Tears All Over Town

It's been a while...

2010-05-19T03:46:00.002+01:00

My blog has lain dormant for six months now, so it's high time I updated. In that time I've completed my second novel, Everything Beautiful Is Far Away, that I'm hoping to find a small press publisher for. I'm enormously pleased with how it turned out, so hopefully it'll find a home soon.
I recently heard from Sharon Ring who reviewed an old story of mine that was published in Joel Lane's Beneath The Ground anthology about seven years ago. It's one of my favourite stories so it was lovely to hear someone enjoyed it after all this time. Here's the review. Hope Sharon doesn't mind me reprinting it here...

SSM Guest Review: Lost and Found by Simon Avery from Sharon Ring
May 6th, 2010
by gav.
Title: Lost and Found Author: Simon Avery Collection: Beneath The Ground Editor: Joel Lane Publisher: Alchemy PressRelease Date: 2002, although I’ve also heard that a “problem with printers” meant the release date was actually 2003.

The blurb on the back of Beneath The Ground promises “tales that explore the transition between our world and the tunnels and mines beneath”. As with any anthology, some of the tales are more successful at fulfilling this promise than others and, as we all know, “getting” a story is a very subjective thing. Two stories in this collection really stood out for me; Where Once I Did My Love Beguile by John Howard and Lost and Found by Simon Avery. It was difficult to pick just one for review but in the end I opted for Simon’s story as it fed into an old phobia of mine, the London Underground system.
Lost and Found is, at its most basic, the tale of an obscure folk singer’s descent into madness and his eventual disappearance told through his friend (who remains nameless). It is set in both the seventies, when Danny’s life falls apart, and in the early 2000’s, when his friend and Danny’s sister renew an old relationship. Simon bridges the two decades beautifully with a series of letters sent from Danny to the friend who then shares them with Danny’s sister, Sarah.
Throughout his mental breakdown Danny becomes increasingly obsessed with the London Underground system, finding himself there frequently when he wakes, and ultimately becoming convinced of its otherworldly nature to which he is invariably drawn. As his sister points out, “it was London. Somehow, once it got hold of him, it was corrosive”.
Each detail of the story crafted by Simon feeds a quietly oppressive feel to the narration. This is just another London disappearance which goes unnoticed apart from by Danny’s close friends; there are no national headlines, no public outcry, just another person lost to the city. As for Danny’s version of events, told through his letters, this is just as simply told. That otherworldly existence he glimpses then pursues just is, without any need to over-describe or fill with visceral images.
Lost and Found is a beautiful and haunting read, one which won’t easily be forgotten.
—
Sharon Ring’s blog is Dark Fiction Review

Paranormal Activity

2009-11-09T23:07:00.004Z

Against all the odds, Paranormal Actvity absolutely works. It's a genuinely scary horror movie. I'll let that sink in for a moment; when was the last time you saw a horror movie that did what it said on the tin?

Of course, horror movies (and books) should do more than scare; I at least expect a decent story as a foundation (the Saw movies can leave the room for a start), characters that I care about (Blair Witch, off you go too), and something with a degree of artistry about it (other genres can expect it, so why can't horror?)

Yes, there have been some great and good horror movies in recent years, but they are few and far between: The Orphanage, REC, Let The Right One In, The Descent... I'm sure there might be a couple more, but on the whole, the discerning horror fan has slim pickings to be honest.

So, yes against the odds, Paranormal Activity works. I hated Blair Witch Project with a passion; while I liked the concept, the execution was poor and underwhelming. It simply wasn't scary and I found the characters deeply annoying. I really didn't need or expect to find anything remotely interesting about another low-fi, mock non-fiction horror movie.

The story concerns a suburban couple, Katie and Micah, who, having recently moved in together, find themselves besieged by increasingly intrusive nighttime visits from an unseen and possibly demonic presence. As night-time eeriness is captured by a night-vision camera set up by Micah, further conversations reveal that Katie has been experiencing such hauntings for nearly two decades, since before her house burned down as a child. Katie can't escape; whatever it is is haunting her, not the house. A medium comes and goes, Micah borrows a ouija board that causes friction between the couple; then he unearths a similar story about a woman haunted and then possessed by a demon that plays on our generations' memories of seeing The Exorcist.

It's a slow and deep focused dread that first-time writer-director Oren Peli wrings from the set-up. Much of the tension is wrung from the night-time camera set-ups, focusing on the couple, their bed and the corridor beyond. Early on, you find yourself peering into the corridor, as the timecode rolls by on the camera, waiting for the jump, for the scare. The build-up is effective, almost ponderous at times, which makes the first real event all the more disturbing: As the clock spins like mad to show the passing of hours between phenomena there is the image of Katie rising from the bed and standing motionless, as if still asleep, for two hours straight, simply staring at Micah.
Soon you're dreading bed-time for the beseiged couple. Scene by scene, the claustrophobia and anxiety grows more and more palpable, and our bond with Katie and Micah stronger.
And it is genuinely unnerving. Later, the scares escalate as Katie and Micah begin to realise the inevitable: there's simply no escape.

And that's one of the great templates of horror, surely. That sense of control being lost, of events escalating beyond one's control, of despair replacing the status quo.

What really marks this out too is the believable performances of Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston (their names in reality too). They're wholly sympathetic and their set-up as a young couple is convincing enough so that a good percentage of the population can feel they could be these people. It's a classic horror set-up, and the reason Stephen King is one of the most popular writers in the world: these people could be you; this is how you might react. It's simple camp-fire horror story-telling, but its a desperately fine art to get it right.

By the time we get to the BIG scare in Paranormal Activity (and for me, it raised all the hairs on the back of my neck and left me reticent to climb into bed that night), it becomes clear that a young man with a couple of cameras and a bit of cash, filming in his own house has produced something that most horror movies from big studios cannot: a ghost train of a film that plays right into our homes and basic fears and leaves us a little bit afraid of the dark. It's just a shame that as time goes on, the exectations of the film from all these glowing reviews will doubtless diminish the impact of this brilliant little film.

So check your expectations at the door and try and see this movie soon.

Gorgeous Vintage and Deco Poster Art For UP

2009-11-03T20:44:00.006Z

...just beautiful - I hope Pixar make them commercially available as I really want the last one.

Her Fearful Symmetry

2009-11-03T01:10:00.003Z

Rather belatedly this year I caught up with Audrey Niffenegger's fabulous The Time Traveler's Wife. It had been languishing in my 'To Read' pile (actually it's more like a 'To Read Cupboard' but that's by the by) for some time, but, as the movie adaption was imminent, I thought I'd finally give it a go, then go see the movie. Well, I never got to see the movie (and it seems to have divided critics and lovers of the book alike, so I shall wait for the DVD I guess) but I devoured and adored the book. For lovers of Steven Moffat's The Silence in the Library episode of Doctor Who, there's a huge chunk of time travel mind-fudging at the start of the book that must have influenced some of that Who episode, but after a hundred pages or so of slight confusion as to just how the time travelling works, the book simply takes off and deposits you breathless and, I admit, a little teary-eyed at its end 300 pages later. It's a beautiful, elgiac bit of writing that I believe lost a huge chunk of male readership due to its Richard and Judy Bookclub tag that kind of gave it a chick-novel kind of vibe. And yes, it does play to the ladies, and yes, the movie does make it look like a shmalzt-fest, but for me it was one of the best, most fulfilling novels I'd read all year, beside the incredible The Shadow of the Wind.

I was expecting to be a little disappointed then, by Niffenegger's new book, Her Fearful Symmetry. How do you follow a book that sold by the bucket-load and has such a classic status place in a lot of people's hearts?
Well, of course, you don't. If you're writer worth your salt, you write a book that is an absolute left turn, the absolute opposite of that first book. Although what Niffenegger's new book does share with The Time Traveler's Wife is the question 'What If?' TTTW asked 'What would it be like if we could really travel in time, up and down the years of our life?' And in Her Fearful Symmetry, the question is 'What if we could come back from the dead?' They're both questions that hundreds of writers have asked down the years, but most of them are considered horror or SF writers, but Niffenegger has managed the audacious feat of being a writer who gets away with curious speculative fiction in the populist mainstream.
Admittedly, the strange, supernatural moments in Her Fearful Symmetry are couched in a novel that is at heart a leisurely paced charcter piece. The ghostly element is weaved in early on, but it takes half of the book for the reader to see where Niffenegger is heading. And it's a strange, credibility defying turn that seems to have divided the critics.
But taking into account that I loved The Time Traveler's Wife, and that although elements of Her Fearful Symmetry don't always work, I enjoyed this new book equally, if not more. I'm not entirely sure why yet (I only finished it last night), but this was one of those books that I simply couldn't put down and actively looked forward to picking up again. It was even one of those books that I started to slow down with, so as to make it last that little bit longer. That doesn't happen too often!
Here a quick blurb:
Julia and Valentina Poole, two American identical mirror-image twins in their early twenties, are bequeathed an apartment in London overlooking Highgate Cemetery by their aunt, Elspeth, who was herself the identical twin of their mother, Edie. Elspeth and Edie have not had contact for more than two decades, and as a result, the twins have never met their mysterious benefactor.
Naturally delighted, and yearning for adventure, they readily accept the bequest, even though it comes with a couple of strange conditions, the main being that their mother and father are not to set foot in the apartment. They arrive, and soon spend their time becoming accustomed to their new home, and indeed their new country and surroundings.
The apartment is on the first floor. Underneath them lives Robert, a thirtysomething writer, and guide at the cemetery who was the lover of Elspeth, and who has not yet come to terms with her death. Above them lives Martin, an obsessive compulsive crossword compiler, whose Dutch wife, Marijke, has recently returned to her home country, unable to continue living with her husband’s ever deteriorating condition. And creeping into their home comes The Little Kitten Of Death, a snow-white feline visitor from nowhere who is soon adopted by the twins as a pet albeit without it’s consent.
And into this strange brew, another companion enters. Elspeth herself, who finds herself quietly haunting the twins’ apartment, observing them for the first time as they make their new lives, and unobtrusively occupying the locked desk drawer of the desk in her old office.

What makes Her Fearful Symmetry really sing is not the speculative supernatural stuff (although that's handled with the same kind of reducing something down to its nuts-and-bolts-aplomb that Niffenegger displayed with time travel), but the quite beautifully drawn characters that inhabit the house that sits next to Highgate Cemetery.
Robert, torn between his devotion to Elspeth's memory and his attraction to Valentina, who's almost half his age; Martin, the obsessive-compulsive who can no longer leave his flat, and whose wife leaves for Amsterdam after twenty-odd years of marriage when she finds she can no longer deal with his sickness; the twins themselves, Valentina, who decides she wants to free herself of the domineering shadow of Julia; Elspeth, who discovers that although she is dead, she can exert control over all of them; and Highgate Cemetary itself - so much so that I think next time I'm in London, I shall try to visit. Niffenegger draws it with such a rich palette that it sounds irresistable.

It's a fantastic, Autumnal kind of book, brimming with atmosphere and a sense of place, and populated with flawed characters that you genuinely hope make the right decisions. Martin, in partiular with his physical rituals and emotional tics and his flat filled with boxes is an acutely observed study of OCD, and his relationship with his wife and one of the twins is worth the price of the book alone. And indeed, if the direction the book takes in its last third seems a little too audacious for some, I didn't mind too much because I was already too invested in the characters.
It's a sublime bit of writing.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

2009-10-29T02:48:00.003Z

Although we went to see Breakfast at Tiffany's a week ago now, I simply haven't had the time to write a few words about until now, as I've been concentrating on finishing up my new novel (only twenty pages or so to go!)
So, after motoring down to London last Wednesday morning and catching the Tube in, we had a mooch around the usual haunts in the city, passing the Theatre store, where John Barrowman was in the middle of a signing session for his new book (which is excellent, by the way), then passing the celeb haunt, The Ivy (on the way to the Cinema Store) and passing Andrew Lloyd Webber, then onto FP and the fabulous Fopp (where I picked up season 6 and 7 of The Shield for £8 each - we're midway through season 6 and loving it - full thoughts on the whole thing soon).

While waiting for the show to start, we saw Anna Friel arriving late for the show and then settled into our seats (dead centre and about five rows from the front). The Haymarket Theatre (which recently ran Waiting For Godot) is a beautiful old place, reeking of history and grandeur. Alec Guiness performed here, as did JOhn Gielgud, Peter O'Toole, Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman. Amazing history.
This version of Breakfast at Tiffany's is an adaption of Truman Capote's novella rather than taking its cues from the Audrey Hepburn movie, but it retains much of that movie's charm for those who haven't read the book.
Of course any adaption of Breakfast... stands and falls on the actress filling Holly Golightly's (doubtless expensive) shoes, and Anna Friel (whom I've long shamelessly lusted after) is more than capable. She's luminous and simmering with just the right amount of eroticism and charm to instantly illustrate why all the men in her world are falling over themselves to have her. Joseph Cross (who was in Milk, Flags of our Father's and Running With Scissors) is excellent too. He's very young and manages just the right balance of naievete and bitterness.
Of course, much of the publicity for the show has been focused on the fact that both Friel and Cross have scenes of nudity, and while I can take or leave the male nudity, it all feels fairly functional to the story. I admit, I may have pulled something in my eyes for the Friel nude scene as I was staring so hard, but Amanda was just glad I stayed in my seat and didn't start whooping.
Clearly it wasn't what some of the audience were expecting - a few people never came back after the interval. Perhaps they were expecting the light frothy romantic comedy of the film and not the rather darker, profanity littered story of the book.
But we loved it. It was well worth the trip down to London again to see such a high quality production. I just wish I lived a little closer; I think I could quite happily become a theatre buff if I did. We're back in November again for the (I'm guessing star-studded) closing night of La Cage Aux Folles and the Collectormania on the day after at Earls Court.

UP

2009-10-29T00:50:00.003Z

It's easy to take the genius of Pixar for granted. Every year or so, another movie comes out of their studios, and it's visually sumptuous, technically ground breaking and furnished with a script that is filled to the brim with wit and wonder and - most importantly - a very honest, human voice, untainted by the usual studio money-men and their regurgitated ideas. Pixar are all about craftmanship and creative courage. All the studios may be following in their footsteps, but really, Monsters vs Aliens, Cloudy, With A Chance of Meatballs and Ice Age 3 are nothing more than the warm up act for Pixar's newest, UP.

And while Pixar pretty much established the form of making movies for children which came smuggling all kinds of nods and winks and sly wit for the adults in the audience, with Up, they've broken their own rules and gone in a much more subversive direction. It still plays to the younger members of the audience of course, but from the first ten minutes of this beautiful film, it's clear that Pixar want to do more, reach further.

While Wall-E similarly played with the tropes of what a childrens' animated movie could do (and Wall-E for its first half was a majesterial, Kubrickian revelation, only slightly let down by its chase-filled second half), Up goes for the grown-ups throats from the off.

Putting aside the fact that Up has at its heart a bizarre Miyazaki-like character-driven story about Carl, an old man who uses a bundle of balloons to fly his house to the jungles of South America to accomplish the dream his late wife never had the chance to, this is an immensely moving piece of cinema about marriage and dreaming for someplace else.

The first five minutes which chronicle the lifetime of Carl and Ellie in a silent movie montage is hands-down one of the most beautiful, heart-breaking pieces of cinema you will see all year. It manages more emotion than most directors manage in their whole careers. The kids meet, grow into a teenage couple, they marry, buy the house they met in, work day jobs and dream of adventure in far-flung places, deal with the joys and tragedies of everyday life, then we watch them grow old, ending with Ellie's 'My Adventures' scrapbook still unfilled, dying and leaving Carl alone.

You could leave the cinema there and then and feel you'd got your money's worth.

Carl becomes a disgruntled old man, desperately clinging to his home in the face of property developers. When he's forced to give up the house and move to a retirement home, he decides to do what he and Ellie never got to do, and ties thousands of balloons to his house and sets sail for South America. And while what follows is naturally filled with the crowd pleasing Pixar fare such as a little boy-scout who happens to be on the front porch when Carl goes UP, talking dogs, mythical birds and an evil nemesis in the wilds of the South American jungle, the movie never loses sight of the huge heart of the story, and continues to wring every last drop of emotion of the journey Carl makes in memory of his wife. Seriously, certain scenes left pin-drop silence in the cinema we were in. Luckily we could all hide behind those 3D glasses.

And what 3D. Pixar have made the leap to that tech without pandering to all the usual in-your-face visuals that most of the current crop of 3D movies resort to. Instead UP is simply dripping with depth and colour and makes the absolute most of what 3D is capable of, and indeed simply becomes a tool to enhance the richness of the story. The moment that Carl's house lifts up into the sky and floats above the city is quite simply one of the most visually stunning things I've ever seen at the cinema.

Despite all this twenty-first century technical wizardry, Up is filled with a warm nostalgic glow that harkens back to the golden age of animation. But kids never had it this good; even the greatest Disney movies couldn't manage this level of laugh-out-loud wit, emotional honesty and sense of wonder. Absolutely perfect.

