Writing REALITi (contains spoilers)

My first produced feature-length screenplay REALITi will be showing at the 2014 New Zealand International Film Festival this month. Directed by Jonathan King and starring Nathan Meister, Michelle Langstone and Graham McTavish, REALITi premieres in Wellington and screens later in Auckland. You can book for the Wellington screenings here and the Auckland screenings here. This is a blog about writing the screenplay and its relationship to my other work. If you want to avoid spoiling the movie, stop reading now.

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Making REALITi has been a long road. Around 2005/6 after he had made the horror-comedy Black Sheep, Jonathan asked me if I had any movie ideas "lying round." I did. In 2004 I had written a short film called The Alibi Girl for the 48 Hour Film Festival. Directed by Clinton Phillips. The Alibi Girl is about two women trafficking a street drug that alters the perception of time. You can see it below – again, if you want to avoid partly spoiling REALITi, don't.

 

The Alibi Girl was an idea I had been thinking about taking further. So the screenplay for REALITi started with that idea of two people dealing in a street drug that turned out to be something else. The effects of the drug were time-shifting and illusory, which causes the characters to wonder if the world they're in is really the world they're in. I've approached the subject before in my novels Heaven and Electric, and in stories like 'Somewhere In The 21st Century'. But this time the idea felt more like a movie.

The second idea for the screenplay came from an experience I had in Los Angeles in 2004. The hotel where I was staying had the newspaper delivered to the room every morning, and every morning the stories always seemed to be the same: a few national headlines, Beverly Hills real estate, and military action in Iraq. After a week of reading, Iraq seemed both closer to Los Angeles and further away. Here was everyone sitting in the sun while over there people were being killed. When I got back home TV was running the same war footage with a different voice over. It didn't seem real.

Using the short movie as the set-up for the second longer story I wrote a treatment and then a feature-length screenplay. I wrote it very quickly. It was never going to be a conventional story. There was an obvious way of approaching the script which you see all the time -- a mystery leading into a chase sequence, lots of shooting and everything wrapped up happily at the end. I wasn't interested in doing that. I wanted to do something that rattled you more and relied on the old-fashioned language of film. I kept referring to REALITi as a sci-fi drama or a sci-fi movie with no special effects. Its reference points were 1960s TV series like The Avengers and The Prisoner; movies like Last Year at Marienbad and Alphaville. The idea was for it be something that was mysterious and cool.

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In this blog I've referred to REALITi as both a sci-fi noir and a SF movie with no special effects. It's a drama about normal people confronting a surreal possibility. In that respect it shares something with my 1994 novel, Heaven, which also plays with the idea of changing realities. Heaven was made into a movie by Miramax in 1998, directed by Scott Reynolds:

Like Heaven, REALITi plays with the idea of repeating, if slightly altered, personalities and events. It's about a media executive who begins to wonder what's real – an idea which also popped up in my 1994 science fiction story 'Somewhere in the 21st Century' (from The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself.)

The idea of reality-altering drugs figured in Electric, in which chemicals cause different cities around the world to occupy the same space. Chemicals influences are everywhere in REALITi. Four of the character names – Holly, Mandrake, Meg (nutmeg), Jessamine (jasmine) – are taken from plants with toxic qualities. There is also some nominative determinism in the lead character of Vic Long: he's not quite a victor.

Some people have asked if the plot all adds up. It does. But you'll have to watch it more than once.

Nailed it

QUQ has blogged about authors' incomes in response to an article in the Guardian.

Whenever the subject of authors' incomes is raised – in particular by someone who's been paid to do so – I reach for this, by Nick Tosches from In the Hand of Dante, my favourite rant on the subject. When I got the book from the shelf I discovered it was bookmarked: the subject must come up often.

Nick writes:

"Faulkner. His story said it all. For every writer, every publisher, every editor, every reader: his story said it all. 

"'I have written THE book, of which those other things were but foals,' he had told Boni & Liveright, the publisher of his first two, God-awful novels, after finishing the manuscript of Flags in the Dust, in the fall of 1927. He was right. And the book was published in due time, in the summer of 1973, eleven years after he was dead. 

"The house of Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith did, however, publish another one of his great books, The Sound and the Fury, in the fall of 1929. Depression or no depression, bestsellers then, as now, could and did sell in the millions. All Quiet on the Western Front, also published in 1929, would sell more than three and a half million copies throughout the world in the span of eighteen months. The Sound and the Fury sold one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine copies. 

"When Harrison Smith saw Faulkner's next book, Sanctuary, he responded aghast: "Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail.'" Smith eventually summoned his courage, and when Sanctuary was published, in early 1931, it sold more than six thousand copies – a degree of commercial success that Faulkner would not see again for another eight years. 

"Random House acquired these books when it acquired Smith's company and became Faulkner's publisher in 1936. As Smith had shown bravery, conviction, and devotion, so did Random House. Though it took almost thirteen years, from 1931 to 1943, for The Sound and the Fury to sell another thousand copies, bravery, conviction, and devotion paid off. For Random House, The Sound and the Fury, and the rest of Faulkner's novels, became in years to come one of the most profitable and prestigious treasure-troves that any publisher could dream ever to possess. 

"The catch, of course, is that, while Random House has justly prospered from its bravery, conviction, and devotion, the sweat and suffering of Faulkner's own brilliance and bravery have, as they say, earned out only after he has taken his place beneath the dirt. 

"I'm sick of these sons of bitches who moan and groan about how they work so fucking hard for their families. They're full of shit, every fucking one of them. Only the artist truly works for his loved ones and descendants alone. And this is because they are the only ones who get to see the fucking paycheck. Artists are not paid hourly. They are not paid weekly. They are not paid monthly. They are not paid annually. They are paid posthumously. In life, there is nothing: not even a decent down-payment, not even the token gesture of a ten-percent lagniappe."

Nick Tosches, In the Hand of Dante (Little, Brown and Company, 2002) pp.99-101 

Photo:  Sylvia Plachy  / No  Exit Press

Not yet remembered

Harold Budd talking to Tim Jonze (2014):

I owe Brian [Eno] everything. But the primary thing was attitude. Absolute bravery to go in any direction. I once read an essay by the painter Robert Motherwell and he pointed out a truth that is so obvious and simple that it's overlooked: 'Art without risk is not art.' I agree with that profoundly. Take a flyer – and if it fails don't let it crush you. It's just a failure. Who cares?

