Keeping count

You may have noticed a new widget in the sidebar, keeping track of the wordage I’m hammering out for NaNoWriMo. At time of writing, I’m just about back on track after a lazy weekend. But man, I’d forgotten how disciplined you had to be just to keep your head above water with this challenge.

It doesn’t help that there are people that have already passed the 50,000 word barrier. God, that’s demotivating…

FODDERBLOG – Some Tasty Writing

The food special in yesterday’s Indie was notable for it’s insightful articles and lack of the usual wibble that spoils it’s feature writing. Principally I guess as the bulk of the material was written by the chefs and restauranteurs themselves. The Heston Blumental/Alain Ducasse double header is especially worthy of your attention.  

The Ugly Truth about Radiohead

I am one of the 40-odd per cent of people (according to a slightly spurious poll published this week) who actually ponied up some cash for the new Radiohead album. And in fact I paid slightly over the average for it. Why? I’m a great believer in bands going their own way and getting their music to the fans without needing a middleman. The release of IN RAINBOWS seemed a worthy exercise, and one I wanted to support. It was money well spent, not simply for altruistic reasons (yeah, yeah, I know, support your local mulitmillionaire rock band) but because it’s the best thing they’ve done since Kid A. 

It’s interesting to read about the backlash/sneering/feigned surprise that yer average punter would decide not to pay any money at all for the music. These commentators clearly aren’t paying attention. It’s becoming an industry truism that “the album” is becoming little more than a loss leader for concert ticket and merchandise sales. For better or worse, people are out of the habit of paying for music. Why should they, when even twerps like me can configure a P2P client and snag stuff for free? But Radiohead are still laughing, as with no marketing campaign they’ve still managed to achieve 1.2 million hits in under a month, with a significant majority of visitors downloading the album.  That’s brand awareness for you. Free publicity? Priceless! Thanks for doing all our advertising for us, blogosphere!
It’ll be interesting to see if the physical release, out early next year, offers any extra value. This is a strategy that I’m paying close attention to for reasons of my own. Let’s put it like this. The Radiohead approach doesn’t just have to be applied to music. Just ask Cory Doctorow. Or for that matter, Michael Moorcock.
while we’re on the Creative Commons tip, let’s have a bit of a mashup, shall we?
 

Honey, I just accidentally created a Fox show.

Here’s some inspiring news – Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku are working together again, on a new SF show called Dollhouse.

Weird that Joss would be happy to work with Fox again after the way he was treated over Firefly. Still, anything that gets him back behind the idiot lantern is good news by me. Check his comments about the WGA strike too…

Aaaaand They’re Off!




November already? Blimey. It’s been a busy 2007, but it doesn’t seem like a year since I wrote the first words of what would eventually become Satan’s Schoolgirls. And now here we are again. It’s NaNoWriMo season, and I am again obsessed with word count and the ever encroaching deadline of December the 1st.  This year, I’m giving an old short story the respect it deserves, and opening the world it contained up to closer examination. The story is The Prisoner Of Soho. It’s got magick, gang warfare, kerosene powered mecha and espresso-fuelled madness drooling off every page. You will need this story in your life. Trust me, I’m a writer. 

You can find ongoing word-countyness and choice cuts from the story as it develops by simply clicking on the PARTICIPANT icon to your right at the top of the page.
Yeah, by the way. The only reason I’m hammering it out so quickly is cos I’m at home with flu at the moment. Little to do except sit and write.  Trust me, that’ll change. By month’s end I’ll be panicking about the deadline just like everyone else. 
Shouts to my writing buddies this year, Clive and Rob. Good luck, guys, and just remember. Keep cranking it out.  

Some Laughs, Some Tears, and L’il Viggo

After the craziness of last week, it’s been nice to take a few days to decompress and catch up on some sleep. However, we still ended up with a busy old weekend. 

Saturday afternoon saw us as Leicester Square. We’d booked up for a couple of screenings through the London Film Festival. Unfortunately, the one we wanted to see, Todd Hayne’s I’m Not There, sold out scary quickly. The films we chose to see instead were by no means poor replacements.
First up, Grace Is Gone, with John Cusack playing a house -husband who finds it impossible to cope when his wife, an Army sergeant, is killed while serving in Iraq. It’s been widely, and favourably reviewed, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The film’s rep as a tear-jerker is also well-founded. I certainly had something in my eye at the end. 
It’s very much an exploitation movie, though. By which I mean, you’re there for one purpose. Grace Is Gone wears it’s politics lightly, and the linear plot is engineered to take you to the place at the end of the film where you can have a bit of a cry about how awful it all is. Let’s put it like this. It’s a road movie. Once the characters reach their destination, there’s nowhere for them to go but back home to mourn what they’ve lost. The single bit of narrative tension comes from not knowing when Stanley, the John Cusack character, is going to tell his kids they’ve lost their mother. And it’s pretty obvious. 
A film like Grace Is Gone is all about characterisation, and this has it to spare. John Cusack is on top form as Stanley, a failed soldier and the bad cop of the mother/father team, who suddenly has to take on a lot more than he’s ready for. Spontaneity is almost impossibly hard for him, and this really shines through. It’s a long way removed from Lance in Say Anything, that’s fur shure. 

