John Martyn

RIP John Martyn, who died yesterday. Although he was never a household name, he was one of the great guitar innovators. Solid Air, his most famous album is one of those albums you need with you if you were on a desert island. Every track is magnificent, and sounds utterly sublime, particularly on vinyl.
Martyn had a dark old life. There were periods of alcoholism (sometimes there were live performances marred by drunkeness), drugs and failed marriages. In 2003, he had his right leg amputated and continued to play live in his wheelchair. There was an excellent documentary that BBC4 ran around this time (Johnny Too Bad), following the operation and his return to live performance that revealed a cantankerous (and frequently hilarious) stoner of a man, who refused to sit still.

"May you never lay your head down without a hand to hold

may you never make your bed out in the cold..."

John Martyn - May You Never

Objects Of Inexplicable Desire # 3: The 12" Rocketeer

This is niche market stuff, I know, and I'm not usually one for action figures. But I love The Rocketeer, in comic book form and movie form. In fact there'll probably be a post about the late Dave Stevens, creator of The Rocketeer coming shortly. The movie wasn't exactly a huge success but I know

it has a special place in the heart of many a comic book fan.

Japanese company, Medicom picked up the license to produce a limited run of 2,000 of these 12" Rocketeer's for their Real Action Heroes line. As they were only available in Japan and various speciality stores around the world, they're worth a pretty penny these days. I'd go look up one on ebay, but it'd just upset me.

The helmet is also a thing of geeky beauty, and similarly expensive..

*EDIT* I just checked, despite myself, and there's one of the Medicom toys going for £136 on ebay. Nice. I'm glad I did that.

Let The Pictures Do The Talking Part Four: Hugh Ferriss and his World of Tomorrow

Although trained as an architect, Hugh Ferriss never designed a single noteworthy building, but early on in his career, specialised in creating architectural renderings of other's architects' work. As a delineator, his work was in creating a perspective of a building or project as part of the sales process or for advertising.
By the mid-twenties, countless New York skyscrapers were queued up to be bathed in Ferriss's moody draftmanship. The city was transformed into a dramatic chiaroscuro, the buildings massed in shadow and fog, lit and obscured by roaming spotlights; the structures themselves almost overwhelmingly gigantic, like the houses of gods.

Ferriss intended his work as an example to other architects that they would put concept, human experience and emotional response before capitalistic concerns. What he also did was create a visual language to understand the potential of skyscrapers. Look at Batman's Gotham City or the recent Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow to see the effect that Ferriss still has in popular culture. The art really speaks for itself. It's staggeringly beautiful. All cities should look like this...

Objects Of Inexplicable Desire # 2: Steven Thomas - Interplanetary Travel Posters

These are just plain gorgeous. Created in the style of early 20th century travel ad posters.

http://www.zazzle.com/stevethomas

Let The Pictures Do The Talking Part Three: Jack Cole

Comic book illustrator, cartoonist and Playboy's premier artist, Jack Cole was a tragically short lived comic giant.

After working with Will Eisner (subject of Part Two in this series) on The Spirit, and then later creating his own satirical take on the hero with Midnight (complete with fedora, domino mask and ahem, a talking monkey), Cole then went on to create Plastic Man. Plas (as he was known) was an off-beat kind of superhero, and an immediate hit with the funny-book reading public. A cheap wiseguy, Eel O'Brian gained his powers of elasticity after being dunked in a vat of acid. Abandoned by his cronies, Eel was soon fighting crime with his bizarre stretching powers, along side his comic relief partner, Woozy Winks (a notorious jail breaker). The character's ability to take any shape gave Cole a huge amount of license to experiment with layout and text.

Although Cole was outwardly a mild-mannered Clark Kent kind of guy, Plastic Man's manic and surreal magic act hinted at the troubles that bubbled beneath the surface.

Despite his success in the comic field, Cole had always harboured ambitions of being a full-time gag cartoonist, and in 1954, along came Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine. Hef, a cartoonist himself, and fan of Plastic Man encouraged Cole to produce full page, lavishly watercoloured gag 'toons of beautiful but slightly dim girls who mesmerised the poor saps within their orbit. His art appeared in the fifth issue of Playboy and he would have at least one piece published in every issue until his death. In 1958 Cole also realised another ambition when he created his own syndicated newspaper strip, Betsy and Me.

Then, not four months later Cole one morning drove to a store and bought a .22 pistol. He mailed two letters, one to his wife and one to Hefner, then drove to a secluded spot and shot himself in the head. The two letters were effectively suicide notes, and neither were made available to the public, although his wife testified that 'Jack had given his reasons.'