The Mouth (2014):

I live in a very handsome house in Joshua Tree, California, in the desert. A very beautiful house – very artistic shall we say. I’ve often been asked that I must be very interested in the desert, in the open spaces. In fact, I’m not. I’m not interested in that at all. I’m not interested in the architecture outside of it being architecture. There’s no correlation with my music at all. Not so far as I can tell, anyway.

And Andrew Fleming (2012):

I’m in a very strange place right now. I don’t listen to music. I look at a lot of art. I’m not sure where I’m going with it. I would say, in other circumstances, that I have a block of some kind.., but it doesn’t bother me. It’s not something I have to overcome.

Namaste.

Show me the magic

Paul Mazursky's Tempest (1982) is the sort of movie people used to make all the time. It's not huge or important or famous or even a cult classic: it's just good. The screenplay was co-written by Leon Capetanos and that Shakespeare guy. It's a riff on The Tempest and stars John Cassavetes as a disillusioned New York architect (Phillip) and Gena Rowlands (Antonia) as his disillusioned wife. Also starring Molly Ringwald (Miranda), Raul Julia (Kalibanos) and Susan Sarandon (Aretha – but basically, Susan Sarandon). Julia's great. They're all great.

Tempest is a film about personal crisis and love affairs and escape, beautifully acted, with scenes that could have only come together in the editing suite. My favourite moment is Miranda and Aretha washing a sheet in the sea: they raise it; the movie cuts to a long and disruptive flashback, then they lower it again and the story continues. I suppose it's a theatre trick ("We're Segueing Here, Everybody! Segueing!") but it's an example of a moment that would be the first thing to go now, struck out or hammered flat by committee.

Nine years after Tempest Peter Greenaway made Prospero's Books, which had far more cred but a comparison between the two now (do "audiences" even remember Greenaway?) is sobering. Mazursky's Tempest is variously funny and sad, angry and sentimental, disciplined and spontaneous. Rowlands and Cassavetes are amazing. It's a story. It's a movie.

Maybe it's the allure of The Island. Maybe it's because it's medium budget and small scale, or that great idea Shakespeare had. Or the performances. Or maybe I'm simply prone to being charmed by art that's pre-everythingthesedays. But I recommend Tempest to anyone.

Cable

I am very late to The Wire. Partly from being a refusenik but also timing. I prefer to obsessively binge-watch one thing at a time.

It's great seeing it now when it's so old: 35mm screen ratio, Hill Street Blues production values. The drama is all in the writing. Season one was dense with ideas and directions: you didn't know which way it was going to go. Towards the end of that first run there was a perceptible budget bump and the show acquired a little more predictability... but, man: the writing.

Here is creator-writer-producer David Simon talking to Nick Hornby in 2007:

I think what you sense in The Wire is that it is violating a good many of the conventions and tropes of episodic television. It isn’t really structured as episodic television and it instead pursues the form of the modern, multi-POV novel. Why? Primarily because the creators and contributors are not by training or inclination television writers. 

Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare.... We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality.

And talking to Meghan O'Rourke in Slate, 2006:

We realized that explaining that why the drug war doesn't work would get us only through the first season. So, we started looking at the rest of what was going on in the city of Baltimore. The big thematic heavy lifting was done in Seasons 1 and 2, when Ed and I were figuring out what we wanted to do: how many seasons, etc. We came up with five. We talked about many things; nothing seems substantial enough for a Season 6. When other writers came onto the show, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, we would throw it at them: This is what we came up with, five things. If there's anything else you have, any ideas for extending the series, say so. There was no general agreement on anything but the five.

And to Alan Sepinwall at The Star-Ledger in 2008:

To talk about symbolism, if people get it, they get it. if they don't, telling it to them ruins it. You know that.

Ghosts

The Haunted Life by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Classics, 192pp) is a novella written in 1944 and (probably) mislaid by the author in a Columbia University dorm room. The pencilled manuscript came to light in 2002 when it was auctioned at Sotheby's. Editor Todd Tietchen has collected it here with a detailed introduction as well as supporting fragments from Keruoac's work and his father's correspondence. You could skip all that and go straight to the story but the accompanying material shines a light on it.

As Tietchen notes, 1944 was a turbulent year for Kerouac. His friend Sebastian Sampras was killed in action. The author was jailed on an accessory charge (later dropped) and he made the acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

By contrast, The Haunted Life is a modest coming-of-age story about Peter Martin, a young man living in a romantically fictionalised New England town. Caught between the Great Depression and World War Two, Peter is leaning towards an intellectual, roaming life. He is deciding, in other words, whether or not to become Jack Kerouac.

"Someday, we'll sit right down in some old jalopy and drive right out to Fresno, California," says his friend, 19 year old Garabed Tourian. The author would begin On The Road six years later.

The Haunted Life is a young man's story in every sense. There is a palpable tension around rebelling against the traditional male roles of worker and soldier, and the form of the novella itself is a rebellion: less predictable than a short story but refusing to conform to the conventions of the novel.

Some of the dialogue has curdled over time. The characters' thoughts are limited to those of the author aged 21, and their declarations clunk. Rather than "say" the characters cry, choke, prompt, mumble, mutter, chide and so on. But when they shut up and let the author write, the prose takes off:

"Field smell, flower smell, and the smell of cooling black tar in the night. The air misty and drooping with its weight of odours, the river's moist gust of breeze... The radio next door, Mary Quigley and her girlfriend from Riverside St dancing to a soothing Bob Eberly ballad in the living room littered with new and old recordings."

Critics can argue about the importance of the manuscript but this is straight up good writing. It's the ardent voice of the male spectator: the Kerouac people will continue to shoplift and read and talk about.

Sunday Star Times, 13.04.2014 Pic: Kerouac in 1943 c/- Wikipedia

All things bad

The True Detective finale got it right. The series was about the relationship between Cohle and Hart (coal and heart!) and the last episode resolved it. The extent of the serial killer's murders was too expansive to depict literally so the writer and director employed metaphor -- an image Lovecraft and Philip K Dick readers would catch immediately -- and in that moment the crime story transcended its genre. Which, in my humble opinion, makes great crime/noir stories great. Think Kiss Me Deadly when the suitcase exploded.