Shélan O’Keefe and Gracie Bednarczyk, both first timers, get props for the incredible job they do at portraying Stanley’s daughters. Utterly believable. In short, I’d recommend it, if you don’t mind being gently but insistently herded towards an involuntary sniffling fit at the end.

Between times, Clare decided we should stand by the barriers at the premiere of I’m Not There, on the offchance that a certain Mr. Ledger should show up. No dice. she had to make do with Christian Bale and Ben Whishaw, which doesn’t seem like much for 90 minutes in the cold and damp. Still, I’m not a fan, so what do I know. 
Back in the warm, and we settled in to watch Talk To Me, Kasi Lemmons’ affectionate retelling of the life of Petey Greene, Washington DJ, comedian, and peoples activist in the 60’s. This is a straight up, unapologetic biopic, and a fine example of the form. It’s a bit disjointed, a bit obvious, but the tale is still told with a lot of verve. It’s also very funny, thanks to Don Cheadle’s pimp-roll of a performance as Petey Green. The show’s stolen by Taraji Henson, though, who is hilariously OTT as Green’s long-time girlfriend Vernell, big hair, big … lungs on display throughout. Chiwetel Ejiofor also deserves a shout as the solid foundation of the film, playing Petey’s manager Dewey Hughes, a man who stifles his own showbusiness dreams in the face of a greater talent. He, and director Kasi Lemmons were at the screening, where she described him as a national treasure. A sentiment the whole of the Odeon West End wholeheartedly agreed with.
We would have stayed for Q&A’s, but trains and the need to hit the sack before 1am took precedence. That’s the one pain about living in Reading. You can’t leave it too late to get home, and the trains that run any time after half 11 stop at every third lamp post. Slow trip back, but at least you can doze safe in the knowledge that the last stop is home.
Sunday. Miserable, cold and rainy. The perfect day to cocoon with the papers and Goldfinger as a matinee, but I had other plans. Back to The Square, to meet up with Clive and check out the new David Cronenberg, Eastern Promises.
Apart from the rotten title, this is a cracker. It’s written by Steve Knight, who also wrote Dirty Pretty Things, and it shares it’s focus on the grimy side of London life with this earlier film. The cast and direction are uniformly excellent, but most of the attention is going to be on Viggo Mortensen, who plays the Russian anti-hero Nicolai with a cold precision that’s beautifully chilling. Right up to the fight scene in an Islington steam room, where he’s set on by two Chechen assassins. He’s naked. Boy, is he ever naked. This scene will show up in best fight scene polls for years to come, I betcha.
After the movie. Clive and I retired to a nearby pub to plot the next month’s activities. He’s being foolish enough to join me in this year’s NaNoWriMo, 50,000 words in 30 days. Regular readers may recall I made the total last year, and loved the experience enough that it was a must for 2007 as well. This time, I’m going in with a reasonable idea of plot and character, which is a big step up from 06. Expect posts on the blog to be brief at best, although I may throw the odd scene in to break the tedium.
Now, if only I hadn’t knackered the letter N on my laptop…

Frankenstein

Well, they couldn’t have timed it any better. On the day that a UK mother has given birth to twins developed from an egg developed from cells grown in a laborotory, ITV screened an updated version of Frankenstein, that taps into the idea of genemod research. For the most part, it wears it’s ideas lightly, preferring to be a juicy modern gothic rather than being a serious discussion of the issues at hand. This is where Jed Mercurio’s script and direction work best, I think. Despite his former work as a doctor, the science by which the Monster comes to be is sketchy at best, and still seems to involve a honking great tank full of bubbling chemicals and lightning. Hardly the cutting edge of biotech. 

The film falls over when the plot steps away from the simple story that should be it’s heart – the relationship between parent and child. By shoehorning a spurious sub-plot involving the military-industrial complex into the midst of a perfectly satisfying relationship tale, Mercurio drags the classic tale down to a standard monster-in-a-box horror. I felt a little cheated by the quick ending. I’d love to have seen a story that deals with a family dealing with the most special needs of all children. I’d loved to have seen a story that dealt with the implications of growing a human being, and the consequences of that. I felt like there was plenty more that could have been done with the story. It’s a 21st century Frankenstein. Is this the best a gifted writer like Jed Mercurio could come up with?  
However (in my reviews, there’s always a however) there were some neat nods to the mythos, not least the sequence with the child, which did not flinch away from the nastiness of the original script. And Helen McCrory was, as ever, great, and the most believable thing in the whole film. On the whole, not bad. Just not great. It was something of a wasted opportunity.