Top Of The World, Ma!

...or at least at the top of Snowdonia. The last station of the mountain railway. Amanda took this after a little direction from me.

Let The Pictures Do The Talking Part Two: Will Eisner

Will Eisner was one of the most gifted and innovative storytellers that American comics have produced. His most famous and influential creation was The Spirit, a hero he killed off by page three, then brought back. The mask was incidental; the rest of his costume was a blue suit, fedora and tie. One of the hallmarks of an Eisner Spirit story were the exquisitely designed title pages where The Spirit appeared as a visual device in every issue (as a headline in a newspaper, scraps of paper in the wind, as shattered bricks). Then there were the women: Eisner peopled his comics with the very best femme fatales - Sand Saref, P'Gell, Silken Floss - all with a kiss me, kill me agenda.

Over time, Eisner became a master of the short comic book story, experimenting with the grammar of a form in its infancy, cribbing cinematic techniques for the funny-books and influencing the field to this day.

Although he retired The Spirit in the 50's, Eisner's influence continued when in 1978, he established the graphic novel as a form of literature with A Contract With God, a book of four stroies about the residents of an old Jewish tenement in the Bronx. He continued to create, working on twenty graphic novels until his death in 2005.

You Are What You Choose To Be: The Iron Giant

This beautiful animated film, made in 1999 by Brad Bird (who worked on The Simpsons, King of the Hill and then had huge hits with Pixar's The Incredibles and Ratatouille) more than deserves it's reputation as an overlooked gem; one of those movies that failed to find an audience upon release, but now has a huge cult following.

The Iron Giant, adapted from the late poet laureate Ted Hughes book, The Iron Man shares some themes with E.T. - a young boy meets a visitor from outer space who's stranded on Earth, and falls prey to paranoid government agents. But The Iron Giant is so much more than that. When lonely kid, Hogarth Hughes, who's raised by his single mother (Jennifer Aniston) meets the amnesiac iron man (Vin Diesel), he enlists the aid of hipster beatnik, Dean (Harry Connick Jr) to stop an obsessed Federal Agent from finding and destroying the Giant.

Taking place during the fifties at the height of the Cold War, The Iron Giant is an utterly charming and lovingly crafted parable. It draws on a stylised view of the past when America was preoccupied with nuclear holocaust and little green men (indeed there's an hilarious cartoon public service film, Duck and Cover where kids are advised to shelter from a nuclear attack by hiding under a table), and looks utterly unlike any other cartoon you've ever seen.

I'm not a huge fan of cartoon movies as a rule. I get easily restless during the parade of cute animals and song and dance numbers. But The Iron Giant has none of that. What it does have is some of the best voice acting I've ever heard on an animated movie, a loving 50's retro-futurism look to the characters and the huge clunking Giant, a lot of humour and a huge huge heart. This is the movie of a true auteur. Moving and unforgettable, The Iron Giant is one of the (if not the) best animated movies ever made. Wonderful.

Objects Of Inexplicable Desire #1:Dr Grordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators (That's Rayguns to the layman)

Who doesn't love themselves some retro-cool raygun action? Well, if you've got the cash to splash (and I mean a lot of cash), then head over to Weta (who brought us armies of rampaging orcs and an ice dancing Kong) for just that.
To the left, we have the Victorious Mongoose Concealbale Ray Pistol (a snip at £264), which will (and I quote)... obliterate four pounds of Budgerigars in three fascinating seconds.

And how could one resist the Goliathon 800 Moon Hater Death Ray, which would make a superb centre-piece to any laboratory or lounge and allow you to begin a well rounded bombardment of any Moon habitation you fancy, all from a comfy chair.

...or Lord Cockswain's weapon of choice - The Unnatural Selector, built in metal, glass, Tremontium and rare Venusian Worm Oak.
Going for the princely sum of anywhere from $4,500 to $7,900.

http://www.wetanz.com/rayguns/

Let The Pictures Do The Talking Part 1: Robert McGinnis

Robert McGinnis is one of my all-time favourite artists. An illustrator of over 1200 paperback covers and more than 40 movie posters, including Breakfast at Tiffany's, Barbarella and various classic Bond films. These days, at the ripe old age of 82, the man is still painting some classic covers for Hard Case crime, and he still knows his way around a mighty statuesque dame...

It's easier to let the pictures do the talking...

All Cars...

...should be this way.