The ritual of the Yellow King was a portal to another universe of parallel evils courted by all the characters. Rust carved the figures of victim and spectators out of beer cans. Even Marty's daughter when she played dolls arranged them in the same voodoo circle: she was toying with an opening to all things bad. It was no accident that fornication led to both Marty and Rust's downfall: Rust took Maggie from behind and the final straw for Marty's marriage was fucking a prostitute up the ass. Everyone fell into an opening, and the opening changed their lives.

Sexuality is not gender, and some critics have commented that there should have been "more" female characters in True Detective. Which is true. Instead of a triangle between a female and two male leads it could have been between three women, or a group of four female friends. Perhaps there could have been some light comedy to it, too, and better product placement. But that would have made it a different show.

To the end

My definition of an artist is someone who gives people permission to do something that they've never done before.

I don't meant the critic's fantasy of violent innovation or breaking ground or breaking the glass ceiling but the tiny shift by degrees that comes from real lovers of the form copying and mimicking their own heroes and repetition (think: the blues) and, as a by product of that, causing the machinery of creation to skip a gear and go slightly out of control.

If the work and the creator survives, everyone else working in the field sees that they can take things a little further, and from that point onwards is faced with the choice of whether or not to develop it.

(There's another very middle-class idea that what makes art great is how much work goes into it. I tend the other way: look how much hasn't.)

Alain Resnais made Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year At Marienbad and after that, film would never be the same. Ever. Ever. Ever.

Why we work

 

Pretty much everything that ever inspired me to become a writer right there. Although I don't know if I could work with that view. Opening titles from Columbo, 'Murder by the Book' (1971), c/- @columbophile.

Paris 1213

The Mythiq27 exhibition opened in Paris this week. The art by Invader and Rero and my accompanying text are shown above and there is a short movie of the exhibition in total here.

Mythiq 27 is an anthology of art and texts about 27 musicians who died aged 27. Curator and editor Yann Suty asked me to write about Kurt Cobain; I went into more detail about the project earlier here and here.

You can see more photos of the book launch and the opening night on the project's Facebook page and of course there is a Twitter feed.

Suty's project uses the tensions between obscurity and fame to meditate on the short time we all have here. Viewing its collection of dead celebrities, fragile street art and clipped transmissions from a distance lends it an even greater ephemeral quality.

Re-reading; remembering

INTERVIEWER

I read somewhere that you started writing because you wanted to be a musician.

SHEPARD

Well, I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.

INTERVIEWER

Did you start right in?

SHEPARD

Not immediately. My first job was with the Burns Detective Agency. They sent me over to the East River to guard coal barges during these god-awful hours like three to six in the morning. It wasn't a very difficult job—all I had to do was make a round every fifteen minutes—but it turned out to be a great environment for writing. I was completely alone in a little outhouse with an electric heater and a little desk.

INTERVIEWER

Did you already think of yourself as a writer?

SHEPARD

I'd been messing around with it for a while, but nothing serious. That was the first time I felt writing could actually be useful.

-- Sam Shepard interviewed by Benjamin Ryder Howe, Jeanne McCulloch, Mona Simpson for The Paris Review.

But who knew?

I thought if you were a singer and went out and performed, that’s how you made your money. Like when I would see Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra on TV, I thought of course you went in the studio and made records—that’s how the public got to like them—and then they’re going to make their money when they go out and perform. So I never thought about royalties. When we toured the UK and US, that’s when we made tons of money. But who knew? It was nothing compared to what the writers and publishers got.

But I don’t care. I’m still out there. I'm still on stage and they're not.

-- Ronnie Spector

The Shibuya phase

The early days of the internet were like ham radio: a few keen operators who communicated with each other more or less alone in the network. The web stage saw newcomers who actively reached out to each other, building networks. The third stage was a general, off-line population who joined the networks out of curiosity and interest, generally seeking fun. The fourth stage was the capitalisation of said networks; the fifth was the commercial trawl for new users. The sixth was about pushing: consolidating the gold rush, locking users into systems that complimented and became essential to their everyday real-world lives. Everything since then has been competition -- first for "eyeballs", then the remainder of the virtual body.

You don't need to go online to find things now. Now, things find you. People look for you, corporations look for you, products want you to work with them. The new frontier has become the crowded mall, the jammed city. The community is a crowd, the group is a mob.

In theory we could avoid this by going off-line, but in reality that's as practical as disconnecting the plumbing.

So the next stage, I propose will be the stranger in the crowd phase. We know we're out there, we know we're in a public space, we know everything we do online is visible to someone at some point in time. So we'll put up the same front that we do when we're crossing a busy street: yes, this is me, but it's not the real me.

And we won't go online to interact. We'll go online just to be online, knowing that we'll be confronted by in-your-face bots and channels and real people, all of them pan-handling -- because going online is as natural as crossing the street.

But we won't be going online to do anything. We'll simply be online because we have to be there. Having an online presence will become as passive as that phrase. We'll just be there in the crowd. And sometimes you'll find money on the sidewalk, and sometimes strangers' eyes will meet. But mostly it will be crowded and noisy and not carry much meaning beyond the space itself.

Welcome to the rush hour: the strangers in the crowd phase. We're all in Shibuya now.

(Pic: Shibuya by prof.dr.cash c/- Panoramio)

Bruce

I still love The Big Boss. The film boasts a perfect mise en scène: an ice factory in Thailand. The weather is hot and the men are trying to stay cool, Bruce Lee most of all. After a brief scuffle at the beginning he holds it in for the better part of the film before erupting into, well, Bruce Lee. He's a slow burner, like Clint's Man With No Name. He's imperfect, tested, and prevails.

This is what heroes used to be: stoic, principled, tested -- always to failure -- but coming back at the end when their true self is realised. The storyline is likewise classically simple: starting quiet and driving to a climax. Now movies start big, flounder, panic and distract with gewgaws until arriving at some legal definition of an ending: boxes ticked, pulses never raised.

