You can't depend on a beginning, you can't depend on an end

Anthony Rainone: But let's talk about The Lost Get Back Boogie, which I think was rejected -- what, 110 times? What was that whole ordeal like? How did you cope with it day in and day out?

James Lee Burke: By the time I was 34, I had published three novels in hardback in New York, and had a fair amount of success, and I was a Bread Loaf Fellow. I thought I was on board. With The Lost Get Back Boogie, I assumed it would be published. But, boy, I went 13 years before I was back in hardback again. And the agency that was handling my works sent everything back. They cut bait. It was pretty depressing.

-- James Lee Burke profiled by Anthony Rainone for January magazine, October 2004.

With The Neon Rain, my first Dave Robicheaux mystery. I'd been out of hardback print for a long time, nearly 13 years. A friend of mine named Rick DeMarinis said, "Why don't you try a crime novel?" I thought about it, and three days later Pearl and I were in San Fran, right down by Ferlinghetti's bookstore City Lights. I bought a yellow legal pad and walked down to this Italian café that's right across from the Catholic Church there on the boulevard. I ordered an espresso, and I sat down and started writing the first chapter of The Neon Rain. That's a fact.

As soon as I started writing, I knew it. I knew it when it started.

-- James Lee Burke to David Langness of Paste, November 18, 2014

So I've got that on him

Bruce DeSilva: Why do you write crime novels?

Robert B Parker: I write them because I know how, and because it never occurred to me not to write them. The process I go through is the same process Faulkner went through. The difference is that Faulkner writes better than I do, not because he is not writing crime novels but simply because he is a greater talent. He's dead, of course, so I've got that on him.

BD: Some people don't take crime fiction seriously. They see even your best books as mere entertainments.

RBP: Writing is either good or it isn't. It's not good because it's about 20th century angst. It's not bad because it's about a private detective. If it's good, it should be taken seriously. There is a misapprehension that it's easier to write a bad novel than a good one. It isn't. You write what you can, and if it comes out good you are lucky.

BD: Why is this such a hard lesson for some people to learn?

RBP: Literature is perceived as what you were taught in college. Professors can't teach books that are not difficult. If students read a book and they all understand it, there's nothing left to talk about in class. The second thing I would say is that most reviewing in this country is not very good. Its main function is not to do something useful but to enhance the reviewer's career. It's easier to review a difficult book because you get to explain it.

BD: Tell me how you work.

RBP: I think up a story and then I outline. The outline isn't terribly long – four or five pages handwritten. Catskill Eagle took me three months to think up. It's the hardest thing to do. I may go two, three weeks with nothing on the notepad, but I am not nervous about it because I know it will come. It always has. When the outline is completed, I write five pages a day.

BD: No matter how long it takes?

RBP: Yeah. Sometimes it takes eight or ten hours, but usually it takes no more than two. But I deliberately don't press on because if you do, then you start thinking you should write seven pages a day. It's better just to stop. I type it up in a draft, make a few pencil changes, and someone retypes it for me and sends it in.

-- Robert B Parker talks to Bruce DeSilva in 2011

Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt

In 1963 Michael Peppiatt joined Francis Bacon's circle after interviewing the artist for a student newspaper and later being invited to his Dean Street lair: "... the moment I go in Francis is standing at the top of a very steep flight of stairs, his arms opened out in welcome." A lively relationship of art and drinking ensues, which Peppiatt recreates in vivid detail. The author claims to recall the artist's lengthy monologues so well because Bacon repeated himself often -- a reminder that for all the painter's talk of spontaneity and the unconscious, he relied as much on rehearsal and theatre. Both Bacon and his admirer(s) strive for effect in this substantial memoir which pops with colour. It triangulates agreeably with other Bacon biographies including the ur-text interviews with David Sylvester and is a starry account of the time when the art world spun around a few blocks in Soho.

-- Sunday Star Times, December 2015

School's been blown to pieces

What a great movie. Woody Allen's Irrational Man is small like a Russian short story. Instead of Chekhov's gun it has a pocket torch (although there is a gun, too); in place of the writer-director's often cringemaking sexual reveries the relationships are adult and on-point (although again a scene in which a writer working at home is interrupted by Parker Posey bearing a bottle of whisky is as agreeable a fantasy as one could conjur). Like the mis-en-scene of London finance in Match Point the hermetic world of a New England campus focuses the characters' dilemma. Joaquin Phoenix (paunchy, cold) plays a philosophy professor paralysed between theory and action, Posey (brittle, confident) a scientist with chemistry, and Emma Stone (wide-eyed, smart) a student who learns something. The script lacks the wizardry and magic that spoils every other Woody Allen. There are jokes but the actors ride over them, tamping down the smart-ass observations until they read as self-deprecating mumbling. Phoenix literally kills the humour and the movie soars by staying in the box. It's a solid little masterpiece that locks down its story with broad themes, sly editing and the eloquent style of voiceovers that made Vicky Cristina Barcelona such a good picture to look at.

Adrian Tomine

What's your creative process? For example, do you write the story first, or sort of make it up as you go along?

