Mad Men S5 E11

spoilers ahead...

who could put a price on the lovely Joan? ... Pete Campbell could.

Mad Men S5 E11 is the kind of episode they should teach in screenwriting school. It had a theme and that theme was the price society puts on women and women's work and each element of the theme mechanically worked its way through the various plots and subplots until the end. I imagine the writers of this episode were very proud of themselves at how slickly this was achieved, in fact, this episode was so well oiled it reminded me of those Season 5 Seinfeld episodes where each one of the four main characters would have a story and all four stories would come together at the end of a tightly edited 22 minutes. 
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Peggy has been feeling undervalued all season and so she went to see her mentor Freddie Rumsen (it was great to see Bill Murray's brother back for an episode) and after consulting with consigliere Freddie she finally took a job offer with a rival firm. At the end of the episode she told Don she was tired of his hot and cold routine. He thought she was kidding and seemed genuinely distraught that she was leaving. He kissed her on the hand in a moment that seemed to break Peggy's heart, but in a clever touch (by the director?) as she walked out of Don's office she grinned to herself as the Kinks played over the titles. 
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Joan too has been feeling undervalued and when a creep from Jaguar offered to give SCDP the contract for the car if she could be washed and scrubbed and brought to his tent, it was Pete Campbell who brought her the news. Instead of slapping him on the face she told him that SCDP couldn't afford her. And then it became that old joke "we know what you are, we're just haggling about the price." Don thought the whole thing was distasteful but Lane said that if she was going to sleep with the tubby creep she should at least hold out for a partnership. She did and she did with only a few teary surface regrets at the end but, no doubt, icebergs of trouble lying underneath. 
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Megan...ah who cares about her. The casting directors at her audition wanted her for her body, not her acting ability. She was shocked. Shocked! Isn't she French? Doesn't she have any knowledge of the world? 
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So all the women were feeling used and abused and throughout the episode SCDP Creative were pitching a campaign to sell a Jaguar E type as a man's expensive, high maintenance mistress...You don't have to be Gloria Steinem to work this one out folks. And yeah to me this all seemed a bit heavy handed. We watchers of Mad Men are not stupid, the writers don't have to hit us over the head with their themes, they don't have to block capitalise, they don't have to shout. Shout they did though. 
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So what are we left with at the end of this pretty great, action packed ep? Joan's a partner, Peggy's gone, Megan's wise to the ways of the wicked city. Don let another women slip through his fingers...A lot going on and that big easy, yummy theme that Emmy voters will lap up. 

My Favourite Albums Of All Time

The album sleeve for House of the Holy collides Arthur C Clake's
best novel, Childhood's End, with the most interesting
place in Ireland, The Giants Causeway, with the greatest
band in the world at the time, Led Zeppelin

Rejigging the list for 2012... 
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A list which is always changing, always evolving, sometimes devolving. At the moment the present stay of play is below and in a month or two it'll be different again. You'll notice no Beatles (not a big fan) or Springsteen (played him to death unfortunately although Nebraska might squeeze in there) or rap (I like individual songs but albums of the stuff?)  This isn't a PC list like Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums or a hipster collection like the NME list. Its merely my favourites. Old fashioned? Out of touch? Sure. I've limited myself to one album per artist and you'll notice that most of the records are in that sweet spot 1965 - 1979 when books, films and records were just better. 


1. The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico
2. Blood On The Tracks - Bob Dylan
3. Houses of the Holy - Led Zeppelin
4. Let It Bleed - The Rolling Stones
5. OK Computer - Radiohead
6. Astral Weeks - Van Morrison
7. Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd
8. Pink Moon - Nick Drake
9. Liege and Lief - Fairport Convention
10. Franks Wild Years - Tom Waits
11. Parallel Lines - Blondie
12. PJ Harvey - PJ Harvey
13. I'm Your Man - Leonard Cohen
14. The Smiths - The Smiths
15. Dummy - Portishead
16. Horses - Patti Smith
17. Kind of Blue - Miles Davis
19. Are You Experienced - Jimi Hendrix
20. The Undertones - The Undertones
21. Automatic For The People - REM
22. Legend - Bob Marley
23. Never Mind The Bollocks - The Sex Pistols
24. Dusty in Memphis - Dusty Springfield
25. The Ramones - The Ramones