The Death of Bunny Munro

2009-10-19T22:16:00.002+01:00

Finished Nick Cave's second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro today. I zipped through it in a few days as its a pretty fast-paced read. Although it's full of Cave's trademark hellfire and brimstone, it's at heart the relatively small-scale odyssey of a door to door salesman who happens to also be a sex maniac. There's a rich seam of utterly absurd comedy as Bunny takes to the road with his ten year old son after his wife commits suicide. Bunny is a monster, of course; slowly going mad with visions of his dead wife and depraved fantasies involving Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavigne (whom Cave apologisesprofusely to in the acknowledgements), as well as having sex with every bored housewife he can lay his hands on. But Bunny is on the run from his life too, from the council flat his wife died in, from his dying dad and the responsibility of being a proper father to Bunny Jr.
As absurd and depraved as it gets (and it gets very depraved at times), it's also a deeply heartfelt and poignant book; utterly unsentimental but also quite moving. In many ways it's like one of Cave's better albums, able to se-saw through comedy, horror and sadness in the space of a few lines. It's one of those books that sticks around too; like a skewed version of the world that clings to you after the book is finished. Absolutely recommended.
And here below is an excerpt from YouTube of a Q&A he did in Montreal. This bit concerns his experience writing a script for Gladiator 2 (which he titled Christ-Killer). Absoutely hilarious. Would have been a whole lot better than the original film...

An update and some classic Waits

2009-10-16T23:57:00.002+01:00

So, finally back from four weeks in the non-internet wilderness following my move next door. Without the internet I've managed to finally catch up with the first season of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, some Pushing Daisies and the third season of Dexter (which while the weakest season so far, does improve as it goes along. And season 4 is shaping up much more impressively with John Lithgow as the serial killer).
I've also been working my way through a splendid unauthorised biography of Tom Waits by rock journo Barney Hoskyns. It's spurred me onto filling the gaps in my Waits collection - Small Change, Foreign Affairs, One From The Heart - and it's also inspired my next bit of fiction, which'll be a full on noir tale with all the cliches included, and populated with some strange Waitsian characters.
So with that in mind, here's a very funny interview on Letterman, along with a blistering Make It Rain from Real Gone...

Cornwall Holiday Pictures Part Two and Three: St Ives, Lands End, Doctor Who Exhibition, Padstow and Tintagel Castle

2009-09-15T00:06:00.013+01:00

After the Eden Project and various other little towns on day one, the sun really came out on day two and we headed down to St Ives, which is a beautiful little fishing village that Cornwall does really rather well. The beach was pretty crowded and we ventured out onto the sand so Amanda could paddle and I could take some photos of the boats, a few of which are reproduced here...

After that we drove down to Lands End via some seriously circutous small lanes, and before heading down to the coastal path, we had to take advantage of the Doctor Who exhibition there. We've done the Cardiff and Earls Court one, and this one held up pretty well in comparison. Some excellent exhibits there, including some Cyberman stuff from the last Christmas special, series four and crazy old Dalek Caan in an excellent Dalek room at the end. Here's some pics...

...and to Lands End. Despite the blue skies, it's seriously windy out there!

On day three we headed down to Padstow, home of chef, Rick Stein (whom I have no real knowledge of, but Amanda assured me he was a chef of note). Pretty little place, but not hugely exciting...

And then onto Tintagel, the village and castle being associated with the legends of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. It's a beautiful little village, filled with tourists from all over the world, and although the trek down to (and back up from) the ruins of the castle is back breaking work, the view is dizzying; it's all sheer clifftops and wild landscape and roaring sea far, far below. Very windy, very knackering, but well worth the trip down the lost little lanes of Cornwall. I also got a cool dragons head for mounting on the wall (it'll make sense to those of you who visit the new Avery Towers in the near future).

Cornwall Holiday Pictures Part One: The Eden Project

2009-09-13T22:49:00.009+01:00

We had an excellent week away down in Cornwall last week, and I naturally took a shedload of pictures while we were down there so here's the first batch that cover what we did and where we went. The first day was the only overcast day. The rest of the week was all blue skies and ridiculously hot weather, so we were pretty lucky considering the usual state of the British weather! It being overcast we decided to head to The Eden Project as it's all pretty much undercover and, as one of the biodomes is of a tropical/rainforest kind of heat, the cooler it was outside, the more bearable it'd be inside! That said, it was still pretty heavy going, heat-wise, but was well worth the visit. The setting, even in the dense kind of fog that surrounded the area that day, was visually stunning. The domes themselves are strangely beautiful, alien things, and you really feel like you're stepping into some science fiction landscape. Here's some pics from the day. It was difficult to get clear pictures as the lens would mist over if you left it open for too long!

I liked this pic of 'The Seed', a structure in the central area, purely because it put me in mind of something from a Kubrick movie. It's about 20-30ft high, and again, feels deeply alien. Whoever comissions the art and sculptures at the Eden Project is someone after my own slightly twisted heart and mind. There's some splendidly weird stuff as a bonus to the spectacle of the biodomes.

And this was very cool. Constructed out of 'found items' such as washing machines, vaccum cleaners and PCs, it was a huge, huge structure that put me in mind of something from the heady days of 2000AD...
In the Mediterranean dome, my eye was caught by these stunning, almost Barker-esque sculptures by Tim Shaw of Bacchanal Dionysus rites - scenes of divine madness, possession, sacrifice and orgy. It didn't seem to find favour with the older folk in the dome, but I absolutely loved them, and gave me some ideas for my next novel which I'll be researching soon.
Next post will be St Ives and Land's End, which may contain scenes of a Doctor Who nature, as there was an exhibition that, being the geeks we are, we had to visit...

Ukraine Has Got More Talent...

2009-09-04T03:18:00.002+01:00

This is really quite astonishingly good and puts to shame the standard of our variation on this show. Kseniya Simonova, the winner of Ukraine's Got Talent doesn't do dog tricks or karaoke versions of Mariah Carey songs. Instead, set to music, Simonova depicts - by drawing in sand - the invasion of Ukraine by Germany in World War II. And if that doesn't sound all that impressive, you'll change your mind pretty quickly. It's eight mesmerising minutes, ending with the message "you are always near." Watch it and despair at what Britain parades as 'talent' in these kind of shows...

How I Met Your Mother Comes To E4

2009-08-27T22:17:00.005+01:00

Mark it in your diaries: September 4th. The best US sitcom since Frasier is finally coming to the UK (albeit four seasons behind). After repeating Friends until I can just about quote every line of all ten seasons, E4 have finally bought How I Met Your Mother. BBC bought the first season a few years ago and killed it stone dead by showing it at 3 in the morning, and I only in the past year or so rediscovered it.
At first it seems like little more than a Friends clone, but by the end of season one, you will - I personally guarantee this - be utterly addicted and invested in the characters. It's frequently hilarious, always has a least one perfect quotable for the rest of the week moment, and, as it goes on becomes as perfectly poignant as Frasier used to be.
There are far too many highlights to name: The Slap Bet, The Bro Code, Marshall and Lily's wedding, Robin Sparkles...
And nothing can prepare you for Barney Stinson. He's Legen- wait for it - dary.
Here's a clip from one of my favourite episodes...

Harvey

2009-08-27T02:15:00.003+01:00

"Years ago, my mother used to say to me, she'd say: 'In this world, Elwood,' she always used to call me Elwood. 'In this world, Elwood, you must be oh, so smart or oh, so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. And you can quote me."
A story about an alcoholic dreamer with a giant invisible white rabbit as a friend. Sell that these days and think about all the ways that Hollywood could (and would) spoil it.
Luckily we'll always have Harvey, possibly James Stewart's finest hour (and considering his incredible career, that's really saying something), and one of the most gentle, magical, moving and downright luminous films ever made.
I don't need to say anything more about this film. I loved it as a child and, seeing it again tonight, I loved it even more. One of the most wonderful and beguiling movies ever made.
And Stewart's speech about sitting in a bar and meeting strangers is a sublime reminder for the creatively bankrupt movie makers of Hollywood about the power of words...

"Harvey and I sit in the bars... have a drink or two... play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they're saying, "We don't know your name, mister, but you're a very nice fella." Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We've entered as strangers - soon we have friends. And they come over... and they sit with us... and they drink with us... and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they've done and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that's envy, my dear. There's a little bit of envy in the best of us. "

John Hughes

2009-08-07T03:07:00.004+01:00

I always thought John Hughes might have a classic comeback movie in him one day, but alas it's not to be. Despite some diminishing returns late in his career, he was nonetheless responsible for some classic comedy: The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Uncle Buck and National Lampoon's Vacation (both sublime comedy films in my estimation), She's Having A Baby (an often overlooked gem of a film) and Planes, Trains and Automobiles (which is one of those films that I could watch again and again.)
I can't think of a better tribute than a clip from my favourite Hughes movie.

They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To...

2009-08-05T03:00:00.012+01:00

It's true. They really don't make them like they used to. After seeing some pretty lame fare (and to be honest, I can't even recall what it was that set me off) I decided that it was high time to go back and either rediscover some old classic movies that I'd seen as a young man (and probably didn't fully appreciate), or have my mind blown by one that I'd never managed to see.

I've devoted a shelf of late to these classics, as they've begun to monopolise my movie watching interests. Why sit down to something pedestrian and disappointing (as, lets be honest, is pretty much 90% of formulaic A to B to C modern movie making these days) when you can put on a movie starring Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn, and be pretty much 100% assured of a thumping good hour and a half?

I'm not going to review them in any great detail, as movies like these have pages and pages devoted to their charms in film theory books and websites already. So a list of the delights we've savoured over the past few weeks...

North By Northwest

There's a rapidly expanding place for Hitchcock movies on my shelf. I've already got the classic Hollywood era films - Rear Window, The Birds, the utterly sublime (and my personal favourite) Vertigo, Notorious (which is in the to-watch pile for the next week) and Psycho (which I just got hold of, and I simply could watch every day). But North by Northwest is one of Hitch's films that I never could get on with for some reason.

But having obtained it for a couple of quid this week off Amazon, and re-watching it, I realised two things: One: It's bloody awesome. Two: Cary Grant - they just don't make movie stars as luminous as him these days do they? and Three: I realised that whenver I'd seen it previously, I'd missed the first part of the movie and was always subsequently confused as to what the hell was going on. With this realisation out of the way, I sat back, enjoyed it and discovered it was easily up there with Hitch's greatest movies. It just glows with genius and Hollywood magic.

Doctor Zhivago

A confession: until last week I'd never seen a David Lean movie all the way through. I'd seen bits and pieces of Bridge On The River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Zhivago as a child, but never really had the patience for them. I was young and to be fair, they are all at least three days long. The Director's Cut of Lawrence of Arabia that I picked up last week will take you a fortnight to get through, and I'm only just joking. They're long.

But I set three hours aside last week and sat back with Doctor Zhivago, which of course, is sumptuous, sprawling and self indulgent. But those three hours simply fly by. Lean was a master craftsman. Even with a rather diluted view of Russian history in service to an epic love story, it's a quite staggering piece of cinema for its detail and period set-pieces. Julie Christie, Omar Shariff, Rod Steiger, Alec Guiness and Tom Courtney: five perfect reasons to watch this movie alone. Amazing. I felt richer for having seen it. And I bet you don't get that with Transformers: Rise of the Fallen...

Funny Face

Put an Audrey Hepburn film on and I'll be entertained for 90 minutes. I've had this one knocking around for a while, but hadn't quite had the enthusiasm for it as I'd had for Breakfast at Tiffany's or Roman Holiday (probably my favourite film of all time at this present moment) or Sabrina.

It's a musical for one thing. I'm not a huge fan of musicals but I'm warming to them slowly. And I'd never seen Fred Astaire in the proper sense. I'd seen bit and pieces of him with Ginger Rogers as a child, but never really seen his work.

But after seeing Funny Face, I'm getting closer to liking musicals. This is filled with exquisite Gershwin songs and quite simly stunning choreography. I knew Astaire could dance, but my god, I didn't realise just how good he was. Literally jaw-droppingly good. He makes Strictly Come Dancing pro's look like me dancing. Although he knocking on for 60, while Hepburn was in her 20's, they still manage to make this majestic musical comedy romance work, and work beautifully. An absolute feast for the senses.

The Third Man

Another movie that I knew all about but had never seen. I watched this last night, and the imagery is still swarming around my head. The greatest British movie ever made? Quite possibly. There are few films quite so noir as this one. Orson Welles has less than half of the movie in screentime, but his prescence fills the movie. His entrance is sublime movie magic. He's charm and reptile all rolled into one. The cinematography casts post-war Vienna in a nightmarishly angled light (or darkness) and the soundtrack of Anton Karas's zither is one of the absolute great soundtracks. Filled with tension and some sublime set pieces, this is absolutely the classic everyone says it is. Shame about the 90 minute documentary on the second disc though. It drags with a pretentious and ponderous weight. Everything that was said could have been said in 30 minutes.

Sunset Boulevard

Any student of cinema, amateur or otherwise, should point to Billy Wilder as one of the greatest (and subtly subversive) movie directors of all time.

Sunset Boulevard is generally regarded as the best film ever made about Hollywood. This story of a faded movie star and a struggling screenwriter is, like most of Wilder's work, absolutely timeless. He was a writer and director who was years ahead of his time. Consider a career that covers Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Sabrina, Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard (to name but a few). This man was a genius. Everything I've seen of his stuns me, and he's beginning to woo me away from Hitchcock as the auteur to collect. Gloria Swanson ("I'm ready for my close-up") is a washed up actress, playing a washed up actress. Her servant is a washed up director playing a washed up director. And William Holden is a washed up actor, playing a washed up screenwriter (after being spurned by Audrey Hepburn, he turned to drink and barely recovered, save for this career defining performance). This Special Edition has some excellent docs and features on it too. Well worth a couple of quid off Amazon.

I haven't been keeping up with the blog of late as I'm still ploughing through the short novel I'm writing (150 pages and counting so far!), but I'll try to cover the next batch of movies I have waiting in the wings: Paris When It Sizzles, Notorious, Lawrence of Arabia, Eyes Without A Face, Brief Encounter, Charade and The Barefoot Contessa.

The Death of Bunny Munro

2009-07-10T00:17:00.002+01:00

This sounds fantastic. Nick Cave's new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro is to be released in September, and the man himself is doing a series of events comprising music and readings to promote it.

The Audiobook looks very interesting too, as it features a specially composed soundtrack by Cave and Warren Ellis, using a '3D Spatial mix'. The excerpts on the website sound cool. Very twisted black humour. Definitely one not to miss...

Definitely Maybe

2009-07-09T01:21:00.002+01:00

I like the occasional romantic comedy every now and then, especially when they're as good as Definitely Maybe. Coming from the Working Title stable (Love Actually, Notting Hill etc) Definitely Maybe manages to side-step all those usual A-Z cliches of Rom-Coms, while still being sweet and funny and managing to tick all the boxes any casual film-goer would expect.
I've always been a fan of Ryan Reynolds, from way back in his sit-com days when he starred in a show called Two Guys and A Girl, which never really got a decent airing over here in the UK, and still hasn't ever seen a release on DVD anywhere. It started out as a Friends clone, but evolved into a very funny ensemble show, and also introduced the world to the charms of Mr Nathan Fillion. But Reynolds always stood out, and I expected him to have a huge movie career. But he's been saddled with some pretty shoddy vehicles over the years.
Definitely Maybe kind of slipped under the radar upon release, possibly due to its slightly-smarter-than-the-average-bear credentials. But it's an excellent film.
The story is mainly told in flashback, as Reynolds' daughter in the film (played by the wonderful Little Miss Sunshine's Abigal Breslin) quizzes him as to how he met his mother, who he’s in the process of getting a divorce from. Reynolds' tale follows three failed romances - with college sweetheart Emily (Elizabeth Banks), free spirit April (Isla Fisher), and ambitious intellectual Summer (Rachel Weisz) - and the film holds back on revealing the answer to its mysteries until pretty much the final reel.
It's not laugh out loud funny, but it carries a little more weight than your standard rom-com and by the end leaves you feeling that you've seen something with a little more substance than usual. The cast are excellent, particularly Isla Fisher, (who pretty much labours under the weight of being Sasha Baron Cohen's other half these days), and Reynolds repartee with Breslin is beautifully played. Kevin Kline (who plays an alcolholic writer also has a splendid part to play in the proceedings. It's unconventional, bittersweet and much, much better than you'd expect from the writer of Wimbledon and Bridget Jones 2. Highly recommended.

Torchwood: Children of Earth

2009-07-08T00:25:00.002+01:00

Well, it might have taken three seasons (even if the last half of season two was rather good) but Torchwood has finally stepped out of the shadow of Doctor Who and become the show it always just needed some fine tuning to be.
Two episodes in and it's fast paced, witty and finally feels like a show that gives US TV a run for its money. It was a clever ploy by the Beeb to air the show on its flagship channel with the week long event that it deserves, and return the ubiquitous Mr Barrowman to what he does best: being killed multiple times and getting his arse out...
High points so far: the Torchwood-mobile being stolen by Chavs, the creepy Wyndham-esque WE ARE COMING, and the very funny WE WANT A PONY riff on it tonight, the scene between Jack and a daughter who looks older than he does, the regeneration of Jack in episode two, and the curious allure of Eve Myles running around with two guns...
A slightly Scooby-Doo escape in episode two did nothing to diminsh the fun of it all. It's hokum but it's utterly wonderful hokum.

One Time Directors

2009-07-05T19:49:00.002+01:00

A quick question for anyone who's out there. There's part of my current novella that involves a director who only made one film due to box office failure and critical indifference, and I was trying to compile a list of similar directors for inclusion in the story. Most cinephiles know about Charles Laughton and Night of the Hunter which failed mightily upon release, but is now generally regarded (rightfully) as a classic, but are there any others?
Any help would be gratefully received!