The Fast And Furious series is the closest thing to a modern equivalent of the Hong Kong martial arts movies. A gallant camaraderie, tight budgets and cheap locations, a cast that can laugh at itself and shonky set pieces that work in spite of their ludicrousness because you're in the heroes' headspace and you want them to prevail. The female characters are equally noble. Maria Yi is the moral compass in The Big Boss just as Gal Gadot is in Fast 6.

Threat levels

'Pornography violates the Aesthetic Distance. What does this mean? When we see the scene of simulated sex we can think only of one of two things: 1) Lord, they're really having sex; or 2) No, I can tell they aren't really. Either of the above responses takes us right out of the film. We've been constrained to remove attention from the drama and put it on the stunt.'

-- David Mamet, Make-Believe Town (Little, Brown, 1996)

'I think that one of the functions of Art (both for the artist and for the perceiver, though not necessarily in the same way) is to furnish a false world which is an analogue of at least some of the aspects of the real world and to explore within that new behaviour patterns that might yet be too dangerous or imponderable in a real-life context.'

 -- Brian Eno (Another False World interview by Ian McDonald, NME Dec 3 1977)

'Any sort of upheaval gratified our anarchic instincts. Abnormality we found positively attractive.'

-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life (Libraire Gallimard, 1960)

Been thinking about how many of my favourite things have fallen foul of both official and self-appointed censors. (Including my own work.) Talk is cheap, anger is free and all threats in art are metaphorical.¹

Those threats which one believes can pass from the fictional world and into reality to do real harm (computer games, pornography, modern art, hate speech, fight scenes in movies, Miley Cyrus at the VMAs) tends to be dictated by personal taste rather than empirical evidence.

I could be wrong. The only way to find out is to keep talking about it which, unfortunately, also requires one to keep listening, no matter how much you don't like what you hear. Or watch, or log into, or subscribe to, or buy to read every day, over and over...

(Pics: Existenz (David Cronenburg), Maitresse, Once Upon A Time In America, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny tease Reddit for The X-Files 20th anniversary)

  ^{1. I think Eno said this but I can't find the quote just now. I propose a law that after being interviewed for so many years all quotes can be attributed to Brian Eno.↩}

Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this?

Q: Many films based on real-life events are being attacked over accuracy. What responsibility do you have to the facts?

CLOONEY: This is a new thing, by the way. This is all, like, bloggers -- if that existed when Lawrence of Arabia came out, believe me, Lawrence's own autobiography would not hold water. Patton wouldn't. You can go down the list of movies -- Gandhi -- these movies are entertainment. And that's what we have to get back to. A movie like 12 Years a Slave, somebody will go looking for something that doesn't jibe and they'll try to disenfranchise the whole film because of it. Because there's this weird competition thing that's going on now that didn't exist 10 years ago. That happened with us on Argo. It's bullshit because it's got nothing to do with the idea that these are movies. These are not documentaries. You're responsible for basic facts. But who the hell knows what Patton said to his guys in the tent?

-- Actor / writers George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Julie Delpy, Nicole Holofcener, John Ridley, Danny Strong and Jonas Cuaron interviewed by Stephen Galloway and Matthew Belloni The Hollywood Reporter.

Johnny is a man and he's bigger than you

And a very interesting thing happens to your brain, which is that any information which is common, after several repetitions, you cease to hear. You reject the common information, rather like if you gaze at something for a long time, you'll cease to really see it. You'll see any aspect of it that's changing, but the static elements you won't see ... The amount of material there is extremely limited, but the amount of activity it triggers in you is very rich and complex.

-- Rob Tannenbaum, "A Meeting of Sound Minds: John Cage and Brian Eno," Musician 83 (Sept. 1985)

All of my heart

"Character in any sense that we can get at it is action, and action is plot... We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are." (Henry James) 

(ABC, Cat People, Night Stalker, Maitresse)

The Dark-Haired Girl

'It's like [Eye in the Sky] when actual rescue is right at hand but they can't wake up. Yes, we are always asleep like they are in Eye and we must wake up and see past (through) the dream -- the spurious world with its own time -- to the rescue outside -- outside now, not later.' 

 -- Philip K. Dick quoted in Divine Invasions by Lawrence Sutin (Paladin 1991)

The Excellent Man

'There is only one situation in which the virtue of the good citizen and excellent man are the same, and this is when the citizens are living in a city that is under the ideal regime...'

-- Edward Clayton, Aristotle: Politics (2005)

(REALITi, Mission Impossible, The Prisoner)

California

Don Van Vliet is a 39-year-old man who lives with his wife Jan in a trailer in the Mojave Desert. They have very little money, so it must be pretty hard on them sometimes, but I've never heard them complain.

"Have you seen Franz Kline lately? You should go over to the Guggenheim and see his 'Number Seven', they have it in such a good place. He's probably closer to my music than any of the painters, because it's just totally speed and emotion that comes out of what he does."

-- Lester Bangs interviews Captain Beefheart for Voice (1980)

In the warm room

Three results from three unrelated image searches. Top to bottom: Beate Bartel of Liaisons Dangereuses (1981), Sex Pistol memorabilia girl Liz Hall by Phil Strongman (1979) and Barbara Eden, I Dream of Jeannie (1965).

Why does it have to be this way?

When I was working at Rip It Up¹ there was no better way to start a fight than to lob in a reference to bands like Propaganda or the Art of Noise. Zang Tumb Tuum packaged them as new and radical but they were straight-up pop. 'Dream Within A Dream' was 'Kashmir' and the Noise's Fairlight samples² were the same ones used by everyone from Peter Gabriel to Yes. Both bands were produced by Trevor Horn, who had already given ABC The Lexicon of Love and their career.

Mid- to late-80s synth pop looks impossibly fertile now. Everyone dressed like Gaga but they had songs as well, and the cross-pollination of indie, electronic and dance music -- let alone songwriters' one-for-them, one-for us attitude to the marketplace -- made for great records.