Wolf Hall & Bring Up The Bodies

Thomas Cromwell, badass

Let's talk first about the thing that few reviewers seem to want to talk to about: religion. As well as being a clever work of art Wolf Hall is a sustained and subtle attack on the authority of the Catholic church and its role in English affairs. Most reviewers of Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize winning novel have somehow missed this overt agenda but when you grow up in Northern Ireland (with the sixteenth century Protestant-Catholic conflict regrettably still alive and well) you readily see what Mantel is up to. In 1935 Sir Thomas More was canonised by Pope Pius XI and his PR has been nothing less than excellent since, that is until Mantel got on the case. GK Chesterton, A Man For All Seasons, The Six Wives of Henry VIII etc. have all cast More as a witty man of principle attempting to deal with a bullying King Henry and a treacherous Thomas Cromwell. Mantel aggressively subverts this story in a way that only someone who suffered at a Catholic boarding school can. In Wolf Hall More is not the genial pacifist of the legend but in fact is a chilly religious fanatic who gets his kicks from torturing and burning alive those who dared to commit such heinous crimes as doubting the existence of purgatory or translating the Holy Bible into English. Thomas Cromwell by contrast is a smart, liberal, worldly man of the streets who has lived and fought all over Europe. Mantel's Cromwell is a good husband, a good father, a wit, he speaks half a dozen languages and he is tolerant of error. In a now famous passage Cromwell's talents are touched on:


His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and late to bed. 


I wasn't convinced by Wolf Hall when I first read it. Do we really need another book about Thomas More and Henry VIII, I asked myself? We've got The Tudors on the telly, we've had several versions of A Man For All Seasons and numerous historical novels about this period in history. We also had this episode drummed into us in school and on half a dozen BBC history programmes. What else new is there to say? Well, quite a lot actually. Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies together form a strident counter narrative to the prevailing view. The history I got in school was the story of a greedy Henry VIII and an evil Thomas Cromwell destroying the monasteries, places of learning and charity. Mantel, as any good defence lawyer will do, goes a bit overboard to show us that the monasteries were in fact places of corruption, sloth, cruelty, stupidity and pederasty. 
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Of course we also get the story of the women of the time, especially Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour. Anne is clever but indiscreet, Jane is simple, coy and beautiful. The young Queen Elizabeth is a spiky ginger and Queen Mary is a cold religious prude. But the real heart of these two novels is Cromwell. Mantel's Thomas Cromwell has become one of the richest and most interesting heroes of contemporary literature. It's obvious why this novel is more popular amongst women than men, because the Thomas Cromwell of Wolf Hall is an idealised male lead, impossible for any man to live up to. Whether the real Thomas Cromwell was anything like him I have no idea, but judging from the achievements of his children and wards I'd say that Mantel's take is probably closer to the mark than the villainous coxcomb of A Man For All Seasons. Early in Bring Up The Bodies Cromwell builds a tennis court at his home in London and his game play is described as a strategic, clever and canny, just the way you'd expect it to be. Mantel's Cromwell we come to realize is the true "man for all seasons" and the ball is now firmly in the court of the defenders of Sir/Saint Thomas More to attempt to return Mantel's devastating double volley.