Lenka - The Show

2009-07-02T22:45:00.002+01:00

Very much enjoying this lady's new album. In the vein of Regina Spektor (but with a dash of some world music influences), Aussie TV actress Lenka's The Show is a fabulously catchy summer record. The title song had featured on numerous adverts, and the video is suitably kooky. It's a crowded market these days (and I must admit there are too many crazy singer songwriter girls around these days), but this is fab.

It's Been A While, I Know...

2009-06-28T03:49:00.005+01:00

I've been a little absent from my blog for a while now. Admittedly it's for good reasons. In the past month I've finally completed all the work on my novel and started sending it out to agents. Thus far I've had three rejections, but there's plenty of agents and most of them only take on one or two authors a year; throw in the present current financial climate and it's a uphill struggle.
To offset any downside to the rejections, I've started work on a new novella, Everything Beautiful Is Far Away which I'm currently 40-odd pages into. It's going extremely well too. The writing feels good to me and a niggling problem with some of the 'weird stuff' was rectified this morning with one of those 'eureka' moments. I had to get out of bed to make some notes and now the core of the story has some much needed internal consistency. Even the weird stuff needs internal consistency...

Aside from that, I have a lot of plotting done for another full length novel (should the first one not find a home, I'd like a back up book to be ready to go), as well as notes for a follow up to the novel that out in agent-world.

In between bouts of writing, I'm also enjoying the Wimbledon this year. Tennis is the only sport I can stand to watch without lapsing into a coma. All those Russian female players certainly aid the enjoyment too. Plus we finally have a Brit who can play. Andy Murray absolutely slaughtered Troicki today on Centre Court...

I'm currently half way through Carlos Ruiz Zafon's excellent The Shadow of the Wind. This was a huge Spanish bestseller about a 'Cemetery of Forgotten Books' in Barcelona, and the mystery of an author's life and death. It's a great book; deeply evocative and full of mystery and atmosphere.

And on the less cerebral side of life, I'm currently enjoying Dead Space on the XBox - hugely entertaining and downright scary stuff on a monster filled space station. Whack on the surround sound at night and this is jump out of your seat good. Looks beautiful too. I've also picked up TopSpin 3 too, which is an excellent Tennis sim - much more fun than Virtua Tennis - and a lot less effort than actually playing tennis...

And we watched Priceless tonight. An fantastic French comedy starring the luminous Audrey Tatou. She plays a scheming opportunist who dates rich older men on the French Riviera purely for their money. When she mistakes a shy bartender (the fanbulous comic talent, Gad Elmaleh) for a millionaire, this lovely movie unfolds like a modern day Audrey Hepburn movie. Tatou is gorgeous and the film shimmers with French Riviera heat. And it's absolutely hilarious. I recommend it highly.

The Dark Angel - Camille O' Sullivan at the Town Hall

2009-06-04T00:13:00.003+01:00

Daily Telegraph: "The new queen of Cabaret...When she sings it's as though her breath is soaked in paraffin; one spark, and the whole room would ignite"
Next time Camille O'Sullivan comes around to Birmingham EVERYONE I know has to come. Tonight's Dark Angel show was more than just a gig; it was Cabaret of the darkest kind, it was frequently hilarious, and took the term 'audience partcipation' to its absolute limit!
Having heard how O'Sullivan likes to bring the show to the crowd, I decided to book tickets that although right in the centre, was a 'safe' three rows back. Alas, when we got there, we discovered that the row in front of us was purely for her to prowl across and then jump over... we were right in the firing line! By the second song, she was amongst us, sitting on laps, talking to us, taunting us and in my case, ruffling hair and enjoying the look of fear on my face...
But it was incredible. I'd go as far to say that it was one of the best gigs I've ever been to. I, of course, was a captive audience: she sang Jacques Brel (My Death for the starter), Nick Cave (Little Water Song, and her stunning interpretation of The Ship Song for the finale), Tom Waits (All The World Is Green and Misery Is The River of the World), as well as a staggeringly emotive version of Hurt, a very dark version of Mack The Knife (in the original German, no less), and an impromptu rendition of Nick Drake's River Man (that they'd rehearsed once and completely nailed).
The intimacy of the Town Hall - and the fact that we were front and centre - made it feel like you were transported to the dark and unpredictable 30's Weimar Berlin. It's part West End show, part absurdist comedy and pure burlesque. To cover songs like Brel's Amsterdam and Bowie's Five Years, and make them entirely her own is no mean feat. It was absolutely stunning.
At the end, she and her band filed off the stage singing the final refrain of Cave's The Ship Song, and then out into the foyer. And afterward, she even waited to meet everyone, sign CDs and talk about the songs and the show, and was a delight to meet.
And as I said before, next time EVERYONE is coming. Front and centre. I think it's the only way...

... and as an example of that 'audience participation' thing, here's a YouTube clip of just that...

Franklyn

2009-06-01T03:45:00.002+01:00

Although this escaped into the world with only lukewarm reviews, I finally managed to catch up with Franklyn tonight, and enjoyed it immensely. It's admittedly not for everyone. Taking place in modern day London, as well as a the dystopian future Meanwhile City (where church and state are one), Gerald McMorrow's feature film debut deserves to be celebrated, not just because it's a pretty satisfying story that refuses to explain where it's going until it's good and ready, but also because it's nice to see a new Brit movie maker who can make something as visionary as established fantasy movie makers like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton, but on a minimal budget.
While the aetheist vigilante Ryan Phillipe wears a hollow eyed mask in search of his nemesis, The Individual in Meanwhile City, in a more prosaic London, jilted groom, Sam Riley goes in search of his childhood sweetheart, Bernard Hill searches for his estranged war damaged son, and Eva Green makes video installations of herself comitting suicide.
It's an audacious (and sometimes a little bit pretentious) bit of storytelling; a scattered jigsaw of pieces that gradually begin to form a satisfyingly complete picture, while playing with comic book mythology and the notion of perception and fantasy.
The design of Meanwhile City is a ruined gothic delight, the acting is subtle and the writing sensitive and low key. I hope that despite the somewhat muted response to the movie, McMorrow can follow Franklyn up with more of the same. We need more Brit directors with this kind of vision. It's interesting to note that McMorrow started out as a runner on the movie Hardware; there's a hint of that DIY spirit that Richard Stanley started out with in Franklyn. Lets hope McMorrow doesn't end up with such a disastrous career...

Jonathan Carroll

2009-05-15T02:46:00.003+01:00

As a side-post to the last one, I started re-reading Jonathan Carroll's Land of Laughs again the other day, when I realised that the aforementioned novella was going to similar places as that wonderful book. Just to make sure that no fictional toes were stepped on.
And I'd forgotten just how brilliant that book was. Of course, most of Carroll's books are wonderful, uncategorizable flights of fictional genius, but Land of Laughs was most people's point of entry into his world, and it remains one of his absolute best and the template for much of his work: a smart, funny, likable narrator, a sparklingly perfect woman and a romance that unfolds, and then things get weird. Dogs talk in their sleep weird.
Of late, I started to fall out of love with Carroll's books purely for the reason that the madness seems to start too early in his recent stuff; in the early books he took his time with the romance and introducing a normal world and then turned it upside down. I've tried to read White Apples and The Wooden Sea several times and just can't get into them (although I'll doubtless try again).
To that end, I've embedded this audio interview with Carroll from the Barnes and Noble website, as it's an excellent interview. I had the good fortune to meet Carroll a good ten or twelve years ago now in - of all places - Swansea. I was with Rog Peyton for a horror convention, and Rog knowing Carroll, I was introduced to him. I've never met another writer who seemed to have such an aura about them; even other authors were falling over themselves to introduce themself and looking sort of awestruck.
He arrived with a beautiful woman that Rog didn't seem to think was his wife. He wafted about the halls, giving off the whiff of an old Hollywood star; in short we were all under the influence of the magic of his books - he brought it with him somehow.
On the Sunday afternoon I took my chance to talk with him. We were in a crowded room and although our eyes didn't meet across it, no one else seemed to be able to summon up the nerve to talk with him. So I did. And we talked. And talked. And talked. During that hour of one to one, he told me about his father, Sidney Carroll, about his writing habits, about Vienna, and about his lunches with Harrison Ford and Oliver Stone (who'd both intended to make movies of his books). I in turn felt impelled to tell him about the time I was reading Bones of the Moon; it was deep in the middle of a very harsh British winter; I had taken the bus home in the snow from work with about a hundred pages of Bones to read. About a mile from my house, the bus finally gave up amongst the drifts of snow, just as I'd finished. Anyone who's ever read the book will tell you what an emotionally affecting ending that book has and I was in tears. I had to surreptitiously wipe my eyes before we all disembarked and started the trek on foot. He was enormously pleased to hear the story.
When I looked around after an hour, I realised that a lot of people had that look of why am I not talking to Carroll? I probably wouldn't be able to do it now, so I'm glad I got the chance. It's good when your heroes are more than you expect.
Here's the link...

A novella and reasons to hassle me...

2009-05-15T02:13:00.003+01:00

In the course of bringing all the strands of a recent idea together for what will probably be a novella, I've been gathering various (and very disparate) books and research materials for it. The first seed of the idea began a couple of years ago while we were holidaying in Devon; we were in Ilfracombe at the time, which is one of those old, faded (but still deeply pretty) Victorian seaside towns. I realised that I wanted to set a story there, possibly in one of those old, dilapidated guesthouses, and probably in the vein of Don't Look Now. I wrote it down, along with a few notes and left it to percolate in the recesses of my brain.
At some point I've wanted to write a fictionalised version of the Carry On ensemble, as they've long fascinated me; Kenneth Williams in particular. And Williams at some point became a key figure in the aforementioned story idea. The camp raconteur with the acid tongue, and a faded Victorian seaside town. That's all I had for a long time.
Then a couple of weeks ago, the idea seemed to want to come out; ideas do that sometimes. They're like babies; they've come to term and here they come, ready or not. So I started taking notes, involving spiritualists and little children and the past, and suddenly the story was taking shape, and then wanting to be a novella when I discovered there was a burgeoning market for them (no money, but a market just the same). Then a little side-note to add some colour suggested something else, and I ended up discarding a lot of the plot and going elsewhere.
I ordered a book of Kenneth Williams diaries, and an annotated volume of the complete Lewis Carroll as Dodgson and little Alice were taking over the story too.
I'm hoping I can get this off the ground in the next couple of weeks as I've written nothing since completing the novel. Hence this post. Forcing myself to feel bad if I don't get this story about Alice and Carroll and Williams and the Muses in a faded seaside town done. Hassle me about it if you know me. Really. Hassle me about the novel too while you're at it...

Star Trek

2009-05-10T19:29:00.002+01:00

There's little I can add to the generally across the board love for the Star Trek franchise's reboot by J.J. Abrams. I'm certainly not going to disagree with any of it. It's a fantastic blockbuster movie, made even more impressive by the eye-popping IMAX cinema experience.
The young cast are excellent. Quinto's Spock is as perfect a piece of casting as everyone expected, as is Karl Urban's spot-on 'Bones' McCoy. Chris Pine, wisely side-stepping a Shatner caricture is also absolutely excellent, playing his Kirk as defiant, rebellious and heroic and promising to only get more confident and comfortable in the role as the franchise continues. In fact all of the classic characters get a fair crack at the whip - the young Sulu and Chekov play on some old series tropes and come out well, as does Pegg's Scotty, who delivers the classic Doohan lines with relish.
The story manages to straddle the old Trek values and cliches with a knowing wink and also serves up a huge effects-laden blockbuster that barrels along at break-neck pace. This is, of course, no mean feat. Re-imagining a forty year old show for a much more clued-up generation while retaining its charm, character and look is a real achievement. It's hard these days to be really swept up by the blockbuster movie, as there's just so many of them, but the new Trek is two hours of exhilarating, unalloyed FUN. Fantastic.

The Witnesses Are Gone

2009-05-06T02:12:00.004+01:00

...and speaking of Joel Lane, I just ordered his new novella, The Witnesses Are Gone from PS Publishing tonight.

Here's the blurb:

The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the underworld in all the wrong places. Martin Swann, its narrator, moves into an old house and finds a box of videocassettes in the garden shed. One of them has a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by a little-known French director, Jean Rien.

Martin's search for Rien's other films, and for a way to understand them, draws him away from his home and his lover into a shadow realm of secrets, rituals and encroaching decay. An encounter with a schizoid film journalist in Gravesend leads to a drug-fuelled vision in Paris – and finally to the Mexican desert where a grim revelation awaits him.

The Witnesses Are Gone updates the Orpheus myth for a world losing touch with reality. Blending supernatural horror with eroticism and warped comedy, it takes a look behind the screen on which our collective nightmares play.

It can be found here at PS Publishing. Sounds fantastic. I'll post a review once I've read it.

Also available (but a little more expensive at $40) is a new short story collection from Ex Occidente Press, by the title of The Terrible Changes.

I may try and get hold of one at some point as it looks like a nice selection of 25 years of Lane horror, and has an absolutely tremendous cover that feels very reminsicent of the old Arkham House Lovecraft hardcovers.

Beneath The Ground and Lost and Found - A new review of an old book...

2009-05-05T21:50:00.003+01:00

Some time ago I contributed a short story called Lost and Found for Joel Lane's Beneath The Ground anthology, which after some delays was published in 2003 by Alchemy Press. It remains one of my favourite short stories as it references a couple of subjects that have long been close to my heart: the music of Nick Drake and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. To be able to merge the two into some kind of cohesive piece of fiction is one of my proudest achievements. Sometimes you look back on old work and you recall where and who you were when you wrote it, and see shortcomings both in your life and your work, but I think Lost and Found still holds up even now. It being for Joel Lane, who inspired and encouraged me right from the start, I felt an obligation to give him the absolute best that I could, and I think I did.
I bring all this up purely because I was pointed toward a recent review of Beneath the Ground by D.F.Lewis here

Lost and Found
This substantial story continues the river of people on the London Underground from the previous story, each story complementing and enlightening the other. I can't do this story justice. It is teeming with images that coalesce: an obsession with the London Underground finally bearing fruit as a religious epiphany with a presence that overhangs us all as well as subsuming us; a subtle narrative trick of narrators narrating being narrated in various layers of collusiveness and non-collusiveness; relationships both sibling and sexual; loss, failure, amputation, Leonard Cohen... but I was listening to Goldfrapp's 'Felt Mountain' duing the reading of this story and it imbued everything with a gorgeous sadness... "'It was like a cathedral,' he wrote. Amongst the stalagmite basins and the stalactite pillars, he could hear the sound of something like prayer. He was terrified and in awe." There are letters, too, a stack of letters. This story would not have worked in the email age. I feel as if I cannot fix this story in the kiln. It's far too diffusive - like music straight into the veins. Like trying to shape origami from air (to pinch an image from the story). Or as if trying to rediscover a place... "'It was one of those anonymous East End streets,' he wrote. 'Concrete gardens. Children playing in the road. A chip shop at one end, an off-licence at the other. It was the kind of place you'd never find twice.'"

It's nice after all these years to see that people are still discovering the anthology and the story. Strange too at this point while I'm about to start working on a short horror story that feels like it'll have a similar 'vibe' to Lost And Found. Perhaps someone's trying to tell me something...

A Persistence of Vision - Theodore Roszak's Flicker

2009-04-28T21:29:00.002+01:00

What initially strikes you about Flicker is, quite apart from its cultural prescience (and it was published in 1992) is its similarity thematically with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. But while there are shadowy conspiracies, paranoia and Gnosticism, Flicker contains no car chases, cliff-hangers or narrow escapes.
Roszak at the time was better known for his sociology texts and for allegedly coining the term 'counterculture'; subsequently Flicker is a slow-burn - literary, analytical, comtemplative and a deeply, deeply seductive piece of writing.
Beginning in the 50's, Jonathan Gates, a young film scholar gradually discovers that the works of an all-but forgotten German film-maker, Max Castle are a window to an ancient hidden conspiracy, the ongoing work of Cathar religious heretics.
Gates finds himself under the tutelage of the older, analytical Clare Swann, a woman running a mildewed art-house cinema in L.A. and who likes to use film criticism as a sex aid. A "frenzied cerebral-genital curriculum". Together they unearth more of the mystery of the enigmatic Castle. To avoid the Nazi's Castle fled to Hollywood and found himself knocking out low grade horror and exploitation fare. After Castle was lost at sea near the end of the war, Castle's movies slid into obscurity. When they discover one of the 'lost' Castle movies, Gates slowly starts to realise there is more to his movies than meets the eye - literally. There are movies within his movies, something hidden within the 'flicker'...

There was in Castle’s films a genuine horror, one that froze through to the bone. At no point could I have said precisely where the film’s power lay—except that I was sure it was nothing I’d consciously seen that produced the effect. Rather, it was as if somewhere behind my eyes, another part of me was observing a different world, one in which the vampire and his victim were real, the supernatural events were real, the blasphemy was real.

Of course the subject of subliminal imagery has cropped up in many movies over the years: the skull over laying Anthony Perkins face in Psycho, the devils head in The Exorcist, and of course any amount of subliminal messages lurking behind modern day advertising. But that's a whole other conspiracy for another day.

