is all subjective. It's not a competitive sport. I was an athlete -- you know that -- I mean the thing is, in a game is to score more points than the other guy, the other team. This is not that way. I prefer to think of it as entirely subjective. "Comparisons are odious" as Gary Snyder once famously said to Jack Kerouac when discussing Buddhism. And I really embrace that philosophy.

I basically write when inspired. I don't feel it's necessary to write every day. When I start on a project then I go I through to the end. Then I am devoted to it and I stick with it. I don't sit down everyday at the typewriter. I actually write in longhand and then go to manual typewriter. The thing is, I don't feel I have to sit down every day with a blank sheet of paper in front of me and wait for what comes or try to force something. I have never been that way. I try to sneak up on it, I don't know how else to say it. I like to do it without a certain kind of pressure.

Smoke

The Insider, again. Some days it seems like Michael Mann and Kathryn Bigelow are the only American  directors who matter. Which is wrong, of course, but the modern language of meetings and business, the euphemisms of corporate blandness, the power of the telephone and the text message, the dead cold hand of unfeeling legal procedure -- who else now really gets that? Fincher (Sorkin) in The Social Network, but that was that movie's subject. The Social Network wouldn't exist without the visual vocab that Mann minted: documents, coffee cups, whirring photocopiers, sodium lights, rain on the car windscreen. The Insider depicts the modern urban world where everything's talk but the pictures say it all, wordlessly.

Mann talked to Salon.com about directing the subtext:

There seem to be five things going on in every scene.

I wanted to direct, I tried to direct the subtext. That's where I found the meaning of the scenes. You could write the story of certain scenes in a code that would be completely coherent but have nothing to do with the lines you hear.

For example, in the hotel room scene, Scene 35, when Lowell and Jeffrey first meet: All Lowell knows for sure is that Jeffrey has said "no" to helping him analyze a story about tobacco for "60 Minutes." He doesn't know yet that there's a "yes" hiding behind this "no." There's a whole story going on that's not what anybody's talking about.

If you wrote an alternate speech for Jeffrey, it would go: "I'm here to resurrect some of my dignity, because I've been fired, and that's why I dressed up this way and that's why I have these patrician, corporate-officer attitudes." And you could do the same for Lowell, and have him sitting there and saying, "This man wants to tell me something that is not about why he's meeting me."

Al Pacino just took over Lowell's great reporter's intuition to sit there and laser-scan Jeffrey with his eyes. You know, he looks at him, looks at him, and doesn't move, until, after all the fidgeting and shuffling with the papers, Russell, as Jeffrey, gets to say his great line — "I was a corporate vice president" — with the attitude "Once upon a time, I was a very important person." And that [Mann snaps his fingers] is when Lowell has it.

CBS reporter Mike Wallace criticised the film's dramatisations as "excessive".":

Two-thirds of the film is quite accurate. It was dramatized excessively.

How was it watching Christopher Plummer play you?

Mike Wallace: Listen, I could have been a contender if I was that good-looking. He did a good job, I thought, he got some of my tics. But, the basis of the film was that I had lost my moral compass and had gone along with the company and caved in for fear of a lawsuit or something like that. Also, Don Hewitt, who is the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, but mainly me. That was utter bullshit. It was done for the drama involved. Then finally, at the end, I found my moral compass again, except it was not true.

In a quote from the movie, your character says, "I'm with Don on this." In other words, "Yeah, we should kill it." You didn't do that?

Mike Wallace: Certainly not. In the broadcast that we did do at that time, I did a mea culpa on behalf of CBS. I negotiated it with the people at CBS, which permitted me to say that for the first time in the history of 60 Minutes, for the first time in the history of CBS News, as I know it, I was told not to do something. We weren't going to broadcast something that I had done for fear of a law suit or something of that nature. God, that happily is not my reputation, and it was a lie. But it made it more dramatic.

Got wood? Ed Wood?