I do a lot of "pre-work" before I actually start drawing. This involves wandering the streets and thinking, sitting on my couch and thinking, filling up notebooks with ideas, filling up sketchbooks with drawings, etc. When I feel like I've got a pretty good story worked out in my head, I sit down and do what I consider to be the hardest work. I get the scenes all organized, and I write a very rough version of all the dialogue. Then I convert those words into comics form. On a small tablet of graph paper, I break down all the dialogue into panels and pages, tinkering with the dialogue and quickly indicating characters with stick-figures.

Finally, I draw the actual pages that get printed. I often continue to change scenes and dialogue as I draw it because new ideas will emerge as I draw the actual panels. Based on advice from Chris Ware, I try to allow a certain level of spontaneity, even though my process is fairly labored.

How long, on average, does it take you to do a single issue?

It usually takes me a week to draw a final page, but if you factor in the writing process, as well as all the commercial illustration work I do, it can take up to a year for me to complete an issue.

A lot of press compares your writing to 1970s American film and fiction, especially the "realism" of Raymond Carver. Are they acknowledged influences?

A lot of people don't believe me when I tell them this, but here's my story about Raymond Carver. When I started drawing Optic Nerve, I had never even heard of him. After several issues, I started getting letters from people saying that they could see his influence on me. Eventually, my older brother told me more about Carver and recommended one of his collections to me. Of course, when I read his work I instantly fell in love with it, and I'm sure it had a big impact on me, but I think I was already heading in a certain direction before I read him, and his work just reinforced that.

-- Adrian Tomine interviewed by Andrew Duncan

Guitar, heroes

Robert Fripp's God Save the Queen / Under Heavy Manners. I used to own this on vinyl: it has never been released on CD. But someone has been good enough to rip and post it on YouTube. It's still wonderful: unsentimental and surprising. Re-issue it, Mr Fripp, and I can stack it dustily alongside The League of Gentlemen, The Equatorial Stars, No Pussyfooting and Evening Star. I still have Exposure somewhere which I bought on cassette from the Virgin Megastore in Oxford Street for about £2.99 back in 1979 when home taping was killing music but my only player is in the car.

The last album I bought on iTunes didn't sync to my phone because a prior software upgrade sneakily toggled off automatic downloads for purchases. I could have streamed it at whatever rate my carrier charges for data but that would be about as practical as having it on cassette.

Your dad's data.

Speaking of dads: the Frank Miller Dark Knight version of Batman that kids wanted to see in 1986 has finally made it to theatres in the form of Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: dark, gritty, paunchy, heavy hangs the crown sort of thing. Alas the kids in 2016 want bright and sociable superheroes who just get along, which is why TV's Supergirl is owning it.

Death in Venice

For people like me who watched Flaked and wondered what was going on Hollywood Reporter critic Daniel Fienberg does a good job of breaking it down. TV's stream-and-binge zeitgeist is challenging writers and directors and the results while far from consistent interest me more than movies because the results are far from consistent. Flaked failed on a number of levels -- there were just plain gaps in it -- but the first five episodes were watchable because they weren't going anywhere. Remember when stories dawdled? Some of the best tales of the modern everyday are in the comics of Adrian Tomine.

Before the morning comes, the story's told

JESSE PEARSON: I've heard a lot of writers say that sometimes novels take on a life of their own, and I've heard other writers say that that's just bullshit and that doesn't happen and you're always in control.

PETE DEXTER: It's not bullshit. I don't ever feel like I'm in control.

JP: I love that thought, but I'm trying to understand how it works.

PD: It's like you're writing and you get to a place or an event and you sit back and think about who the guy is and how he reacts to it. You don't know what that reaction is going to be until you actually think about the guy, put yourself in the guy, and then think about the circumstance. And then you see, and the choice he makes there leads to all his other choices. In that way, it's kind of like life. Now, the opposite of this is these guys who plot their books in the beginning. I couldn't write a book like that. It would bore me to death. This is a problem in screenwriting too.

JP: That's been made into this weird algebraic thing, where it's like, "Three minutes in, this has to happen. Twenty-seven minutes in, this has to happen."

PD: You get 12 guys around a table, eight of whom are afraid that they're losing their jobs, and they're looking at a script and they start doing what you're talking about. "There's got to be more x, y, or z here." They want to plug all these things in even though they don't fit, and that's why you see so many movies that look like other movies.

JP: Right.

PD: Because eight guys are worried about losing their jobs. But I've got no idea how you'd maintain any kind of spontaneity, even within the personalities of the characters, if you had the whole thing plotted out ahead of time. If it's any kind of a story at all, it grows as you write it. The characters grow in ways that I can't possibly anticipate at the beginning of things. As well as I know the story of my stepdad and me, if you'd asked me four years ago, before this book really got going, what it would be about and I had to guess, I promise you that three-fourths of the stuff I guessed would be wrong.

JP: So you have to let the narrative guide you as you write it.

PD: If you can anticipate to the end in any way beyond, you know, the feeling, then I think you're kind of cheating yourself as a writer. Things happen that ought to be allowed to happen.

JP: It also seems more courageous and maybe pure to write like that.

PD: To me, it's more economical. When you follow the story, as opposed to leading it, you're less likely to make huge mistakes. You used a good word when you said "pure" because, if you follow the story, the things that you write will be purely of the story and of the characters. Even if today you look at yesterday's work and can't use it, there are still going to be things in there—if you followed the rules—that are useful to you.