Over the course of 600+ pages, Roszak very deliberately builds up a grandiose conspracy involving Gnostic dualists, Catholic persecution and an impending apocalypse that manages to convince purely because he's taken his sweet time about building up a rich fantasia of characters and places. There's a deep abiding love for cinema too, directors, actors, Hollywood trivia and an almost masturbatory detail for media theory. Orson Welles makes a cameo after it's established that Castle was on set for Citizen Kane, and was responsible for many of the innovations in the movie; indeed there's a wonderful overlap of fiction and actual movie fact in Flicker that you constantly find yourself wanting to rush to Wikipedia in order to tease apart the two in more obscure refrerences.

The subliminal 'movies within movies' is a seductive idea too; aside from the more well-known examples as noted earlier, it makes you wish for a real life equivalent of Castle's movies. Readers of the novel will know each other by the quickening of their pulse at the mention of a 'sallyrand', and I'll say no more.

Alas in the final 200 pages or so of the book, Roszak loses focus to an extent as he turns his attention from classic film appreciation to modern day movie making. The conspiracy takes centre stage and the characters slip out of focus somewhat. And for all Roszak's clear and abiding love of the golden age of cinema, his view of more modern fare makes him sound like an old curmudgeon. The ending too, while admittedly quite peverse, is something of a let-down after the comtemplative and academic stance of much of the novel. It feels like the denoument of a completely different, slightly more sensationalistic book.

That aside I can say that I did adore the book. It's rich, funny, beautifully written and filled to the brim with ideas. And books like that don't come along all that often.

Apparently Darren Aronofsky and Fight Club screenwriter JimUhls were connected with the book for a while, but it appears to have slipped through the cracks for the time being. Although Flicker would be a tough call for most directors, I can easily imagine Aronofsky getting to grips with the book's complexities and playing with the idea of Castle's subliminal movies within movies. Maybe one day.

Next up is Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road...

STENDEC

2009-04-14T01:17:00.005+01:00

The memory is a funny thing. Years ago when I was quite young, I used to collect re-prints of 50's comic books published by Marvel before Stan Lee went on to create Spider-Man/Fantastic Four/X-Men etc. They went under the banner of Atlas Comics and had titles like Tales of Suspense, Strange Worlds and Tales to Astonish, and usually contained short comic book tales akin to Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. At an impressionable age, they really blew my mind and remain a delight. In fact I started to track them down on ebay to see if they were as good as I recalled, and they were. They were also probably my first exposure to the writing talents of Stan 'The Man' Lee and the wonderfully weird world of artist Steve Ditko.

But that isn't really where the post is going. Tonight after watching an episode of the recently obtained boxset of Supernatural (a show that has inexpicably slipped under my radar for four seasons, and is really rather fantastic), I was reminded of a story I read when I was probably no more than six years old in one of those Atlas Comics reprints. It purported to be a true story of the Stardust Airliner that vanished from the skies mid-flight in 1947. I don't recall the details by now but what I do remember is the final panel that recounted the final radio message from the Stardust minutes before it vanished; it was

ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 [standard time] STENDEC

The meaning of the word STENDEC has never been conclusively explained, the comic book told me.

Somewhat bizarrely the word STENDEC has stuck with me for over thirty years. I've forgotten the detail of people's faces, names, dates and experiences, but STENDEC stuck with me. When this episode of Supernatural concerning a demon causing a series of plane crashes begun, STENDEC suddenly popped into my head for the first time in a few years, and as the internet was at hand, I typed it into Google, expecting some seriously random results.

But it turns out that that story in a reprint of a fifties comic was based on an actual event, and finally after thirty years the mystery of the word opened up for me again.

This is from a BBC site concerning a Horizon programme about the missing Stardust...

On August 2nd 1947, a British civilian version of the wartime Lancaster bomber took off from Buenos Aires airport on a scheduled flight to Santiago. There were 5 crew and 6 passengers on board the plane - named "Stardust". But Stardust never made it to Santiago. Instead it vanished when it was apparently just a few minutes from touchdown. One final strange morse code radio message - "STENDEC" - was sent, but after that nothing more was heard from the plane.

Despite a massive search of the Andes mountains no trace of the plane was ever found. For 53 years the families of those who disappeared have not known what happened to their loved ones.

But earlier this year the plane suddenly reappeared on a glacier high up in the Andes, more than 50 km’s from the area where the plane was last reported. In February this year the Argentine army arranged a major expedition to visit the crash site beneath the massive Tupangato peak (6800m). Their aim was to bring back the human remains which had been found at the site, so that an attempt could be made at identifying them. The expedition also offered a unique opportunity for crash investigators to see if they could finally explain what happened to the ill-fated plane.

The expedition discovered the plane and some human remains, and explained much of the mystery surrounding the Stardust's disappearance: the high altitude 'jetstream' in all probability caused the Stadust to veer from its course and collide with Mount Tupangato; the plane then became buried in the glacier, travelling downhill under the influence of gravity until it reached a warmer zone, and the ice began to melt. Fifty years later, the Stardust had revealed its secrets.
All save for one: STENDEC.
For a long time it became part of the tapestry of UFO conspiracy theories (and becoming the name of a Spanish UFO magazine); but of course, once the Stardust was discovered, we could be fairly certain that little green men had nothing to do with it. If I recall correctly, that Atlas story certainly indicated the UFO angle, and was probably why it captured my imagination at an early age; who doesn't love a UFO story when they're a kid?
In 1947 the official report into Stardust’s disappearance had this to say on the subject of STENDEC:
The 17.41 signal was received by Santiago only 4 minutes before the ETA. The Chilean radio operator at Santiago states that the reception of the signal was loud and clear but that it was given out very fast. Not understanding the word "STENDEC" he queried it and had the same word repeated by the aircraft twice in succession. A solution to the word "STENDEC" has not been found. From this time on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was made with the control tower at Santiago. All further calls were unanswered.

Type STENDEC into Google and you'll find a multitude of theories:

STENDEC is an anagram of DESCENT. Variations suggested that the crew might have been suffering from hypoxia (lack of oxygen) as the Lancastrian was unpressurised and the plane was flying at 24000 feet, which would have led the radio operator to scramble the message. Other explanations for the appearance of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic radio operator and/or receiver in Santiago, and playfulness on behalf of Stardust’s radio operator.
The radio operator meant to say Stardust. STENDEC and Stardust have some similarities both in Morse code and English.
Various people came up with intriguing, imaginative and sometimes amusing messages based on using STENDEC as a series of initials: Hence we have:"Santiago tower message now descending entering cloud" (or "Santiago tower aircraft now descending entering cloud")"Stardust tank empty no diesel expected crash""Systems to the end navigation depends entirely on circle" (although this correspondent conceded that "the last bit may be a bit muddled")."Santiago tower even navigator doesn’t exactly know"

STENDEC (or anything similar to the word ) doesn't appear in any language apparently, so the mystery will remain unsolved. I'm sure the truth is really rather prosaic (as is often the case), but at least tonight I've resolved a word that's been bouncing around unarrested in my subconscious for thirty years. Maybe one day I'll find the comic it appeared in too, and I can close the circle completely...

Easter Means...

2009-04-08T01:19:00.002+01:00

... a new Doctor Who. Who needs Easter eggs when you have a new Doctor Who on the telly?

Histoire de Melody Nelson - Serge Gainsbourg

2009-03-30T22:07:00.007+01:00

When Serge Gainsbourg died on 2 March 1991, the news resulted in Paris coming to a standstill. Police blocked off the streets around his home at the Rue de Verneuil as thousands flocked, in much the same way that John Lennon's fans had gathered at the Dakota building. There was nothing on the TV but Gainsbourg all day long; the radio a continous rotation of Serge's prodigious backcatalogue. People in tears. Flags were flown at half-mast. French President Francious Mitterrand said of him, "He was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire... He elevated the song to the level of art."

Gainsbourg is best known to the world at large for the song Je t'aime... moi non plus, and beyond that, the general audience knows little else about the man. But Gainsbourg was (and remains) part of the French culture; Gitane-smoking, louche, the epitome of French cool. A singer, songwriter, soundtrack composer, novelist, photographer, actor, artist, director, screenwriter and a drunk. He was dedicated to cigarettes, alcohol and sex. Over three decades, his musical output encompassed classical, chanson, jazz, pop, reggae, disco, rap... His lyrics were astonishing exercises in Franglais double and triple entendres and rythmic word percussion. His subject matter covered literature, coprophagy, sexual obsession, incest, farting, philosophy, Nazi death camps and cabbage heads.

Since his death his musical legacy and reknown has grown in the past fifteen years or so. Jarvis Cocker (who incidentally wrote the lyrics for Charlotte Gainsbourg's solo album in the 'Serge-style'), Franz Ferdinand, Michael Stipe, Portishead, Beckand Nick Cave all owe (and freely acknowledge) a debt to Gainsbourg's years-ahead-of-his-time style. And anyone who owns an album by the French duo, Air should know that Gainsbourg created that style of music way back in the early seventies.

Which brings us to Histoire de Melody Nelson, Gainsbourg's finest and most 'complete' work. I only discovered Gainsbourg's work in the last few years, following our first trip to Paris. I'd immersed myself in a lot of Parisian culture when I realised that my first novel would indeed be set there. So that meant Piaf, Pere Lachaise, Pigalle and Moulin Rouge. And it had to mean Gainsbourg. It seemed incredible that I was arriving at such a 'complete' artiste in my thirties. How had I missed out on someone like this for so long?

There's a lot to get through and the Best of... package Initials S.G. is a good starting point for a potted history that takes in the early Be-bop jazz style, the classic Bardot collaborations (Bonnie and Clyde being one of the greatest three minutes of pop ever committed to tape), a smattering of Melody Nelson and some of the later, less impressive reggae diversions.

But if you want a crash course in French cool, Histoire de Melody Nelson is the first and last stop. There are a lot of arguably 'cool' albums: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Velvet Underground's Warhol album, Tom Waits Rain Dogs, Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers, Sinatra's Songs for Swingin' Lovers... but ...Melody Nelson outcools them all.

A loose (and louche) sort of concept album, its Lolita-esque storyline involves the middle-aged Gainsbourg losing control of his 1910 Rolls Royce and colliding with English teenage nymphet Melody Nelson, and the subsequent seduction and romance that ensues. Although I've since discovered an English translation of the superb (and decidedly kinky) lyrics, which are written with a novelist's grasp of narrative, language and allusion, it's inevitably the music that leaves an indelible mark on a non-French speaking listener.

And what music it is! While Serge mutters close to the microphone about sex, aesthetics, death and obsession, a thick and rubbery funk bass guitar rumbles beneath it all, creating rhythmic tension and melody, along with a scraping, staccato, almost punk-ish electric guitar, piano rolls, lush strings and choir. While much of the early seventies output of many progressive rock outfits now sounds dated, Gainsbourg's use of funk and deep orchestrated string and choral arrangements which accentuate the rhythm and salacious atmosphere make ...Melody Nelson sound like an album made in the nineties rather than the seventies. An organ that fades in and out on the track, L’Hotel Particulier creates a spacey trip-hop effect that pre-dates the synthesizer, and will make any new listeners instantly think of Air's Moon Safari.

In L’Hotel Particulier (Special Hotel) , Gainsborug slyly describes the hotel where he and Melody consummate their relationship: “While up there a mirror reflects us, Slowly I intertwine Melody.” After that En Melody (In Melody) it's clear what's transpiring—not only because of its title, but due to the vocals by a squealing Melody (vocalized by Jane Birkin, the girl on the cover and Gainsbourg's muse and long term love).

Despite selling little more than 15,000 copies on its release, it was a highly influential album, and remains so to this day. The cover also bears a mention. Mainly, because it's a gorgeous, iconic bit of pop art, but also beacuse there are stories behind it. Jane Birkin in a short red wig and a pair of patched bell-bottom jeans. The monkey she's holding was buried with Serge and the jeans are open purely because Birkin was at the time four months pregnant with Charlotte (who has gone on to become a respected actress and musician).

On our second visit to Paris there were a couple of trips I had to make. By this time I was a fully paid-up fan of Gainsbourg, and the city seemed different to me because of it in a way that only great writers and movie makers can transform people and places for you through their art.

We visited Montparnasse cemetary where Gainsbourg's body was laid to rest. It's a beautiful place and home to Baudelaire and De Beauvoir and Sartre. Serge's grave is hidden beneath a mound of metro tickets, fluffy toys, wine bottles and cigarettes. We weren't the only one's there; a man had come from the same metro station as us and sat opposite the grave, studying it carefully for some time. Being English we didn't linger as long. But by the time we left, an older couple had arrived and left something on the grave themselves.

We also visited 5 Rue de Verneuil, Serge Gainsbourg's modest two-storey home until his death. It's situated in a repsectable street in the St Germain area, a stones-throw from the Seine, and it's the kind of place where the shops sell old masters and antiques. A few years ago, the residents of the street paid to have the walls of Gainsbourg's home white-washed after his fans travelled from all over the world to cover it with slogans and graffiti. That same night someone arrived, spray-painted a new slogan, and it began all over again. The residents gave in.

It took a little while to find, and it is in a very high-class area and the shops do sell very expensive wares. So it's all the more fascinating to find hidden there a section of wall covered in colours, caricatures, graffiti, poetry, metaphysical debates and phallic images. This more than the grave in Montparnasse felt more like the Serge I'd discovered at this late point in my life.

In retrospect I should have contributed something to the wall as I had when we visited Abbey Road a few years previous (No one I think is in my tree seemed apt at the time). But I didn't. That English reserve again. Graffiti in an expensive area - how could I? I probably will if we visit again.
Apparently, hidden amongst the scrawl is a message that seems to sum Gainsbourg up perfectly. It reads, "Serge is not dead. He's in heaven, fucking."
That seems about right.

The Strange (movie?) Adventures Of H.P.Lovecraft

2009-03-26T22:24:00.004Z

The new four-part Image comic book, The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft hasn't come out yet, but has already sold to Universal and Imagine Entertainment for Ron Howard to direct.

"Created by Mac Carter and Jeff Blitz, the book borrows elements from Lovecraft’s life, such as his family’s struggle with mental illness and his own bouts with writer’s block, and transforms the young writer’s darkest nightmares into reality when he comes across a book that puts a curse on him and lets the evils he conjures up loose on the world.”

Ron Howard wouldn't have been my first choice to finally bring some classic eldritch Lovecraft inspired-horror to our screen, but I'll take what I can get. It's high time. Hopefully the comic itself will do Lovecraft justice, and we'll go from there...

Tour of Chernobyl

2009-03-24T23:26:00.006Z

A link here and here and a video for the somewhat bone-chilling tours of Chernobyl, site of the world's worst nuclear disaster. I've always found the place fascinating - 30km of 'dead-zone' surrounding the centre of the explosion. I'd love to go. It's not exactly a conventional holiday destination but the idea of tramping through those abandoned and radioactive buildings, fun fairs and schools in Pripyat to the sound of a clicking geiger conter just appeals to the ghoulish side of me I suppose.

But there's also something distinctly poetic to an area that's now become a haven for wildlife, due to the absence of humans. Particularly as many of those animals are deformed due to the contamination.
Should you want to book, you can do so here. Just don't tell your girlfriend/wife. It'll be a nice surprise for her when she gets off the plane...

Carter Beats The Devil - Glen David Gold

2009-03-24T21:32:00.003Z

A brief story about Glen David Gold before we begin. Before he wrote Carter Beats The Devil, Gold met his future wife, Alice Sebold (the bestselling novelist of The Lovely Bones) when they were both MFA candidates at California University. Gold arrived on a motorbike for the orientation and upon meeting Sebold, tried and failed to get his helmet off without success. He sat through the entire orientation with it on, and Sebold was smitten.

It's an odd little story but after finishing Gold's Carter Beats The Devil today, it sounds like a moment lifted from the novel itself.

Like Michael Chabon's incredible The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay, Carter Beats The Devil is a rich, surprising concoction of history, magic, science comedy and romance. A book that, despite it's size (560 pages), makes you wish it were longer. Those old adages about skipping meals and losing sleep due to a novel all apply to Carter Beats The Devil. It's an unalloyed joy from start to finish. I simply couldn't put it down.

The novel begins in 1923 with Carter performing his act, the climax of which is a duel with the Devil, with president Warren Harding taking part. But two hours later, Harding is dead and a dogged secret service agent is convinced Carter is responsible and in possession of a final Presidential secret.

After the audacious beginning, Gold takes us back to Carter's childhood in an upper class turn of the century San Francisco, following the budding magician through the vaudeville circuit, a titanic clash with a rival magician, a meeting with the legendary Harry Houdini, and Carter's ascent to his status as the greatest magician in the world. There's a dazzling array of larger-than-life characters along the way: fortune tellers, the world's tallest man, the inventor of television, pirates on the Molucca Sea, a blind woman with a dark past and pet lion called Baby.

To say more would be to spoil one of the biggest treats that books have to offer you. Gold's novel is an epic sleight of hand as well as a rip-roaring page turner. Using the old magician's adage of hiding a secret in plain sight, the book twists one way and then another, constantly suprising you. There are amazing escapes, huge magical set-pieces, and Gold effortlessly evokes the atmosphere of the early twenties and the spirit of theatre and vaudeville, weaving (and then tying up) an array of subplots and a wonderfully OTT villain into the finale. It's also a beautifully written love story between Carter and the two women who come into his life. Only in this book can a magician and a blind woman flirting in an overgrown park while a lion eats roast beef off of wax paper move you so completely. It's a charming, clever and unique piece of fiction, and destined to join Kavalier and Clay as one of my all time favourite novels.

