Bellissimo

Saw Bernardo Bertolucci talk at the BFI last night. He was on good form. He was cheerful and gentle but gave his interviewer a little slap at the beginning just to let everyone know who was boss. He flattered and coped with the different egos in the room at question time, and told some very funny stories. The funniest was about Godard, natch, giving his producer an actual slap onstage at a premiere of One Plus One and then demanding that the audience return their tickets and forward the refund to the Black Panthers (nobody moved). Bertolucci also talked about filming Brando Last Tango In Paris (he never knew when Brando was making things up or quoting from memory) and working with Sergio Leone on the script for Once Upon a Time in the West. (In his interview for the script job Bertolucci told Leone how he admired the way the director filmed the horses' buttocks, like John Ford.) He talked a lot about the power and influence of movies in the 1960s and wondered if today's young audiences found films as "menacing."

Bertolucci said he loved "contamination", by which he meant the way reality intrudes on the process of filmmaking no matter how carefully it was planned. He said he always "leaves a door open" on the set for change to happen; at the same time, one of the filmmakers he admired was Kubrick "who built a wall across where the door was" and tried to control everything. Bertolucci also said he loved the digital revolution: the speed and ease of modern filmmaking and the "very acid colours" which digital processes could bring to film. The final clip of the night, the bal-musette scene from the restored print of The Conformist, possessed a brilliance I didn't recall: bright blue windows, bright red trim, golden floor. Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli remained the colour of milk.

Dreaming far away from today

Just saw a double decker bus skid. Yay for London. Driver non-plussed (hand on chin, blinking a little, well it 'appens dunnit nuffinktoworryabout). NZ GST increase means the monthly fee for storing my belongings is going up. Hey, as long as no-one opens those hat boxes, I'm happy. BT connection still not connected but if I stand holding my iPod in a corner of the flat I can hop on to a free signal. The old Powerbook G4 is still lovely to write on but it lags in signal reception, and video. Hence back to the local cafe in the mornings. When I was working earlier this year they would practically reserve the same table for me. Kid sitting next to me has a cold, the f*cker.

I'm scribbling notes for draft four. You didn't want to hear that, did you? Anyway, all done by end of October and then blowing the hatches for somewhere sunny to get my head together. Or rather, take it apart.

Other young man in cafe without cold reading over my shoulder. It's only when you're flicking through your laptop in a cafe that you realise how much porn is on it...

Sorry to be so short with you but I'm tapped

On the off-chance that you're trying to email or phone me over the next four days, you can't. BT has disconnected my phone line because I didn't request it. I've confirmed three times with them that I didn't request it, and they've confirmed with me that indeed I had not and so the line would not be cut. So naturally it has been, at exactly the time they said it wouldn't.

I knew this would happen. I've seen foreigners in tears over BT. Locals grit their teeth and say it's like that for everybody. I try not to buy into the stereotype of a Certain Sector being so useless that they can't find their ass with both hands but this is the second time BT has done this to me in a year. The first time was in Brick Lane when engineer rang up in the middle of the day to test the number. 'Why?' I wondered, and with paranoid speed thought to ask which one. Not mine: he was installing a new connection and had crossed the line. 'That's okay,' he said, cheerfully. 'I'll put the old one back.'

I knew what was going to happen then, too. There was a click and the line went dead. Not my line - the new line. My line was still working, connected to a different address, so technically there was no fault on it. Explaining that to the call center person was like describing time travel to an elderly relative. BT took a week to fix the problem - a week of robot voice management systems, call backs, SMS updates, order numbers. Worse, BT try to charge users £125 every time they (re)connect them. Only a cynic (or someone with a barrister handy) would suggest that such technical incompetence is a positive factor in the company's revenue stream.

The quickest way to make progress with BT, it turns out, is to bitch about them on Twitter. Which sounds progressive and modern until you realise what BT must have done to have been reduced to that level of damage control. Such incompetence would be funny if it wasn't true - and if it were possible these days to even use the bathroom without checking online first. I need my Telephone Thing for everything, even when I'm not talking to anyone.

OK: Officially sad, now

You know it's going to happen but it still hurts.

Skye Ferrante has spent six years at the Writers Room in Greenwich Village, blissfully banging away on his grandmother's 1929 Royal typewriter. The 37-year-old writer represented a bygone era, the last typewriter-user in a special room devoted to typists.

"In the event that there are no desks available, laptop users must make room for typists," read a sign posted in the "Typing Room" for years.

When Ferrante returned to the Writers Room in April after an eight-month break, the sign was gone and his noisy typewriter was no longer welcome.

"I was told I was the unintended beneficiary of a policy to placate the elderly members who have all since died off," said Ferrante, a Manhattan native who's writing children's books. "They offered me a choice to switch to a laptop or refund my money, which to me is no choice at all."

