Bedside reading (.epub edition)

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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?

Signing off

Concrete jungle where dreams are made of

Seriously - best TV ever. Mad Men season four, ep three. Throw it up on a big screen and it'd be what a movie used to be, long ago, when movies were about people: small, crappy, sexy, compromised, doomed, beautiful. Novelists aren't allowed to write like that any more. Novels have to be events whereas TV can be, literally, whatever.

Now playing

Uncut interview with the great Tony Visconti:

UNCUT: Low is Generally perceived as David at his most emotionally honest, but most unhappy. Looking back, is this interpretation accurate?

TONY VISCONTI: It wasn't a difficult album to make, we were freewheeling, making our own rules. But David was going through a difficult period professionally and personally. To his credit, he didn't put on a brave face. His music said that he was "low."

Does it still annoy you that some people still think Eno produced the 'Berlin' albums?

Yes. David's set the record straight many times since, and of course my name is in the credits as co-producer with David. How rock journalists continue to make that mistake is beyond me. Come to think of it, I don't recall Brian ever setting the record straight. I know that David and Brian spent some time together before going in the studio with me, but they were writing. Brian spent an average of three weeks on each the Triptych albums recording his bits. He wasn't present for the vocals, lots of other overdubs and the mix.

I've always thought that there's a prevailing mood of hope throughout Low (certainly not a pessimistic album). Do you think that comes through?

I find "Warzawa" very uplifting. Despite a few really bad days we had quite a lot of fun making Low, especially when all the radical ideas were making sense and things were starting to click. I remember after a couple of weeks of recording I made a rough mix of the entire album so far and handed a cassette of it to David. He left the control room waving the cassette over his head and grinned ecstatically saying, "We've got an album, we've got an album."

Some of them are old

I've started writing late at night again, maybe because I need quiet and darkness for the slow stuff, with the TV set flickering in the background and the shot I promise myself when I finish, which I never do, but have anyway.

MaudNewton-dot-com has a great interview with William Gibson in which the novelist discusses the old and secondhand objects that appear in his stories:

I have a kind of vast and half-forgotten library of objects — artifacts, really, because the things that I describe are always man-made. And one of them will be summoned from the library through some unconscious or poetic process when the narrative requires it. I know that sounds precious, but I can’t think of a less precious-sounding way to put it.

I reach instinctively for something without knowing why, and place it in the narrative, and if it strikes a resonant chord with me, I’ll leave it there. There probably are times when the thing that arrives from the library proves to resonate oddly with where the narrative wants to go, and it has to be taken out and replaced with something resonates more in tune with the rest of the structure.

Pictured: my great grandfather, Bill Collard (white suit) and the crew, Waiuku, 1921.

This is the news

The US justice system is revving up to stop Lindsay Lohan having fun. Wish they'd moved to stop her injecting stuff into her lips; the rest is her business, shurely? Anyway. Old Salon interview with David Mamet:

Is the idea of the con game something that appears in all your films?

Yeah, it appears in most of them. I think that film, as opposed to theater, is intrinsically a melodramatic medium. And one of the wonderful categories of melodrama is the confidence thriller.

Elsewhere you mentioned the "light thriller." What is that?

I contrasted the light thriller and film noir. The light thriller is much closer to the tradition of comedy. The film of comedy is such that in every scene, the hero makes a misstep and yet is rescued at the end by the forces of good, or by God, or by a deus ex machina. Tragedy is exactly the opposite. At each step, the hero seems to be doing the correct thing, but at the end of the movie ends up consigned to perdition, or death, or disgrace, because of some internal flaw. So film noir is much closer to tragedy and the light or Hitchcockian thriller is much closer to comedy.

Still the man even after marrying the Pidgeon robot. Kinda like her as well. Am sentimental. And from Jezebel, a short history of film merkins. Sadly they omit Sienna Miller's digital merkin, which was some pimply IT operator's karmic reward.