But those bands did upset people. And not just any people -- the right people. I remember Barry Jenkin introducing Spandau Ballet's 'To Cut A Long Story Short' on the radio and muttering darkly that 'two singles does not an album make.'³ And I remember people in the office hitting the roof when I said I liked, say, Anne Pigalle.⁴ Pop music was not proper music. It was not the Velvet Underground or Leonard Cohen or classic soul or indie. It was pretentious, style-obsessed, fake and so on and it made people very, very angry. Which is ironic⁵, because all pop was ever trying to do was be liked.

Now at a time when music is an accepted commodity -- 'something you consume while you're checking your e-mail,' as Trent Reznor⁶ put it -- pop music is annoying the right people again. Was Miley Cyrus's MTV performance any more ill-advised than the Yesterday and Today cover? What is Lorde's 'Tennis Court' but a direct skip to the good Kate Bush -- not the embarrassing Kate Bush ('Babooshka') or the stoner Kate Bush (Aerial) but the electro, B-side Bush ('Watching You Without Me')? What is Lana Del Rey but Portishead without the image problem? And who are the Naked and Famous but ABC with more songs?

It's upsetting.

---

1 "And avoiding responsibilities at art school" (Chris Knox, Jesus On A Stick #1)
2 'Like a full bottle of milk dropped on a stone doorstep' (anon.)
3 He was right, obv. It takes three. Has Justin Timberlake in his whole life written enough hit tunes to fill Rio? No, he has not. Say it, guys: don't make me point again at Pete.
4 Disclaimer: In London in 2010 I sat behind Anne Pigalle in the audience at a boring book reading and at one point she turned around and looked at me and rolled her eyes. Afterwards I saw her ride off through Soho on a bicycle. This was not a dream.
5 Like 10,000 spoons.
6 Saw NIN at the O2 center in 2009. Trent Reznor bought on Gary Numan as a special guest performer. Think about that.

Paris 2727

The catalogue for the street art and literature project Mythiq27 is published this week in France.
Curated and edited by Jann Suty, Mythiq27 is about the legendary "club" of artists who died aged 27: Dave Alexander, Jean-michel Basquiat, Chris Bell, D.Boon, Arlester Dyke Christian, Kurt Cobain, Peter de Freitas, Richey James Edwards, John Garrighan, Peter Ham, Les Harvey, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Rudy Lewis, Ron "Pigpen" Mckernan, Jacob Miller, Damien Morris, Jim Morrison, Kristen Pfaff, Gary Thain, Jeremy Michael Ward, Denis Wielemans, Alan Wilson, Amy Winehouse and Mia Zapata.

Suty invited 27 authors to each write 27 lines about one of the members. The collected texts would be exhibited alongside commissioned works from 27 street artists and published in a book.

I was asked to write about Kurt Cobain. Not being a poet I was curious about the idea of writing to a 27-line word limit. Moreover I was excited that the artist chosen to illustrate my piece was Invader, whose work I'd seen in London and Paris. Above is his Kurt Cobain piece, in his trademark coloured tile-style.

The full list of authors in order of subject is: Paul Vacca, Oliver Rohe, Arnaud Viviant, Philippe Routier, Marc Durin-Valois, Chad Taylor, Émilie de Turckheim, Yann Suty, Solange Bied-Charreton, Marc Villemain, Claro, Sorj Chalandon, David Fauquemberg, Laurent Binet, Jean-Michel Guenassia, Jean-Philippe Blondel, Harold Cobert, Grégoire delacourt, Laird hunt, Paulverhaeghen, Brian Evenson, Elsa Flageul, Fabrice Colin, Aude Walker, RJ Ellory, Alexis Jenni and Manuel Candré.

The street artists -- again, in corresponding order -- are: Sfief Desmet, Orticanoodles / Bernard Pras / Frank Fischer, Sp 38, Jonone / yz, Sd karoe / Charlotte Charbonnel, lnvader / Rero, Oudhout, Samuel Coisne / Yves Ullens, Seize Happywallmaker / Wen-Jié Yang, David Gouny / Antoine Gamard, Denis Meyers / Mademoiselle Maurice, Osch / lnvader/ Maykel Lima, Sd karoe / Shaka, Autoreverse / Nina Mae Fowler, Frank Fischer / Moolinex, Niark 1, Beb-Deum / kashink, Yoh Nagao / Graphic Surgery, Antoine Gamard / DHM, lnvader / Rero / Blek le Rat, Maykel Lima / Seize Happywallmaker, Ludo, Lana and Js, Oli-B, C 215 - Christian Guemy, Graphic Surgery / Johnnychrist and Mademoiselle Maurice / Lim Si Ping.

There's more information on Mythiq27 on Facebook and you can download a PDF of the press release. The Twitter feed for the publication and exhibition is @Mythiq27. If you do find yourself in Paris, the exhibition is at Espace Cardin in December. Big ups to Jann Suty for putting it all together.

Urban Mama: Neneh Cherry

One more thing. Neneh Cherry had broken big by scratching Malcolm McLaren's 'Buffalo Girls' for the single 'Buffalo Stance'. In 1989 she released her debut solo LP, Raw Like Sushi. 

In the background to this Rip It Up interview was the discussion about what sampling and sequencing was going to mean for "real" musicians. Such debate seems quaint nowadays but it was a major topic for artists and fans at the time. There was a lot of fear about the new technology and its implications for copyright and creativity.

Likewise my precious questions re: dance vs mainstream and UK vs US styles, the distinctions between which have all but disappeared. (Cherry was speaking from New York.) But would a modern musician with a top ten single name-drop Fripp and Eno? Some things were better then. 

By happy coincidence I had just done a phoner with Malcolm McLaren and he'd given me my opening line.

Well, Neneh Cherry, Malcolm McLaren says you're just doing what he did, but with a pretty face.

"Ha! Someone said to me, 'I'm so glad that you could go and rip Malcolm McLaren off because he's been ripping everyone else off for so long. It wasn't ripping him off, of course, but I thought that was so funny. It was so obvious -- 'Buffalo Stance', 'Buffalo Girls' -- y'know."

Neneh Cherry is a child of the modern dance: an intelligent talker, a muscled mover. You might recall her as part of Rip Rig And Panic who were making a lot of noise as dance was breaking into the mainstream. Black grooves were fusing with white technology, Kraftwerk were bumping into Afrika Bambaataa. Now it's crossed over, it's hard to know where anything stands.