-- Pete Dexter interviewed by Jesse Pearson for Vice, 2009

Play

(Eyes Wide Shut, Amanda Warner AKA MNDR, The Cage / Nona Hendryx)

I wrote you a letter and I told you you were dead

"I've always felt more comfortable with the bad reviews than the good ones. Well, until I decided to stop reading them. I'm the kind of person that if I'm in a room with twenty people all saying, 'That's good' and there's one person saying, 'You know what, that sucks', I'll be going, 'He's right! I'm sure it does suck…' After any approval you'd get a little frisson that lasted twenty minutes from somebody saying something nice, then… That unleashes a lot of self-doubt that turns into self-loathing. I've found that a lot over the years. With those emotions comes the rapid retreat from wanting to do it at all. And that's what happened back in the 90s.

"I went kind of nuts ... I ended up in hospital. I was not a well man. That was the decision made for me. So I retreated back to Usk in Wales. I'd always liked the place when I was a kid. I knew it was quiet and I knew it had some nice pubs. I just wanted to get away from everybody. So I did. I split up with my girlfriend, split from my management, split up with the musicians in the band, left the record labels and left my flat in Islington empty. I left everything there for years."

-- Green Gartside of Scritti Politti interviewed by Robin Turner, 2011

Sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave

What's your writing regimen?

I think I'm going to just start writing and keep writing until they throw me in jail. Other than that, I set aside all day every day for writing and break it up with going home to see my family or having lunch or getting a haircut...

Do you see a career plan?

I don't know. I just make them up as I go along. Whatever anybody says, you're always making it up as you go along. It's like when you have babies; nobody gives you a how to book; nobody gives you a manual. It's like any of the important things in life. Whether it's your career, whether it's marriage, whether it's child rearing, you're making it up as you go along. And you try to have certain precepts, and sometimes they even change.

-- The Dramatist Poet: A David Mamet Interview by Fred Topel

Going dark

Bad style

"... Style, when it works, takes the reader to a deeper place than can be arrived at thematically. It takes you to an inner understanding of the writer's mind that isn't about words. In art, style is not superficial. Or rather it is, but it's also a way into the deeper body of the thing in a way that's hard to talk about, or write about, but which readers feel. The book had a sensibility that disturbed some people, but I don't think it was truly about "hardness." If anything, they may've been disturbed by the very softness I refer to, because it may've made them feel something."

-- Mary Gaitskill talks to The Slant about Bad Behavior

Take the blue mask down from my face

Before somebody blows your goddam brains out

Waking the Witch

"... the hardest thing is sort of being psyched up in the right way to do the vocal with the right emotional feeling. And the hardest thing for me is to be able to feel relaxed enough to be uninhibited. So sometimes I do get just a little drunk, and at other times I like to do them with Del, because I feel much more relaxed than if there's an outside engineer there. I mean, I do become quite sensitive when I start singing."

So can I assume you're pissed out of your head on The Big Sky?

"Yes, I might be getting drunk on that one -- the ad libs on the end, that was where I had to get drunk. And definitely on Waking the Witch. I was very drunk doing that."

-- Kate Bush interviewed by Peter Swales, 1985

Wild wing

"What is it that I really like? Following that is a long process of self-excavation from being buried by what you've been told you should like."

-- Jon Hassell interviewed by Daniel Patrick Quinn, 2014

"When you hear the word 'jazz,' immediately you've got a certain connotation. If you're not on the inside and know that it's a much broader category, you're just kind of like, 'Oh yeah, I've been there, done that.' If a piece were played on a classical station, saying 'This is the new Phillip Glass,' or the new this-or-that, of somebody from that world, I think it would be accepted, number one; and it would be a whole [different] group of listeners who could be enticed to buy the record, number two.

"I look at it this way. First of all, I grew up in America. I grew up where jazz comes from. It's in the air and in the bloodstream. But if I were looking at the world's music from a more objective viewpoint—outer space or something—I'd say: 'Well, jazz is this music over here. And so to leave it out, if I'm really listening to all the flavors, let's say, from all the places, then to leave that out would be crazy. First of all, it's in my bloodstream. And jazz, itself, is a hybrid, a musical hybrid. It is the collision of African and American—actually African and European, as translated through an American sensibility. So that's why the references are there, and the general feeling of latter-day jazz manifestations à la Gil Evans and Miles.

"At the same time, it was a strange learning process for me—I think I've used the phrase before about parachuting into the jazz world and not having hacked my way through the jungle to whatever center there might be. When I studied, I'm in Memphis, I hear things, I'm blown away as a kid by hearing Stan Kenton and the big improvising orchestra coming—a string section, five trumpets, five trombones, five saxophones, with Maynard Ferguson screaming on top. That was the most thrilling thing I'd ever heard in my life. Not that I didn't know—my parents would let me drive the car if I would go to church on Sunday. But what I'd do is just park and listen to the radio. And I remember Kenton coming on, and I thought, 'Wow! This is amazing. I've never heard this before.'