Europe Central by William Vollman

No, not an odd man who gives trouble in parks,
this is William Vollman

I recently finished the novel Europe Central by William Vollman. I certainly salute the artistic vision of the book but I'm not entirely sure that it really works as a novel of World War 2 or indeed as a work of fiction at all. In a weird way it reminded me of that vast Niall Ferguson history text War of the World, which is the story of the period 1914 - 1945 told from multiple perspectives. Vollman tries to do the same thing in fictious form and while it's certainly very ambitious and the research and cast of characters is impressive, like much of Vollman's work it is, however, a bit overwritten and the style is very much one you will either love or hate. (If your favourite Thomas Pynchon novel is Against The Day then you probably will like Europe Central.) Europe Central was written while Vollman was a visiting scholar in Germany and it did win the National Book Award so it's certainly got a respectable pedigree, but it just ain't my cup of tea I'm afraid. 
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My favourite WW2 novels below: 

10. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
9. Men At Arms - Evelyn Waugh
8. The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
7. The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk
6. King Rat - James Clavell
5. Empire of the Sun - JG Ballard
4. Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman
3. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
2. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
1. The Thin Red Line - James Jones

5 Reasons Why a Blade Runner Sequel Would Be A Bad Idea

nice shooting, but completely inappropriate rain gear, love

The news leaked out this weekend that the Blade Runner sequel is definitely on. While I'm slightly encouraged that Ridley Scott is hiring Hampton Fancher to write an original script I still think this project isn't a very good idea. Here are the reasons I gave back in March when this was just a horrible rumour:
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1) Most sequels are horrible. Even the good ones like The Godfather Part 2 aren’t really a patch on the original. This rules applies even more so in science fiction with the curious exception of The Empire Strikes Back. The Matrix sequels were so completely awful that they managed to ruin the mythology and all the good will of the original.

2) We’ve been down this road before and it wasn’t good. Harrison Ford’s reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise: Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was the worst film of his career. It was also the worst film of Steven Spielberg’s career. And Ray Winstone’s. And John Hurt’s. etc.

3) Ridley Scott doesn’t understand his own movie.  Scott has repeatedly said that Harrison Ford’s character Deckard is a replicant when this makes no sense at all in the context of the story. Both screenwriters agree that this doesn’t work as a plot device and it makes even less sense when you’ve read Philip K Dick’s original novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This doesn’t bode well for a Ridley Scott retread of this material.

4) CGI will make everything worse. Blade Runner was shot on the old Maltese Falcon set on the Warner Brothers back lot. The set looked so bad  that Scott only shot at night with lots of fake rain and smoke. Constant rain and night shoots made everyone on edge and it shows in the film which has a genuine misanthropic, dystopian feel. A sanitised, blue screen Blade Runner would likely be as uninspired and lifeless as the Star Wars prequels.

5) The end of the story is already flawless. Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut ends with the great emotional high of Roy’s speech on the roof of the Bradbury Building followed by Deckard and Rachael fleeing for their lives from his apartment. The last shot in the film is the elevator doors closing on Harrison Ford and Sean Young as they run towards an uncertain future. To me this is as self contained, ambiguous and brilliant as the ending of The Graduate and any additional information would only spoil this pitch perfect note. Occasionally Hollywood should ignore the accountants and let art win a round or two in the eternal fight between art and commerce.