"I think that we're all for more aware at what went down in the last 20 years than people were 20 years ago when they looked back. That's the availability of communication that you've got now -- you can sit down and watch Woodstock on TV. We're far more open in a way, and that's why music is becoming more open. You listen to the De La Soul album and sure, it's basically hip-hop, but you can hear more -- soul, 70s songs, Walt Disney."

People wax lyrical about the artistic virtues of naiveté. Do you think it's harder to find that sort of naiveté in popular music now?

"The best things that are coming out are really naive, still, because people are capable of breaking the rules. As for as I'm concerned, people have an awareness, and that's good, but they also feel they can do something themselves. They know about all these old songs, and they use them, they're playing around with them. It's great when you're in the studio; you can find a song that matches what you're doing, and make a break out of it, a drum roll, or loop it into a track. It's like a giant puzzle. And to me, creatively, that is really exciting."

I remember an old Rip Rig and Panic interview when you were slagging anyone who had anything to do with drum machines or synthesisers. Yet now you work with very little else.

"I found what happened to people when synthesisers and drum machines first came out was very embarrassing. People stopped playing the machines, and the machines played the people. Now people are actually playing them -- playing them -- so they're like new instruments rather than computers. People are taking them for less seriously now than they did a few years ago.

"Kraftwerk have done some great music, so have Fripp and Eno -- they were the start of that sound. And then guys like Teddy Riley came along, making synths sound jazzy, or whatever. Those people did what they did with a certain kind of passion. But the ones who followed in their footsteps lost it.

"So I know why I said what I said when I said that. A lot of barriers have been broken down since then. One thing that machines have done is to give people who may not have any formal, technical ability, a way of making music. Now they can throw the manual away once they've learned how to operate the instrument.

"It's great because the kids that are buying records can also sit down now and make records. That's why the energy now on the dance scene is very similar to the energy that was on the punk scene. The people that are young are making sounds, and there's a hell of a lot of difference between that and a bunch of over-bred session players making music which they think people want to hear."

Neneh's mother is a Swedish artist. Her stepfather was avant-garde trumpet man Don Cherry. (You might have seen Don Cherry when he played in NZ with Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell as Old And New Dreams. Charlie Grey toured them here in 1980.) As a musician she's hob-nobbed with some of the cooler individuals in pop: Rip Rig and Panic, Float Up CP, Phill Chill and Bomb The Bass's Mark Saunders and Tim Simenon.

Simenon produced 'Buffalo Stance', but his name only features once on the LP. How much of your sound and success relies on him?

"I don't think I could say that I've relied on anybody. We just like each other. He's cool to the music I like, which is the most important thing. Tim is easy, y'know; he likes the same ideas and we work together well. I feel really easy about the stuff that we do; I can go in and trust him. It wasn't really a question of him doing something for me -- we did 'Buffalo Stance' together, at the same time. We've got a similar attitude.

"Sometimes I know what I like but I don't know how to get what I like out of myself. Tim is one of those people who's really good at getting that. It's a nice balance.

"'Buffalo Stance' is the only track that he produced on this album. The track 'Manchild' and 'Heart', we didn't really know what to do with, so he came into the studio and finalised things. So that's a healthy exchange -- better than giving a song to someone who's completely insensitive to what you're doing, who then goes off and makes it into their thing."

How did you two meet?

"Just from around town. Whether you're in a city as big as London or a village, the longer you stay, the smaller it gets. I'm automatically drawn to a certain type of person, I'm always hunting for my people, you know? Tim's part of the family. I met him and I thought yeah, I know you, I know where you're coming from."

One of Bomb The Boss's maxims was a search for a dance sound that London could call its own.

"If we're talking dance music, a lot of the initial ideas come from America, but England's starting to make its own interpretation of that. They've been very dogmatic in their following of what's been happening here for a long time; now it's moving in a direction. You've got Bomb the Bass, Soul II Soul; they take their music from a lot of places and I guess we've got a lot ofthe same energy.

"But England's a good place to work. People will let you be, you're allowed to carry on with whatever it is you wanna do without being pressured."

Who else would you like to work with?

"There's a couple of people over here [in New York] that I'm starting to hook up with, like Red Alert, he's a DJ who does a hip-hop show on Kiss FM. He does things like Boogie Down Productions, the Jungle Brothers and De La Soul all those people, what they're doing now is very significant. They've made the hip-hop thing a great success in the States."

What's the difference for you between the UK and the US?

"It's pretty similar. Unfortunately Acid House is beginning to break here... Otherwise it's pretty close, especially between New York and London. When you go out in London you do hear a bigger variation of music, not just hip-hop. Here you hear more dance music -- mixes rather than tunes."

What do you think are the characteristics of English dance music?

"I think it is finding its feet. Soul II Soul is the biggest dance record in this country, you hear it everywhere. It's a traditional R'n'B formula together with that street sound, it's got that garage, slick feel -- it's killing people. Soul has followed hip-hop in the studio. The sound which we've all been raised with has been taken and made into something different. So England's standing in a really good place at the moment. Also, England has a reggae heritage, and you can feel it in the songs."

(1989)

Apple Crumble: Tama Janowitz

Last flashback: Tama Janowitz on the line from New York. Her collection Slaves of New York was published in 1986. The movie came out in 1989 and was generally panned, as was Janowitz's next book, A Cannibal in Manhattan, the subject of which she hints at towards the end of the interview. I don't know how critics rate Slaves of New York nowadays but you can find traces of its DNA in everything from Sex And The City to Girls.

She had the most wonderful voice. Think Janice in Friends.

New York, New York, city of dreams. Where the streets are paved with gold and the Velvet Underground were invented. Where King Kong climbed the Empire State and where the editor of Vanity Fair gets a $20,000 clothing allowance. Where Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe worked and died. Where Def Jam was born. Where the stars go for lunch. Where art dealers live like rock stars. How are things in New York, Tama?

"It's raining."

Wow! No kidding?

*

Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York chronicles the city's urban sprawl in 22 short stories. It's her second publication (the first was the lauded but less sensational novel American Dad) and the subject and timing has captured the popular imagination. At its weakest the collection is a thin pastiche of Damon Runyon; at its best it's an amphetamine-paced chronicle of the art world that Robert Hughes loves to hate.