Ferrante was peeved, but not completely surprised. A growing number of scowls had replaced the smiles that once greeted the arrival of his black, glass-key typewriter.

"The minute the sign came down, I realized there was antagonism from some of the new members," he said. "They gave me an attitude when they saw me setting up the typewriter."

Pour yourself a drink before you read the rest at The New York Daily News.

And if that hasn't laid you low enough, this from the Wall Street Journal:

It has always been tough for literary fiction writers to get their work published by the top publishing houses. But the digital revolution that is disrupting the economic model of the book industry is having an outsize impact on the careers of literary writers...

Much as cheap digital-music downloads have meant that fewer bands can earn a living from record-company deals, fewer literary authors will be able to support themselves as e-books win acceptance, publishers and agents say. "In terms of making a living as a writer, you better have another source of income," says Nan Talese, whose Nan A. Talese/Doubleday imprint publishes Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood and John Pipkin.

The article puts the blame on ebooks. Really? Really? Calling bullshit on it. (a) I don't think Nan will be moonlighting on her job anytime soon. (b) The music analogy is faulted. Bands famously never really "made a living" from record company deals: at the best they received huge advances, with all the career complications that involved. (c) And does anyone get into writing literature for the money? Oh, wait...

On the basis of a 4-page proposal, Alfred Knopf's Sonny Mehta has paid $2.5 million for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the new novel by Kiran Desai. She's the Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss.

So that's alright, then. Back to bed, you kids. Mum and Dad were just talking in loud voices, that's all.

(Patricia Highsmith photo from Corbis Images.)

Now playing

Can see what the fuss is about. I saw The Naked and Famous before I went away up on K Road somewhere and liked them a lot, and This Machine has been travelling with me since then. Although I liked that EP a lot too, I thought the songwriting stayed rather too faithful to the post-punk creed of repeating a sequence of notes until the audience just bloody admitted it was a melody, dammit, while the drummer marked time impatiently: hurry up n dance, plz? A germinal recording, in other words, or maybe simply German -- oddly, TNAF reminded me of D.A.F., the little sweethearts. But what The Naked and Famous did have as a group more than made up for what the Yeah Yeah Yeahs lacked when I caught them in London only a few months later. Watching Karen O demand that you love her on the off-beat caused me to remark to my ticket booker (Finn!) that I would have loved to see what The Naked and Famous could have done with the Brixton Academy's sound system, a performance-enhancing technology that was responsible for at least a third of the YYYs' entertainment value.

Maybe that will happen now. Passive Me Aggressive You has perfect timing, chiming as it does with the sparkly Dennis-Wilson-falling-downstairs aspirational visions of what I can only call Baby Prog: Neon Indian, MGMT, School of Seven Bells, Blonde Redhead, Animal Collective et al. Actual songs, babies, from the bedside hush of 'The Sun' to the LCD rush of 'All of This.' When I saw TNAF in Auckland the two singers were passing the baton - your turn, mine - but now they've worked things out; one takes the lead and the other follows up, the sentimental choral touches balancing the rat-a-tat-tat. 'Eyes' is on hi-rotate. 'Young Blood', in context, doesn't even stand out that much: another sign that they have a real album on their hands. And the bv's for 'No Way?' Big hugs.

Anyone with a working set of ears in NZ is raving about this. This is The Naked and Famous's Riverhead / Becoming X moment. Please, Gods of Alt - don't let them fuck it up...

Bedside reading (.epub edition)

Up

I am officially the worst sleeper in the world. When I was three my parents tried giving me sleeping pills (or Mickey Finns, as my father called them) which had no effect. Instead my parents took the pills themselves and left me to it. Which explains far too much.

I'm fascinated by people who can sleep; for me it's like waiting for a parcel that never arrives. Then about once every three weeks I collapse for nine hours and nothing will wake me. I've tried all the tricks (cutting caffeine, etc) but they don't work. Now I just sit up. I get a lot of work done late, and I read, and I've developed an interest in professional poker as a result of watching so much on TV. And working is easier on computers instead of mechanical typewriters - in the old days I'd have to type quietly.

One of the late events I remember staying up for was the telecast of the Apollo 11 moon landing. My older brother and his friend came over to watch, but crashed out: I stayed awake for the whole thing, aged 4 and a bit. NASA are releasing new footage of it now.

Second advantage of being a bad sleeper: lucid dreaming, any time, anywhere.

I almost killed this blog today; I'm not sure why I maintain it. I guess it's largely because people don't email each other anymore. Also finished the dr*ft. Know it's coming to an end because I'm having ideas for the next one. Agitated by London & not sure what I'm doing here. The fiction coming out of this town is terrible and publishing's in a white-faced panic. Music might be looking up, though, and the people are cheerful, although that might have something to do with the drinking... I'm agitated generally. But then again, when am I not? When?

Up.

PS. When?