On A Mission (part two)

Sorry about the hiatus. Being crazy busy left me with little time to blog, so apologies if I’ve been leaving you hanging.

We’re home again. The washing machine is running on overtime rates, the kettle is on pretty much constantly, the cats are conspicuously sulking and I’m viewing everything through a fog of exhaustion. A happy exhaustion, though. It’s good to be home. There’s a clean English blue sky outside, and a tang of autumn in the air. It’s a long way from the heat, and the heart of San Francisco. 
Saturday night on Union Square. We spent some time in a bar that the late great Chronicle writer Herb Caen called ‘the last of the great nightcapperies” – The Gold Dust Lounge. It’s a dodgy tourist trappy saloon that’s been in place since the 30’s, and looks like it hasn’t been decorated since it opened. Dirty gold coloured Anaglypta on the walls backing saucy tapestries and fading photos. It’s a long thin space, with a couple of bars. The long one is the place to belly up to and start snarfing beer and shots. 
The other one only serves music. The band sits behind that, and they dole out a thick cocktail of blues, soul and rock ‘n’ roll. The drummer looks like Kenny Rogers, which made the version of “The Gambler” they tore through doubly surreal. Oh. “The Gambler” has also been adopted by the English rugby crowd as an unofficial anthem, and it was requested by an Aussie girl with an evil grin. Earlier that day England had lost the Rugby World Cup to South Africa. I have to think it wasn’t a coincidence. Anyhoo. The place is pretention-free, with a great mix of people all having a good time. About as cool as a chili dog, and I didn’t care two bits. I was too busy paying my respects to the Maker. 
 
Sunday morning dawned, waaaaay too bright and sunny for a boy on the bourbon and his vodka-soaked doll. But there was nothing we could do about it. We had been bad. And so we would have to go to prison. 
Alcatraz. Sat on the shimmering waters of the Bay, a cruel reminder amidst the beauty of the darker side of human nature. A natural outcrop of sandstone that has been used as a fortress, a military lock-up, and most famously as the prison where America’s worst were sent. Since 1973, it’s been run by the National Park Service. At it’s most populous, there were maybe three hundred inmates on the Rock. Now, it’ll see five thousand people a day in high season. And today, we’re amongst that throng. 
There’s a strange atmosphere to the place. Visitors treat it with a kind of reverence, a quiet respect. The ranger’s introduction at the dock area is jolly and welcoming, but doesn’t really seem to gel with the experience you get from the rest of the place. You get extraordinary views of San Francisco, a ten minute boat ride back across the Bay, and that’s part of the problem. For the bright lights and the sounds of the city to be that close, and that far out of reach, must have been close to unendurable for all those prisoners. 
They don’t do the thing any more where you’re locked for a little while in a cell, but you can wander in and out of a couple of them. I’ve seen better equipped animal pens. The isolation blocks are worse. Windowless steel boxes, two long paces long by one wide. If you misbehaved in Alcatraz, you’d spend some time in one of these. Alone. In the dark.
The audio tour that comes with admission now tells the story of how one prisoner coped (I’m paraphrasing here, but not by much): 
“I’d pull a button off my shirt. Then I’d throw it somewhere. Then I’d turn around a couple of times, get down on my hands and knees, and I’d look for that button. And once I’d found it? Why, I’d do it again. You had to do something in that black hole, just to keep yourself sane.”

We were both quiet for a little while after that. It’s sobering to consider that the island itself is now a major tourist attraction, with rare species of bird and plant calling the place home. Yet it’s the tales of misery and suffering, the cages and the shrapnel marks in the floor, that draw the crowds. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Something for another post.
We were in the mood for something uplifting when we got back to the mainland, so we hopped onto a bus crosstown, to Golden Gate Park. One of the great urban parklands, I think it can hold it’s head up in amongst company including Central Park and indeed Hyde Park. It’s bloody massive, that’s for sure. Thirty blocks long by ten wide, stretching from Haight St to the sea. You couldn’t walk it in one day. Fortunately, we didn’t have to. After checking out the Conservatory of  Flowers (imagine a dinky version of the big greenhouse at Kew) we hooked up with a couple of the guys from Friday night, Auntie and Gnash, who whizzed us around on a guided tour in Auntie’s pickup. There seemed to be impromptu parties and pockets of craziness everywhere, including a stomping mini-rave by the car parks. On a warm sunny Sunday, it seemed to make perfect sense to head for somewhere green, and rock some ass.
I, of course, had other ideas. Gnash drove us to Ocean Beach, where we soaked up some hazy afternoon sun and cocktails at The Cliff House, a three-story restaurant perched on the cliffs overlooking the wild Pacific. All very decadent, and a tad Hitchcockian. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Cary Grant hanging by his fingernails while hanging over the cliffs, before straightening his tie, and heading to the terrace room for a martini. The cocktails were very good. 
It would have been nice to sit and booze out the evening there, but we still had things to see. Notably, after plenty of remote nagging from different sources we finally hit the western end of Haight St, and Amoeba Music. 