Moulin Rouge and Secret Skin

In honour of finally (finally! only a bloody year!) finishing the synopsis to my novel, a picture from the archives of our favourite Parisian nightspot, Moulin Rouge, and a little snippet from the book itself...

The last of the day’s light was flickering from the sky. The buildings were tinged with the orange and gold of a late summer’s evening. He loosened the top button of his shirt, ran a hand through his hair. In the candle-lit cool of the cafes, wine was being uncorked and allowed to breathe. He watched the bright lights of the bateaux mouches pleasure boats as they cruised towards the Ile de Cite. The golden buildings of Sainte Chappelle and Notre Dame. He hadn’t walked along here in some time. It calmed him. He took out a crumpled pack of Gauloises, lit a cigarette, exhaled slowly, watched the streelights shimmering along the Seine.

from Secret Skin by Simon Avery

Three Dames To Kill For. Part Three: Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's

I can't believe it's taken me this long to see Breakfast at Tiffany's. Sometimes you find that when you finally see one of cinema's classics, your expectations exceed the movie, but not this one.

Although it's essentially a light and frothy rom-com confection (and pretty much became the template for hundreds that followed it), it's delivered with such panache and aplomb, it's hard not to love.

Loosely derived from a novella by Truman Capote, it's the story of the slightly eccentric and vulnerable socialite, Holly Golightly, who breakfasts to 'bet the reds' outside Tiffany's jewellery store, owns a cat with no name, and earns $100 a week to visit an ex-mobster at Sing Sing prsion. When a young writer, Paul Varjak (a scarily young George Peppard) moves into the same apartment building, he falls under Holly's spell.

It's a perfect piece of cinema, a lushly produced time capsule to a slice of American that never existed outside of the cinema. It manages to walk the thin line between Hollywood saccharine and Capote cynicism and leave you with a wistful, warm glow that cinema just doesn't do anymore (or not often, at least).

It's hard to pinpoint just where 'the magic' of Breakfast at Tiffany's resides. Certainly in the glowing cinematography of Franz F. Planer, and in the light comedic touch that director Blake Edwards would also later bring to the Pink Panther movies. But of course, it's also in the iconic Audrey Hepburn, a stunningly beautiful woman who simply glows in every frame of this movie. There's none of the implied eroticism of Louise Brooks or the man-eating sexuality of Ava Gardner; Hepburn's allure is harder to define: elegant and vulnerable, quirky and bittersweet all at the same time. Despite the almost inescapable images that this film conjures, one has to see her in action to see the allure, the spell she could cast.

One of those movies that if you could, you would happily live inside for the rest of your life. Ah, the magic of Hollywood!

Three Dames To Kill For. Part Two: Ava Gardner in The Killers

Two professional killers roll into a sleepy town to kill 'The Swede'. He's expecting them and he welcomes his assassination. An insurance investigator pursues the case and pulls together the threads of The Swede's life, uncovering a convoluted tale of treachery, a heist gone bad, and a femme fatale, the mysterious Kitty Collins...

Adapted from an Ernest Hemingway short story, the first twenty minutes of The Killers is a faithful adaptation, even retaining the author's trademark laconic dialogue. Producer Mark Hellinger paid $36,000 for the story, making it the most expensive short story in Hollywood history at the time. Reportedly, Hellinger called Hemingway up, asking him what the rest of the story might be, to which the author replied, "How the hell do I know?"

Luckily Hellinger brought in an uncredited John Huston to work on the script with Richard Brooks, and together they improvised an excellent and solidly plotted bit of noir storytelling. Hellinger and director Robert Siodmak made the decision to light the movie in what they condsidered to be naturalistic way: four lights instead of forty for the moment the killers roll into town, no fill lights when the actor's eyes became shadowed; even Ava Gardener being sent back to her trailer to remove all make-up, save for a little vaseline applied to her skin for a sheen effect.

Film noir: phantasmagorical style in the name of naturalism. Woody Bredell's cinematography on The Killers is where all the cliches of film noir lighting spring from.

The labyrinthine plot, full of the usual double-crosses and and twists is composed of flash-backs (sometimes flash-backs within flash-backs)and is as grim and fateful in its unfolding as a film noir yarn should be. Burt Lancaster, in his screen debut plays the tough but limited Swede, doomed as the 'lucky stiff' who falls for Gardner's Kitty Collins.

