The Green Parrot

Start of the working day. La Perruche makes it.

Work in progress

Back to work on the Manuscript I Never Finish. No idea whether I'll finish it this time. Maybe, or maybe not.

Have you got anything left to say before I shoot myself

The above is poster advertising a book (or 'printed entertainment') as displayed on the London Underground. The book - that's it down there in the corner, see? - is titled Even. I'm guessing Even is a story of revenge, probably starring Agent David Trevellyan who is motivated to seek revenge when someone steals his life. Because Agent David Trevellyan's life is his - not theirs - he's angry but instead of getting angry like you and I might do, Agent David Trevellyan will get even. Sure enough, Even is the title of the book. That's probably Agent David Trevellyan talking in the poster - or rather, quoted, because if he was actually talking you would hear his voice in your ears above The National on your iPod. Agent Dav - oh, look, I can't be bothered typing it again because there are so many letters in it omg it goes on 4eva but Even, it's called and it's about this guy who gets even. Do you follow? If you can't, try reading the poster again. But don't move closer to read it because then you would fall on to the tracks, and that would delay the Northern Line.

I like a thriller as much as the next man but if the people you're selling the book to are truly this hard of understanding then reading the thing will be fucking hard going, unless it has a lot of pictures in it, or the pages are blank.

By contrast, drinkers are approached with this level of sophistication:

You don't need to be smart to drink. Why do you have to be a moron to read a book?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

In a funny kind of way Philip Kaufman is one of my favourite directors. He's made some great adaptations: Rising Sun, Henry and June, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a remake of the B-movie classic. Invasion is such a perfect story that it's become a template for a genre I always think of as the Twilight Zone format: everyday setting, big concept and a tidal current of consequences - sexy, unavoidable, bleak. All this is based on a writer's idea: Jack Finney who wrote the original story as a serial for Collier's magazine. You've never heard of Jack but the idea he had feeds into everything from Close Encounters to The X-Files.

The Black Dahlia

First saw it in France, with subtitles, which is the best way to see a Brian De Palma movie: the text is a constant tap on the shoulder, reminding you that it's a "film" and framing its artifice as, well... artifice. The movie version is monstrously inferior to Ellroy's novel, which in turn runs second to the author's White Jazz and American Tabloid: a seething, self-loathing, tangle that twists towards multiple resolutions, and is the greater for it. If you can survive the first 100 pages you will be hooked and rewarded.

David Fincher developed the movie version before being replaced by De Palma; I've always considered Fincher's lengthy, multiple-storylined Zodiac to be the modern imprint of how his Dahlia might have been. De Palma reduces the novel's layers to tight, trademark sequences that belie its multiple twists. Josh Friedman's workmanlike script makes a similar mistake, structuring the story with such concision that the main characters' emotional dips and dives - faithful to source - seem irrational and even silly. Josh Hartnett's Bucky is especially undermined, tearing up in almost every scene; Scarlett Johansson's Kay seems spoiled and childish rather than the complex mirror-of-the-Dahlia victim that she and all the other females in the novel become.

Still, even without subtitles I'll go the De Palma version for Scarlett's voice - a menthol woodwind cracking wise - Hillary Swank's ice-cold Madeleine, De Palma's steadicam introduction to the inbred Linscott family, and Fiona Shaw's extra crazy Ramona. For all the movie's (studio trimmed) gore and savagery Shaw provides its most ghastly moment using just her face and two fingers. Aaron Eckhart holds up his end as Lee Blanchard but true to 40s noir the men are redundant: it's the women who drive. Mia Kirshner plays the saddest girl in the world. The movie was much longer before the producers cut it down: it would be a dream to watch the version De Palma intended. Until then The Black Dahlia is a movie that could have been: a beautiful corpse, in pieces.

What do you need, a road map?

The NBR is putting on a happy face by saying Peter Jackson's co-review of the NZ Film Commission "hit the spot" with producers. The lawyerly SPADA press release conspicuously avoided mention of the report's recommendation that the NZFC bypass producers in the early stage of development and instead funds writers directly, a suggestion which the NZ Writers Guild liked very much.

Reading Jackson's report is emotional for any NZ writer who has experienced what is charitably termed "the development process", i.e. bullshit about writing by people who can't. I don't have a dog in that fight (and won't again) but liberating experienced writers will make for better New Zealand films, period.

The Sundays

Douglas Adams called it the long, dark teatime of the soul. I do a lot of work on myself to enjoy Sundays, mostly in the form of actual work. Today it's some legalese and another spelling check. I went for a run in the very early a.m., weaving between kids on their way home and drunks doing the chicken walk, one clutching the side of his face as blood trickled down his elbow. (Stepping between pools of vomit in London is a fitness exercise all in itself.) And shortly I'll get into the tiny, teeny revisions: spell check, some crabbed sentences and tracking down a scene that continues to appear twice, like a ghost in a photograph.

The NYT has a great article on Laurie Anderson's Homeland album. Her working method now features some guy named Lou Reed:

When Ms. Anderson finally began assembling the album, she faced an overwhelming amount of data. "I was staring at like a million sound files, trying to fit together pieces from different songs, different years," she said. "I thought I was going to lose my mind. I was going to give up, and I was kind of crying about it every day. Lou got a little sick of hearing this. So he finally said, "Listen, I'm going to sit with you until you finish it.' " And Mr. Reed did, sitting on the studio couch and helping her make ruthless, don't-look-back decisions.

Commentators are annoyed by NYT commentator David Brooks' comments on the Rolling Stone article on General McChrystal. Brooks has interpreted the magazine's reporting of the Afghanistan commander's statements as a symptom of a 'culture of exposure':

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority... the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

I listen to Brooks and fellow columnist Mark Shields' PBS broadcast every Saturday and always enjoy it. I doubt I'd agree with any of Brooks' politics (he leans towards the neocon) but I'm always interested in what he says. Ditto Rolling Stone, the ultimate wannabee magazine: even its writers who were there write as if they weren't and desperately wish they had been.