"So I have a much longer treatise to write about, in some sense, what it is that presets an ear—our sensibility to listen to big, thick chords; to the lush harmonies that came via [Maurice] Ravel, [Claude] Debussy and Impressionism, coming through people like Gil [Evans] and the tradition of using it and translating it in urban terms, the harmonic language of Impressionism. So I've come up through that, I go to school, I'm in Eastman School of Music, I'm studying orchestral trumpet playing, orchestral excerpts and trying to learn "Petrushka" solos and things like that, and [Igor] Stravinsky, at least 'Histoire du soldat.' And I'm kind of slated towards orchestral playing. But then I'm a composer, I'm not really there for trumpet; I'm there in composition basically. Actually, at that point, it was probably for both.

"So I'm in the kind of wild wing of composition..."

-- Jon Hassell interviewed by John Helman, 2009

Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne (A Da Capo, 1987)

Poetics

Suzuki

I couldn't spend another hour of daylight

"What if you were driving in your car on the way to the desert and suddenly your engine stopped? What if you got out to flag down a car and you just disappeared?"

-- Darren McGavin on Kolchak: The Night Stalker

Trance state

"Once I'm writing a novel, it's like laying a few bricks every day to build a house until the house is done. I write early in the morning. I work from seven or eight until one o'clock in the afternoon. I just add to it. In general, I don't know where I'm going with it. I like to have a process of discovery, so it's kind of a mystery to me where it goes, but I know the characters well ... When I'm involved in a novel, it's really like being in a trance for the several months that it takes. I'm preoccupied. But the great thing, Todd, is that there are no rules. That's something I always liked about being a writer. However you get it done, you get it done."

 -- Barry Gifford interviewed by Todd Summar, 2015

Easy movement

"Mennonites ... believe that if you look at the history of tractors with rubber tires, you see failure within a generation. Rubber tires enable easy movement, and easy movement means that, inevitably, the farm will grow, which means more profit. More profit, in turn, leads to the acquisition of even more land, which usually means less crop diversity, more large machinery, and so on. Pretty soon the farmer becomes less intimate with his farm. It's that lack of intimacy that leads to ignorance, and eventually to loss."

-- The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber (The Penguin Press, 2014)

Girls in Danger

Who is the murderer?

With which word did he give himself away?

(See page 116 for the solution.)

-- Puzzlers for Young Detectives (Krimischule für junge Privatdetektive) by K. Franken
(Verlag J.Pfieffer, 1968 / Piccolo, 1972)

Always do what you are afraid to do

"There's a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, something to the effect of: 'if you can't be free, then be as free as you can be'. And I like the arbitrary restrictions that one places on oneself, so that you don't get scatterbrained and don't reach for everything that's available. Keep your focus very narrow: just this and nothing more, and make that absolutely exquisite and don't get sucked into distractions, don't listen to the siren chorus singing across the waves about this keyboard that has a billion sounds in it. I couldn't care less about things like that. They just get in the way. I'm not bragging, but the way I work is that I focus entirely on a small thing and try to milk that for all it's worth, to find everything in it that makes musical sense. A studio gives you the freedom to do that, but it also gives you the freedom to do everything, and to me everything is a tyranny. What's the point? So for me it's a conscious choice to work in a studio when I want and need to, but not to own a studio. It's the same with owning instruments. All I have is an old, worthless Casio 202, which I don't even use any more, and the shakers and bells. I don't even have a piano any more."

-- Harold Budd interviewed by Paul Tingen for Sound on Sound, 1997

We're a long way out to sea

"So you’re standing on the Earth. Let’s assume the Earth is a perfect sphere, because that makes things a lot easier. What does our situation look like?"

The moment you know

Gaga did Bowie. Duncan Jones tweeted:

"overexcited or irrational, typically as a result of infatuation or excessive enthusiasm; mentally confused." Damn it! What IS that word!?

— Duncan Jones (@ManMadeMoon) February 16, 2016

The problem with Bowie tributes is that Bowie left all that stuff behind. He didn't linger when he could or should have: it wasn't the changes but the changing. He left a trail of fans holding moments that were important in their lives, which is what pop does: it marks time like a photograph of summer. But then the seasons shift, and no matter how good they were to recall them is to roll in melancholy.

Bowie himself was never truly melancholy until the goodbye wrench of 'Where are we now' -- his last album, Black Star, is filled with a resolved sadness but it's nothing like the beautiful dejection of that 2013 single. The cover of The Next Day is Heroes, patched with text like an afterthought: the moment when the artist reached back for his Berlin self just for a moment, then let go.

The End

Low

Cut the patch, then cut the hole

I have been taking time off writing to repair and paint the house. I don't like not writing but I get satisfaction from fixing things. And although I am not the best or fastest tradesman, my rates are excellent.

I live in a 60s weatherboard house almost the same age as the one in which I grew up in south Auckland, which was almost the same age as me. I have a lot of memories about how a house like this was put together and what needs to be done to maintain it. This house, like my parents', is woodframe on concrete piles but its hill location and exposure to wind and sun over the decades has hardened the frame like steel. The builders who replaced the roofing were surprised that they didn't have to replace any beams; the technician who installed the fibre connection blunted a drill trying to put a hole through a stud. (You're not a real tradesman until you cut a supporting beam. Being an amateur I got him to drill a hole in a corner of the floorboards instead.)