Now seven years after the publication of Carter Beats The Devil, Glen David Gold has a new novel imminent, which sounds equally fascinating. Sunnyside opens on a winter day in 1916 during which Charlie Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary mass delusion. From there, the novel follows the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world's last (and worst) Wild West star, as he heads to the battlefields of France; snobbish Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America's doomed engagement with Russia; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vice of complications - studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother - to finally make a movie 'as good as he was.'

And just as promising is the news that Carter Beats The Devil has been picked up by AMC, the company behind Mad Men to be adapted into a mini-series. Although Tom Cruise owned the rights for several years, and intended to produce and star in movie version of the book, this AMC produced version sounds like a much more appealing proposition. Let's hope it pans out.

Another Story Girl: Stina Nordenstam - Memories Of A Colour/And She Closed Her Eyes

2009-03-23T20:52:00.004Z

I first heard Stina Nordenstam in the mid-90's; she was featured on a long forgotten TV show in the small hours of the night on ITV. The piece lasted no longer than a few minutes and I don't even recall a moment of it, other than it mentioned the release of her second album, And She Closed Her Eyes. Of course it was the sound of her music that made an impression: delicate, spare, fragile, ever so slightly jazzy; a voice like a child singing in an empty room and lyrics that hinted at whole worlds of experience and filtered through a very European sensibility. Songs that sounded like a Goddard or Truffaut movie in three or four spider-web like minutes. In the middle of the night I was converted and went out the next day to a wonderful record shop in Birmingham called HIghway 61 that was our one-stop shop for cool and obscure music back in the 90's. And against the odds I found that album along with her debut, Memories Of A Colour. Both were promotional copies; I snapped them up and subsequently fell in love with the reclusive woman from Stockholm who rarely gave interviews and hasn't toured since that first album, back in '91.

I've always gravitated towards musicians who operate outside of the mainstream. Scott Walker (whom I've written about in an earlier post) shares the same reclusive tendencies, exercises complete artistic control over how the songs are (meticulously) constructed and produced, and hasn't performed live since the sixties. Walker, like Nordenstam also knows how to use silence as skillfully as sound in song.

Although Nordenstam has subsequently gone on to write far more avant garde fare, the first two albums are coloured with warm jazz piano and French horn, and the voice is tremulous, pensive. Dusky and plaintive melodies that draw you in quietly then open out for a moment into something thrillingly gorgeous and mournful. Think of snow falling in Stockholm, the minutae of relationships as they hesitantly begin or slowly fall apart, memories of childhood, faded photographs in wallets, a former lover's clothes in a wardrobe, cold coffee, empty streets, airport inertia... Nordenstam's songs are like morning-after lullabies, gauzy with mystery...

Soon After Christmas

I've called you now a thousand times

I think I know now

You're not home

I've said your name a thousand times

To be prepared if you'd be there

I wanted so to have you

And I wanted you to know

I wanted to write songs

About how we're walking in the snow

You've got me slightly disappointed

Just a bit and just enough

To keep me up another night

Waiting for another day

The city's taking a day off

The streets are empty

No one's out tonight

My life is in another's hands

I wanted so to have you

And I wanted you to know

I wanted to write songs

About how we're walking in the snow

But there's no snow this winter

There's no words for what I feel for you

It's not enough

Though it's too much

Why must it always be like that?

The TV screen is lighting up my room

The film has ended

Every inch of my skin is crying for your hands

And I wanted so to have you

And I wanted you to know

I wanted to write songs

About how we're walking in the snow

You've got me slightly disappointed

Just a bit and just enough

To keep me up another night

Waiting for another day

Of course, all these years later, it's a little easier to learn more about the artists you love, however obscure. Nordenstam gives interviews (even if she gives little away) and there are websites and forums that offer clues, breadcrumbs to follow.

A favourite story about her that I discovered a couple of years ago was that Nordenstam had left her long-term retreat on a secluded island off Stockholm in order to see her family, purely to inform them that she never wanted to see them again. And she never has. Which seems entirely fitting with what I've learnt about the woman.

This year, a seventh album is imminent after 2004's brilliant The World Is Saved, which was a return to the jazz/pop and irresistable melodies of those first two albums that beguiled me all those years ago.

In a way of bringing this post full circle, after consulting YouTube, I discovered this Electronic Press Kit that was produced for And She Closed Her Eyes, and is in fact the feature from that middle-of-the-night TV show I saw all those years ago. Here it is, along with Little Star, the single from that album.

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello

2009-03-21T03:12:00.003Z

I first saw this stunning piece of 'Steampunk inspired' animation a couple of years back on BBC3 or 4 and was bowled over by its sheer visionary brilliance. But it was late and I'd forgotten the title by the following day. Then yesterday I stumbled on it by accident after some random internet browsing, so I'm reproducing it here for your viewing pleasure. It's half an hour long but well worth your time. It's absolutely exquisite.

Nominated for an Oscar and for a BAFTA award, Jasper Morello is a short feature made in a unique style of silhouette animation developed by director Anthony Lucas and inspired by the work of authors Edgar Alan Poe and Jules Verne. In the frontier city of Carpathia, Jasper Morello discovers that his former adversary Doctor Claude Belgon has returned from the grave. When Claude reveals that he knows the location of the ancient city of Alto Mea where the secrets of life have been discovered, Jasper cannot resist the temptation to bring his own dead wife Amelia back. But they are captured by Armand Forgette, leader of the radical Horizontalist anti-technology movement, who is determined to reanimate his terrorist father Vasco. As lightning energises the arcane machineries of life in the floating castle of Alto Mea, Jasper must choose between having his beloved restored or seeing the government of Gothia destroyed. Set in a world of iron dirigibles and steam powered computers, this gothic horror mystery tells the story of Jasper Morello, a disgraced aerial navigator who flees his Plague-ridden home on a desperate voyage to redeem himself.

Let The Right One In and There Are Monsters

2009-03-16T22:57:00.007Z

A shamless bit of recycling today. We visited The Electric Cinema over the weekend for the final day of Birmingham's Flatpack festival to see Let The Right One In on the big screen. I've already posted a review of this wonderful film in the formative days of Tears All Over Town, but as I haven't much to talk about I thought I'd reprint my original thoughts here, with a few additional thoughts. But for those of you that have already read it, there's some additional material on the fabulous short movie that Flatpack had chosen to precede Let The Right One In...

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…
In terms of horror cinema, 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; places that the original source novel goes, some of which would simply be too contentious for even the more liberal European audience. There remain little traces of some extremely dark subject matter and are perhaps 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....

But before the main feature we were treated to a stunning little short movie, by Jay Dahl, entitled There Are Monsters. I'm often a little disappointed by short movies; often they're either too amatuerish, or simply have nothing original to offer. If you can't do something visually and creatively arresting in ten minutes, then I don't think you should bother.
Luckily Jay Dahl's little horror movie has one of the best jump-out-of-your-seat moments that I've seen in a long time. The entire assembled audience at The Electric left their chairs (and Art Deco sofas) at the required moment and it was a wonderful moment. But after that, Dahl delivered another more subtle scare, creating a protracted and deeply creepy scene of implied threat, and then proceeded to deliver a final jolt at the end of the ten minutes, leaving us all giggling in that shared, slightly embarrassed afterglow that happens so very infrequently these days.
After visiting Dahl's website, I noticed that There Are Monsters (which is a tease for a full-length feature) is available to watch on YouTube, so here it is in it's entirety. There are a fair few other movies at his website to watch too, so I recommend clicking here to see the rest of his work.
So if you can, turn off the lights and crank up the volume, then watch this...

Camille O'Sullivan

2009-03-12T22:41:00.004Z

A couple of video clips tonight. I discovered Camille O'Sullivan a few years back and managed to get hold of one of her CDs (A Little Yearning). Back then it was some task as she was still relatively obscure, and I had to order the CD from some small independent Irish distributor, not knowing if I'd actually receive anything in return. The instant appeal for me was due to the fact that she adapted some of my favourite artists: Tom Waits, Scott Walker, Jacques Brel, Nick Cave; and she did so in a very singular and dramatic Weimar/Cabaret style.
A few years on and she's now on the cover of Time Out magazine, winning awards left, right and centre, as well as appearing in movies. Last year we discovered she was doing a show at Birmingham's newly re-opened Town Hall but at the last minute and couldn't make it. Luckily I noticed yesterday that her 'The Dark Angel' show was coming around to the Town Hall again in June and tonight managed to get some tickets.
After a bit of a scout around on YouTube, I found these two performances that I thought I'd post, as they're a good representation of her versatility.
The first, a version of Kirsty MaColl's very funny In These Shoes is from Jools Holland's Later, and the second is her interpretation of Nick Cave's The Ship Song. It was already one of my favourite of Cave's 'quieter' songs, but O'Sullivan's version is simply stunning, and possibly better than the original.

Design is thinking made visual - The Genius of Saul Bass

2009-03-12T00:28:00.010Z

Saul Bass is one of those names you know but whose work you might not immediately be able to name. His work is also the kind of work that, once you see it, you realise you know all too well. Particularly if you're a film-buff. His work is singular, utterly unique; he was a visual and conceptual genius. Before we go any further, here's the proof:

"Symbolize and Summarize" were the words Bass lived by. Before Bass, movie posters were all about luring an audience into the darkened theatre with nothing but a painted or photographic picture of the film's star. But Bass broke tradition for good in the fifties and sixties by utilising a jagged and bold style with broken type letters that spring from the posters he designed.
And Bass was about more than visually arresting poster design. He was responsible for some stunning opening title credit sequences, the like of which are often imitated for films that aspire to that Bass 'vibe' that kicked off movies such as The Man With The Golden Arm, Anatomy of A Murder, Psycho, Oceans Eleven or Vertigo.

Otto Preminger's The Man With The Golden Arm - a movie about a jazz musician's battle to overcome heroin addiction - caused Bass to come up with a title sequence and poster featuring the arm as it's central image, implying the intravenous heroin angle. When Preminger's movie arrived at US movie theatres in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans - "Projectionists – pull curtain before titles".
Until then, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie titles were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. But Preminger wanted his audience to see The Man with the Golden Arm’s titles as an integral part of the film.

This was 1955; the drug angle was pretty taboo stuff. But it cemented Bass's reputation as a visual stylist who could as Martin Scorsese put it: "(create) an emblematic image, instantly recognisable and immediately tied to the film."

Bass caught the attention of Alfred Hitchcock who employed him to produce posters and title sequnces for Psycho, Vertigo and North By Northwest, all utterly unique and visually striking. My favourite is for Vertigo...

The title sequence for Stanley Kramer's 1963 film, It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is also notable, as it's been aped by a multitude of movies such as Catch Me If You Can, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and a whole host of Bond openings...

Bass's influence extended to visual consultantcy on Spartacus, West Side Story and Grand Prix. But most famous of his collaborations is his influence on Psycho's infamous and visionary shower scene. Although Bass claims he actually directed the scene, co-stars and movie historians disagree. But whatever the extent of his input on one of the most famous moments in cinema, much of his visual style is certainly present in the final product, as evidenced by the splendid storyboards he produced for Hitchcock...

Bass's lavish design sense fell out of fashion in the late sixties, and he then turned to corporate design, making a similar mark there with iconic logos for AT & T, United Airlines and Quaker. He also made a little seen SF movie called Phase IV in 1974. It took a generation who'd grown up with his work to start making movies of their own, and bring Bass back to work his magic on them. As well as creating titles for Broadcast News, Big and War of the Roses, Bass struck up a working relationship with Martin Scorsese and went on to make his tonal mini-credit movies for Cape Fear, Good Fellas, The Age of Innnocence and Casino.

A year after Casino, Bass died. His New York Times obituary hailed him as "the minimalist auteur who put a jagged arm in motion in 1955 and created an entire film genre…and elevated it into an art."

Watchmen

2009-03-08T20:49:00.005Z

I, like a lot of comic-book fans, have waited a long time for Watchmen to come to the big screen. Sometimes it seemed too ridiculous a notion to comtemplate: who was insane enough to even try to adapt something so dense and multi-layered?
Watchmen differed from much of my comic-book history; my love for Batman and Spider-Man started at a young and impressionable age and were informed by my dad's enjoyment of them. At six or seven I would borrow his best of anthologies and then subsequently go on to create my own comic collection.
But Watchmen was, for many of us, a revolution that happened in comics while we were in our late teens; it was ours. It belonged to us. It wasn't part of a golden or silver age (although it certainly referenced both); it was something entirely new. As every issue arrived it was evident that this was clearly a milestone in comic history. It was complex and thrilling and fascinating; it referred to that aforementioned golden and silver age of comics and gave it a new and somewhat poignant spin. And it comtemplated a world that was still wrestling with the notion of imminent nuclear catastrophe.

A few years later, myself and an old friend, Chris had the pleasure of meeting Alan Moore at a friends comic store, and spent an afternoon in his company. Moore in person is a fascinating set of contradictions. A big man with a big beard and long, wild hair. He looks insane. That day he was wearing a string vest. But as we discovered, Moore was delightful company; full of sparkling humour and tall stories, and of course, well versed in just about any subject. It was a fine day, made ever so slightly hazy by the selection of flavoured bottles of vodka on offer. He signed a stack of books for us and after several hours we took the train back to Birmingham with a memory two comic book nerds (that we were and sort of still are) would treasure forever.
So Watchmen became a little bit sacred to me and to all that discovered it for themselves. How could anyone hope to transfer something so inherently comic-book to celluloid and satisfy me and its legions of fans worldwide?
But to my surprise, Zach Snyder has pretty much done us proud.
Watchmen is far better than I anticipated. Although I enjoyed Snyder's previous efforts - the re-make of Dawn of the Dead and his adaption of Frank Miller's 300 - my reservations were that although they were visually impressive, there was very little actual 'meat on the bones'.
And while his adaption of Miller's 300 was a slavish, almost obsessively detailed exercise in making Miller's art come alive on screen, the blame for the slightly juvenile nature of the movie could just as easily be laid at the artist's door as much as Snyder's. 300 is a beautiful book to look at, but it is (for me at least) one of Miller's lesser efforts.

When it was revealed that Snyder was taking on the almost herculean task of translating Watchmen for the screen, I was fairly sure that it would at least look like Dave Gibbon's beautiful and ridiculously detailed art come to life; as for the feat of getting one of Alan Moore's most celebrated pieces of writing into the cinema intact... well, I wasn't all that optimistic. Despite all of Snyder's reverential talk of being as faithful to the book as he was to 300, Watchmen seemed to me to be just too big, too complex to be serviced in celluloid.
For a start, there's a lot of text in Watchmen in those appendices at the end of every issue, a rich intertextual seam of backstory and history that breathes a lot of life to what amounts to a relatively slight murder-mystery as the book's fulcrum. Of course, the mystery of who killed The Comedian is incidental in Watchmen; it's far from the most important aspect of the book. Moore and Gibbon's opus is about the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war and, by extension, the notion of power and control. It's also a dark and satirical treatise on comic history; its inherent absurdities and its natural conclusion. And it's one of the finest examples of a writer and artist working at the top of their game together.

Last year, The Dark Knight established that comic-book heroes on the big-screen could be treated as more than just fluff: an origin, a villain and a big CGI finale. But although he was working with a character with almost seventy years of history, Christopher Nolan's film was its own beast; it cherry picked all that was good about Batman and only had its predecessor, Batman Begins to live up to. Had he been adapting Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, fans might have been a little more hard-core and nit-picking (as is their wont) in their analysis of his movie making.
But essentially, Snyder's Watchmen is Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen. It's reverent and more often than not, absolutely spot-on. Although some of the book is unfilmable, 90% is made for film. Gibbons' layouts are inherently cinematic and follow a clean narrative structure. It's a storyboard waiting to happen.
What Snyder has done is eliminate the fat, but retain an incredible amount of minutae, both plot-wise and graphically. There are sacrifices: the news vendor and his young Black Freighter comic book reader are given short-shrift (although that comic that serves as a sort of meta-fiction has been animated and may be cut back into the movie as part of the director's cut), the psychiatrist's obsession with Rorschach is limited, and of course the much talked about omission of the alien squid at the finale (which, to be frank, was always an absurdity too far anyway, and is replaced with something that works far better for me here).
But any detractions are minor when weighed against the many pros during these 160-odd minutes. The opening credits act as a potted history of The Minutemen and their place in time, to the strains of Dylan's The Times They Are A Changin', and are a delight, filled with little 'easter eggs' from those intertextual appendices, while also serving as an introduction to the newbies in the audience.
There are a few standout performances amongst the generally excellent cast. Jackie Earl Haley's interpretation of Rorschach and Walter Kovacs is spot-on; he's essentially the crypto-fascist element evident in Batman or his template, Steve Ditko's The Question. But we can't help but sympathise to an extent with his anger at the world. Jeffrey Dean Morgan makes the most of his limited screen time as The Comedian; a gun for hire monster who seems to want someone to stop him (as in the chilling scene with Manhattan and the preganant Vietnamese woman). Billy Crudup is excellent too under the heavy CGI as Dr Manhattan, a man adrift from the world and time and serving as the finale's fall guy; creating a new utopia over the fear of an angry god.