It’s one of the best record stores I’ve ever been in, and dumps from a great height on the soul-less Virgin Megastores and HMV’s that clog up music retailing so much. This is a megastore with heart and soul. As you can see from the pic, it used to be a bowling alley, which has been stripped out and is now home to as much cool stuff as your poor aching credit card can handle. They hold free live shows here (turned out I missed gigs from The Go! Team and Thelma “Don’t Leave Me This Way” Houston this week) and have the DVD department that beats ’em all and has ’em coming back for more.  

In some ways, it’s probably best that we found the joint so late in the week, because otherwise, well, lordy, luggage excess would have been putting it mildly. Gnash told us that the trade counter gets very busy, not least with rip-off kids burning all their purchases to disc then getting the cash back. I wouldn’t have the heart. A place this good deserves support, and it’s doing great business by all accounts. 

This is really heartening news. I’ve made my views clear on the state of music retail in the UK clear recently, but my shift towards downloads has more to do with the fact that music stores in general are just no fun to be in anymore. There seems to be a focus on pushing a limited range of titles, and charging through the nose for back catalouge. Plus, a majority of UK music stores are nasty, soul-less warehouses. (No, not all of them, so don’t rush to defend Selectadisc or What Music or Andy’s, I’m down with those guys and support them as much as I’m able)(actually yes, do, let’s have a list of cool record shops for me to bankrupt myself in!)) This was never the case with Fopp, and isn’t with Amoeba either. The fun of the browse, the wander guided by fuzzy logic, coming across albums you’d forgotten about or artists who seemed interesting, all yours for a fair price. Wandering out blinking into the sunshine wondering where the last hour had gone, with a warm glow in the belly and a smile in your eyes. Then off for a pint somewhere to paw over your new lovelies. You know, the fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon. No wonder I never got into football.
Right. Sorry. I was telling you about San Francisco. Although we’re pretty much at the tail end of it now. Gnash drove us back to the hotel, where S3’s and sock changes all round were definitely in order. Then out for dins.
The one problem with being based in Union Square is that after a long day’s sightseeing, you’re not in the mood to get back on the bus to find somewhere for dinner. And dining around Union Square can get tourist trappy if you don’t choose with care. I fancied a meal at John’s Grill, which had been made famous in The Maltese Falcon, only to find out they charge 28 bucks for a steak. Which is taking the piss and cruising on a reputation all in one sharp kick to the monetary nads. No thanks, John. 
We ended up in a jazz place, listening to a rather cool four-piece who really could have used a foxy female vocalist (I’ve yet to hear a convincing version of Cry Me A River sung by a man)(yes that’s a challenge. Find me one!) and eating a nice mahi-mahi en papiette. “Ooh,” I think, “that fish has come in a nice filo pastry basket. Tastylicious!” It’s more robust than it looks, and it takes me a little while to bite a piece off. Once I pop it in my mouth, I realise my mistake. (quote of the day) En papiette is literally, in a paper bag. Oops. I try to spit the soggy piece of chewed brown paper out onto my plate so that Clare doesn’t notice. I fail. One of the many reasons I love this girl? She doesn’t take the piss when I do that kind of thing. Much. 
And then it’s Monday, and we’re jumping up and down on our cases to get them to close (HA. No, we’re not. Two words of advice from a seasoned traveller – squishy bags. Nevertheless, it’s a tight squeeze (other quote of the day)). The lovely Madame X volunteers to take us to the airport, and she takes us to lunch before dropping us at SFO. Time drags, in the way it only can at an airport. I spot Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith’s Fell – Feral City for sale in a news concessionary – which is a bit of a culturefuck as it’s on the same shelf as rants from right wing publicity-whore nutbags Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter. 
And then we’re on a plane and I don’t sleep despite the Dramamine and hypnotherapy and I blink again and it’s Tuesday and we’re home and it’s autumn. Honestly, you’re away for a week, and someone kills the summer. Oh well. If you’re going to stick a knife in, you might as well twist it.
Crikey, what a week. San Francisco is an extraordinary place, with a friendly vibe that instantly puts it up amongst my favourite places on the planet to stay. We’ve met some great people, and seen some amazing things. We’ve only really raised goosebumps on the place. We want to get better acquianted. We’ll be back.
Oh yes, my lovelies. We’re coming back.