One of the good things about doing work like this is being taken away from my keyboard. But researching technical matters has reacquainted me with the best of the internet, which is its repository of DIY information, in particular the forums (bulletin boards at their best) and videos. You could characterise the videos as amateurish or funny or sometimes just weird (the one on replacing plasterboard has an art school quality), but I can watch these things for hours.

Spies like us

I wouldn't wish a Bond movie on anybody. Locked in the very early 60s the character and stories have been preserved in aspic. Each element of the branded franchise must be ticked off in the movies like a nursery rhyme we all dimly remember. The Bond movies are panto: look out behind you.

Having said that, my pick for Bond has always been Wesley Snipes by the simple math that of all the younger male movie stars who shared a bill with Sean Connery in the 90s (Costner, Gere, Baldwin, Cage, Lambert etc) Snipes was the only one who held his own. In Rising Sun Snipes could do action, comedy, be vulnerable, be seduced, mess up, shoot straight and look cool as fuck in a suit -- but most of all stop your gaze sliding towards Sean if he so much as coughed. Connery like Michael Caine and Anthony Hopkins is a scene-stealer, but Snipes steals it right back. Idris Elba? Also good. But Snipes should shoot first.

This will not happen. Bond does not need to be updated because the form has been absorbed into a broader matrix, like jazz, westerns and literary novels. But were the character to be retrofitted, steampunk style, with the accoutrements that would enable him to do his job in the syntax of Fleming's original -- a cruel, racist loner who is terrible with women -- a quick mind would cut and paste Peter Quinn from season four of Homeland.

As Quinn Rupert Friend has been a prick from the start, knifing that nice Damien Lewis, killing children, having terrible relationships and not blinking when he shoots a gun. By season four he's the star of the show. The limits of a TV budget makes him more realistic than Matt Damon's Bourne, although again the opening of the third movie of that revived series -- the chase in a London train station observed from all quarters which can be escaped only by use of a cellphone -- is Bond redux: everything that Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ought to be but can't.

On the beach

Body double

Director Brian De Palma to Rich Juzwiak in 2013:

You know, Body Double is the kind of movie that people always talked to me about. It got massacred by the critics when it came out, but I can't tell you how many people come up to me to this day and talk to me about Body Double. So who knows ... times change.

Peaches, the artist formerly known as Merrill Nisker, to Melissa Leon:

Ugh, I just think it's time for everyone to fucking get naked. What's the point when Miley Cyrus wears two little suspenders or whatever [the outfit Cyrus wore to the VMAs]? "Look, I'm skimpier than you!" Just get fucking naked. Why do we have these problems? Really all we have is our bodies. I'm sorry, designers, I'm sorry you'll be out of a job but why don't we just show ourselves?

Série noire

I am still currently on a Jean-Patrick Manchette jag. It's like finding someone holding the other half of the locket.

Robert Polito writing at Bookforum in 2011 says Manchette sets his Néo-polars "at the convergence of state crimes and individual yearnings":

Manchette crafted a sly rendition of Situationist détournement: a collage of redux plots that emerges as simultaneously a refinement and a travesty of noir ... The situations of the ten books Manchette published during the '70s and '80s, mostly in Gallimard's Série noire, sound so familiar that you're sure you've experienced them already ...

The full article is here.

My noir novella Aurélie is available as a digital edition from Amazon | Smashwords | Kobo | Barnes & Noble and Apple Books.

Into darkness

In an excellent essay on NYMag.com Angelica Jade Bastién asks if the modern noir has "atrophied":

True Detective is the clearest example of the emptiest aspects of modern noir: vengeful, self-centered white men; casual racism; violence without grace or purpose; mistaking the cliché strong female character for something meaningful; lack of levity or humor; labyrinthine plotlines without verve.

Not sure if she's talking True Detective 1, 2 or both; haven't seen the latter, am a fan of the former. Bastién continues:

In the early 1940s, noir began as a movement born of a number of factors: the changing gender and racial landscape of America during and after World War II, the Expressionist influence of European-refugee filmmakers like Billy Wilder, and studio-system economics.

Missing from her list: the novels and short stories on which the movies were based. That's your problem right there: the source material. Look at Michael Winterbottom's version of The Killer Inside Me. Jim Thompson's novel was published in 1952: viewed from this side of the century it's fifty shades of go fuck yourself.

Contrary to any rosy academic spin one might apply now the so-called "classic" noir movies were typically violent, sexist, populated by gender and racial stereotypes, hacked by studios and curdled by portentous public service messages and disclaimers. But they were good because the stories were good, and they remain powerful because their subversive, disturbing messages ring true.

(I'm suspicious of art that tells you how things should be: far more interested in what tells you how things are -- and even better, how bad it can get. There is no rule in the manual that says art should be virtuous.)

If you want to set your tuner to classic film noir pick up a copy of Barry Gifford's The Devil Thumbs A Ride: a film diary by one of my favourite fiction authors.

If you want to see where film noir is going, check out Mr Robot. Show creator Sam Esmail talked to Engadget about his approach to the series:

... I really wanted to do a character piece about one specific character from this world. I wanted to be inside his head as intimately and as close as possible. Then the character of Elliot started to form. Taxi Driver hands down is probably one of the best character pieces in cinema, so of course that was an inspiration. The use of VO (voice over) and the sort of isolation, in terms of the filming and storytelling -- really you're just locked in with this guy.