There's much more to Snyder's Watchmen to be discussed, and more to be gleaned from future viewings. The notion of a director's cut with another thirty minutes only adds to its appeal, a film made for the blu-ray generation. All in all, there's sufficient depth to it, and that's the big surprise for me. It may not be an absolutely perfect movie but for me, it's the best Watchmen movie that I could have possibly expected.

Now, who's up for The Dark Knight Returns?

Watch The Skies! - The Thing From Another World

2009-03-06T00:54:00.003Z

Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World is a movie that passed me by entirely during my childhood. Of late I've been trying to catch up with all those classic old movies that I did see when I was young, but only have dim recollections of: The Creature From The Black Lagoon, Bride of Frankenstein, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Them, The Fearless Vampire Killers... the list is long.

Unlike a lot of re-makes, the do-over of the Hawks' movie by John Carpenter was visceral, eye-popping top drawer horror movie making; so I was curious to see the original after all this time.

And Hawks' movie is a entirely different beast to be sure, but no less effective. (And by the way, it's technically directed by Christian Nyby, but to all intents and purposes, The Thing... is a Hawks' movie through and through.) This claustrophobic, thinly-veiled meditation on the anti-communist witchhunts in the form of a malevolent alien being terrorising an air force crew and the scientists at a remote Artic research outpost is full of mood and suspense, and plays like a more contemporary movie.

What surprised me most was the dialogue; it's fast-paced, exceedingly snappy stuff for a horror movie of the 50's. Dialogue was never top of the list of requirements for SF/Horror back in those days (and some, me included, would argue it still isn't, alas). But Hawks and Charles Lederer's script bristles with one liners with characters' dialogue often overlapping in a realistic way. It's also notable for having a female co-star who's pretty sassy and more than capable when the alien starts his reign of terror on the base. There's also some light bondage fun to had with male lead, Kenneth Tobey!

Of course, a fifty year old movie simply can't compete with the (still) stunning FX work by Rob Bottin in Carpenter's remake, and James Arness stumbling about in the snow looking like a sub-Karloff Frankenstein doesn't especially do it any favours. But despite this, Hawks' Thing slow-burns the tension, making the menace - out there - all the more fearful, and instead focuses on the interplay between the exceedingly well-drawn characters, and then throws some well-staged and atmospheric set-pieces into the mix for the finale. The final fire and electricity scenes are simply beautiful bits of black and white cinema. There's also some fabulously spooky music by Dimitri Tiomkin that lends extra chills to the shadows and largely unseen menace.

Despite its somewhat heavy handed 'Reds in the bed' subtext, Hawks' The Thing From Another World is huge 50's blockbuster fun. Them is next on the list...

You Can Go Home Again - The Genius of Frasier

2009-03-05T03:06:00.003Z

Just recently we started watching Frasier again. Right from the start, as we have them all on DVD. And each time I return to this show, I fall in love with it all over again. For eleven seasons this show maintained its elegance, absurdity and razor sharp wit. It sounds like a cliche but the core group of Frasier, Niles, Martin, Daphne and Roz (and Eddie!) became something akin to friends whose company you treasured and adored. There was none of the schmalzt that often marrs a lot of American sitcoms, and for a show that took quite broad character sweeps - wine and opera loving fopps/ crotchety retired cop/ a very English maid/ a sex mad producer - nevertheless managed to breathe real life and and a rich seam of depth into each of them.
I picked the following clip from Season three because it ecompasses everything I adore about this show. You Can Go Home Again sees Frasier celebrating three years of his radio show and flashbacks to his first farcical day on the job at KACL, meeting with Niles for the first time in several years, and then seeing his father Martin for the first time since The Crane's mother's death. What Frasier did brilliantly was go from laugh out loud humour to moments of pure perfect poignancy. Kelsey Grammer distills everything that made Frasier touching, funny and warm in this scene in Martin's apartment. It speaks for itself. Perfect. Just perfect.

The Six Word Story

2009-03-02T21:49:00.002Z

In the twenties, Ernest Hemingway's colleagues bet him he couldn't write a complete story in six words. In retaliation, Hemingway wrote this:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

His colleagues paid up. Hemingway considered it his best work.

Six Word Stories takes this challenge and includes stories by famous people and reader submissions. And while nothing approaches the tragic genius of Hemingway, there are some real gems on there.

Some of the SF one's are my particular favourites...

Time traveller dies tragically. (1967 - 1608) (Sean from Dublin)

“Hello Son,” it said, tentacles waving. (G. Sulea)

Last man on earth. Hears knock. (Pete Berg)

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time (Alan Moore)

Leia: “Baby’s yours.” Luke: “Bad news…” (Steven Meretzky)

While in the Death category, we have three of my writing heroes...

Automobile warranty expires. So does engine. (Stan Lee)

With bloody hands, I say good-bye. (Frank Miller)

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so. (Joss Whedon)

Objects of Inexplicable Desire # 5: Horrified B-Movie Victims Action Figure Set

2009-03-01T23:25:00.004Z

Having bought Them, 50's classic SF/atomic monster movie today, this utterly silly action figure set seemed apt...

From the Baron Bob website: Don't you love those old time monster films, that bloated blob oozing after that scream queen? Well now you can reenact your favorite scenes anywhere whether it's at your desk during work or in your bedroom. Every time you look over at these awkward looking fools, you'll be sure to get a laugh. Celebrate the greatness of the heart of cinema with the soon to be classic Horrified B Movie Victims Set.

Hard Case Crime (via Derek Raymond)

2009-02-28T01:02:00.012Z

I remember when I first discovered Hard Case Crime. In 2000, when I U-turned from writing speculative (or slipstream) fiction, I turned to crime. Not literally, you understand; just crime fiction.
I'd grown up surrounded by my dad's voracious love of crime novels, but hadn't myself caught the bug until a fellow writer, Joel Lane introduced me to the novels of Derek Raymond.

Raymond was the nom de plume of UK novelist Robin Cook, who in the 80's started the Factory series, his sequence of pitch black police procedurals, a kind of metaphysical noir journey into the heart of darkness of an unnamed police detective.

The book Joel introduced me to, I Was Dora Suarez is the most highly regarded and grimmest book of the bunch. Its manuscript caused Raymond's publisher Dan Franklin to vomit over his desk, such was the intensity of the work.

And It's fair to say that after that book, Raymond changed everything about my writing direction and style. Before Suarez, I was writing pretty dark stuff, but like most fledgling writers, was still finding my voice. I was hugely influenced by Joel Lane's work, and by his friendship and guidance, but by 2000, I felt I was chasing my tail. Then I sat down and began writing something entirely different: Leaving Seven Sisters was about two floundering men in middle age, broken marriages and the beautiful dead daughter of a corrupt MP. It was a dark, bizarrely romantic piece of British noir, and got me nominated for the Crime Writers' Association Short story Dagger. After that,I didn't look back. Finding your voice is one of the hardest things to do in writing, but when you do, it's immensely liberating. I've returned now and then to horror and SF, but the sense of noir lingers in those stories too. It's what I do now. My novel, Secret Skin is a hard-boiled foray into the private eye genre. I love playing with the cliches and tropes of noir, updating them to apply to our current ways of life. In a previous post, I reprinted an excerpt from The Remains of the Richest Man in The World, which contains an ex-con ex boxer, another failed marriage, a young prostitute and a grand old double-cross. All noir cliches, refracted through an English modern-day sensibility.

After Raymond, I began to devour crime fiction: Ian Rankin was recommended by one of my oldest friends, Chris Monk. I loved Rebus: he's one of the great British cops; an angry cop, operating from the fringes of the law. Then there was Mark Billingham's Thorne books, Mo Hayder's staggeringly bleak Birdman and The Treatment. And James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux, one of crime fiction and indeed literatures' great creations.

But of course, noir to me (and to most) is epitomised by the paperback crime novels from the 30's to the 60's. James M. Cain (Double Indemnity), Jim Thompson (The Grifters, The Getaway), Cornell Woolrich (Rear Window). There's nothing finer than finding a shabby paperback in a second-hand bookstore by Mickey Spillaine or Lawrence Block or Carter Brown. Not just for the raw hard-boiled thrills contained within, but often just for the jaw-droppingly beautiful covers by artists like Robert McGinnis (featured in one of my earlier posts (Let The Pictures Do The Talking).

And this of course brings us to Hard Case Crime. Charles Ardai and Max Phillips' love for the form of those dime-store thrills just leaps from these books. As well as publishing new fiction by up and comers as well as established pros like Stephen King and Lawrence Block, they bring back into print some lost classics of the pulp era.

It's all about noir: determined detectives and dangerous dames, fortune hunters and vengeance seekers, criminals on the lamb, jewel smugglers and hired psycopaths...

I'd recommed you go and just buy a handful of them. Pick any; they all have their own charms to offer. But I'd particularly recommend Ardai's pseudononymously-penned Little Girl Lost and its sequel Song of Innocence; George Axelrod's (screenwriter of Breakfast At Tiffany's and The Manchurian Candidate) Blackmailer; King's Colorado Kid; and the recent Money Shot, by the outrageously talented Christa Faust.

And even if you don't like the books, then you could just buy them for the covers. All new original art that perfectly captures the era of pulp noir by Robert McGinnis and Glenn Orbik.

Just recently Ardai published Fifty-To-One, the fifty book anniversary of Hard Case Crime. Told in fifty chapters, each named after the fifty books published. Of particular interest to me is the upcoming Honey In His Mouth, by Doc Savage creator Lester Dent, a book that has never seen print until now.

So go visit Hard Case here, and grab yourself some hard-boiled thrills. It's good to know that in fifty years time, some young writer will track these paperbacks down in a second-hand bookstore and keep the noir flame alive.

Photobucket fun

2009-02-27T01:52:00.002Z

I've never used Photobucket before tonight, but I'm pretty pleased with the results of my manipulation of the photo below, now transformed into my new blog title header, above. As Photoshop continued to resist my best efforts, I decided I'd have to resort to something simpler and a little more user-friendly.

Remains Of The Richest Man In The World - short excerpt

2009-02-26T03:56:00.002Z

A brief excerpt from one of my favourite of my children, The Remains Of The Richest Man In The World, published in Crimewave 6: Breaking Point.
Available from Amazon marketplace.

Had she at some point sat down - as Gillespie had himself in some less focused way - and looked at her life. A really good hard look: forty-odd years. All those mad times, growing up too fast, living rough, then, after becoming a Gillespie, in each other's pockets; the kind of life you always hoped for. Never quite managing to savour the moment, because there had been so fucking many, but in living so fast, turning around finally to find it crumbling quickly, like a house full of rot. And then living the last fifteen, twenty years, looking back at it with at first fondness, then regret, and then finally bitterness at what was remaining, and worse: still to come.
Sometimes a rented terrace , a pretty little garden and a Jack Russell terrier seemed like a poor result for a life that had once been just fucking luminous.

Lovecraft Art

2009-02-26T03:18:00.012Z

Possibly only a thing of beauty to me and a handful of other like-minded pulp fans: two Astounding Stories that featured At The Mountains of Madness, and The Shadow Out Of Time. As I'm knee-deep in pulp/Victoriana/Steampunk/Atomic SF research for my next writing project, these two covers appealed to me today...

Happy Enough: Waitress - A Belated Review

2009-02-26T01:55:00.002Z

The sad fact about most movies that you see is that they're often entirely predictable fare. Strap yourself in for 90% of horror/thriller/comedy films and you know what you're going to get: your standard A-Z of movie cliches and tropes. This is all well and good; sometimes it's comforting to sit down to something you know and love: horror invades normality, boy meets girl, hero versus villain etc.
And of course when someone comes along with something fresh, with a vision, with a twist on old cliches, it's all the more refreshing to welcome them into our hearts and minds, and follow them wherever they may go, because - to borrow from one such auteur - they had us at hello.
Step forward Chris Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, David Lynch... you all have similar lists.
And so where does this leave us with Waitress? I'm a little late to the party with this movie, I admit, but I couldn't pass up the chance to write a few words about a movie that's so delightful and sweet, and that should have promised a bright future for its writer/director Adrienne Shelley.
Of course, that's not to be. Shelley was murdered before the release of the movie, and if there's anything optimistic to take from such a tragic waste of talent, it's that Waitress is a quirky little gem of a movie, and as lovely a creative legacy that one could ask for.
Jenna (Keri Russell) is a maker of extraordinary pies in her local diner. She's also trapped in a marriage to the worlds worst husband, Earl (Jeremy Sisto) and in a life she didn't expect for herself. When Jenna discovers she is pregnant and her plans to leave Earl are thwarted, she finds herself having an affair with her new doctor (Nathan Fillion).
Waitress lives in the white-picket world America of David Lynch. There are no dancing dwarfs on display here, but it does shares a penchant for stylised dialogue and vivid Blue Velvet photography. With the pie-making (each named with whatever is on Jenna's mind at the time), there's also a similarity with Pushing Daisies; both share that primary colour palette and slight deadpan tilt away from reality.
What Waitress does brilliantly is tease some beautiful performances from its cast.
Keri Russell (whose work I've thus far missed entirely) is endearing and walks the fine line between the sweet absurdities of the script, and the emotional heft that it ultimately delivers. Jeremy Sisto (whom I know ostensibly from Six Feet Under) plays the overbearing and abusive monster of Earl with the sense that his whole personality is a house of cards. Despite having no back story, he invests Earl with a brittle vulnerability. And of course, Nathan Fillion brings the same charm he brings to everything he stars in. How this man isn't a huge star is beyond my comprehension. His subtle, ever so slightly anxious doctor is measured perfectly all the way. Andy Griffith too bears mention with his grumpy pie customer Old Joe, who forms the heart and message of the film: make the leap away from your life if it's not the one you want for yourself.
Everyone is given an affectionate arc, but the core of the movie is Jenna's self-discovery. And it also returns us to the start. What begins as a simple charming romantic comedy ends as something else. Self- discovery, but with the child Jenna has convinced herself she doesn't want, and not with that seemingly perfect other man.
There are a few places where the movie loses its footing near the end, but they feel almost as if they might have been decisions made in the absence of its writer/director (although I could be wrong).
But they're slight misgivings. Waitress manages to transcend the simple romantic comedy with a lot of warmth and a beautiful sense of whimsy. But it's also laced with a sense of sadness; there's a particular sense of poignancy to the final scene of Jenna walking away into her future with Shelley's real life little daughter. One less auteur in the world.

Jenna: Cal, are you happy? I mean, when you call yourself a happy man, do you really mean it?
Cal: You ask a serious question, I'll give you a serious answer: Happy enough. I don't expect much. I don't get much, I don't give much. I generally enjoy whatever comes along. That's my answer for you, summed up for your feminine consideration. I'm happy enough.

Let The Pictures Do The Talking Part Five: Dick Sprang

2009-02-20T01:40:00.011Z

Ah, childhood. When you're a kid, you don't care about the names on the comic books. You don't really see Adam West's Batman as being any different to the stories you read in the funny books. When you're young, it is, as they say, all good.
Looking back, I remember a large Batman anthology that my dad had that I read from cover to cover on a regular basis. The only other superhero that got a look in at that time was Spider-Man; I had a small paperback collection of the first six or seven Lee & Ditko stories that every time I cracked open those pages, my mind went BOOM. Literally B.O.O.M. I don't have that collection any more but I do have the first six or seven Essential Spider-Man collections, and if I went over to the bookshelf right now, my mind would do the damn same thing. BOOM. I wouldn't return to this entry until I'd flicked past that first Sandman story, or the Doc Ock intro, or that timeless Face it Tiger, you just hit the jackpot.

But I digress. That Batman anthology started with those crude Kane and Finger tales, moved through Jerry Robinson and a variety of other artists, ending with some of those gloriously gothic Denny O'Neill/Neal Adams tales from the seventies. But the bulk of this anthology featured the art of a man who depsite my not knowing his name, came to represent Batman to me more than any other artist in my youth: Dick Sprang.

It wasn't my fault that I didn't know his name. Up until the sixties, all those Batman stories were simply attributed to Bob Kane. You could spot stylistic changes, but heck, I was a kid. I thought Adam West trying to spray shark repellent and trying to dispose of that BOMB on the pier was high drama. (For the record, I still love that movie, and I wish they'd release the TV series on DVD.)
Sprang was hired to ghost on Batman in 1941 when it was anticipated that Bob Kane would be drafted to fight in World War II, and that the then current artist Sheldon Moldoff's workload was growing increasingly large. In complete anonymity, Sprang received his Batman script, drew it and sent it off to be inked. Having no creative authority, it all seemed to imply that he would just be another Batman artist.
But Sprang worked at DC for twenty years, and on the flagship characters at that. Just Supes and Bats. He was Golden Age royalty.

When I look back at those reprints I have of Dick Sprang's work, I have that same frisson that I get with those Lee/Ditko Spidey stories. The art leaps off the page at you. Every panel is alive with detail and frenetic angles. Sprang's Gotham was filled with oversized everyday props that Batman and Robin would almost certainly be swinging into the scene from, or dodging as the Joker loosed them as he made his all too brief escape. Sprang used all the weapons that the great comic artists had in their arsenal: insane perspectives, aerial shots, worm's eye veiws, compositional variation from panel to panel... and he used with the utmost panache. No one drew a more insane Joker, terrifying Two-Face or affecting Batman or Robin.