I've only recently finished reading Love Is Nothing, by Lee Server, the biography of Ava Gardner. I picked it up on a whim, knowing little about Gardner or her work, and expected the book (which is a bit of a doorstep at 500-plus pages) to be a bit of work. But it was a joy from start to finish, due to the fascinating life Gardner lived, and the ultra-cool James Ellroy-like style that Server writes with.

It's fair to say that Ava Gardner lived life to the fullest. She was married to Mickey Rooney, jazz musician Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra. She was pursued by Howard Hughes, and befriended by Hemingway (who carried around one of her kidney stones as a lucky charm).

The Killers was the first of Gardner's films that really announced her prescence in Hollywood, despite the fact that she has relatively little screen time. But when she is on screen, she is positively luminous; the epitome of the femme fatale.

My favourite line? "Don't ask a dying man to lie himself into hell!"

A quintessential piece of film noir.

Three Dames To Kill For. Part One: Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box

Three days, three classic movies and three of the most glamourous women to grace the silver screen. The movies: Pandora's Box starring Louise Brooks, The Killers starring Ava Gardner, and Breakfast At Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn.

Part One: Pandora's Box starring Louise Brooks

G.W.Pabst's Pandora's Box, made in 1929 was the movie that catapulted Louise Brooks to international stardom, and made her the icon of the Jazz Age. Two hours of silent German movie-making doesn't initially sound like an easy way to spend an afternoon, but Pandora's Box is a a beguiling and hypnotic piece of cinema, due in no small part to Brooks, whose prescence is bewitching, and performance light years ahead of the usual fare of the period.

An uninhibited roaring 20's flapper girl, Brooks was essentially blacklisted by the Hollywood studios as something of a 'loose cannon', for her over-publicized social life. Brooks departed for Germany and for Pabst, who recognised something in the actress that it would take the rest of the world almost half a century to catch up with.

Pandora's Box tells the ultimately tragic story of Lulu, a young and sexually promiscuous performer (and prostitute), who marries then accidentally murders one of her customers, escapes justice with the aid of her pimp (whom she refers to as her father) and son of her former husband, finds refuge in an illegal gambling den, and ends up living in squalor in the East End of London, where she encountes Jack the Ripper.

Pandora's Box is a melodrama and a surprisingly erotic dreamlike one at that. At times it's unrepentantly over the top with it's frank sexuality (it even features - whisper it - a lesbian), Pabst throws everything but the kitchen sink at it, but it holds together surprisingly well, and moves along at a fair pace for it's age.

But of course, it's Brooks that has endured in much the same manner as Bettie Page. Both women had a small window of success in their time, then endured years in the wilderness before history and popular culture rediscovered their charms and deemed them icons.

Despite the seductive, caredree and deadly manner that Lulu lives her life, Brooks imbues her character with a tragic, childlike innocence. Despite it's outrageous themes, there's nothing sordid about her. The girl simply can't help it.

What marks Brooks out as something beyond her time was her extraordinary naturalistic prescence on screen. Silent movies demanded exaggeration by their very nature, but Brooks face is not only a radiant, beautiful thing, but subtlely expressive, conveying a startling range of nuances and emotions. She was an actress years ahead of her peers in terms of performance.

Even if Pandora's Box were not a decadent, masterful bit of German cinema, it would be worth seeing purely to witness a woman who seduced and possessed the screen with her grace and beauty. A thoroughly modern woman and thoroughly modern movie.

Upon her return to the US, bit parts and B movies followed until she retired from the screen in the forties and lapsed into obscurity and alcoholism. She worked on an autobiography, then incinerated it. She filed for bankruptcy. She became a recluse in New York city. Then in the fities, French historians rediscovered her work and a former lover, the founder of CBS provided a small monthly stipend for the rest of her life. She also later wrote Lulu In Hollywood, a collection of essays on her time in the limelight.

Pandora's Box is available on DVD, restored, re-scored and uncut, and is packaged with an excellent hour long documentary, Looking for Lulu, which is worth is worth the price of the DVD alone.

How to hallucinate with ping-pong balls and a radio

Definitely something to do in your spare time. See horses prancing in the clouds! Talk to your dead relatives! Awesome...
(Click on the picture to enlarge or go to the original link
here)

Portmeirion

A picture of Portmeirion today, which seems apt considering the loss of Number 6 this week. When we arrived in 'The Village', it was about nine in the morning and the tourist onslaught hadn't yet begun, so we had a couple of golden hours in the sunshine, free to take some people-free pictures.
It's a unique, utterly beautiful place. I could have taken thousands of pictures, but this one in particular I think, captures something of the essence of The Prisoner.