And if you want the real thing? Go read a book.

(Pic: Jessica Alba in The Killer Inside Me (2010), dir. Michael Winterbottom.)

The devil has the best songs

James Sallis on Jean-Patrick Manchette:

There's much that's quintessentially French about Manchette: his political stance, the stylish hard surface of his prose, his adoption of a "low" or demotic art form to embody abstract ideas. Like any great illusionist, he directs our attention one way as the miraculous happens in another. He tells us a simple story. This occurred. That. But there's bone, there's gristle. Floors give way, and wind heaves its shoulder against the door. His stories of cornered individuals become an indictment of capitalism's excesses, its unchallenged power, its reliance on distraction and spectacle.

-- The New York Review of Books, June 2014 

Artists in the studio

Maxime Schmitt on Kraftwerk's working method:

I was thinking, "Is there a good song coming out of this?" or "will the stuff that I heard be as good in three months?" There was this quest where I wanted to bring back something really strong. I remember I used to go to Düsseldorf and I would listen to the new material, saying "But there you are not doing Kraftwerk anymore, you are doing a sort of Queen!" And they would say, "After all, maybe it's not bad, maybe it can be a new direction." But in fact, they came back very fast to their style. When things went towards new directions, within six months it had become recognisably Kraftwerk again.

– Pascal Bussy, Kraftwerk: Man Machine and Music (SAF, 1993)

The best crime writers you've never heard of

There's a lot I like in the novels of French noir author Jean-Patrick Manchette and just as much that I admire. The translations can clunk but the energy sparks and the style references are to die for.

American crime writer James Sallis reviewed Manchette for The Boston Globe:

Much about Manchette seems quintessentially French: the stylish glistening surface of his prose, his objectivist method, his adoption of a "low" art form to embody abstract ideas. This goes far towards explaining why he remains virtually unknown and to this point untranslated in the U.S., while all about Europe, having salvaged the French crime novel from the bog of police procedurals and colorful tales of Pigalle lowlife into which it had sunk, he's a massive figure.
"The crime novel," he claimed, "is the great moral literature of our time" — shortly before he set about proving it.

Sallis is very good also. His mainstream "break" was Drive (2005) which was turned into a movie in 2011. Although the movie did well he tells Oliver Franklin-Wallis not a lot has changed since:

We get so many calls I won't answer the phone. My latest book The Killer Is Dying has had a lot of interest but so far nothing is happening. Certainly I feel more visible. But as a writer, my favourite are emails from readers saying "I loved the film and I immediately went out and bought the book, now I'm reading the four Lew Griffin novels" because it really is leading people to my other work.

CNN called Sallis "the best crime writer you've never heard of." Sallis's other nominations in that category:

J.M. Redmann writes lesbian mysteries which are absolutely wonderful. One of her best titles is The Intersection Of Law And Desire, which are two streets in New Orleans. S.J. Rozan is a great writer and so is Jean-Patrick Manchette, a French writer who nobody knows in the States. I also love George Pelecanos. There's so much exciting crime writing being done now. Something like Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn – what a hell of a novel – would never have been written fifty years ago.

Sallis, talking to Keith Rawson, describes his writing process:

Mostly it’s all on computer nowadays, though each page, each line, gets questioned, revised, rewritten, buffed, trimmed and fileted hundreds of times.

That's how you do it.

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris

Between You & Me is an index of things editors dwell on so that readers don't have to: word gender, the dangling participle, commas, hyphenation. Author Mary Norris is a copy editor at the New Yorker. After an introduction that is easeful even by her employer's standards she introduces the magazine's dictionary of choice, Webster's, which she employs as a prelude to American English, and here the book comes alive ("The best thing ever written about hyphens is..."). Far from "a mean person who enjoys pointing put other people's errors" Norris is tickled pink by her subject. The book is nostalgic in places – New York, mostly ("... her desk facing a wall James Thurber had drawn on in pencil") but her outlook is modern ("I would never disable spell check. That would be hubris"). Grammatical examples are presented as witty mnemonics: it's fun, and you'll learn something.

-- Sunday Star Times, June 2015

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Documentary maker Jon Ronson has assembled an excellent chronicle of individuals who have wreaked real-world damage via social media: Adria, who tweeted a developer's remark at a tech conference, which led to the developer being fired; Justine, who tweeted a joke before getting on a plane and found herself professionally destroyed by the time it landed. Ronson digs up details: the developer was rehired; Adria assailed. Justine, a PR worker, had been targeted by Gawker: "The fact that she was a PR chief made it delicious," said Gawker's Sam Biddle. Another "victim", Max Mosley, survived his public shaming by refusing to be cowed -- and hiring a QC. The meddling facts of each case undermine easy comparison and propel the author in circles. Ronson concludes that social media dehumanises us, but also that society was cruel all along. By book's end his outrage has dimmed, leaving only juicy anecdotes. It would make compelling TV -- his subjects were right to trust print.

