Non

Time has a nice, brief article on not sleeping:

Of the people who have gone on these long sleep-deprivation jags, one became a drifter and lost his wife and job. Another person [who set the Guinness World Record for sleep deprivation in 1965 with 264 hours, or more than 11 days awake] seemed to do quite well.

Also, Jean-Luc Godard did not go to Cannes. When I was in LA in 2004 failing to sell a script I bought Colin McCabe's Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy at a bookstore in Century City. (The bookstore owner smiled when I bought it and said, 'Wow, Godard - so how old is he now?' Only in Los Angeles would someone ask that question of a book called "...At Seventy" without irony.) For the next week I smuggled food into my hotel room, finished the book, made notes for a treatment, blocked out a story that would later become Departure Lounge, and scribbled notes in my notebook on the director bio.

Of most interest to me was that no less than 10 of Godard's films before 1968 were based on literary properties or existing writer's work: Breathless (Truffaut's treatment), Une Femme est une Femme (Genieve Clieng - [?my writing's hard to read, there]), Vive san film (Sacotte), Les Carabiniers (Joppolo's play), Le Mepris (Alberto Moravia), Band A Part (Dolores Hitchens), Pierre le Fou (White, n.), Masculin Feminin (Maupassant), Made in USA (Westlake), 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (Vimenet).

My notes are scribbled so the spelling might be (=is) off. And some of the films are very lightly based on the original works. But it shines a light on the auteur theory: even if you're as good and wild a director as Godard - whose work I love - you're still nothing without a writer.

Also: if you go to LA to sell a script but you are really very interested in Jean-Luc Godard, particularly the schism between his pre- and post-1968 work - and when you see the reference Maupassant you think, 'Hey! Guy de Maupassant!' then Hollywood might not be the place for you.

Later I wrote a very short story about some of the ideas I was having about Los Angeles, dialogue and editing of narrative sequences. It's called DIN, and was published in French last year. You can download a PDF of the English language version and some other short stories of mine for absolutely nothing, here. When I have some spare time - or even better, find a developer who can do this for me - I'm going to make some of these PDFs available to read in Stanza or iBooks or whatever.

Let's not go to work

T.J. Hooker is also on in the afternoons here. Yesterday Hooker chased a stolen car into a fuel truck, which exploded. Last week he chased a fugitive down a boat ramp fuelling station, which exploded. There is an explosion in every episode, and a scene where Hooker jumps onto a moving vehicle, and often there is a strip club. I'd make a joke about combining all three but they may have done that.

For all the silliness the scripts are pretty solid: the stories are true to their own internal logic. There is a post-modern case to be made that the show is a 20th century version of Shatner's other series, Star Trek. Certainly the strip clubs look like alien worlds: doors to the Orient, the other. If you believe that you probably also believe pyramids sharpen razor blades but it's how we used to read it at art school, while enjoying the explosions. Heather Locklear co-stars: her nose was always like that. The most beautiful nose in a TV police series however remains Melina Kanakaredes' in CSI: New York, before she had it done.

Saturdays are boring, aren't they? Especially when you rise early in a heavy drinking town. I have a stack of notes to write up. I'm itching to start but I'm telling myself I need a day off.

Friday

A Guide to Modern Cinema

Furry Vengeance
(Contains mild violence)

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs
(Contains one use of mild language and scenes of mild comic threat)

Crazy Heart
(Contains strong language.)

Four Lions
(Contains strong language and sex references)

A Nightmare On Elm Street
(Contains strong bloody violence and threat)

Hot Tub Time Machine
(Contains strong language, crude sex references and drug use)

Iron Man 2
(Contains moderate violence and bleeped strong language)

Robin Hood
(Contains moderate violence and sex references)

Streetdance 3D
(Contains mild language, sex references and violence)

The Ghost
(Contains strong language, once very strong)

How To Train Your Dragon
(Contains frequent mild threat)

Nanny Mcphee and the Big Bang
(Contains no material likely to offend or harm)

Warnings courtesy of Odeon Cinemas UK. Really looking forward to the summary for this one.

WIP

I'm too tired for havin' fun

Laying new track today. My great grandfather center, white jacket, Waiuku, 1921.

Oracle Id (old joke)

David Brooks writing about something else entirely in the NYT, labels it:

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.