The Wrestler

After the awesome delight that was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button just a couple of days ago I was unprepared to see something equally as good so soon, but I have. Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler is staggeringly good. I have no reservation whatsoever in saying this movie will be nestling at the top of my list of favourite's of 2009. I also have to say that if Mickey Rourke doesn't walk away with a Best Actor Oscar come award season, it'll be a crime.

Rourke plays Randy "The Ram" Robinson, in the 80's (as a credits montage reveals) a superstar wrestler. The top of his game. There were video games and action figures and adulation aplenty. But by the time the opening credits are over, we follow (literally) a broken man, both physically and mentally. He continues to trawl the low rent wrestling circuit, lives in a trailer park and has a fractured relationship with a stripper and his daughter.

Unlike the sparkling beauty of Aronofsky's previous (and wonderful) movie, The Fountain, the Wrestler is shot cinéma vérité style. Often the camera simply follows Rourke as his life is incrementally revealed. When we finally see the actor himself, his face is no longer the handsome 80's heart throb of Angel Heart, but a victim of the ravages of boxing and botched plastic surgery. Within a few minutes, the genius of the film is that Rourke is Randy and vice versa, so much so that much of the film feels like you're privy to the raw pain of Rourke and the life he's lived, the mistakes he's made.

And raw is the best word to describe the film. The second of two sequences of wrestling in the movie is utterly painful to watch and leads to a turning point that I won't reveal here. But it's clear that Rourke isn't acting or appearing to act at any point.

One scene that bears a mention too is when Randy visits an American Legion Hall for a meet and greet event that amounts to a handful of has been sportsmen behind tables of videos and t-shirts of them in their hey-day, while tiny amount of fans come in for autographs and polaroids. At one point, Rourke glances around at one of his fellow wrestlers asleep at his table, and at others in wheelchairs or staring into space. It's one of the most profoundly sad and moving scenes of any movie I've ever seen.

If this all seems a little heavy, far from it. The movie never loses sight of being an audience pleaser. There's plenty of humour spinkled amongst the dark stuff, and in the end you'll walk away from it feeling utterly satisfied by its emotional heft. Everything is perfectly judged. Best film of 2009? It's going to take some beating.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Adapted from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the life story of someone who is born as an old infant, and who then spends his 80-odd years growing younger (in body at least).

For David Fincher (whom I associate with making some of my favouite - and dark - flicks: Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac) it's a soft, elegiac and romantic movie, and deserves some kind of Oscar recognition, although it's up against a lot of stiff competition this year, and will probably be regarded as a little 'light' purely for it's fantastical premise.

But it's a heavyweight movie too, full of amazingly 'complete' characters that Button encounters on his travels, and in the central love story that resonates throughout the years. Button meets Daisy (an incredible Cate Blanchett) when she's a child and he an 'old infant', and their connection continues to a point where they meet in the middle, fleetingly the same age. Beyond that Button continues to grow younger and Daisy older. I won't give away more than that. There's a huge amount of pleasure to derive from Button's two and half hour running time. There's a beautiful framing device that uses Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans; an exquisitely drawn encounter with the wife of a spy in Russia (played by Tilda Swinton) and some staggering effects work that portray Pitt and Blanchett through 80 years.

A classic bit of cinema.

Twitter-ing

Despite feeling like I'm far too old to do so, I'm now engaged in that Twitter-ing that all the kids do (and Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry and so on). Don't expect any I'm going to Asda! or I'm making a sandwich!...

http://twitter.com/simonavery

Let The Right One In - review

After seeing both The Wrestler and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in the space of a week, I feel like I've run out of superlatives to heap upon further movies. But alas, it's time to get the thesaurus out because I've seen my third utterly astounding movie of the week. And it's all the more incredible for being a micro-budget Swedish vampire movie. Strap yourself in, because I'm afraid I'm about to wax all lyrical...

Adapted from the best-selling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In tracks the quiet movements of a small Swedish town, which, like the ever-present snowfall, remains stubbornly serene when talk of a serial killer spreads.

It’s the early eighties. In due spirit a Rubik’s Cube becomes the catalyst of a new friendship between pallid, scrawny schoolboy Oskar and the mysterious girl next door Eli, whose droopy eyes and quiet manners belie a sinister secret.

Eli has been 12 for a very long time.

And in all her veteran experience as a preteen she encourages Oskar to stand up against the school bullies whose daily abuse has become a banal ritual for him. If at times he copes with his new regime, at others he still needs a little help…

It's hard not to mention Twilight when it comes to this film. I loved the Twilight books (I've yet to see the film), but while both stories share a skewed kind of romance between a human and a vampire, that's really where the similarities end.