-- Sunday Star Times, May 2015

Girl In A Band by Kim Gordon

Girl In A Band's opening chapter detailing Kim Gordon's breakup with Thurston Moore has been chewed over by an online audience that might not normally discuss a woman in terms of her relationship but the memoir in total is judicious and single-minded: a personal narrative of laterally-mobile ambition signposted with appearances by the fashionable and infamous. The author presents herself as a ‏60s art school child who jumped almost directly to the New York 80s gallery scene, bypassing disco and rock. As per the title she has much to say about gender but it's Gordon's adult quality that sets her apart from her morose peers: even while professing fears of inadequacy the narrative focus is intelligent and self-possessed. The chapters on her favourite Sonic Youth tracks make a fine 20 minutes on YouTube and her memories of New York are a paean to an urban culture now priced out of existence.

-- Sunday Star Times, 2015

Moving

The dialogue in Furious 7 is epic to the point of non-sequitur. The rap video T&A is equal opportunity: Rodriguez kicks ass; the Rock wears a singlet in the office. Fights are Hong Kong phooey and the laws of physics pushed out as far as a rocket-propelled coyote on a granite ledge. But the series works because at its heart – and it has a lot of heart – it's about chivalry. The central theme is family – not military. Furious 7 never winks at the audience. For all its stunts, the filmmakers play fair with the viewer: the movie believes in itself, and the audience believes back.

The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

Murakami's The Strange Library appears designed for younger readers but few of them would recognise a library as it's depicted: borrowing cards, inked date stamps, stacks of books teetering over the door. The book is designed by Suzanne Dean, whose credit is tucked at the foot of the credits. An endpaper note explains that many of the illustrations have been sourced from The London Library and visually the enterprise has the charm of an English storybook but the story, translated by Ted Goossen, is less attractive. A boy researching the Ottoman Empire becomes imprisoned by a extremely threatening old man; his fellow inmates are a girl who speaks with her hands, and a sheep man – a recurring Murakami character who appears in Dance Dance Dance. The combination of inventive design and lurching narrative renders the experience either more frustrating or engaging, depending on your tastes. The final effect is subversive: looks like a children's book, freaks you out.

-- Sunday Star Times, 2014

Good reading

This is being passed around: Salon's Anne Bauer on why it's a problem that writers don't talk about where their money comes from:

... When an audience member — young, wide-eyed, clearly not clued in — rose to ask [an unnamed author] how he’d managed to spend 10 years writing his current masterpiece — What had he done to sustain himself and his family during that time? — he told her in a serious tone that it had been tough but he’d written a number of magazine articles to get by. I heard a titter pass through the half of the audience that knew the truth. But the author, impassive, moved on and left this woman thinking he’d supported his Manhattan life for a decade with a handful of pieces in the Nation and Salon.

Also being passed around: Vulture's David Marchese talks to Jon Ronson about how we use social media to shame others. Says Ronson:

... We still see ourselves on social media as the hitherto-silenced underdog, yet we have huge power. We are more powerful en masse than NBC... We like to see ourselves as righteous people, but we’re behaving as unforgiving and cold. We’ve sort of tricked ourselves into believing that we’re something online that we’re not, or that we haven’t turned into something that we have.

And Jon Ronson again, on the New York Times, about destroying lives with Twitter:

... In those early days, the collective fury felt righteous, powerful and effective. It felt as if hierarchies were being dismantled, as if justice were being democratized. As time passed, though, I watched these shame campaigns multiply, to the point that they targeted not just powerful institutions and public figures but really anyone perceived to have done something offensive. I also began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment. It almost felt as if shamings were now happening for their own sake, as if they were following a script.

Features fuse like shattered glass

Now I watch movies while saying over and over again, 'They could never make this now.' You couldn't be this clear and cold and dissolute; this adult. Literally: the teenage children of the couple would be enabled as the heroes, their wealth signified by product placement and a contemporary soundtrack. And the heroine would not be wetting the bed.

Reversal of Fortune: Directed by Barbet Schroeder (More, Maitresse). Written by Nicholas Kazan (At Close Range).

Blogging via a Twitter feed: Mike Nichols

 
Reading a tweet about someone you like. (beat) Realising the tweet is because they're dead.

Anyway: WOLF. Jack Nicholson's fantastic portrayal of line-editing a manuscript.

And Anne Bancroft, obv.

After THE GRADUATE swimming pools in movies were never the same.

Prior to that a swimming pool was CAT PEOPLE or just the edge with someone climbing out of it.

Anyway. Mrs Robinson was the pool.

He couldn't stay down there forever.

This was back in the day when movies had a subtext.

(Subtext)

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

Flash Boys opens in late 2008 on Spread Networks laying the straightest possible fibre optic cable between Chicago and New Jersey in an effort to reduce the trading time between two stock exchanges by five milliseconds. The connection will earn Spread $2.8 billion in rentals from traders who will use its advantage of five thousandths of a second to execute "flash" trades: to buy and sell shares in the time it takes traders on slower networks to press a key.

The numbers are dazzling but the principle is rock simple: if a trader is faster, he can beat others in the queue. As computers and software have improved in speed, the physical distance between exchanges has become the last mile. Flash trades rely on dedicated software (often adapted from open source) and hardware like Spread Networks' "Gold Route" to close the gap. It also helps that the majority of flash trades are made in exotically named "dark pools" -- exchanges where the transactions remain essentially secret. Whether high-speed trading is fair or not is part of a larger argument, especially if you employ Wall Street's tortured, relativistic language. But does the notion of secret exchanges give anyone pause? Isn't secrecy the weapon of capitalism's modern villain? The Enron? The terrible Madoff?