The Feel Good Book Of The Year

Manhunt by Peter L Bergen doesn't really have any scoops or offer us anything new about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, but it is still a compelling, thorough and fast paced read. Bergen knows what he is talking about and got access to the White House, the CIA and joint special forces command. As a CNN reporter Bergen met Bin Laden in the 90's and because of his close relationship with the Pakistanis he was the only western journalist who was allowed to visit Bin Laden's compound in Abbotabad before it was demolished.
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Bergen isn't in the business of apportioning blame for 9/11 and Bin Laden's escape at Tora Bora in December 2001, but I am. According to Bergen on August 6th 2001 President Bush was told by the CIA that Bin Laden was determined to strike the US. Bush's national security team led by Condoleeza Rice had previously been informed that Al Qaeda was desperate to hijack planes on US soil. After the August 6th briefing Bush did nothing. He issued no executive orders and did not raise the security level at US airports. Bush listened to the briefing and spent the rest of the day "clearing brush" at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. What was odd about this is that on a previously aired episode of The West Wing President Bartlett was faced with a similar threat and took an entire episode to decide what to do about it. Bush and Rice however didn't give this terrifying information a moments thought. 
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At Tora Bora the guilty men were General Tommy Franks and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who refused to let commanders on the ground insert US Army Rangers or Marines to prevent Bin Laden slipping through the net. Rumsfeld was fixated on maintaining a small US footprint in Afghanistan and at the crucial Battle for Tora Bora where Bin Laden escaped there were actually more Western reporters in the region than US soldiers. Iraq was one of Rumsfeld's fatal obsessions and on the day Bin Laden escaped "Rummy" was having General Franks rework a Pentagon invasion plan. Bergen makes the point that the Iraq adventure was a severe drain on the resources of the CIA and the special forces and that by the time President Obama came to power the entire Bin Laden unit was only about two dozen operatives strong. Morale was low and leads were few. President Obama dramatically increased the CIA's Bin Laden unit and tripled the number of drone strikes on the Pakistani tribal areas that devastated the upper echelons of Al Qaeda from 2009 - 2011. 
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The rest of the story is well known. The CIA followed Bin Laden's courier to the compound in Abbotabad and after a few months trying to gather intelligence a raid was recommended to the President. Vice President Biden and Secretary of Defense Gates both thought the raid was a terrible idea but the majority of Obama's national security team felt it was the right call. Bergen did not interview the SEALs involved in the raid so his account of Operation Neptune's Spear has nothing substantially new to add to the stuff that's already out there. According to his youngest wife, Bin Laden spent much of his six years at Abbotabad watching old videos of himself, reading Noam Chomsky and writing maudlin poetry. His last words were "don't turn the light on." (The rather more successful German poet Goethe's last words were "more light, more light...") 
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I listened to Manhunt as a Random House audiobook and although I enjoyed it I have to say that I think it was a mistake for the narrator to try to impersonate Presidents Bush and Obama and his Pakistani, Afghan and Arabic accents were unintentionally hilarious (they sounded like Peter Sellars in the Goon Show). I also wonder if Bergen hasn't gotten too close to his sources in Pakistan. He completely lets the Pakistanis off the hook and insists that no one in Pakistan knew that Bin Laden was in their country which seems prima facie unlikely. That aside, Manhunt is a pretty good audiobook and it has a nice happy ending with the vain, solipsistic, deluded mass murderer cowering in his room for fifteen minutes and then getting shot in the eye. 

The Swimmer As Hero

(a post from the blog's infancy)
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I had never heard of Charles Sprawson's Haunts of the Black Masseur - The Swimmer as Hero until I read a review of the book by JG Ballard in an essay collection. Ballard endorsed it so strongly that I ordered it immediately from Amazon.com. It is a cultural and literary history of swimming through the ages, enlived by Mr Sprawson's own swimming exploits: learning to swim as a boy in India, bathing at Pliny's house in Como, dodging Russian tankers as he attempts the Hellespont, lounging in the pools of Hollywood. Sprawson is one of those people who have read everything and he must have dozens of notebooks full of swimming references which he generously doles out for our amusement in lovely, streamlined prose. Byron gets his own chapter as do the Romans, Greeks and German romantics and many likely and unlikely figures in between. The book is charmingly illustrated and bound. It would be flawless but for the fact that it lacks an index. Though published by the small University of Minnesota Press it has been continually in print since 1993; so I would urge U Minn to hire an indexer for the next printing and if they don't Mr Sprawson should jump to Penguin or NYRB who would, I'm sure, love to have him on their lists. Charles Sprawson's interview with the BBC is miraculously still available here.