Let The Right One In is something else entirely; a story of who we allow inside our defences when the options are limted, and what we'd do for them to keep them there. It's a coming of age love story between two children who haven't been allowed to be children for some time.

The direction and cinematography is nothing short of sublime. It has the pacing and stillness you'd expect of a Scandinavian film, but it's also punctuated with some of the most shocking and visually arresting scenes that I've seen in a horror movie for some time. Some of the cliches of vampire myths are magnificently re-intepreted; the title plays on the vampire trope of having to be invited over the threshold (the price of doing so without invitation is both startling and poignant); sunlight is as deadly as it ever was, and again plays into another stunning visual; and feeding is a feral, brutal act, all the more shocking when it crashes into the spectral wintry stillness. There are numerous subtexts too, that bubble under the surface. Some I suppose were cut in the transition from word to screen, but hint at some extremely dark subject matter and are all the more disturbing for their ambiguity in the film.

Of course a movie that centres around two twelve year old children could all too easily stumble if the young actor's performances fell short, but Lina Leandersson and Kare Hedebrant are simply luminous. Both portray achingly sad children, forced to rely upon each other when all else in life fails them, emitting a chilling and utterly convincing innocence.

Let The Right One In is nothing short of stunning. In my opinion it's the best interpretation of the vampire story that I've ever seen. You should all see this. I guarantee you'll fall in love with it....

Taken in Snowdonia last year. A lake in the middle of no where. We skidded to a halt and scrambled down to the shore to take a few pictures as the light was excellent and the view staggering.

Be Seeing You...

After getting into The Prisoner in a big way last year, I was saddened to hear about Patrick McGoohan's death on Tuesday. Having finally aquired the series in its beautifully restored form in the fortieth anniversary boxset, and absolutely adoring the show, I found the man and his work fascinating. Let's not forget that The Prisoner pretty much defined the sort of modern day episodic and 'difficult' TV fare such as Twin Peaks or Lost or The X-Files. McGoohan pre-dated all of those TV auteurs such as Lynch, Whedon and Carter by creating, writing, producing, starring and masterminding someting with startling vision.
But The Prisoner was more audacious than pretty much anything we have now; a challenging allegory about attempting to find freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia. It was an envelope pushing piece of fiction that was far ahead of its time, and remains still, socially and politically prescient. The final episode, Fallout, outraged audiences by refusing to give a pat conclusion to the series; instead McGoohan crafted a surreal, witty hour of TV that continued to ask questions. I loved it and McGoohan for his steadfastness. When asked about that final episode, he said:
"If I could do it again, I would. As long as people feel something, that's the great thing. It's when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that's tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had."
Anyone who hasn't seen it... well, you should. I loved visiting Portmerion last year; it was a unique experience to walk around The Village itself, unchanged in forty years, surrounded by hundreds of other people who were there for the same reason. How many TV shows will have that kind of longevity and leave such a huge legacy in the culture?
It's very rare that any celebrity death has any impact upon me, but I'm actually quite sad. I was hoping that he might get that cameo in the imminent Prisoner remake, starring Jim Cavziel and Ian McKellen, but apparently he was already too sick to do so.
So RIP, Mr McGoohan, you sir were a visonary.
Be seeing you Number six...

On High In Blue Tomorrows - An Inland Empire review

So where to start with Inland Empire, David Lynch's most recent headscratcher?

Hmm...OK, so like much of Lynch's recent output, Inland Empire is baffling, beautiful, hypnotic and frustrating, all at once. It begins for the first hour to make a sort of sense. Laura Dern plays a actress who takes on a new role in a movie that promises to boost her fading cache in Hollywood. She then learns that said movie is actually a remake of a Polish film that never got finished when the lead stars were killed.

