I see red

John Carter. Miles better than Avatar. Mars is a planet where things are very light; its inhabitants must speak without contractions, and the red-skinned males have the same unfortunate hair that bedevilled the Romans and operatives in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The introduction is slow and a little jerky, and in the darkness of 3D it's difficult to tell whose flying machine is which. But generally, man, it's pulp-scifi great. All the parts you like are there: What Is This Earth Of Which You Speak; stampeding eight-legged armies appearing in dust from a distance; the noble companion (Woola!); the flying machine gate-crashing the big wedding; the shape-shifting grey men... The source material is a compendium of lovely parts. Also: Lynn Collins.

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.'