Let's be Frank

London is in a roil of Malcolm McLaren reminiscing but as a true measure of the man may I suggest considering how many of the artists McLaren "managed" would be able afford cancer treatment in Switzerland? I'm picking a number between zero and none.

McLaren was the only phone interview I did where I hung up on the subject. After over an hour of his raving I had all I needed and a lot more that I didn't so I literally put the phone down on him in mid-sentence. It was at the time of Waltz Darling, which featured some stellar songs ('Something's Jumping in Your Shirt', 'Deep in Vogue' and the title track). In the same month I got to talk to Neneh Cherry and parrot McLaren's line that she had stolen from him. Which worked, because she jumped and gave me a better interview.

As that old skirt chaser Goethe said, folks, how short life must be if something so fragile can last a lifetime. It all seemed important at the time and if I go back to the music I remember why: Cherry's Raw Like Sushi still sparkles, and her duet with Youssou N'Dour on 'Seven Seconds' (from Man, I think) is one of my top 20 tracks eva. McLaren's 'Buffalo Girls' is fun but consider that the Beastie Boys have pulled the same or better tricks of wit and funk every other year since 1988. He was never that great, but now he's dead, he's perfect. The British press are trying to pull the same trick with Ian Drury and that's not working either. It's a great compliment to appraise someone as a small influence on the world, which McLaren was -- and that's more than many will be.

Obituaries piss me off because they're always too late (sic). I was more pleased to read Manohla Dargis's piece on Dennis Hopper while he is still alive: it's a great warts and all look at someone I will miss far, far more than McLaren. Hopper is dying and has had the grace to let it be known, and what I love about him (although he's far from loveable) is that he's dying in the same way he lived: pissed off and out of control, but at the same time way more in control than is necessary (he's placed a restraining order on his wife and is filing for divorce).

Hopper has been called one of Hollywood's few Republicans, which is saying something. He was a Ripley (not a good one), he made Easy Rider (with a lot of help, based on Terry Southern's great writing) and The Last Movie (which I saw when I was way too small and really, really loved), and he was Frank in Blue Velvet, which I still rate as the best movie ever, period. Hopper played the villain Frank Booth, and Lynch had the idea that the actor, as Frank, would inhale helium before reciting his lines to give him a squeaky, childlike voice. Hopper suggested it would be better if he simply acted as if he was inhaling something - an amyl nitrate like vapour - so Lynch went with that. Good move for the movie.

Like David Lynch, Hopper is an artist with a nailed-down sense of structure, going wide but always covering the basics. Both share a very 1950s sensibility. Hopper's police movie Colors was really only a very big version of Adam 12; The Last Movie is about as deconstructed as, say, a Pink Floyd album (by comparison Zabriskie Point or any given Godard blows it away) -- it sits very happily with Vanishing Point and Rebel Without A Cause. Hopper was 33 years old when he made Easy Rider: not a rebel but a pro.

Here we go again

It's a standing tradition that the day after I send off a manuscript, I start work on the next one.

I don't believe in writing 7/52/365. Stephen King does that and it shows. I'd be happy to if someone was paying me. When I was a child I thought being a writer would be like writing scripts for Star Trek every week: a producer would come in, give you a list of constraints and you'd write a story around it. This is a male thing, apparently: wanting to be helpful. I was never one for scratching it out a word at a time on scrolls of vellum. More green visor, two fingers punching an Olivetti kinda thing. Working class values, basically: writing as a trade.

(Some trade. There's a lovely David Lynch interview in which he talks about George Lucas asking him to direct Return of the Jedi in which Lynch says something like "I do what I love and he's doing what he loves, but what he loves makes about a billion dollars." Couldn't have put it better.)

Anyway, I started work on the next one.

Bedside reading

Talked about her a little bit in my Prima Storia interview. Jane Robertson asked me if I was a fan and I blathered on about Highsmith's lesser known The Tremor of Forgery. Yeah, I'm a fan.