After an hour of thinking, yep, I'm with you, I'm following this fine, I'm really gonna follow this Lynch movie, Inland Empire goes batshit crazy. I've read explanations of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, and upon returning to those movies, I can can sort of see the thread of (I'm reluctant to say) logic upon the repeated viweing. There are similar themes to those recent Lynch movies running through Inland Empire: the splitting of personalities/identities; the wilful use of dream logic and the repetition of events in different contexts. But that in mind, this movie defies exact definition. Like a dream, walls appear behind scene after scene, so that you're left with no clear way out of the maze. At times, Dern appears to be the character in the movie she's making; a whore, a battered wife, an actress, and even a time traveller of sorts. And similarly to Naomi Watt's character in Mulholland Drive, who travels to another self via a box midway through the film, Dern seems to be transported White Rabbit-like through a cigarette burned hole in some silk underwear. There's a sit-com with three figures with rabbit heads (which again implies that White Rabbit theory), the usual Lynchinan tropes and motifs of guttering electricity, strobing lights and bizarre characters speaking portentous nonsense, and his ability (like no other)to make an otherwise prosaic American front room simply reek with dread. There's also a posse of LA prostitutes who at one point do a line-dance to The Locomotion (and rather well, I might add), some Polish trafficking characters, and the sense that as a viewer, you are part of the mystery - there are certain points where characters turn to the screen implying that something is expected of you.

After having a post-viewing look on various sites that try to tease apart the conundrum of Inland Empire, I can see glimpses of what appear to be a fairly cogent explanation, but I think part of the charm of Lynch is that it's all subjective and it's not all supposed to make sense. The journey is more important than the destination.

So, Inland Empire. Did I like it? Yes. I think I was more prepared for what was to unfold after the (now realtively straight-forward) narrative twists of Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway. It's a little too long, but I can forgive Lynch the indulgence of it for the basic fact that there is no-one who makes movies like this. He is utterly unique, a trailblazer, and to be celebrated for the fact. Inland Empire is hypnotic, polyvalent, unsettling and maddening, and even if you find Lynch's lack of narrative cohesion frustrating, you have to keep going back to his movies, time after time for a reason you can't quite define.

It's also Lynch's first foray into the world of DV - shot on a Sony PD-150 and edited on Apple's Final Cut Pro. I'd thought that DV might undermine that lush sense of classic 35mm 'celluloid' that his previous movies have, but the crispness of the image manages to seem somehow more Lynchian, if anything.

So what's Inland Empire about? All of the above and a bit more besides. It's still running around in my head now, and I feel like I want to return to it at some point to unravel it some more. Which, I guess is as good a recommendation as anyone could give. But as one witty poster on a Guardian forum put it when asked what Inland Empire was about: '...three hours. And one hour too many.

Introductions first...

So, welcome to Tears All Over Town. After using LiveJournal (http://stillwater1.livejournal.com/) and myspace (http://www.myspace.com/simonavery) for the last few years, I decided to branch out onto a blog to post film reviews, photography, news on my fiction, and sometimes just some general ramblings on whatever takes my fancy.

First, a bit about me...

I've been writing crime fiction for over ten years now. Prior to this, I wrote 'wierd fiction'. Sometimes I still do. I've been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies, and was nominated for a CWA Short Story Dagger Award in 2001 for 'Leaving Seven Sisters', originally published in the UK in Crimewave magazine.

I've recently completed my first book, Secret Skin, a private eye novel set in Paris, involving sex traffic, diamond theft and corporate crime. Once I've completed the synopsis for submission to an agent (actually harder to write than the actual novel!), I have plans for further novels featuring Charlie Sandoval, the American PI in Paris.

Here are some reviews on recently published fiction...

In CRIMEWAVE 10 NOW YOU SEE ME: 101 Ways To Leave Paris - A hard-boiled tale of revenge in the City of Light
Now we get to the story I consider the best of the issue, “101 Ways to Leave Paris” by Simon Avery. Jack Chappel, a man wronged by the woman he loved and the brother he cleaned up after, comes back to Paris after a stretch in prison, looking for some kind of justice. It opens with what appears to be an unconnected vignette of a young man playing matador in the middle of Parisian traffic, described in vivid detail by Avery. His language is lush and descriptive as he describes careening cars and the delicate twirl of a red coat. After the obvious occurs, we move to the meat of the story, which looks at first to be a stereotypical revenge plot but blossoms into something better and altogether more interesting. The personalities at play here are conflicting mirrors, their actions and reactions echoing one another in a cinematic style. Avery entices the reader into Chappel’s head and then makes it impossible for the reader to leave, layering the story on, hinting at some things and bringing others full out into the light, but always leaving the reader wanting more. This is noir at its finest, with the world blurring to gray around the characters as each struggles to find some measure of balance. ( THE FIX) http://thefix-online.com/reviews/crimewave-10/

'101 Ways to Leave Paris' is the longest story in the collection, and shows once again what a fine writer Simon Avery is. It's a thirty-year menage-a-trois, between the two brothers and the woman who seduces them, and between the woman the narrator and the city. Glorious.'