Although Sprang retired in the sixties, in 1995 he created a gorgeous lithograph, The Secrets Of The Batcave, signed and numbered and limted to 500, and then in '96, Guardians of Gotham. They're both reproduced above and they're simply gorgeous. They crop up on ebay from time to time, and one day I'll buy one, as the very sight of them takes me back to my childhood. Before the bills and the problems and the day to day that gets in the way of the simpler and more beautiful things in life. Ah, childhood. Thanks, Mr Sprang.

Objects Of Inexplicable Desire # 4: Lamponi's Lamps

2009-02-19T23:08:00.002Z

This is just plain cool. Mr. Lamponi and his cool lamps. This 50's spaceship with halogen lights would look just awesome over the fireplace. Alas there aren't any prices on his website, and I dread to think what they might cost...
Lamponi's Lamps

Gran Torino

2009-02-19T01:14:00.005Z

There have been a lot of reviews referencing Dirty Harry in Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood's supposed acting swan song. It's part of what attracted me to the film to be honest. I was brought up on a diet of Eastwood movies, my dad being a major fan. I've seen the Dirty Harry movies many, many times, and I've heard my dad yearn often for a final return to Harry Callahan before it's too late. Well, Gran Torino isn't that film. And although there are references to all those Eastwood hardasses that he's played before in Torino's Walt Kowalski, there's also a bittersweet twist to all that simmering violence that's one of the most suprising things about this movie.
Gran Torino takes it's title from the 1972 Ford automobile parked in Walt's garage, a symbol of an idealised past while Walt spends his days on the front porch, glowering at the immigrants who supposedly threaten his patch of suburban Detroit.
Thao (Bee Vang), the son of the Hmong family from next door tries to boost Walt's car as part of a gang initiation, but when Walt catches him, the boy is forced to work for him. Walt puts him to work doing up the eyesore of a house opposite, and gradually the old man and the boy begin to bond. The thaw continues when Thao's sister, Sue (Ahney Her) stands up to Walt's racial slurs and invites him round to sample her fatherless multi-generational family's food and beer.
If it sounds a little cliched and over-earnest, you're right; it is. Gran Torino's script by newcomer Nick Schenk, is clunky in places and you can hear the gears grinding (no pun intended) at times as the movie changes tone and mood. Only Eastwood's surefire direction keeps the movie on track at times.
Initially Walt is Dirty Harry in the suburbs, it's true; when the gangbangers invade on Walt's territory, Eastwood cocks his rifle, squints at them down the barrel and growls: "GET. OFF. MY. LAWN." Then when, the same gang attack Thao after his first day at a job that Walt has arranged for him, Walt heads over, waits them out and stands on the head of the last guy left until he gets the message.
But what makes Gran Torino more than the sum of it's parts is the ending that turns that myth of the cliched Eastwood hero on it's head. It's an audacious and bittersweet twist that more than makes up for the earlier lapses in the script.
It goes without saying that Eastwood is terrific. He takes the caricature of the obnoxious and bigotted curmudgeon Walt and infuses him with subtlety and a sly humour. Now, as much as any time in his prime, Eastwood is a magnetic prescence on the screen, one of the last Hollywood legends. He also elicits some excellent performances from the first timer Hmong cast; both Bee Vang and Ahney Her more than a match for the 78 year old veteran on his swan song.
Gran Tornio is no Unforgiven. Although both movies flirt with similar themes, Torino is a little generic, a little too simple and predictable. But its final act that flirts with the notion of the Eastwood hardman, cleaning up the neighbourhood for one last time, only to turn into something far more moving and redemptive is more than enough to be a fitting close to the man's acting career, and more than enough to recommend it.

Dollhouse

2009-02-18T02:12:00.003Z

When it comes to Joss Whedon, it's hard for some of us to be impartial. Perhaps it's the feeling of being the underdog. Whedon has always been at his best when he writes about the disadvantaged in society, even if said disadvantage is being an immortal soul or the chosen one of your generation to protect the living from the dead.
I fell in love with Joss Whedon's writing within the opening seconds of Buffy The Vampire Slayer's pilot. Who could resist a perky cheerleader with a destiny, a bookish wallflower and the bumbling but lovable fool who make up the core of their self-proclaimed Scooby Gang?
Very few TV pilots have you at hello: The X-Files for sure; Twin Peaks too; but beyond that you find you have to put in a little work, have a little faith. Angel, Buffy's spin-off and former squeeze, took it's sweet time in reeling you in with its own spin on the dysfunctional family that its parent show took as its paradigm. Cordy and an Irish half-demon as Angel's side-kicks? Really? But by the time Doyle had sacrificed himself and his unrequited love for Cordy to make way for the wonderful Wesley Wyndham-Pryce, you knew you were in for the long haul, or however long the network would allow it.
Five seasons; it seems like a lot of episodes, but it also seems like a woefully short allowance for something you didn't just like if you were a Whedon fan. No, you loved that show, possibly even more than Buffy. By the end of both, your heart had been broken several times over: for Willow when Tara is killed by a stray bullet, for Xander as he walks away from Anya on his wedding day, for Wesley when he finally wins the love of Fred, only to have it stolen away at her transformation into Illyria; and for Buffy... oh, so many times that we don't have the space for here.
And then of course, we have Firefly. We hardly had time to realise how much we loved that band of underdogs before Fox snatched them away from us after fourteen episodes. At least we got ourselves a movie to say our goodbyes with, and it was, as they say, shiny.
And so, here we are, a little while later, hearing the news that Joss Whedon is returning to TV and making a new show for Fox. Dollhouse. At the time of the announcement, my thoughts were (and I'm sure many shared them) A: Why go back to that network, when Showtime or HBO would be such a better fit, and B: Dollhouse... I've seen that show already; it was called Dark Angel.
So the optimism was cautious, but it was optimism, nonetheless. Whedon says they're new people at Fox, they've changed. OK. And as for B, well, Buffy The Vampire Slayer didn't sound like that good an idea on paper, did it?
But then that cautious optimism starts to crumble. Fox have some problems with the pilot; then they can it altogether and Whedon reshoots it. Production closes down for Whedon to reassess the writing, the direction, etc. Then Dollhouse is placed onto a Friday night slot that to us none US viewers is considered the graveyard for TV shows. It all sounds strangely, depresssingly familiar.
But still... the same thing happened with Angel and Firefly, and look how they turned out.
And so to Friday, and the premiere of Dollhouse.
By this time, I admit, my initial excitement for the show had diminished somewhat. There was the sense that I didn't want to invest in something that would get cancelled a few shows in (although from what I gather, that Friday night slot is a blessing rather than a curse, having little to perform against). And the idea simply wasn't lighting a fire under me like Buffy and Angel and Firefly did. But still, as we sat down to Dollhouse, there was that flicker of excitement, bubbling away, despite myself: a new Whedon show, new characters to fall head over heels for, new Whedon dialogue to call your own and endlessly quote...
Except...
Eliza Dushku plays (let's make no bones about it) uber-hot Echo, an 'active' without any discernable memory or free will, controlled by a stealth organisation who regularly brainwash and reprogramme her to be whatever the Dollhouse's ultra-rich clients want them to be.
When we first meet Echo, she's a motorcycle racing escort in a dress so small, it's pretty much a belt. Later in the pilot, Echo is reprogrammed to be the negotiator in a child kidnap, and arrives with her new persona dressed in specs and a tight secretarial outfit. Mixed in with all this is the boss (or madame) of Dollhouse who comes on like a British dominatrix, Echo's handler of the older (but not-Giles-in-any-way-at-the-moment) persuasion who raises all the ethical and moral questions that the audience has early on, a computer geek who does the imprinting and offers the only character in the pilot to feel Whedon-esque, a largely dull FBI agent trying to uncover Dollhouse's secrets and a slightly vague naked nutter on a coffee table looking at videos of Echo pre-mind wipe.
It's a lot to take in, and it feels deeply bogged-down with trying to get all of the pieces into place. This isn't to mention the spa-like Dollhouse itself (that looks suspiciously like Wolfram and Hart to me), filled with robot like 'actives' who sleep in strange pods and all shower together for no other reason than it's titillating to the audience.
I can forgive many of the initial faults that spring to mind in that first hour, but the main thought that springs to mind is: where in all of this is Joss Whedon? All the hallmarks of a Whedon show are largely absent. The characters are curiously uninvolving and make little or no impression. There's none of that light touch that Whedon can bring to even the darkest of stories; indeed Dollhouse is utterly devoid of humour, and it's this that jars the most. It's always been that feeling of Whedonesque that made us fall in love with his work in the first place. Perhaps that rewrite and reshoot of the pilot left no time for fine tuning and lightness of touch.
In fact the only thing that made me feel the need to tune in next time was the fact that this is Joss Whedon. I can't imagine what the rest of the world would think. But I'm still cautiously optimistic. The prescence of so many of the Buffy alumni of writers who've returned along with Whedon, and the surefire knowledge that it will only get better because it's Whedon will take me back week after week.
Here's hoping it finds it's legs and the network leaves it alone long enough...

A Girl Called Eddy

2009-02-13T02:16:00.004Z

American born Erin Moran trades under the name of A Girl Called Eddy. Her debut album, written and performed with the outrageously brilliant Richard Hawley (whose album Coles Corner should be in everyone's collection) is one of those overlooked gems of recent times. It's languid and bruised, warm and wistful, and full of the kind of perfect melodies and lyrics you could swear you've known all your life; songs that sound like the child of early Scott Walker or Roy Orbison.

There are too many highlights to mention but The Long Goodbye ("...take your records, leave me mine / you're the one who said that we lived it all on borrowed time.") and People Who Used To Dream About The Future ("...Drinking our coffee/It's a quarter to three/No one in this place/Just us and our mistakes...") are particular gems.

She has a new album, You Get The Legs You're Given due this year, and I hope it garners the success she deserves.

Find a sample her music at http://www.myspace.com/agirlcallededdy

I'm scattered like newspapers all over the street

I see your face in everyone I meet

I'm avoiding the corners

I'm avoiding your name

I know that I loved you but I loved you in vain

And this city's too small for two

My melancholy friend and you

And these tears all over town

Too many tears all over this town

Tears all over town

Tears All Over Town - A Girl Called Eddy

To a new world of gods and monsters! Bride of Frankenstein

2009-02-12T22:42:00.003Z

Like many of us of a like mind, Bride of Frankenstein affected me at a young and impressionable age. I grew up on a diet of Hammer Horror (usually watched through parted fingers), and from time to time one of the 'classics'. Psycho was one of them, and I could still watch that particular Hitchcock movie on a daily basis and never tire of it. I never much cared for the Bela Lugosi Dracula, but I suppose by that time, I had become used to the near pant-soiling terror of Christopher Lee's turn as the the Count, and Lugosi's version simply seemed too tame to make any kind of impression.
But as a child, the movie that made the largest impression on my psyche was James Whale's tremendous sequel to his own Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein.
Barring the relative oddities of The Godfather II, The Empire Strikes Back and The Dark Knight, there aren't many sequels that surpass their predecessors. But Bride is one of those oddities.
Of course as a child, all that lingers in the mind is imagery, particularly if it's as vivid as that of the beautiful Elsa Lanchester being brought to life by the greatest of 'weird science' moments in cinema history, that electric-shock hair, those birdlike movements and that scream upon meeting her intended mate, Boris Karloff's sublime monster.
I've had the original movie and its sequel on one of those classic Universal special edition DVD sets for a while and simply hadn't gotten around to sitting down to watch Bride of Frankenstein again, until tonight.
And I was suprised by the movie for many reasons.
Of course, Lanchester's appears in what amounts to less than five minutes of screen time (not including her dual appearance as Mary Shelley in the movie's prologue). But of course, those five minutes, and the laboratory sequence leading up to Frankenstein exclaiming, "She's Alive! Alive!" are a delicious concoction of special FX, set design, pure camp and surrealism.
Whale came to Bride with a degree of reluctance, and only after several script passes with numerous contributions by himself, did he agree to the sequel. What stands out about Bride is the air of high camp about it all: the whimsy of various bit part performances, the bizarre miniature people in jars and the outrageously flamboyant turn by Ernest Thesiger as Frankenstein's mentor, Doctor Septimus Pretorius. The homosexual overtones of this queen of a mad scientist, luring Frankenstein away on his wedding night to meddle in some nefarious non procreative life-making is pretty clear, but still delightfully tongue in cheek.
There's also some quite overt religious imagery in the film, despite Whale's lack of any such conviction: the bread and wine with the blind hermit (and this scene again plays with the homosexual inferrence of two men living together, only to be torn apart by two gun toting villagers), the monster strung up in a cruciform pose when captured, the obvious act of scientist's 'playing God', and a scene apparently cut from the script where the monster attempts to rescue the stone figure of Jesus from a cross in a graveyard.
Aside from all of this contentious stuff, there's also the stuff that you'll remember from that first viewing as a child, but had no context for: the gorgeous sets and imaginative camera work lifted from German Expressionist cinema, the iconic make-up for Karloff's monster by Jack P. Pierce (adjusted with more scars and burns after the first film, and simplified for Karloff's comfort, befitting his increased status in Hollywood), the generally impressive cast (even Colin Clive as Frankenstein, who was reportedly drunk for most of the shoot and died just two years later), and the splendid score.
And of course, we return to Elsa Lanchester, the girl from Lewisham, who modelled the Bride's hissing on the hissing of swans protecting their young after feeding the birds at a pond back in England. Those five minutes of quintessential horror iconography, now tied thirty years later with a better understanding of the wit and subversive genius of James Whale.
Mad science at its best.

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

2009-02-12T02:13:00.002Z

"Let me tell you a story. And you tell me where real ends and pulp begins..."
If, like me you get a kick out of the classic pulp of yesteryear, then it's highly likely you'll enjoy the heck out of debut novelist Paul Malmont's The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, a book replete with all those dime-store novel thrills and spills, but also a piece of fiction about the men who created them.
The pulps pre-dated comic books, inspired movies and serials, and became a cornerstone of pop culture that's as pervasive now as it was then. In creating a fictional homage to the pulps, Malmont's book also manages to be a lightning paced dash that takes in post Depression America, warlord-plagued China, the creepy mist filled waterfronts of Rhode Island and the secret temples and opium dens of New York's Chinatown. It also introduces us to Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage and Walter Gibson, creator of The Shadow, two writers at odds with each other and wrestling with the notion of self-identity (both men published under the enforced pseudonyms of Kenneth Robeson and Maxwell Grant respectively).
The death of H.P. Lovecraft, at the time a relatively obscure pulp writer, serves as the catalyst for the mystery that draws Gibson and his young protege, Ron Hubbard (yes, that L. Ron Hubbard) into a mystery at a medical lab right out of a Lovecraft story, and to an island full of zombies. Meanwhile Dent and his wife, who are a beautifully drawn couple, struggling to get past a recent miscarriage, find themselves investigating an old Chinatown tong murder that leads them to an abandoned theatre, a golden statue and whip wielding assassin.
To say more would spoil a rip-roaring three hundred-odd pages. But along the way to the action-packed finale are treasure maps, secret codes, Chinese warlords, barrels of toxic nerve gas and femme fatale (who also happens to be a psychic with a pet chicken).
In addition there are a cornucopia of cameo players for the geeks: Orson Welles (who starred as The Shadow on the radio for several years, and who was a comic and pulp fan), Robert Heinlein, Al Capone (Gibson wrote his biography) and Louis L'Amour, among others. There's even a cameo for Seigel and Schuster: two young fledgling comic artists who are in New York to sell their Super-Man idea; Hubbard tells them not to bother - comic books will never take off...
It's a wonderful and irresistable immersion into 30's America, a pulp story with some of the breadth of Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay, and bears a real sense of compassion for Dent and Gibson as men who despite their fame, lacked the respect of literary authors like Hemingway.
A ripping yarn, as they say. Well worth a trip to Amazon for...

Henri Cartier-Bresson

2009-02-10T23:57:00.003Z

After compiling the previous list of favourite items about my humble abode, I neglected to mention a small postcard that I obtained in a small store near the Pompidou Centre in Paris. I'd never seen the image before (this was a couple of years back) but, having instantly fallen in love with it, I handed over my fifty cents and took it home with me.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the author of the above photo on my postcard was a French photographer, and the godfather of the candid street photography that has influenced countless generations that followed him. And although there are other far more famous photos attributed to the man (and well worth looking up on Google images as the man was a genius), the above image, entitled Brasserie Lipp, 1969 Paris inspired me in all sorts of ways.

I returned from Paris with the outline and much of the dialogue for my novella, 101 Ways To Leave Paris hastily scrawled into a small notepad, all inspired by the photo. (I recall composing an entire conversation in my head mid-way down a Parisian avenue, and having to lean against a wall to write it down). And then, mid-way into the writing of the novella, a three or four page section of it became the seed of the idea that became my novel, Secret Skin. Marianne, the character that Cartier-Bresson's photo drew from me, is the life-long love of two very different sets of brothers in novella and novel.