Tell me why everything turned around

Final edit gone, very early this morning. There's always a final edit. Namely the finished version with whatever errors you spotted now corrected. When I worked at Rip It Up the editor Murray Cammick would barely glance at the magazine on the day it arrived from the printer: if he read it closely, all he saw were the mistakes. After I started working there a lot of the mistakes were mine, which made me feel terrible until I started noticing the mistakes other people had made, including errors added to my copy. After that it became a war of attrition.

There's a golden rule in life: if you write something about typing errors, it will contain a typing error.

Last night I also had to write what Americans call coverage for the manuscript, or what the British call the blurb. This is more difficult than writing the novel itself because it requires taking a step back from the thing that has consumed you for, in this case, a very intense year, and summarising it in simple terms everyone can understand. Please note that the simple terms cannot include a word that might trigger a negative response. So, if noir is out of fashion at the moment (as is the case, apparently), then it's better not to use that term. Try not to have an attitude about this. Try to make things easy for yourself, just this once. Please step away slowly.

Since the iPad was launched there has been further discussion about (yawn) ebooks and whether or not printed books will disappear. I still write by hand (ink, notebooks, legal pads, Kirby-style chunks of plaster board torn from the ceiling) but so much of my writing and editing is performed on screen now, I wonder if ebooks might be already here as far as authors are concerned. Then again, it's no different from editing a film on a Moviola. But then again...

Likewise "the cloud." I have copies of the ms everywhere: on paper, on my weary Powerbook G4, flash drives, even a Micro SD. But the files least likely to be lost, stolen or incinerated are the ones I've emailed to my various Gmail and Yahoo accounts. I don't trust the idea of cloud computing but it's become part of my process without my even realising it.

It's cloudy today, so the Ms. Zunshine isn't out.

Lolls

The human facility and stuff

Patricia Cohen has a piece in the NYT about evolutionary theory and reading. Expect to be really bored by the subject at a dinner table near you, and soon, although it's a step forward from being lectured about evolutionary theory and the market, or how Monet only painted that way because he had cataracts. Anyways, the Professor of English is fantastically called Lisa Zunshine:

Humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time, Ms. Zunshine said. For example, the proposition “Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate” is not too hard to follow. Add a fourth level, though, and it’s suddenly more difficult. And experiments have shown that at the fifth level understanding drops off by 60 percent, Ms. Zunshine said. Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf are especially challenging because she asks readers to keep up with six different mental states, or what the scholars call levels of intentionality.

Perhaps the human facility with three levels is related to the intrigues of sexual mating, Ms. Zunshine suggested. Do I think he is attracted to her or me? Whatever the root cause, Ms. Zunshine argues, people find the interaction of three minds compelling. “If I have some ideological agenda,” she said, “I would try to construct a narrative that involved a triangularization of minds, because that is something we find particularly satisfying.”

NB: Virginia Woolf is also challenging because she's a bit depressing. Still: Ms. Zunshine.

Treatment bound

So that's the Tokyo film treatment done, which makes it a good Easter. I still have work to do on it - some names and proofing - but then it can go off to the Lucky Bastard D*rector and then, whatever. 4000 words bashed out in the space of two days but I've been turning it over in my head for longer.

I wasn't able to write treatments in the past. If someone asked me to I'd literally stop dead, or get up and leave the room. I could never see a story in those terms: I had to start on the inside and work out. But now for some reason I can write them. Writing a treatment is like doing a crossword: filling in squares so everything has to fit. I don't think I could write a novel that way, though. You have to lose yourself in a novel. It's like painting a bedroom wall. If people don't like the colour, you say no worries -- I'll just paint over it.

Writing is like a metaphor, innit. Using an analogy to describe writing frustrates me as much as it does you but you can't use a system to explain itself. Trust me. You can't.

The days of the second treatment, the Stolichnaya, are numbered. I can't drink anymore. But fuck, I'm making the effort. It's London and I'm alone in a big house with Al Green and the NYT crossword. Aced the weekend version, stalled slightly on Easter Thursday until I realised the clues were back to front and then I was away.