Suite101.com

IN BLACK STATIC 6: The Better Part of You - A woman released from a mental institution takes her new lover home to the seaside to escape or confront the darkness of her past.
Most Black Static stories seem reluctant to make their speculative element too blatant, but Simon Avery opens the issue with 'The Better Part of You,' and dumps the speculative element squarely in front of the reader from the moment that Chelsea (an unstable young woman) and James (the narrator) make love. Chelsea feels real in a way the most writers long to achieve; she's one of many women who are a little too out-going, a little too fragile, and end up bruised by life, damaged or even self-destructing. In creating such a memorably believable character, Avery pulls off a tour-de-force. Suite101.com

In BLACK STATIC #1: Bury The Carnival - A twisted re-interpretation of the Pinocchio story. (The title is from a Tom Waits song, Who Are You.
Bury The Carnival by Simon Avery, is a fresh take on Pinocchio, with the role of Geppetto being taken on by Charousek - a man recently released from prison by despotic puritans. Originally imprisoned for his use of old magic, Charousek has returned to the village in time for the End of Darkness, a momentous occasion being witnessed for the first time by many of the town’s younger inhabitants. One of these is the reporter sent to investigate Charousek’s story. What she uncovers is terrifying and life changing. Moving and atmospheric, the gripping style of Avery’s writing delivers an excellently dark little tale... (Whispers of Wickedness)
Simon Avery's 'Bury The Carnival' opens the magazine in style with the longest story in the book; it has a fairytale feel (as in Grimm, rather than Disney), not just with it's mannequin protagonists but also a faux-Eastern European setting. But the sinister Precisemen -tools of the repressive Puritan government- give the story a contemporary twist, and the affecting protagonist and her lover invoke the reader's involvement. Highly recommended.(Suite101.com)

Avery writes with slick, chilling prose and this story will stick in my head for a while. (SFCrowsnest.com)

BIRMINGHAM NOIR: Stories from major crime writers – John Harvey, Nicholas Royle and Judith Cutler – plus a gang of dazzling noir talents The best of "New Noir": tough, dirty realism from a tough, dirty city. Stylish, subtle tales that tackle the complex realities of betrayal, redemption, ambition and love. The landscape of British crime fiction has long been ruled by London. But Birmingham Noir is set to challenge that dominance with these dark urban thrillers that will unsettle and unnerve.
‘Dreams, as one of the contributors observes, are dangerous things – and danger lurks within these pages in an impressive kaleidoscope of settings. These are stories of betrayal, of communication breakdown and obsession. Some show the human cost of losing our ethics, while others reveal how madness can lurk in the supposed safety of a shopping mall or cathedral. But there is humour here too, and an awareness that we can make our lives better. Simon Avery’s perfectly observed narrative about moving on from a broken marriage is worth the cover price alone. Birmingham’s criminal underworld and sex industry are laid bare in these entertaining, saddening and shocking pages. Lock up your daughters, sons and the family cat until you’ve learned from these stories of crime in the city.’ Carol Anne Davis

'Simon Avery's equally well-observed narrative delivers shocks from the start when a Romanian teenager finds herself forced into a life of prostitution. Her experiences are entwined with the actions of a middle-aged man whose marriage is failing. 'Once you begin to pick at a frayed thread, you find that everything unravels at a frightening speed.' alchemypress.com

'The book ends on a high note, with the brutal and emotive 'The Art of Leaving Completely' by Simon Avery... here outstanding with the picture of a marriage on the way out and a man who tries to save somebody else even though he can't save himself.' Peter Tennant

BEST BRITISH MYSTERIES Vol IV - featuring a co-authored story with Ian Faulkner,
Lost in Darkness

'Lost in Darkness" by Simon Avery and Ian R. Faulkner is a psychological tale of revenge. Charleton's girlfriend, Aimee, has been badly beaten and lies broken in the hospital. Charleton feels it is because he is black, and his rage at the people who did it manifests violently. Although the split personality/memory loss plot has been done before, Avery and Faulkner put it to good use here. What they came up with is a well-wrought crime tale that is thrilling to read.' Tangent Online

TRANSMISSIONS FROM BEYOND, the brand new podcast from TTA Press. We feature stories selected from the pages of the TTA Press magazines Interzone (science fiction & fantasy), Black Static (horror), and Crimewave (crime & mystery). New stories appear every other Monday.
http://transmissionsfrombeyond.com/
A reading (by the author) of Bury The Carnival is available now - free! - from the website or from itunes.