I sat down with Jonathan King to view the first and very rough assembly of Realiti, and it's looking good. We have about three shooting days in total to go, although they include capturing something complex that I dashed off quickly. To paraphrase Harrison Ford, you can type this shit, but you can't film it. But I have faith that Jonathan will. He has so far.

The best thing about the movie so far is the direction and the performances. The actors are nailing it, and the images are lovely.

To date, only one corrupted file (touch wood) which our editor Jonathan (no relation) saved by importing it a frame at a time, and one misbehaving computer (cue Wilhelm scream), now reformatted. My role now is mostly sitting nearby saying, 'I'm sure it'll be alright' and, more than once, 'Why don't you just cut that line completely?... Yeah, that's better.'

In the same month, I finally got my writing desk out of storage. It's been a long time, baby.

Changes

Camino has been discontinued, so I've started using Firefox. Deleted Facebook's iOS app in favour of Facebook Messenger. Because iOS switches between different e-mail accounts if one is slower, I've been nudged to migrate from my original and very first email account at Yahoo to my Gmail, which I initially used as a dead email account. My iPhone is the only thing I make calls on, or Skype on my Air. I've been to a movie theater once in the last five months -- Fast and Furious 6. Although I'm living a house with Sky and Soho, the last TV I watched was repeats of The Sopranos, Columbo and The Wire, and a MP4 of Mad Men. Of the last four books I bought, three were on my Nook -- from Barnes and Noble UK, which is cheaper than New Zealand. The last seven books I sold were on Kindle.

But the last music I bought was secondhand CDs, and I still write with a pencil on a yellow legal pad and still carry a Moleskine notebook / diary.

Update: Confirmed? Twitter for iOS does seem to be a data suck.

Hubcap diamond star halo

Bullitt (1968), Vanishing Point (1971), Christine (1983), Fast and Furious 6 (2013)

Earthbound

I bought a secondhand car with a six-CD player but Led Zeppelin Remasters is only two discs: what to choose for the other four? To start I picked up a secondhand copy of Lisa Ekdahl's Back to Earth (1998) with the Peter Nordahl Trio -- quite possibly the exact same one that I'd sold to the store after listening to it in 1999 and deciding that I didn't like it at all. Plus ça change and all that.

When I first heard Back To Earth I found it clockwork but now, 14 years later I like it: I find it clockwork. I remembered her cover of 'Now Or Never' that hits like espresso but forgotten her charming version of Cole Porter's 'Laziest Girl In Town'. And 'Tea for Two', 'I Get a Kick Out of You' and 'Night and Day.' It's like being in a five-star lobby that never closes.

Ekdahl is Swedish, the daughter of a nuclear physicist and a kindergarten teacher. She takes after both parents: her voice is perfect and innocent, precise and untroubled. The band whirl around her like electrons while she glows at the center, neither positive nor negative, on time and in key.

Critics are divided on Lisa Ekdahl, most of them rating her as not very good. Her voice is one you either love or hate, and she makes no excuses for it. As she told Time Out Hong Kong:

I'm aware that I have a tiny voice, and I try to do the best with what I have. So I accept my voice and try not to make it bigger than what it is, because, for me personally, I love when someone naturally has a big beautiful voice, but I don't think it's so interesting when someone with a not very big voice tries to make it sound big. Another thing is that when I record, I'm aware that my voice is tiny, so I want to make a lot of space around my voice, so for me it's very important to work with musicians who naturally leave a lot of space.

The future's uncertain and the end is always near

 

 "When something dies is the greatest teaching." -- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Out of the past

This month's movie top box office earners were based on a 1966 TV series, a 1963 comic book and a 1925 novel. And Daft Punk had a number one with their disco single 'Get Lucky', based whole or in part on guitarist Nile Rodgers' work with Chic circa 1976. Nile talked to GQ about recording with the French duo:

Once it got down to specifics — once I had to pick up my instrument, and it was like, Now we've got to translate from concept to reality, we go from nothing to something—I said, Well, this is how we used to do it. And guess what, guys? You're also in the place where I cut my very first record. This is where Chic became Chic. And not only that, I also did INXS here, the biggest record of their careers. And I was here when the studio was built for Hendricks, and I was here before that, when it was a nightclub called Generation, and I played here and hung out here as a teenager. There's a lot of great ghosts in these walls. And at that point, it was like, Okay, the magic is about to commence. I started to deconstruct my parts — I do one pass where I'm playing it, and I take it apart, and do it sort of in single notes and other components. That process seemed to be the way they worked, because they were working with me. They would sing little licks that they'd hear me do, or I'd play something and that would spark an idea.