Accents In Game Of Thrones Part 2

Rose Leslie as the stroppy Man City supporter, Ygritte

For the last few weeks as John Snow has headed north over the wall I've been thinking that we were finally going to hear some Scottish accents on Game of Thrones but we haven't. You'd think the people over the wall (a Westeros equivalent of Hadrian's wall between England and Scotland) would have a different accent than the ones south of it and when they cast Rose Leslie, who is Scottish to play Ygritte, I expected that finally we were going to hear some Highland vowel sounds. But instead of that they've asked Leslie to do a Manchester/Lancashire accent which she does brilliantly but even so its a little bit of a let down. There are at least half a dozen Scottish actors in Game of Thrones and four or five Irish actors but so far all the accents on the snow are English or quasi English (Yes I'm looking at you Peter Dinklage). There's a couple of very mild accidental Irish accents (Littlefinger and Catelyn Stark) but everyone else either speaks home counties or with a Lancashire/Yorkshire northern accent. Game of Thrones is filmed in Belfast and previously I've expressed some disappointment not to hear a single Belfast accent anywhere near the show. They've filmed in Magheramorne where my grandmother's from and at Red Hall in Ballycarry where I used to play when I was a kid. They've also filmed up in the Glens of Antrim and down in Strangford, areas I know really well and I can tell you that all those places have distinct, old fashioned very interesting accents. Maybe give an extra a line or two? 
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The week before last we did get a hint of Geordie which was nice but really the casting people should be less conservative and let the native Irish, Scottish and Welsh actors use their own voices. Americans could handle Welsh accents or Scottish ones or Ulster or even Brummie. And it beggars belief that in a continent 1000 miles from top to bottom you would only hear two different accents. 
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This guy can do six different Scottish accents (and he forgot 
Glasgow). His Belfast is ok but his Boston and Maine are beyond terrible. Incidentally on a good day I can do 7 different Northern Ireland accents: Derry, Larne, Carrick, Ballymena and 3 Belfast accents: South Belfast/Malone Road, Scary West Belfast & Camp Julian Simmons Style West Belfast.  

Sherlock: A Dissent

Smaug and Bilbo

The new season of Sherlock has been running on PBS so I thought I'd repost my - very mild - dissent about the show from last year... 
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By all accounts Sherlock has been a huge success. It's been a ratings hit in the UK, it's been sold to 150 countries, the newspaper critics have been universally supine (here in Australia the critics all love it) and an American version has even been sold to CBS starring Johnny Lee Miller (the very first Mr Angelina Jolie) as Holmes. If you’ve been avoiding all forms of media for the last year I should explain that the show is an update of the Sherlock Holmes stories that takes place in contemporary London in a parallel universe where Holmes, Watson and presumably Arthur Conan Doyle never existed. Co-conceived and written by Stephen Moffatt of Dr Who fame, it stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, both of whom will also feature in the upcoming Hobbit from Peter Jackson. While the casting is great, the direction slick and there is real "chemistry" between the lead actors I do have a few qualms with Sherlock and these are to do with the writing.

All writers have little tics that they carry around with them, some good, some not so good. Moffatt is a brainy guy (the power station gag in episode 1 was great and all the sly references to old Holmes stories are wonderful) but one of Moffatt's tics is to make everything really dark, really early. The first season of Sherlock was incredibly violent for what is essentially a rather fluffy mystery show. We saw the torture of old people and children and in the last episode of the season dozens of people died in a bomb explosion. I guess Moffatt thinks that if he kills a lot of people it somehow ups the ante. It doesn't. It’s an old saw of mystery writing that whenever you’re stuck over a plot you either kill someone or have someone burst into a room holding a revolver. When Moffatt gets stuck he kills loads of people. But it's better and purer to be more economical with your deaths and some of the best mysteries ever written or put on TV have no killing at all. Mass murder may be a sign of the times but it is not a good sign.