"I just went to New York and hung out and went home and wrote about it," Tama drawls. "I didn't see anybody else writing about this world. It was at a time when the art scene was like the rock n' roll scene. I didn't know anybody, but I could go to a gallery opening and someone would give me a glass of wine and somebody else would say, 'Do you like the paintings?' and 'There's a party on later tonight...' I mean I wasn't writing non-fiction, but I was trying to record some of the situations and problems that were occurring at that particular time and place.''

The stories first appeared in various publications, including the New Yorker. And one day Andy Warhol was leafing through a copy of the New Yorker and...

"Warhol first bought five of the stories from me to make into a movie, so I did a screenplay for him. After his death it turned out that Merchant lvory had been reading my work and they'd been interested in it for some time, so after Warhol's death they found out that my stories were available and they brought them from the [Warhol] Foundation."

Which is how the movie of Slaves Of New York came to be. Janowitz wrote the screenplay, Bernadette Peters played the central character / narrator Eleanor, and the film was produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory.

Merchant and Ivory are the hard-nosed and starry-eyed guys who brought you Heat And Dust, Maurice and A Room With A View. They're the sort of films in which Julian Sands and Anthony Andrews ride bicycles around English colonial settlements and Helena Bonham-Carter frets over her virginity. Was Janowitz concerned that the makers of such films would miss the In Your Face style of modern New York?

"No. Merchant Ivory have been making films for 20 years, many of which have been set in social settings, and I thought in any event that if they could get down the Boston of Henry James and Edwardian England, then certainly that had to be more difficult than modern New York, which was standing right there in front of us. So I never had any qualms -- their work has always been about social mores and behaviour and rules at society and etiquette, and that was what I was interested in too."

On paper the Slaves Of New York are willing victims of the inner-city in-crowd, the Manhattan art-world madness that packs galleries and covers canvasses with some of history's most meagre scrawl. The art scene in New York has always been hyped but the 80s have seen it attain new levels of raging bullshit. Publicity-hungry painters like Jean Michel-Basquiat and Julian Schnabel make Madonna look like a hermit. The movie makes this point not without sympathy, but when it screened in New York the reaction was not good. The Emperor was naked, and in Cinemascope.

"They hated it," Janowitz says, her voice starting to whine. "They hated the whole thing. They said it was undermining the fabric of American society, and that Tri-Star was an evil company for making the film, and that Bernadette Peters was too old. Just one thing after the other. They went crazy.

"I don't think they liked New York being made fun of. They were angry that I got a lot of attention and they were angry that Merchant Ivory were doing something other than Henry James or E.M. Forster."

You'd think that New York could handle a media version of itself.

'They're like sharks here, they gang up on things. It was like the Ayatollah saying, 'Kill Salman Rushdie.'

"I'm not sure that the movie was sympathetic, or that the book was. To me, this is the way the city is. I don't think the people in it are all bad, or all good; I don't think they're all creative geniuses, or they're all hustling, ambitious people -- this is the way people are acting at this particular time at this particular place on the planet.'

New York definitely has its own folklore.

"Well, they come here from all over the place, from Holland and Germany and New Zealand, and they all think that they're gonna make it somehow. There are an awful lot of people here vying for attention -- and there are not many people willing to give any attention."

Which is something you capture -- the spectacle of intelligent people spending their lives trying to shout each other down.

"There are people living on the streets here -- I can't imagine Calcutta being much worse. These men are living in the park, sitting on lawn chairs with furniture, everything. People come from all over and they get stuck here, like on flypaper."

The premise of the title story is that apartments are so hard to get in the city that you end up being a slave to the leaseholder -- is that still the case?

"There are more apartments around now. Do you have a lot of apartments in New Zealand?"

Some. New Zealand's a place with not many people in it.

"That must be nice. My father wanted to emigrate there. You probably have good fishing."

Yes. Do you like fishing?

"No. But if I moved to New Zealand... I could take it up."

*

You had a cameo role in the film. Did you enjoy it?

"I didn't care for that too much. I couldn't remember my lines. It took me like three days to memorise them and it was agony. You have to say them over and over again and you have to get your face to make the same expression. But what the hell do you look like it you say 'Hi there, how are you?' I don't know how your face is meant to look to match that expression. I mean how do you look when you say something like 'Well I'm used to Roger cooking for me, would I have to cook for Bruce?' Am I smiling at that point or what? I dunno."

Playwriting, not prose, was Janowitz's main interest after leaving college. She is currently working on a new play for a Louisville theatre company ("Right now there are 12 players, but some may die") and reading the work of other playwrights to get ideas.

"I'm reading Joe Orton and some Pinter and Sam Shepherd and Beckett. And I like George Orwell and Nabokov and Saul Bellow. It depends on what style I need. I read Marquez for his style. I read a lot of true crime books. And I like to read News Of The World."

News Of The World -- that's the classy one, isn't it?

"It's a little different over here. It has a lot at stories about Siamese twins and women impregnated by aliens."

Is that a source of ideas?

"It makes you kind of ashamed, because if those things aren't true then somebody out there has a fantastic imagination. If they are true then all the better. If they are true, then why bother to write anything at all?"

(1989)

The Camp of Trying To Get It Together: Scritti Politti

Second-to-last article from the archives: Green Gartside, 1988, promoting Provision. After this Green dropped off the map for over a decade before reemerging with a flinty hip-hop album of varying quality, Anomie and Bonhomie in 1999 and then, finally, in 2006, White Bread, Black Beer, a digital bedsit Carl Wilson-tinged collection that at last reconciled the distance he had travelled from North London to New York and back again. It was the second stage of this musical journey which I inexpertly quizzed him about here. OCR'd from the original RIU interview with a lot of my dumb chatter cut out.

"I was disposed not to like pop songs for a while. When I first started out, nine years ago now, I was concerned, in a silly and juvenile way, to be different. I would have hated the kind of songs I play now if you'd played them to me then. I was concerned not to have things that sounded slick, not to have things in 4/4, not to have verse-chorus-bridge. I was concerned with not doing a lot of things, and that all started to look dead-endish to me. When I wrote Songs To Remember I was just coming out of that and had started writing songs; that album sort of has one foot in the camp of Amateurishness As Virtue and one foot on the camp of Trying To Get It Together."