It's a nice thing as you get older – things come around.

Also announced this week: John Slattery is going to direct a movie version of Pete Dexter's God's Pocket starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christina Hendricks and John Tuturro. I'm a huge fan of Mr Dexter, and this means he gets paid.

The dream factory

For the last few weeks I've been working with director Jonathan King on our film Realiti, picking off one day of scheduled shooting at a time. Production on the feature has been made possible by the generosity and spirit of all involved, from location owners to the local film students and hardened professionals who've worked on the crew, and to the wonderful actors who have found time between stage, TV and (very) big film productions to come and be part of Mr King's third feature. When I was writing the screenplay and casually dashing off phrases such as 'EXT. HOTEL EXTERIOR - NIGHT' it never occurred to me that the result would be six people standing on a wet, rainy city street at 11p.m. with their faces turning blue. But stand there they did, until they got it right, and not a complaint from any of them. Honestly, guys, I thought 'INT. NIGHTCLUB' was keeping it simple. And don't get me started on how easy I thought it would be to film 'INT. OFFICE - DAY'.

Realiti is still a work in progress. Without giving too much away I can tell you that I've seen the rushes and they're amazing. But don't tell anyone: we don't want to peak too soon. In the meantime my ongoing thanks and gratitude to Chow and Good Luck Bar; to the crew to date which includes Jack Barrowman, Oren Graham, Joseph Hambleton, Cath Maguire, Kelly Manu, Lee Tolley and Niki Winer; and my admiration and respect to the immensely talented actors including Michelle Langstone, Johannes Meister, Nathan Meister, Miranda Manasiadis, Graham McTavish, Aroha White, Richard Whiteside and Tim Wong. All of whom are being corralled, encouraged and captured by the directorial eye of Mr Jonathan King. Jonathan has been shooting a lot of handheld, and can hold a half-crouch for a really long time.

And hats off, too, to Wellingtonians. Their city might be home to one of the most expensive film productions in the modern world but the locals still brake for a micro-budget New Zealand movie. Literally, sometimes: we've been filming on the street. Sorry about that, chief.

Pictured: Graham McTavish and Miranda Manasiadis between takes at a very special house; cast and extras in the club; Graham, Oren Graham and Nathan in the wind; and Michelle Langstone -- a star and a star on Twitter.

All tomorrow's parties

Futureworld (1976), Logan's Run (1976), Rollerball (1975), The Stepford Wives (1975), Westworld (1973)

All of this has happened before and it will happen again

Montag jammed his Seashell to his ear.
"Police suggest entire population in the Elm Terrace area do as follows: Everyone in every house in every street open a front or rear door or look from the windows. The fugitive cannot escape if everyone in the next minute looks from his house. Ready!"
Of course! Why hadn't they done it before! Why, in all the years, hadn't this game been tried! Everyone up, everyone out! He couldn't be missed! The only man running alone in the night city, the only man proving his legs!
"At the count of ten now! One! Two!"
He felt the city rise. Three . He felt the city turn to its thousands of doors. Faster! Leg up, leg down!
"Four!"
The people sleepwalking in their hallways.
"Five! "
He felt their hands on the doorknobs! The smell of the river was cool and like a solid rain. His throat was burnt rust and his eyes were wept dry with running. He yelled as if this yell would jet him on, fling him the last hundred yards.
"Six, seven, eight !"
The doorknobs turned on five thousand doors.
"Nine!"
He ran out away from the last row of houses, on a slope leading down to a solid moving blackness.
"Ten!"
The doors opened. He imagined thousands on thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys, and into the sky, faces hid by curtains, pale, night-frightened faces, like grey animals peering from electric caves, faces with grey colourless eyes, grey tongues and grey thoughts looking out through the numb flesh of the face.

-- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

The Wanderers

The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up. The number of Americans who considered themselves shy increased from 40 per cent in the 1970s to 50 per cent in the 1990s, probably because we measure ourselves against ever higher standards of fearless self-presentation...

At the onset of the the Culture of Personality, we were urged to develop an extroverted personality for frankly selfish reasons -- as a way of outshining the crowd in a newly anonymous and competitive society. But nowadays we tend to think that becoming more extroverted not only makes us more successful, but also makes us better people. We see salesmanship as a way of sharing one's gifts with the world.

-- Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (Penguin, 2012)

(Pic: Gustav Courbet)

Slip-sliding away

Some people see a glass that is half-full and some people see a glass that is half-empty and others see a Glass That Could Fall And Break Into Shards And Take Someone's Eye Out What If It Was A Child You Would Never Get Over It* (*Celtic Edition). News of a national literary fellowship losing its sponsor puts me in mood (iii). It would be nice to think that private partnerships between the business and the arts community would flatter the former and permit the latter to survive or at least develop with some latitude but the challenge is one of time, not scale: most small businesses are created and die within the time it takes to write a novel, and lately the fortunes of the world economy can turn before a small painting would be able to dry. I benefitted from the Sargeson Fellowship and like to think that I paid it back in column space / visibility / reciprocal behaviours. But as a writer once remarked, the benefit of funding a novel is that at the end of the process, you have a novel.

QED, motherfucker.

Meanwhile, pictured: production art from the highly anticipated Marvel feature Guardians of the Galaxy. This is a movie that will star a raccoon with a gun.

While I am but a nascent fan of gun-wielding raccoon-based entertainment and believe, as a writer, that other writers should be permitted the freedom to express themselves, there comes a point when all you can see is the Third Option. We've all had a lot of fun with storytelling, and I'm the first to acknowledge that. But I think it's become time to stop this shit and go read a book.

Clothes of authenticity

I'm in two minds about Henning Mankell. He doesn't do plot -- surprisingly, for such a mainstream writer -- but, like some other Swedish authors, he really does coffee and sandwiches. Such details bring the Wallander novels alive. Here is the reluctant crime writer on crime and location:

Q: Your 'Wallander' novels too seem to chronicle important changes in society.

HENNING MANKELL: It is twenty years since I wrote the first book, and in that time some interesting things have happened. When I started I realized that crime itself was going through changes, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of Eastern Europe. Earlier you'd only see criminality in a big city like Stockholm but now you can buy drugs even in small towns. Look at where Ystad is situated, down south in Sweden in a border area close to the European continent – you could say that the Baltic Sea is our Rio Grande.

Q: Your choice of setting the books in Ystad appears to have created a trend.

HM: Yes, but today, I'm sorry to say, there's a lot of very bad crime fiction being written in Sweden where writers use small town settings without any real point. If you set a crime novel in Gotland just because you spend your holidays in a cottage there, I'd call it ridiculous. With a few exceptions, much of the crime fiction published in Swedish is trash.

Martin Cruz Smith is a journalist who wrote pulps before sweating 11 years on Gorky Park, the novel that would become the first of several starring Arkady Renko. The subsequent Renko novels have tapered off in length -- Smith returning to his pulp habits, maybe -- but maintain the tone, and are thick with detail. Smith spoke to Anna Mundow about researching place and time:

Q. "Stalin's Ghost" revisits the Chechen war. Are historical events starting points for you?

A. Well, I had to begin somewhere, and the Chechen war is practically a coloring book of disasters. I was interested to read about Chechens in Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago." Then I read a little Lermontov, a little Tolstoy where there is a theme of this wild, hono r-bound, somewhat privileged society. That's one of the great things about what I do; I'm allowed to follow any trail.

