Eating about books

Over at Big Other Ryan W. Bradley has compiled a list of books to read over lunch. I can't think of how many books I've enjoyed over meals either at my desk or in pizza houses or sushi bars. Currently I'm re-reading Bob Woodward's histories of the Bush administration but before that it was Patricia Highsmith and before that a bunch of random pulp and literary titles purchased from the Oxfam shop for not very much money.

(Secondhand books are still technically illegal, right? You're not allowed to resell them. I wonder if that complaint will ever resurface or go the way of home taping, etc. I'm still careful to not purchase books by authors who are either living or living very well - say, anyone other than a best seller.)

So as a result my book collection is an index of what I was eating or drinking at the time. The stains on the pages are less varied in London than they were in Auckland. They work as a kind of index: there are many dabs Thai curry in the last chapters of Woodward's Plan of Attack. The book is a grim tale of political blandishments and peppered with ironies, such as this one from the hours leading up to the war on Iraq:

When [Bush speechwriter Michael] Gerson was finished with his corrections, he joined the president and the others, who were about 10 minutes into the Mel Gibson film Conspiracy Theory. Bush loudly summarized the plot, and during the rest of the movie made fun of it as fairly predictable.

I am the only person in the world who has not read Kitchen Confidential but I like Anthony Bourdain: if you want to read something good about food, here's his dining out diary for a few days. Suggest you eat before reading it. I've never been comfortable in expensive restaurants, a good thing given my choice of profession. Restaurants are for publishers and producers, or publishers and producers who are making nice.

Just like I always imagined it

Something crabby and middle-aged is happening to Nick Denton's mini-publishing franchise but they're still good for something: Mad Men's Betty Draper on the morning after, as captured by Gawker.

Nighthawks

This is a lovely bit of fun. Courtesy of Jeremiah's Vanishing New York blog: a quest to track down the real site and inspiration for Edward Hopper's Nighthawks:

As the truth becomes clearer, I am finding it difficult to bear this idea that, outside of Hopper's imagination, there was no Nighthawks diner at all.

Says the Art Institute of Chicago catalogue:

Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by "a restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet," but the image, with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative, has a timeless quality that transcends its particular locale... Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon... Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another.

Writes Greg Cook in Visions of Isolation:

At the height of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, Hopper seemed an anachronism, but today he’s clearly part of the American Scene realism that includes documentary photography by Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. And he comes into focus as godfather to the staged photos of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Gregory Crewdson... In Edward Hopper’s world, everyone is lost in an unending rut of office overtime, rattling El trains, cheap fluorescent diners, and bad dates. Everything has fallen tensely quiet. And this anxious, itchy mood haunts even the urban landscapes — perhaps half his work — in which the only person around is you, the viewer. Here every man is an island...Women are the stars, usually in tight outfits or scantily clad, energizing canvases with their sexuality, their vulnerability, their unattainableness. Like the woman in the 1944 Morning in City, they appear alone, exhausted and sad, hardened by life, staring out the open windows of cheap hotel rooms.

What's not to like? It also interests me that the characters in the painting are night hawks - predators - as opposed to night owls. The title is a contemporary colloquialism but the longer I stare at the painting the more the characters resemble perched birds - bright parrots in an aviary, or even vultures.

Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention

1. Cloverfield on TV. Works so much better on the small screen. The child actors are difficult to distinguish - Lizzie Caplan is the only one with any real personality.
2. Yelling at the phone.
3. Yelling at email.
4. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Not working yet (see pts 2-3). The chapter on polishing a tile is especially good.
5. Nona Hendryx, Nona. Still hard to get past 'Transformation' which still ranks as the best I'll Just Listen To That One More Time track ever.
6. Yelling at London.
7. For the first time ever being attracted to the idea of a smart phone, the iPhone 4. Considering buying one and yelling at that as having phone and email in same device would halve yelling time req'd.
8. Thinking that honestly this is the last time I'm doing anyone a favour ever again.
9. Nevertheless have done two massive favours. Karma Deficit: 2.
10. How is it possible to make a tile into a jewel? Or even, a Marlena Diamond?
11. A: It isn't.
12. I relate to Marlena because she is bored, knows no-one at the party, saves someone and then dies.
13. I miss Paul, even for the emails we don't send to each other.
14. I hate poetry, or rather don't understand it. Hence the numbers.
15. 116 is a table number.
16. One one eight seven at Unterwasser.
17. And it's raining.
18. As a background I also recommend Alan Watts, The Way of Zen. In print since 1957 = in print now.
19. I'm working on some short stories.
20. The short stories are turning into a novel.
21. I am polishing a tile.