Green Gartside reconciled with pop in 198l with 'The Sweetest Girl'. The bass and drums were milk and honey, and the lyrics struck a balance between sentimentalism and intellectualising. The B-side, 'Lions After Slumber', showed Green getting into a funky frame of mind. After the Songs To Remember LP he split with the other members and took the band name to New York to recruit two new musicians, pianist David Gamson and drummer Fred Maher. Their first single, 'Wood Beez; (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)', was a pumping piece of groovy and a dancefloor hit. Suddenly Scritti Politti had A Sound: focused, simplified, vodka-clear.

So what made Green get it together -- was it the work of Gamson and Maher?

"A lot of it was to do with the decisions made on my part, the aesthetic moves I'd made that pre-existed my meeting David and Fred. But one of the reasons that we worked so well on these last two albums is that we do have a lot in common. They came from the same sort of histories that I'd come from -- listening initially to pop, then to a lot more marginal rock musics and then R'n'B.

"I think that the Scritti Politti sound which people will be familiar with at the moment is a group sound. If I went off now and made a record with someone else, I don't know how much of it would go with me, or how much I'd want to take with me."

ln New York, the hip-hop scene was advancing hand in hand with new technology. Cupid + Psyche '85 used cut-up techniques and sampling, and Green admits a boyish fascination with the gadgets of dance.

"Musical technology, the advances that have been made in the last six years, that's been completely transformatory, what that's enabled me to do. You can get involved with the possibilities and present yourself with far choices than it's healthy to have. If that's a sin, then we're guilty of it! Once you realise that things can be manipulated in all these myriad ways by tiny increments, your head and ears quickly get into that.

"If Cupid + Psyche was an influential record -- and I'm told by a lot of musicians in America that it was -- it wouldn't have been for those reasons. We swiped the whole sampling thing from a lot of other places. It was our approach to arranging the material, on the one hand, which was popular, and we were quite concerned to push the technology we were using to its limits.

"A lot of the arranging ideas come from David Gamson, but we got a lot of it from groups like The System, and Solar Records, people like Shalamar and Leon Sylvers. I was gonna say it's all been done before (laughs), but that's not quite true; it's all been influenced."

Miles Davis plays trumpet on 'Oh Patti'. Others might regard that as a vindication.

"I hadn't thought of it like that. I was as surprised as anybody when Miles covered 'Perfect Way' and he let it be known through friends we have in common that he'd be interested in meeting up. After I'd written 'Oh Patti' it seemed that it would suit him and it would be nice to get him in.

"Were we interested in getting big names to glamourise our project we could have, for whatever reason -- it and still mystifies me a bit -- we could have got an awful lot of well-established Americans to appear on the record. But Roger Troutman and Miles were the only two people that we wanted.

"Miles is a little bit scary and little bit different, but once we got talking to him and met him on subsequent occasions we found him to be quite charming and very nice to us, and very supportive. He does have a very elliptical and peculiar way of going about things but he's not as crazy as people think by any means. He really is straight these days. He doesn't drink or do drugs or do anything else. He drinks his herbal tea and has his injections of lamb hormones or whatever. He's a regular guy."

Provision is also more of a regular album -- Cupid + Psyche '88 -- but what it lacks in innovation it makes up for in maturity. The most it has in common with the days of the Confidence EP and Songs To Remember are the puns and references. Green is the only lyricist cheeky enough to rhyme "Gaultier pants" with "Immanuelle Kant" but po-faced journalists fail to get the joke. I mean it is a joke, no?

"Oh, of course. I think the lyrics are always tongue-in-cheek. They're meant to be funny. It's not side-splitting humour but there's a lot put in there in the hope that it' ll be appreciated with a wry smile. Not enough people get the joke and realise that Scritti has to send itself up, having arrived at this faintly preposterous position. To be fair, I can get into all that after a few pints. If people want to lead me that way I'll be a bar room theorist with the best of them. But that's certainly not the whole story. I don't read interviews anymore. They're so painful -- they never get right or I never get it right. It never, ever comes out right.

Would Scritti ever leave the dance floor, especially now it's become so crowded?

"British pop has always been indebted to whatever version of R'n'B is current, from the Beatles to the Stones to the Bowies, and it will continue to be so. But you're right; there is a lot more black music in the charts at the moment. Hip-hop is very healthy; it looked a bit jaded about three years ago, for a short while, but it's coming back strong. That's the sort of thing we think about. We thought, should we make a hip-hop album and fairly promptly decided no, even though we all listen to a lot of it. Many hip-hop records are made fairly quickly, cheaply and nastily, and I like a lot of that.

"Having said that, I don't know what's next, and I could well imagine being lured elsewhere."

As well as Miles and Roger Troutman, you've worked with Chaka Khan and Arif Mardin.

"I don't feel proud. I don't ever feel particularly confident about myself or about what I do, and in a way working with people, moving up or across a couple of rungs doesn't exactly impart confidence to you. In a way it makes you a little more worried about your own worth.

"As much as one would be fairly frightened of failing, there's a certain kind of fear attached to the threat of success as well; being able to live up to it, or feel that it's honest or you're worth it. So it hasn't had that effect on me; perhaps if it did I'd be able to work a bit faster, or be a bit bolder."

Provision comes after a break of three years. Green says only two were spent in the studio ("on and off -- more on than off"). In the interim he gave away one song, 'Best Thing Ever', for Madonna to include on the Who's That Girl soundtrack.

"'Best Thing Ever' was recorded between albums, and everybody at Warner Brothers had a copy and Madonna heard it and we were asked if we would mind it being included and I didn't mind at all. I didn't go and see the movie and I've no idea what they did with it. I didn't feel proprietarily interested in its fate; it was just something that I'd done and it was gone and out of my hands.

"As soon as l've finished something I don't want to hear it again. All that I'm concerned with is that the album gets a fair hearing and I know that's an impossible wish but that's the most I could hope for. I'm thrilled with it now. That's all I can say. And I'm through with it now -- make of it what you will."

(1988)