In the end she dies

Off to watch the Martin Scorsese restoration of The Red Shoes tonight at the BFI Southbank. I went to see Scorsese speak at the BFI earlier this year on a completely separate subject and he still managed to steer the conversation towards Powell and Pressburger, so in a way he's talked me into it. Uncle Marty rates The Red Shoes as one of his top ten movies of all time. He turned up at the lecture wearing a suit so sharp you could cut yourself on it and huge spectacles like Swifty Lazar's.

Although I've watched Black Narcissus on TV and the big screen, I've seen the obsessive story-within-a-story The Red Shoes only once before, on TV, and in black and white. Manohla Dargis, writing for the NYT, says the restoration is remarkable:

This born-again version of “The Red Shoes,” digitally resuscitated from battered prints and negatives, should surprise even those who have watched the fine Criterion DVD. A film like few others, made like few others — the Powell and Pressburger partnership remains sui generis — it reaches high and strikes its mark, at times improbably. It’s an insistently designed work of non-naturalism, daubed with startling, unreal, gaudy colors that seem to have been created to blast away the last traces of wartime drear.

That should make up for the fucking horrible weather outside then, and round off an otherwise happy day sitting inside the Russian café scribbling revisions.

Revision

Conversation across the counter at the Russian café, customer to owner:

C: Is this song on the radio?
O: It's a memory stick. A man who worked here left it.
C: Oh - I was wondering because I heard it on Twitter.

Mind if I use that portable keyhole?

Reasons to love the internets: the original recordings of Francois Truffaut's interviews with Alfred Hitchcock are available to listen to online. Free. All of them. Translator yapping over Frank and Hitch. Courtesy of If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger There'd Be A Whole Lot Of Dead Copycats. Actual blog name. Conflation of happiness.

Cherry cola, C-O-L-A cola

First draft finito. Way cheaper to print it out at a bureau here (forget Al Qaeda - ink jet printing has won) so it was down the road to treat yet another franchise manager to a break from Thai restaurant menus and mission statements. Like all print bureau people, he skimmed the first few pages as he was checking the formatting. I don't mind that people read the ms as long as they know it's a first draft so, mind the kinks.

I talk such nonsense while asleep...

Stephen Stratford has dug out a fifteen year old interview with me for his cause celebre / literary gossip column™ Quote Unquote. You can read the interview and post your negative comments here. The photo is taken on the back steps of Cafe DKD! Good times. Please note I am no longer wearing my hair like Ensign Ro.

Reading it back I'd give myself points for consistency / stubbornness although for some reason I bang on about "writers' societies". The interviewer was asking me about whether or not I socialised / met with / discussed my work with other writers and obviously that pushed a button. I'm not a joiner - I hesitate to put links on a blog, ffs. What can I say? I'm moody. Or as Bjork put it more or less perfectly: I'm an artist - it's my job to be emotional.

Margaret Atwood made a more cogent case for such societies in her recent speech at the PEN American Center:

....Writers can’t retire, nor can they be fired: As we hear constantly from those who think there should be no arts grants, writers don’t have real jobs. That’s true, in a way: They have no employers. Or rather their employers are their readers: which imposes on them a truly Kafkaesque burden of responsibility and even guilt, for how can you tell whether you’re coming up to the standards of people you don’t even know?

The Daily Beast reports that the speech was made before a glittering crowd of writers from all over the world. Glittering.

So: fifteen f*cking years. It's official: time has flown. The afternoon sun is cutting through the window here and outside I can hear the noisy clatter of the Balconettes preparing another doomed barbecue. As wee Billy Mackenzie says it: My voice deep with age / speaks in tongues of younger days. Big ups.

Rain

You know I'm no good

Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant is even better the second time around. The director's New Orleans is a back door to jungle hallucinations. Tribal peoples conjure spirits as Nicolas Cage's gun-wielding explorer Terence McDonagh slips into a world of dreams. The opening scene has officer McDonagh jumping in feet first; by the end he is literally over his head and swimming with the fishes. McDonagh is as lost as the white explorers in Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, but also as happy. Herzog remains unfazed by William M. Finkelstein's melodramatic screenplay, instead framing the story on a human scale. It's so great to see a movie that shuts up and gets on with being a movie: mid shots, naturalistic lighting, single-take performances and real fucking acting. Cage's performance is balanced by subtle turns from Tom Bower, Jennifer Coolidge and Eva Mendes, and challenged by quirky showboating from Val Kilmer, Brad Dourif and J.D. Evermore. In fact, thinking about it, Bad Lieutenant has a huge cast and they're all good: Herzog has told the story by using people. The consequences are tragi-comic and the result, for all its gravity, is a delight.