Lewis's most remarkable feat is to cut through the obfuscation and euphemism surrounding his subject and emerge firmly on the fence. While a lay-reader might call angry bullshit on the whole enterprise Lewis sees the debate as an opportunity to examine the market along capitalist principles. He uses the tools of fiction to describe lead "characters" (real people both named and anonymous) who believe a line can be drawn, not between but across the exchanges: a boundary that will regulate trading speed and ensure fair play. An honest working trader who cannot understand why his trades are blocked. A Russian programmer with an exceptional talent for designing financial software while himself having no interest in money. A financier who decides to set up a new stock exchange that blocks high speed trading. His youthful heroes come straight from the good-guy deck. Their fair-play solution? In part, coiling a length of fiber optic into a box to slow the signal down.

Many of the individuals' stories in Flash Boys turn on the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Is the author testifying to their patriotism or implying that, having survived one disaster, America is headed for another? Lewis's blindingly intelligent and well-written exposé ends with him contemplating the microwave technology that might outpace the Gold Route, but he stays mum about where it's taking us. Only the markets can decide.

-- Sunday Star Times, June 2014

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Tsukuru Tazaki is an engineer who designs railroad stations. Professionally concerned with ensuring the flow of commuter traffic, he has been personally devastated by the passing of relationships in his formative years. While growing up in Nagoya, he and four other high school students became as close as platonic friends could be. Aka ("re"), Ao ("blue"), Shiro ("white") and Kuro ("black") and Tazaki ("the only last name that did not have colour in its meaning") lived in each others' pockets until the day when the others expelled Tsukuru from the group. "They gave no explanation, not a word, for this harsh pronouncement. And Tsukuru didn't dare ask."

Banished to Tokyo, Tsukuru falls into depression before, as per his aptronym ("Tsukuru" is written with the Chinese character that means "make" or "build") he sets about rebuilding his life. After a series of unfulfilling relationships he meets Sara, who prompts him to confront the mystery he has been trying to avoid: why did his friends reject him?

The premise of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is as direct as its prose. The novel was translated by Philip Gabriel, who also worked on South of the Border, West of the Sun. Any effect that he or fellow translators Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum has on Murakami's prose is a larger discussion: it's my impression that Gabriel smooths things out but the author's frankness still startles. Tsukuru can't picture Shiro "sticking her hand up the anus of a horse"; later, "These insistent caresses continued until Tsukuru was inside the vagina of one of the girls."

Tsukuru's dreams are also shockingly vivid and anthropomorphic, like manga. But it is only when the locale shifts to Helsinki that he becomes a foreigner. "Are you Chinese?" asks a local. "I'm Japanese," he replies: "It's nearby, but different."

Murakami's Finland is like Shusaku Endo's France in Foreign Studies (1965): uninformed, quaint, filtered through other fictions. The methodical tone of the action and the protagonist's tendency for conjecture and tangential self-examination is more than a little Auster-esque, as is the naming of characters after colours and the incidental mysteries. (What is in the box the jazz pianist carries with him everywhere? The answer may be a symbol of Tsukuru's ostracism.)

In a story of colours, music also assumes significance but, like a crime writer, Murakami makes easy reference to art and literature that may well have been enjoyed by someone not unlike himself. It's another casual touch in a novel lacking the conventional turns a marketing department might demand from someone whom the Observer describes as "the best author on the planet." Colorless Tsukuru has been written in spite of such hype. It's a graceful story of a life in transit. The novelist watches: his subject passes by.

– Sunday Star Times, September 2014

Cowboys

By way of civilised conversation with Paul Litterick, Stephen Stratford mentions that Wittgenstein was a fan of westerns. Who isn't? Simone de Beauvoir, writing in The Prime of Life:

I have mentioned elsewhere how Sartre steered me away from 'art films' and initiated me into the world of galloping cowboys and whodunits.

Sartre: always cool. She continues:

One day he took me to Studio 28 to see William Boyd in a classic Hollywood-type feature, the story of an honest, big-hearted cop who finds out that his brother in law is a crook. Big moral decision.

Simone de Beauvoir is probably being sarcastic here. Anyway:

It turned out that the curtain raiser to this effort was a film called Un Chien andalou, by two men whose names, Bunuel and Dali, meant nothing to us. The opening sequences took our breath away, and afterwards we were hard put to it to take any interest in William Boyd's problems.

The Prime of Life begins in September 1929. This is is early in the memoir and she is discussing films she saw over a two-year period. Although the synopses vary I think she's either talking about The Cop (1928) or Officer O'Brien (1930).

Boyd is most famous for playing Hopalong Cassidy, a character created in 1904 by author Clarence E. Mulford, a municipal clerk in New York. Originally written as a hard-drinking tough guy, Cassidy was cleaned up for later appearances in over sixty films and at least one TV series.

Boyd pic c/- Classic Images

Advice from a friend

Sent by a dramatist friend from London, on the occasion of the movie. From Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman (Macdonald & Co, 1984)