My second problem with Sherlock is that the "mysteries" themselves are all a bit rubbish. In the last season a serial killing taxi driver got people to take a poison pill "simply by talking to them." That sounds good doesn't it? Maybe, you're thinking, he did a number on their mind like Hannibal Lecter did with Miggs in Silence of the Lambs.  No such luck. When the denouement came we discovered that he got people to take the poison by pointing a gun at them and ordering them to do it. All the mysteries in Sherlock seem to resolve like that. Nice little premise, crap mystery. In the first episode of season 2 we even had a man who got killed by a plastic boomerang that came back and hit him in the head while he was distracted. A good writer always gives you a clue as to how to solve the mystery. Our clue was this: "the hiker had recently travelled abroad." By that we were supposed to deduce that he had gone to Australia, bought one of those cheap plastic boomerangs and by a miracle the boomerang he had thrown had come back and killed him. When in the history of the world has a boomerang ever come back to anyone? And where was this boomerang? Well it had conveniently "washed downstream" even though this incident had taken place in a field. It may sound like I'm going to town on this, but a boomerang? Really?  

My third problem with the writing in Sherlock is that Holmes doesn't actually solve any of the mysteries by deduction but rather by a kind of magic. He not only sees things that others don't but things that other people can't. He's not a scientist or an investigator he's a magician. In the clunky old Holmes stories the reader has a chance of hitting upon the solution before Holmes does but in the BBC series the viewer can't possibly do it because we can't do magic. This is cheating and it's not cool.

I think Stephen Moffatt is aware of his shortcomings. Designing a really good closed room mystery takes patience and skill, in fact designing any really good mystery takes a deep awareness of the mystery genre and a working knowledge of hundreds of books. If you don't have that, a good way of deceiving the viewer is to throw a lot of stuff up there on the screen. Instead of one well thought out mystery you chuck up a dozen (again, as in the premiere episode of season 2). This is another classic writer's (and magician's trick) and it's called misdirection. You blind the reader, punter or viewer with so much stuff they don't realise what's going on.

So why has Sherlock gotten such great reviews? Well it's actually a pretty good programme. And good acting, good direction and a fantastic cast can mask a lot of defects. But more importantly, I think the reviews have been so stellar because the guys who write the TV review columns for the national papers are not close viewers (with one or two honourable exceptions). TV is the most democratic of media and TV critics strive to be populist. I understand that but still they should be sensitive to good and bad genre tropes and they should point them out even in a superior series like Sherlock.  

Awake

A few months ago I read a long piece about the TV show Awake in the New Yorker which proclaimed it as the future of network television. I did not find the piece particularly convincing and I was somewhat alarmed to discover that Awake was written by the man who wrote the misconceived Mel Gibson vehicle The Beaver. The premise of the show is this: A homicide detective awakes from a car accident to discover that his life has been split into two realities. In one he and his wife survived the accident, in the other he and his son lived. In one reality he is grieving for his dead wife, in the other he's grieving for his dead son. The protagonist played by Jason Isaacs returns to work and in each episode he attempts to solve two murders, one in each reality. One of the realities is either a dream or a hallucination or maybe there is some kind of weird conspiracy going on. This is not that original an idea as the gimmick is almost identical to the gimmick they pulled on Life On Mars and Life On Mars didn't work in the end because they never really thought through the arc of their story. (Life on Mars and its sequel Ashes to Ashes had two separate endings, neither of which really made any sense at all. The American version of Life On Mars had a third ending which didn't make sense either.) 
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In a way there is no point talking about Awake at all because it is certain to be cancelled by NBC in the next few weeks. Pace the New Yorker the critical reviews have been mixed and the ratings have been disastrous. But before Awake disappears forever into TV hell I decided to watch the pilot episode on iTunes. 
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Ok so what did I think? Well the first thing to say is that this is not a show that should have been made on network TV. 40 minutes is not long enough to hit the story points of a conspiracy and to solve two different police procedurals. It would be tough to do all this in an hour on HBO but on NBC each homicide investigation gets about 15 minutes tops of screen time which is less even than on Law and Order. Everything feels very rushed and not in a good way. On the plus side I liked Jason Isaacs in the lead and the supporting cast was ok if a bit lacking in charisma. There are two therapists in the two realities, one of whom tries to nurture Isaacs, while the other is more confrontational and I really liked this idea. As I say I felt the stories were all a bit too hasty and I also wonder if it was a good idea to go this dark this early on Awake which begins with an Elizabeth Smart style rape and abduction of a child. 
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There was one clever moment on Awake that really got my attention however and that was when Isaacs was talking to his therapist and wondering if his reality was all a dream. She considers this, goes to the web and prints out a copy of the US Constitution and asks him to read a piece of it at random. He reads an obscure passage and then the therapist asks him how its possible that he could gain knowledge of something he had never read before in a dream. In dreams you can't acquire new information you can only process information you already had. I enjoyed this scene very much because I've had exactly the same experience in my dreams.  When I've been suspicious in my dream that I was actually in a dream I've tried to read books that I know I haven't actually read and every single time the incongruity has woken me up. I know this isn't a dream that I'm having right now because with a couple of clicks I can go to Project Gutenburg and read a page or two of the Encyclopedia of Needlework or the Castle of Otranto books I'm pretty sure I have never read before (of course I can't be metaphysically certain). I thought that Jason Isaacs would immediately raise this issue with the more confrontational therapist in the other reality but (at least in the pilot episode) he did not. Maybe this has been solved already in the episodes I havent seen but if not I hope that NBC gives the creators of Awake a few weeks notice before they pull the plug so that they can come up with a plausible solution for this nice epistemological conundrum.