Q. Is Arkady's environment increasingly bleak?

A. With "Gorky Park" I thought I had done my Russian book. Then Russia changed. I couldn't get back in, so I got on the factory ship, the Polar Star. I could sense that things were changing. Then at the end of "Red Square" there was great hope that things were coming together, a triumphant feeling. That has disappeared. Arkady is more and more thrown back on his own resources, which makes what he does all the more singular and dangerous.

Q. You literally couldn't get back into the Soviet Union?

A. Literally. I was barred from the country.

My friend Paul Reynolds loved John Le Carré. One birthday when I made the error of gifting him yet another copy of Single And Single he accepted it with enthusiasm -- 'One can never have too many,' he said. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is built almost entirely on details of time and place: the narrative plays out in the characters' memories. (The action centerpiece is Peter Guillam stealing a folder from a library.) Here is Le Carré on location in an interview by George Plimpton in 1996:

There's some kind of constant interaction between the fantasy that I brought with me to the location — the place as character — and what happens to me after that, the way the fantasy takes on some semblance of truth. What we want is not authenticity; it is credibility. In order to be credible, you have to dress the thing in clothes of authenticity.

I'll ring and see if your friends are home

Author and screenwriter Jonathan Ames talks to Jennifer Vineyard about being a writer on Twitter:

AMES: I don't have any certainty about anything. The reason it's hard for me to tweet is I don't want to pronounce anything, and Twitter is for pronouncing.

VINEYARD: Is that why, after joining a Twitter conversation involving New York's Matt Zoller Seitz regarding the criticism that Girls faces — noting that you had faced it as well, but perhaps not as loudly — you jumped out saying, "Very complicated topic for Twitter"?

AMES: I find it very hard to parse things out. I admire people who are able to do it, actually — it's sort of like reading runes. I quit Twitter at one point, and I lost all my followers. Twitter and Facebook, they were bothering me. I felt like I was only using them to self-promote, and that annoyed me, you know? But it is hard to get the word out on anything if you don't do it, so I thought, Well, I've got this novella about it, I want to tell people about it. I came back on Twitter in October, and but I don't know if my announcing it on there actually does anything. It's weird because it's silly and it feels like a time suck. I find it very constraining, and it's hard to talk about anything sensitive like that.

Read the full interview here at NYMag.com.

I am of the pre-Twitter generation that uses a phone to communicate with one person at a time. Pictured: Ray Milland in Alfred Hitchock's version of Dial M For Murder (1954), based on the play by Frederick Knott. In Knott's thriller the personal nature of the telephone call is crucial to the plot. The technology and the premise would later be updated in the too-often-overlooked remake A Perfect Murder (1998).

Frederic Knott worked as a script editor at Hammer Studios before spending 18 months writing the play about a perfect crime gone awry:

"I was always intrigued with the idea that somebody would plan a crime, and then you see that everything doesn't turn out right. You can plan a murder in great detail and then put the plan into action, and invariably something goes wrong and then you have to improvise. And in the improvisation you trip up and make a very big mistake."

The Hitchcock version is the most famous but Knott was still receiving royalties from the play up until his death in 2003. Hold on to those rights.

I'm just looking / Just looking for a way around

'L'Amour fou was just a phrase and became thirty pages.'

-- Jacques Rivette

(Pics: Miami Vice, Heat, Out of Sight)

WIP

It was always very important to me to be able to get involved in diverse situations. The biggest challenge for an arranger is to be able to deal with different styles and personalities. But it is even more important to make sure that the artist achieves its goals either musically or even commercially. It´s also essential to work with the record company to make sure that they are happy enough to spend good money in promotion for that particular project. It would be a very serious mistake to go against the record company or trying to impose your musical "views" into a project that needs your help and specific work done.

-- Eumir Deodato

Q: Breathless put you at the center of the French New Wave. Were you surprised?

A: I was out of work and needed the money. The producer asked Columbia, which then owned my old Preminger contract, if I was available. He gave Columbia a choice of $12,000 or 50% of the world profits. With great foresight, Columbia took the $12,000. It was shot for $76,000 in five weeks. Most of the time we worked half days. We'd break and sit around in cafes. One day the producer saw us, it was his last card, and he got into a fistfight with Godard because we weren't working.