And the first time we meet Marianne, she is that photo:

1977. Marianne: they see her first in Montparnasse at La Closerie des Lilas; the café where Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, Jack notes to Victor (who could care less). The streets seem perfectly still around her. The blue sky of Paris suddenly flooding with clouds. On theBoulevard du Montparnasse the cars are turning slowly. Marianne is seated outside the café in the shade of a ring of trees, with a glass of wine and a copy of Le Parisien spread out before her on the table. She is wearing a short diaphonous summer dress that reveals her thighs. She continually piles up her chestnut hair with her hands to allow the cool morning air to her pale neck, then lets it fall. Through the window, some of the tables still have chairs upturned on them.

Authonomy and Secret Skin

2009-02-06T03:11:00.001Z

Last week I heard a news story about a Birmingham writer who sold her novel to Harper Collins after previewing it on their Authonomy site. This obviously piqued my interest, so I decided to go have a look and find out if it might be helpful to me and my novel.
Basically you build a profile similar to the other networking sites, then upload at least ten thousand words of your book for other people to read, discuss and rate. Authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books – and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.
Once a month Collins pull out the top five books from the Editor’s Desk Chart, and passes them on to their Editorial Board. HC editors will read from the first 10,000 words of each manuscript, feed back their comments to the appropriate authors and, if the book's good enough push it up the ladder with a view to publishing.

After a bit of hesitancy (mainly due to a reluctance to having a chunk of my book available for anyone to read) I decided to bite the bullet and join up. It doesn't hinder your chances to submit the work to other publishers or agents, so it seems like a win-win situation.
So tonight I uploaded a photo, a profile, a pitch, a working cover for the book (cribbed from one of my Paris photo stash) and then the first eight chapters of my book, Secret Skin.
Here's my profile page and here's the page for the novel.
If anyone wants to join up, you can and should! You don't have to have a book to join; you can just sign up as a reader. That way you can back my book and push it up the charts.

Avery Manor: The Tour (Part Four: The Miscellaneous)

2009-02-05T21:26:00.004Z

The fridge. I started buying stuff from wherever I went to attach to the fridge door. Slowly it got out of hand. Postcards, photos, magnets, stickers, badges, from all over Europe and beyond. This is just a small part of the whole. Pics of Amanda at a burlesque night, one of Joe and Ade at Brian's wedding, some Vargas girls, BPRD, Bettie Page, Rolling Stones stickers, Kirby, Ditko and Loisel artwork, some Beatles and Doctor Who magnets, along with various items from Paris and The Village itself. A work in progess at all times...

A christmas present from Amanda, currently residing in the kitchen beside the Superman Returns poster. This is a huge print of some of my favourite photography.

And finally, the current view from the sofa where I'm typing this. And yes, that's Christina Aguilera on the laptop wallpaper (it's artistic)...

Avery Manor: The Tour (Part Three: The Signed Stuff)

2009-02-05T20:57:00.007Z

These are all prized possessions. Bill Hicks, the legendary comedian who died back in '94 signed this cassette (remember them?) and a video when we met him at the Town Hall in Birmingham. We saw him twice; he was a genius. His comedy will never be matched. Alas the video was lent out to the artist Chris Baker, and I've never managed to get it off him. Chris, if you ever stumble across this blog, I want it back!Back when I worked in Andromeda Bookshop (an SF/Horror bookstore) in the nineties, Clive Barker was one of the regular authors to visit whenever he had a book out. I was a huge fan back then, and he was always an affable and hugely entertaining man, willing to talk to everyone who came to the signing sessions, and sometimes do you a drawing in your book.
Once, due to Barker having a signing session in a nearby Waterstones, our signing at Andromeda had to be a low-key un-advertised affair. Ade and I took full advantage, and spent a fantastic hour or so talking about movies and books with him, while he did us a couple of drawings on some A4 sheets. It's gotten a bit yellowed with age, but it's still a prized possession.

Nowadays, everyone knows who Jeff Buckley is. His one album, Grace is a masterpiece. But I can claim to being there before most. I bought Grace on its week of release and shortly after Buckley and his band came to Birmingham to sign copies in the Plastic Factory, a brilliant record store way back when. He was a lovely chap, stopping to chat to everyone and make sure everyone had something signed. Being a bit of a muso at the time, we chatted about a guitar sound he acheived on one of the songs, Eternal Life. Jeff died far too young, and the world was denied one of its great songwriters.

A relatively recent addition to the collection, this. A Hamlet programme, signed by Patrick Stewart, Oliver Ford Davies and David Tennant when we visited Stratford last year. This being a play featuring Doctor Who and Captain Picard, there were huge crowds every night. Amanda and I persisted and got our autographs. This RSC production of Hamlet (which we finally caught in London a few weeks ago) was incredible. One of the best evenings of theatre I've ever seen.
A Superman Returns poster, signed by Supes himself, Brandon Routh at a Collectormania in Milton Keynes. Currently residing in the kitchen.

A panel from Chasing Amy, signed by Kevin Smith, obtained from the View Askew site.

A poster obtained from a Tori Amos gig way back in the early nineties, and signed by Tori herself after an excellent show at Warwick University. She hugged me twice. It was a good night.

Avery Manor: The Tour (Part Two: The Objects)

2009-02-05T20:05:00.008Z

We've made two visits to Venice, and it's a city like no other. Barring the McDonald's and a Toys 'R Us, the stores are unique and beautiful. The first time we got completely lost in the back streets and canals and took an hour or so to reach the harbour before our boat left. The second time, the Piazza S Marco was flooded, and tourists were queuing on trestle tables to get across the square. We on the other hand just took off out shoes and waded across. Such was the Mediterranean heat, our feet were dry within seconds of reaching dry land.
The masks are a huge part of Venice. Every February the city holds the carnevale and dresses to impress in gowns and masks. So every other store in Venice is a mask store. They're quite delicate, so it's pretty difficult to transport too many of them, but I have four now, and I love them all.
On our last visit, we discovered a tiny mask store on the edge of the Ponte de Rialto. We communicated with the owner in some rough English/Italian and he talked about making masks for a lot of the Hollywood movies when they come to Venice to film. The masked orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut utilised this man's designs (of which the central mask in my collection is based on), as well as Heath Ledger's Casanova and many others. I could have spent a fortune. Next time I go back I almost certainly will...

This plaster head was bought from a Cologne market when we visited it on a Winter break a few years ago. There were some incredible designs, and if I'd had enough space in the suitcase, I would have bought more. Amanda has one in a Devil's face design that is equally impressive. This one of mine seemed to appeal to something in my nature...

My Nightmare Before Christmas cookie jar. Always full of biscuits for guests. A christmas gift from Amanda a couple of years back.

My Sinatra trilby in the foreground. Originally purchased from a fantastic vintage clothes store in Walsall for a Shadow costume intended for a burlesque night out. In the end I went for old time magician and didn't need it. (But Joe did go as The Shadow, so it got some use). It's been loaned out to others since then for various events.

In the background is a graffiti artist's print of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. The artist's name escapes me now, but it's signed and it's very striking.

A small amount of my collection of Marvel superhero statues, currently residing in front of some of my DVDs.
Whenever Amanda's parents head off to some exotic location (and they go to some strange Eastern places), they pick me up a new mask. The weirder the better is the only proviso. These two are my favourites (possibly from Vietnam). They remind me of something from a Sax Rohmer Fu-Manchu book. They reside over the toilet, keeping watch while you do your business...

Avery Manor: The Tour (Part One - The Art)

2009-02-05T18:27:00.011Z

Some of the visitors to this blog will be aware of most of the 'sights' on this tour of my humble abode. But as I've noticed that there has been a fair bit of traffic from elsewhere (from Japan, Russia and the US), I thought I'd take you visitors on a whistle-stop tour of my home and its admittedly deeply geeky contents.

So welcome, gentle viewer. And try not to touch anything...

The Art...

I carried this framed print all the way from Paris, from a simply incredible comic book/cd/dvd store that escapes my memory at the moment. I've long been an admirer of European comic art and Blacksad is one of the most popular and easily obtainable of the great Bande Dessinées.

Blacksad, by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido is film noir populated by anthropomorphized animals. The art by Guarnido is beautiful detailed watercolour and once I saw this, I had to part with some euros and carry it back across the pond to live on the wall above my TV.

Check out this Blacksad site for some more examples of this beautiful comic art.

http://www.blacksadmania.com/
A couple of German reproduction prints of Metropolis and Cabaret. Both obtained from one of my favourite stores in London. VinMag is located in the depths of Soho, and is full of movie memorabilia - T-Shirts, posters, old magazines and books and a whole lot more besides. It's a guarantee that I'm going to part with some cash whenever I step over VinMag's threshold...

http://www.vinmag.com/

This print was bought from the US off ebay. Various Golden and Silver Age comic book artists were commissioned to produce new art for a very expensive portfolio. Luckily some of these portfolios have since been split up and the prints sold separately. Variations On A Theme, by Jerry Robinson is one of my favourites. Robinson was responsible for co-creating The Joker, and this print is a riff on one of those classic Golden Age Batman covers. It's also signed and numbered by the great man himself.

Following my recent conversion to all things Audrey Hepburn, I'd had my eye on this huge canvas of

Breakfast at Tiffany's. Not only is it one of those iconic movie images, it's also painted by Robert McGuiness(check out my post on him in my Let The Pictures Do The Talking Part One).

Amanda bought it for me as an early Valentine's Day gift, and now sits at the back of the living room beside my bookshelves.

I obtained these two prints from Paris too. Sky Doll is a series of comic books by Alessandro Barbucci and Barbara Canepa. It's a slickly produced bit of adult SF about religion, mass media and life-like androids. The art for Sky Doll is all over Parisian comic book stores, and I fell in love with it while there. It's got a slight manga quality, but with a 60's/70's psychedelia element to it. I picked up the translations re-printed in Heavy Metal magazine, but now they're also available from Marvel.

http://skydoll.lesite.free.fr/

Albums Of A Lifetime # 1: Tilt by Scott Walker

2009-02-01T23:14:00.004Z

I was brought up to the sound of Scott Walker. When I was a small child my parents lived in a tower-block; I don't remember much of that time save for the view from the window and a vague recollection of fire-engines racing down the road when a fire began in one of the floors below. What I do recall is being rocked back to sleep by my dad to the sound of one of Scott Walker's four solo albums from the late sixties. I didn't sleep well as a child and nowadays I sleep even less. Similarly I was as beguiled then as I am now by the sound of Walker's deep baritone and his singular idiosyncratic approach to words and music.
I vividly remember being drawn to the words from Plastic Palace People on Scott 3:

Plastic palace people

Through fields of clay and granite grey

They play without a sound

Plastic palace Alice

Blows gaping holes to store her fears

Inside her lovers head

I had no idea as a child that Walker's vision was virtually unique. Not everything I heard subsequently would be quite this strange and beautiful.

It wasn't until I was a little older that I 'rediscovered' Walker's work and claimed it for my own. It seemed like a well-kept secret, which is how I usually like my music: A little out of step, a little hard to like immediately, the sense of depth and of hidden currents that only repeated plays and investigation would reward with something rich and for all time.

By that time of course, Walker was already an enigma. Beyond the four solo albums (Scott 1-4) in the sixties, a few aimless recordings and what he refers to as 'bad faith' on his own part, Walker had withdrawn. Only The Electrician on a re-united Walker Brothers album in the mid-seventies hinted at a future. And it was a dark future. I recall the writer Joel Lane describing it to me in his flat, years ago as something that sounded utterly terrifying; a love song between a torturer and his victim:

He's drilling thru the spiritus sanctus tonight

Thru the dark hip falls

Screaming oh you mambos

Kill me and kill me and kill me

When I finally did hear it, I was back in Walker's pocket again. The Electrician is both dark and angular and thrillingly lush with its swelling orchestra and Spanish guitar at its crescendo. Every time I play it, it sounds like the first time. The same goes for Plastic Palace People.

Climate of Hunter followed in the eighties, then Tilt in the nineties and The Drift in 2006. Despite becoming more obscure, more arcane with his allusions, and more abrasive with his composition, Scott Walker isn't so obsure anymore. The brilliant 30 Century Man documentary film to accompany the release of The Drift celebrated his work with contributions from fans and collaborators including David Bowie, Radiohead, Brian Eno and Jarvis Cocker (among others).

But Tilt. I could have picked any of Walker's albums, because there's plenty to say about all of them, but Tilt fascinates me. I've returned to it often since it's release in 1995. It's funereal and elliptical and sounds like nothing else in the world. The words are obtuse, like riddles to tease apart and understand. The music is overtly percussive, punctuated by slabs of noise or orchestra. Sometimes the clouds clear and it sounds like the sun coming out for a few breatless seconds. I come back to it again and again, seeing new angles to approach it from, hearing new things to appreciate. How many records make you want to do that, fourteen years on?

Farmer in the City, the first track is dedicated to the Italian filmmaker, Pier Paulo Pasolini, a man whose murder by a seventeen year old hustler while out cruising has subsequently been speculated upon as political, mob-related or extortion, depending on who you talk to. Farmer in the City is like an ember of the Walker of old; it swells with strings and pained emotion:

Paulo take me with you,

It was the journey of a life...

Certain themes and metaphorical imagery in Farmer in the City crop up time and time again in the rest of Tilt (and indeed in much of Walker's post-sixties work). Animals feature heavily: harness on the left nail... I knew nothing of the horses. And further into Tilt, imagery of horses, swans, cockfighting, butterflies and buffalo prevail. The aforementioned harness suggests another theme in Walker's work: an almost sadomasochistic fetish that vascillates between torture and sex, or sometimes both. There's a similar obsession with the body that permeates vitually everything Walker writes; the suggestion of the fragility of the meat that is us, the torture of it, the death of it, the horror of its failings. Often there's two sides to everything presented in Tilt; something tender can all too easily slide into violence, torture can lead to something like love, however twisted. Tilt is like a jigsaw puzzle: all the pieces are there in front of you, but how do they all fit together?

The Cockfighter, a song about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the 'architect of the Holocaust' is atonal, a frightening counterpoint to Farmer's lush sound. The Holocaust and the industrialisation of mass death is very Tilt. The lines... All the calcium planets/growing in the darkness/all over the body/the flapping body.. seem to suggest the loss of control when the body fails, and then... That ribbon cracks like this one can be read as the gentle ribbons in her hair, or the more sinister cut her to ribbons.

Papa danced four feet away, in the rubbing and fusing, the sealing and pivoting...in Bouncer See Bouncer tie the act of sex with dancing while a bare but insistent drum pounds away in the background. Later in that same song, the percussion gives way to a moment like the sun coming out, only for the darkness to reprise again moments later. It's a song laden with religious and sexual imagery.

In Manhattan and Bolivia '95 Walker returns to themes of torture and prsioners in their last moments. In Manhattan, Scalper in the lampglow and ...stickwiped shirt and his arm somewhere suggest interrogation and worse. While in Bolivia '95 (possibly referring to Che Guevara's death in Bolivia)... I journey each night like a saint to stand on this straw floor and ...The tiles speckling darker and darker around my feet both summon images of the schoolhouse where Guevara was executed. It returns to The Electrician's ambiguity of the relationship between executioner and executed.

Walker has subsequently offered some explanation to Patriot (a Single), saying, "It's simply about a character, perhaps a spy, wandering the desert outskirts of Iraq," and that it "ends as it begins, with the bombing of Iraq." It's a typical Walker song with its fractured words where beautiful transforms suddenly into something altogther more dangerous.

The title track returns to the metamorphosis between animal and man that Walker had previously considered on Climate of Hunter. Aside from dual references to a jacket and a skin as the same thing, Tilt the song is strangely impenetrable, but features guitarist David Rhodes playing minor and major keys at the same time, which sounds slightly unsettling.

The final song, Rosary is stripped of all adornments, and the only recent song in the last thirty or so years that Walker has performed live (and this on Later with Jools Holland, alone before any of the studio audience had arrived - find it on YouTube). It again suggests more body horror: With all the trembling vein that you can bare... Its spare arrangement and raw vocal bring Tilt to a desolate close.

Tilt is an initially infuriating and claustrophobic album that grows into something else upon repeated listens. It's place in the geography of music is unmatched (save for the even darker and more obtuse follow-up The Drift) but it's worth the investment. Only a handful of albums will repay your investment with something so rich and rewarding.

John Martyn

2009-01-30T01:40:00.002Z

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

2009-01-29T23:44:00.007Z

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

2009-01-29T22:27:00.008Z

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

2009-01-28T02:19:00.006Z

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

2009-01-27T02:36:00.006Z

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!

2009-01-27T02:25:00.001Z

...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

2009-01-26T01:46:00.006Z

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

2009-01-25T23:19:00.005Z

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)

2009-01-25T03:54:00.010Z

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

2009-01-24T03:09:00.009Z

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...

2009-01-22T01:46:00.003Z

...should be this way.

Moulin Rouge and Secret Skin

2009-01-20T03:14:00.004Z

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

2009-01-20T00:57:00.004Z

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

2009-01-18T22:50:00.003Z

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

2009-01-18T20:45:00.005Z

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

2009-01-17T03:55:00.002Z

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

2009-01-17T00:03:00.002Z

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

2009-01-16T22:03:00.000Z

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

2009-01-16T21:59:00.000Z

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

2009-01-16T02:30:00.000Z

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

2009-01-16T01:57:00.000Z

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....

2009-01-16T01:22:00.000Z

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...

2009-01-16T00:12:00.000Z

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

2009-01-16T00:03:00.000Z

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...

2009-01-15T23:06:00.000Z

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.