How To Become A Successful Novelist

Everytime I go on Amazon these days I see an ad for an "Amazon Success Story" - a self published author who becomes a bestseller overnight. I've read a few of the books of these chaps and they don't seem to be particularly special or brilliant to me. (But then again what the hell do I know?) What these authors seem to have done is capture the Zeitgeist in a certain moment with a concept or idea that explodes virally with the general public. Book #2 of a best seller will always sell but the real test for these authors will be book #3. I'm sure some of them will continue to do well and I wish all of them nothing but continued success: it must feel brilliant to be rejected by the mainstream publishers and then become a million seller on Amazon. Anyway I know nothing about ebooks but I do know about mainstream publishing and drawing on my wealth of experience I've produced a helpful little pie chart for all you aspiring novelists out there. The figures take your average best seller and break down into percentages what I think the components of that success amount to. I genuinely think that this is pretty much how the mainstream publishing world works for new writers. What I'm really saying here - rather cynically I admit - is that its better to be pretty and connected than to have written a good book. (Not better for your soul, of course.) The pie chart applies to all new novelists except for Nordic crime and mystery writers: if you are lucky enough to be Scandinavian you can write any old tosh and the general public will lap it up.

The Thick Of It

BBC America finally decided to show the controversial BBC political sitcom The Thick Of It last week. They were so scared of creating offense that they put it on at midnight, which is ok, but then they did the unthinkable - they bleeped out all the swearing. The whole point of The Thick of It is that it has some of the best and most creative swearing that we've seen in the English language since Chaucer. The team behind The Thick of It has a new show on HBO called Veep but the reason Veep is such a crashing bore is because white Americans dont really curse with the verve of Brits or Micks and crucially Veep lacks Malcolm, the Prime Minister's sweary terrifying Scots enforcer, the star of both seasons of The Thick of It and the film In The Loop. S3E1 of The Thick Of It, unbleeped, below: 

Triumph of the Fanboys

Pauline Kael awaits buried in a mountain
and will come back to us in our time of
greatest need. We'll forgive her what
she said about Shoah

