Three fines wines buffs

Tan Brothers Brown Muskrat 2008
Packed with the tempting flavours of blackberry, chocolate, raspberry and fist fighting. Great served with fish, poultry, pasta with tomato sauce, cheese, milk, biscuits, flour, mutton, wine.

Suffer Home Merlot 2005
This wench-bodied zinfandel with a hint of writing desk and rich notes of dark berry jam, hints of chocolate and mocha with a soft nutty playful hands tied to a brass bedstead and a dark fruit finish. Enjoy with beef, lamb, pork, pork and lamb, pork and beef, a Panzer division or David Hamilton.

Chateau Bourdeaux Superierurx 2001x
The Merlot brings soft round summer fruits and the Cabernet Sauvignon and Franc add structure and complexity. The colour is a deep ruby damask with tints of purple and Jason Robards. In the mouth the wine is round and generous with long lasting flavours and blackcurrants and a hint of 1970s convertible on the finish.

Tony Montana Unreserved 2008
An enticingly aromatic wine showing notes of dark cherries and Holdens with the alluring complexity of Indian Clubs. On the palate, alarming, slutty fruit flavours are underpinned by nuances of purposeless, smoky vagina. Good firm tannins give the wine length and weight. Very approachable and enjoyable for the moment, but FFS watch out.

Muscle Bay Merlot 2007
A velvety-soft wine full of stewed fruits like plums and rhubarb and mulberry and blackberry with an unpleasant, lingering finish spiced with cinnamon and clove. Am I clown? Do I fucking amuse you? What do you mean smart, smart how? How am I smart? To be enjoyed with creamy pasta, rice, arrows, Semtex.

The Deep

Last night I attended a screening of Knife in the Water: an unrestored 35mm print complete with scratches, pops, blurry subtitles and mono sound. It was fantastic. The first time I saw Knife in the Water was on TV in the 1970s, on TVNZ's "classic film" slot (remember when TV was like film school?); the second was on VHS in the 1980s. Watching it this time I was struck by how complete it is, structurally and tonally, and the technical achievement of its storytelling. There's a scene where the young man swims out and hides behind a buoy on a calm lake: a conceptual stretch, but the director and DOP completely sell it. The yacht is a tiny physical space but after even a few minutes the dramatic possibilities have already become vast. When the three characters finally sit down inside the cabin around the tiny folding table, they might as well be in a ballroom scene. There's so much going on.

You couldn't make Knife in the Water now. You wouldn't be allowed.

Everything new is old again

Ray Kurzweil interviewed by Damon Lindelof at THR:

Kurzweil: There's an issue in portraying the future, which, if you follow my reasoning, will be very different in every dimension. And as soon as you introduce even a single change, you've got to explain what it is. Spielberg's A.I. had human-level cyborgs, but otherwise it was a 1980s reality: The coffeemaker was 1980s; the cars were no different; there's really no virtual reality to speak of. Nothing changed except he introduced this new concept, and then you had some dramatic tension about people's relationships with this new thing. There's actually a reason for that...

Full interview is here.

Guys and Dolls

'I came to the conclusion long ago that all life is six to five against.' -- Damon Runyon

(John Cassavetes, Columbo: Étude in Black; Marilyn Monroe by George Barris; Ben Gazzara, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; Gaga by Terry Richardson.)

All we'll ever have is now

The French government has moved to seize copyright on books published prior to 2001. From the UK blog Authors Rights:

"The Bibliothèque Nationale de France is to compile a freely accessible online database of all works published in France before 1 January 2001 that are not being commercially distributed by a publisher and are not currently published in print or digital form... Once a book has been listed in the database for more than six months, the right to authorize its reproduction and display in digital form will be transferred to a collective management organisation approved by the Minister of Culture."

The French government has been struggling to control the internet. The Hadopi agency has complained about the workload of tracking pirates (18 million complaints; 10 users charged) and the three-strikes law was suspended in 2011 when the contractor administering the system failed to protect its data.

Four of my novels have been published in France -- Shirker, Electric, Departure Lounge and The Church of John Coltrane -- all after 2001, and all still in print (Coltrane is still French only). It will be interesting to see if the Ministry of Culture initiative reaches a compromise similar to the one made for the Google Library Project.

And Stanza has been crashing on my iPod. Stanza is the e-reader I use when I want to strain my eyes on my very battered iPod touch (iOS 4.3) reading Sherlock Holmes, Aristotle's Poetics, Edgar Allan Poe and other Gutenburg Project favourites. More importantly I used it to teach myself about e-publishing and re-issue some of my early short stories on Kindle.

