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Sweded

It says a lot about a movie when the Nazis are incidental to the story. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo starts dark, then gets darker, then darker still before those guys turn up. After that, things take a turn for the worse. Lisbeth Salander is raped three times and fights back three times, is mugged once - trivially, almost, by way of character introduction. She is catatonic when questioned about her photographic memory yet nimble and commanding when the plot requires it. She would be the thinking man's Tank Girl if the men in the story could conceptualise but the men are Swedish and mostly just good at procedure, handling documentation as carefully as torture. When Elisabeth is raped the second time her attacker is prepared with not one but two sets of handcuffs. Does this mean he planned the act ahead of time, or that he'd done it before? Either scenario raises questions than are not answered. But this was early in the film, before it got darker, and Lisbeth fought back anyway - it was only a bump on the road towards even darker things.

As the investigative reporter (is there any other kind?) Mikael, Michael Nyqvist mostly types, in between getting beaten up. As Lisbeth Noomi Rapace is stone-faced; Nyqvist is cartoon-Swede gloomy. When he is finally startled awake by a grazing bullet his surprise is comical, like Kate Capshaw in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. By the time (spoiler alert) Lisbeth rescues him he's weak and unattractive. Even the chick in the basement of Silence of the Lambs fought back: Mikael is The Girl no modern film would allow. At the point when the movie requires him and Elisabeth to have sex he's as surprised as we are.

The film's central mystery is an unfolding flower of texts and digital artefacts that reveal a plot very like James Ellroy's novel The Black Dahlia. The violence is nothing that hasn't been depicted before, in particular in the print and screen version of Thomas Harris's Red Dragon (the Michael Mann version) but in the end it wasn't the characters' endless victimisation that disturbed me so much as the way they all bounced back reliably to exact revenge. What sort of person suffers without empathy or despair? Robots? Nazis? Cartoons? Every character in this movie ends up either dead or a villain, the heroes included.

Bedside reading

It's just a shot away

Second draft finished. Bony and ugly but connected and rock solid, and I can start work on the next draft Monday morning. Listen for the screams.

I used to have this New Yorker cartoon pinned above my desk because it's funny, and it's true.

My friend from Los Angeles says the one thing from Californication that would never be true was Hank's taped-over Porsche headlight - the cops would pull you over straight away. I walk everywhere now anyway.

Also: drinking.

Normal service will be resumed, etc. Big ups.

Now playing (Hi rotate)

I was thinking about songs I can never play just once, especially when I'm walking round thinking. In no particular order:

• Imagination - 'Just an Illusion' 12" The gift that goes on giving. First heard it in A Certain Bar age 17 and then went out and bought it. Locating the track you liked in those days was rarely that simple.
• Nona Hendryx - 'Transformation' The rest of the album (Nona) is good too, but you have to play this track dozens of times before you can get past it. Bill Laswell produced.
• The Beat - 'Save It Till Later' 12" Ultimate pick me up.
• Cabaret Voltaire - 'Sensoria' 12" Hypnotic even before the backing vocals kick in.
• Roisin Murphy - 'Parallel Lives' Really just Roisin's remake of 'Sensoria'.
• Porno for Pyros - 'Pets' They only had one song.
• Phoebe Snow - 'Every Night' Paul McCartney song, I think. Never heard his version. Never want to.
• Serge Gainsbourg - 'Je t'aime moi non plus' Does anyone not like it?
• Air - 'Ce Matin La' Modern Serge really.
• PJ Harvey - 'We Float' Walked around LA listening to this over and over. Playing it now always takes me back.
• Sukhwinder Singh - 'Chaiyya Chaiyya' Bollywood hit lifted by Spike Lee for the Inside Man soundtrack.
• Zero 7 - 'Distractions' Sia's best lyrics.
• Dima - 'Baby Mammoth' From the old Chillout Fourever compilation.
• Fila Brazillia - 'July 23' From Black Market Gardening. Pound for pound this band gets played the most when I'm writing.
• The Dandy Warhols - 'There is only this time' If you want to teach kids that drugs are bad, make them sit through The Dandy Warhols live - a mumbling, aimless shambles. The recorded experience of the band - a mumbling, aimless shambles - somehow forms the basis for arguments to the contrary.

Now playing (I Still Have A Thing For Julie)

I went through a period at art school when I discovered lounge music. I thought I was being arch when really I was just feeling very tired. A year later I sold all the records but I still have a thing for Julie London. Her arrangements are good and she stays within her range. Although she always sang about the blues she never appeared to suffer. If gazing idly into the middle distance has a sound, Julie is it.

This was in the 80s when vinyl records were officially on the way out and could be purchased for a couple of bucks - a good thing considering that different Julie London albums shared many of the same tracks, or tracks that were so similar that they might as well have been the same. Their value was in the craft of their artlessness, the conjuring of melancholia as reliably as a soap opera: up come the strings, big pause and (rolls eyes, stubs out cigarette, casts sidelong glance at ribbon microphone) ... Julie! But without the exclamation mark.

Because Julie London's songs all sounded the same and because they were nearly all about the blues there's one track of hers I can never, ever locate even in this age of the interwebs. It's called 'The Blues' or 'You've got the Blues' or 'Get ready for the Blues' or something. There's a line about 'the clouds look like they'll overspill... in fact, you know they will... get ready, get set for the blues.' If you recognise this, please tell me - it will make me unhappy. Not a staring into the abyss unhappiness: just gazing idly into the middle distance between drinks kind of unhappy, which is a necessary tool for writing.

I'm listening to Julie on my iPod. I am being driven slightly crazy by the lack of a stereo system and often find myself staring at speaker docks. Portable MP3 systems look like crap to me: I can't see how something so similar to a cheap transistor radio could produce hundreds of dollars' worth of sound. My suspicions have been confirmed by Eric Taub in the NYT, who writes about docking devices manufacturer SDI Technologies:

'We recreated the $19.99 drugstore alarm clock radio and turned it into a $100 product,' Mr Ashkenazi said.

Those blues, those everybody hates you blues: they're gonna get you if you don't watch out.

The photo booth on Schönhauser Allee, Berlin, 10.03.10