What's on the slab

The headlines about Richard O'Brien's difficulties in moving to New Zealand contrast with the sporting community's efforts to bring back Sonny Bill. O'Brien's problems are doubtless more to do with the horror (ho ho) of immigration regulations that the nation's attitude to art and culture but, still: I do wonder.

I've seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show once, on Friday night in Avondale in 1978. Once is the exact number of times anyone needs to see it because after a single viewing you can remember every line. The pastiche of horror movies and American rock and roll is so bang on the entire hippocampus lights up in recognition.

To make the show O'Brien and collaborator Jim Sharman plundered American culture. The result is somehow very NZ/Australia, I think because the (mostly British stage) cast are pretending to be American as only a foreigner who worships that culture can. This is one way in which art moves forward: by a series of bald-faced thefts and imitations driven by an inner longing that lifts itself above mere reversioning. It's what I call 12-bar Art, after 12-bar Blues, because it follows exactly the same rhythm as everything before it while at the same time standing out as distinct in itself. Rocky Horror's personality lies in its texture and gradations. It made a jump to the left.

Italian ham

Martin Booth's A Very Private Gentleman was disappointing because it's filled with Authentic Italian Detail. Readers love that sort of thing but to me it renders the authorial voice fussy and uptight. The novel ostensibly concerns a man who makes rifles for assassins but is mostly chatter about prosciutto and muscato and Dante and... oh, fuck, it goes on. The effect is like Tim Gunn doing The Day of The Jackal. It even features a homage / shot by shot copy of the famous "adjusting the sights" target sequence from the 1973 movie. 270pp but the story starts around p.145, or you can wait for the movie, which sounds very post-Bourne.

I love a good thriller and can name about five: the rest are so much dreck. Why (as my late friend Paul Reynolds was fond of saying) should the devil have all the best tunes? I started Hennel Mankell before abandoning it and it's why I've yet to attempt Stieg Larsson. I don't deny readers their fun but it frustrates me to read a book that would come to life if the authors would only shut up.

On page 244 of A Very Private Gentlemen the protagonist orders a grapefruit juice: 'Una spremuta.' Apparently this is risky in Italy because the word sounds similar to the slang for 'blow job.' I learned this from the adventure of an art historian who while travelling in Florence decided to order a grapefruit juice very loudly in a busy street cafe. The waiter's eyebrow went up and the patrons fell silent just long enough for the realisation of what he'd said to sink in, and then everyone exploded.

Hellfire!

The Avengers creator Brian Clemens is speaking at a special BFI screening of 'A Touch of Brimstone' in July. I managed to book over the internet in spite of the internet. The infamous S&M episode was banned in the US but is considered rocking good fun in the UK. The Hellfire Club, Emma Peel waving a snake around, the guy who played Jason King: sometimes London gets it right.

At the contrasting end of the personal liberty spectrum the UK government has passed the Digital Economy Act, which will allow copyright holders to trace and disconnect file-sharers and fuck off everybody else. Commentators are concerned about privacy:

Once the state decides that it has a duty to police the internet to maximise the profits of a few entertainment companies (no matter what the public expense), it sets itself on a path of ever-more-restrictive measures.

Which is true, but ever-more-restrictive is how they like it (e.g. Emma, above). Users concerned about increasing levels of government control may be reassured by the UK's built-in checks and balances system of officials who lose lap tops, a regular occurrence which has nothing whatsoever to do with also being part of the biggest drinking culture on the planet. The government's "electronic eavesdropping center" recently admitted losing 35 computers containing sensitive information:

A GCHQ spokesperson today said there was no evidence that any of the material on the laptops had "got into wrong hands", but admitted: "Given the state of the records, there is no way of confirming that".

Get some sleep, Pam - you're looking tired.