-- Jean Seberg

Q: When will your next solo release come out and what can we expect from it?

A: I don't know and I don't know.

-- Roisin Murphy

Who's gonna pay attention to your dreams?

Ungraded set pic: Nathan Meister in the passenger seat c/- director Jonathan King.

St Valentine's Day massacres

The victim who has been hacked to death and left in the Bayou is an analogue for the movie itself of In the Electric Mist, based on the James Lee Burke novel. Directed by Betrand Tavernier, Tommy Lee Jones's Dave Robicheaux remains too faithful to the character, which has panicked the studio to cut the narrative in an effort to get things moving -- a mistake, because detective novels are all about sitting around. But the movie still works. It has Burke's voice, and his atmosphere and his landscape, with its sudden, emotional bursts of colour. In The Electric Mist could have been Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or No Country For Old Men but in its bones it's Chinatown, i.e. a movie that wants to be a crime novel: complicated and puzzling for most of its length until the resolution appears right where it started. Also: Kelly Macdonald. All movies with Kelly Macdonald in them are good movies.

It's taken me this long to see Before The Devil Knows You're Dead and if I had to draw up a list of the ten best noir movies I've seen it would come in at around number four. Sidney Lumet directed it and it's a fucking gem: modern, shabby, direct and as black as night. Shot in digital, interestingly, a long time before people were talking about that. If you like Black Widow, Against All Odds (one of the best remakes of Out Of The Past) or The Morning After you should really tuck into this. Lumet calls it a melodrama but it's realistic and dirty and moving. The DVD includes a good making of documentary featuring interviews with the cast, producers and director, but not author Kelly Masterson.

Shadows and fog

Some more thumbnails from the set of Realiti, the micro-budget SF movie that director Jonathan King is shooting around Wellington and parts of Auckland. Top to bottom: Miranda Manasiadis and Nathan Meister lurking in the shadows; Graham McTavish giving the news; Nathan Meister hearing it; and Michelle Langstone on her way to something that may or may not happen. Jonathan has been shooting in digital in real locations with found light and a crew so small I'm not sure whether to call it a guerilla or a skeleton.

Realiti is pared-back science fiction: my idea, when I wrote it, was that the characters would come into a room and just talk. I keep referring to it as a science fiction film with no special effects, although when Jonathan is through with it there will be some opticals: removal of objects, fiddling with backgrounds, that kinda thing. Much of our discussion about the movie is what it won't be, and what won't be in it. In many ways it's a noir... but more colourful than that: stranger.

I wrote the script for Jonathan a long time ago. We revived the project after putting our toes back in the water by making on a comic strip, City Lights, which I wrote and he drew. One of the many things I love about these images as they trickle through is the way they evoke the director's drawing style. It's a good sign, I think: evidence that the movie's visual style is evolving naturally.

These preview pics are very small and have not been graded. And the shoot is just coming up to halfway: there's a long way to go yet. But the actors are looking way cool and the footage is looking great. Build it simple, fly it slow...

Bedside reading

Crisscross

Director Jonathan King has wired some more production stills from REALITi: Aroha White as Jessamine; Michelle Langstone as Holly; Miranda Manasiadis and Nathan Meister as Meg and Vic. Currently shooting in Wellington: it's all coming together. I wrote the script years ago but only now do I realise that these were faces I had in mind.

Watch this: Space!

If you're in Wellington in the coming weeks and spot a film crew not on a $500+ million budget from Warner Brothers, it might be Jonathan King making REALITi, a new full-length feature film. Jonathan will be shooting with a small team in and around Wellington which, through the magic of cinema, will be transformed into a New Zealand city in the kind-of present day.

REALITi is a script I wrote for Jonathan in 2008. It's a talkie: a science fiction film with no special effects; an adult fantasy set in the New Zealand now. Pictured: Nathan Meister as Vic and Tim Wong as Lo.