After Amazon bought Lexcycle in 2009 there was chatter on the boards that they had killed the e-reader, one of the best for iOS. But it seems Stanza has been fixed -- if only for iOS 5. Another incentive to upgrade to an iPad, then. Or to just keep reading them on paper.

(Pictured: Alphaville. Still one of the best movies, ever.)

The True Wheel

When work's going well I stop talking and I stop reading. Not entirely, but generally: when your head's good, stay in your head.

I'm writing long on this one. I have to keep reminding myself that novels take longer to write than they do to read. Authors read faster than a bush fire. A lot of the work goes into what's not on the page. The underpinning has to be right but a reader can go a long way into a novel without caring about that.

Brian Eno discussed production to consumption ratios in music with Richard Williams in 1979:

"I have a theory that, as a maker you tend to put in twice as much as you need as a listener. It's the symptom of contemporary production. With the facilities that you have today, you tend to plug every hole.. You're always looking for that charge, so you put more and more in to get it. But as a listener you're much less demanding... you can take things that are much simpler, much more open, and much slower. It's often happened that I've made a piece and ended up slowing it down by as much as half. Discreet Music is an example: that's half the speed at which it was recorded."

Somewhere in the index of Platonic forms there must exist the perfect ratio of writing-to-reading hours. If the time invested in creating a work far exceeds the time it takes to decode, the text becomes a bottleneck: an obstacle to all but the most perservering -- the "important but unread" category. At the other end of the scale would be the pulps -- the real pulps, not the good ones -- that are so light that they offer no challenge and no reward.

I suspect that a prerequisite for book to be a best seller is that the narrative has to be constructed at the same speed at which a reader is prepared to unpack it. Errors and stylistic missteps are irrelevant: in fact, the clunkiness of the prose humanises the narrative. As Johnny Cash said, 'Your style is function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.'

Bedside reading, 1975 #2

I am kind of looking forward to John Carter. "Kind of" because Disney dropped "of Mars" from the title, and the fanboys are grumbling. "Looking forward to" because I read the series when I was very young and liked them a lot. Clive James once said that good books are the ones we feel slightly guilty about reading -- an observation I come back to more and more.

What is striking about John Carter of Mars is how it practically minted a genre. Edgar Rice Burroughs' ideas have become storytelling standards, their components recycled to power Dune, Avatar, Star Wars and many more. Like Edgar Allan Poe or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his pulp fiction is a gift that keeps on giving.

I read Dune later. (As someone else may or may not have once said, the golden age of science fiction is twelve.) I had no time for any of the sequels -- Children of... and all that crap -- but Frank Herbert's original was strange and appealing. I read it at the beach one summer so the images mingle, pleasantly, with sands I saw every day. And I liked the David Lynch movie very much. After Lynch's Dune SF movies had a choice: they could do his version of what scifi looked like, or Ridley Scott's in Bladerunner. Critics and fans hated it, but lately it has been revisited. Writes Andrew Stimpson:

Dune's closest analogue is John Boorman's Excalibur. At the time of its 1981 release a US critic, while denigrating the film as a whole, noted that "the images have a crazy integrity". It was, in effect, a greatest hits collection of Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur: an artfully visualised series of key scenes and epic occurrences that lacked a uniting flow. The same could be said of Lynch's picture and its source novel.

Dune was in development for many years by insane person Alejandro Jodorowsky:

Salvador Dali was cast as the insane Emperor of the Universe, who lived on an artificial planet built from gold and had a robot doppelgänger (actually conceived as a way around the real Dalí's extortionate fiscal demands for appearing in person) to keep people guessing, fearfully, which one they were dealing with. He accepted the part with apparent glee, his only demand being that the Emperor's throne must be a toilet made from intersected dolphins, the tails forming the feet and the mouths to receive piss and shit separately.

Nowadays, of course, that would all be done in CGI.

Jodorowsky's mad-as-fuck version was never made -- all the artists, including writer Dan O'Bannon, ended up working on another little film called Alien -- but you want the flavour of what it would have been like -- and you know you do -- watch Santa Sangre or The Holy Mountain.

PS: Not-a-prequel Prometheus viral marketing starts here. (Milk and cookies keep you awake?)

PPS: The Hollywood Reporter says John Carter is not so bad.