When a film like The Avengers gets a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes you know the culture has effectively surrendered. And surrendered to the worst people in the world: 13 year old boys. The Avengers is a terrible movie: clunky and unfunny and oh so dull but Empire loves it, Peter Travers raves about it and even dear old Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian is afraid to speak against it, lest they think he's a fuddy duddy or something. The only major critic who (I've found) is brave enough to appear unhip and castigate the thing as a childish mess is Karina Longworth who is fighting the good fight over at The Village Voice. Here's a typical review from The Boston Globe, money quote "there is nothing to dislike in this movie".
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The thing is I'm a geek too. I know my Star Wars and my Marvel heroes. I can debate Alan Moore or 2000AD or Sandman with the best of them. I've watched the 2 hour review of Phantom Menace on Redlettermedia and I think the best sitcom of the last decade was Spaced. A non geek can read Blood Meridian and think of John Ford, a geek will obsess over the scene where the Judge makes gunpowder just like Kirk does in the classic Trek ep. Arena; so I'll match my nerd credentials against anyone, but crucially I don't think nerdom is all there is. I'm excited by a movie like Fish Tank or a play like Jerusalem or a book like The Art of Fielding. You know, grown up stuff. 
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I predict that when the final Christian Bale Batman film comes out the critics will lie supine before Christopher Nolan's "genius", but you shouldn't listen to them and get taken in by another awful, boring low IQ comic book movie. The reviewers are either too emotionally retarded and cinematically illiterate to know what a good film consists of or too cowardly to tell the truth about what they're seeing. After believeing the reviews of The Avengers and walking out of that shitefest on toast all I can do is to urge you not to listen to the slavish, boot licking reviews for the flick. The Avengers is not a film for adults. It's a film for teenage boys and those unaccustomed to wit or the deep end of the swimming pool. Joss Whedon is not a good director, and you know what, while we're at it, Christopher Nolan is not a good director either.
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Will the adults ever revolt and demand grown up fare in the multiplexes as well as in the arthouses? I doubt it. It's socially acceptable to be a 45 year old 13 year old. Look at the trajectory of Quentin Tarantino's career. After he made Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown everyone thought he was going to make grown up films from then on, but since then he has gone back to making flicks for 13 year olds and of course they have been hugely profitable. 
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A few critics still look back to the early 70's and say hey how come we don't make movies like that anymore, but they are lone voices crying in the wilderness and no doubt soon they too will be coopted by the 13 year old boy bodysnatchers.

Where I Got The Idea For Sirens

When I used to do book readings I would invariably get asked the question "where do your ideas come from?" to which I almost always had no convincing answer. Where do ideas come from? The subconscious? Dreams? I don't know for sure. For me it's often been the case that the ideas for my books have come as a particular mental image. Dead I Well May Be began as a memory of waiting at the 1-9 Subway Stop at 125th Street and Broadway on one of those humid July NYC days. The Bloomsday Dead began while I was walking the dog back from Blackhead Cliff to my sister Diane's house. (That was a book where I wrote the last chapter first and gradually worked my way back to the beginning.) For The Cold Cold Ground the book came all at once with this line and this mental image: "Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon."  
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I Hear The Sirens In The Street began back in 1983 or 1984 when I was visiting HMS Caroline, my dad's Royal Navy Reserve ship that was anchored permanently in Belfast. Caroline was a venerable vessel that had taken part in the Battle of Jutland, but what impressed me on that particular morning was the sight of hundreds of DeLorean sports cars parked at the Belfast docks waiting to be shipped out to God knows where. The ailing DeLorean car factory had recently closed and John DeLorean himself had been arrested by the FBI for attempted cocaine smuggling, cocaine which he was hoping to sell to the IRA in attempt to get the factory going again. 
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I began walking among the rows of DeLoreans and to my amazement when I tried one of the door handles the gullwinged door opened. I looked inside the DeLorean and was immediately impressed by the left hand drive, the small aircraft like dashboard and the smell of newness and modern-ness. Checking for a non existent security guard I got inside the car and closed the door. I sat there for about two minutes playing with the steering wheel and the peculiar automatic transmission then quickly got out again before I was discovered. I learned later that most of the cars in that parking lot were sold as scrap or for parts which was a shame because in 1985 Back To The Future was released and DeLoreans became prized collectors items. 
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Anyway the idea for I Hear The Sirens In The Street almost certainly came from my memory of sitting in that DeLorean back in 1983/4, a memory that has been knocking around in my brain for the last couple of decades, looking for a way to express itself.