ON DECK: I’m behind due to yesterday’s coffee failure! The newsletter got wrapped on Tuesday, thank god. Now I’m back in this script and either I will kill it today or it will kill me today.
INBOX: 71, I do have some outstanding emails to respond to
READING: BACK BLAST, Mark Greaney (research)
’m reminded of a DARPA proposal called the “Upward Falling Payloads” program. For that, critical goods, including weapons and war-fighting materiel—but, why not, perhaps also emergency organs for frontline surgery—could be stored underwater, in the middle of the ocean, using “deployable, unmanned, distributed systems that lie on the deep-ocean floor in special containers for years at a time. These deep-sea nodes would then be woken up remotely when needed and recalled to the surface. In other words, they ‘fall upward.’”
In that link, a plan to drop goods from orbit. But it’s “falling upwards” that I liked.
The ancient Greek historian Strabo referred to the presence of an important shrine located on the west coast of the Peloponnese some 2,000 years ago. Remains of such an Archaic temple have now been uncovered at the Kleidi site near Samikon, which presumably once formed part of the sanctuary of Poseidon.
Notes on a new Meret Oppenheim retrospective:
Portfolio: Andie Taylor:
A thing I’ve been asked often in the past: how can I tell when a new idea is a graphic novel or a prose novel? I’ve previously answered that it’s instinct from experience, but that’s not very helpful. And the question occurs to me again this week because in the past few days I’ve started work on a new idea that I instinctively knew was a comics series. I usually don’t develop comics ideas without a specific artist in mind: I develop for and with them, to their skills and interests. TREES, for example, comes as much from Jason Howard’s curated moodboards and curiosity collections as it does from my own obsessions.
To begin with, I will say: this is my personal approach, not an immutable physical law. Find your own way of doing things, make your own rules.
The two things I consider first are information and interiority. The comics page radiates less information than the prose page. And serious interiority tends to require lots of words, and the comics page can only usefully interpolate a certain volume of words.
(Various people have expressed various different “rules” for that. Stan Lee claimed something around 28 words of text in a panel, as I recall. Mort Weisinger said it was 35. Alan Moore once suggested it was 210 words per page. See how those work for you. Lettering was a lot bigger in those days, but lettering is a graphic actor in the panel. And then look at the brilliant Emil Ferris in MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS breaking every “rule”)
The third – how boring is is going to be for the artist to draw?
These things can connect in different ways. There are artists who love nothing more than drawing acting, physical language, facial expressions. This is one of the reasons why I prefer to develop comics with an artist in mind. If your artist is absolutely allergic to “talking heads” comics, then your calculation will shift.
What does your artist want to say? (This is the rule I’m breaking right now with this story idea. Maybe I’ll find an artist who finds what they want to say in it, or just fancies drawing it. Maybe I won’t. It happens.)
Comics and books have different toolkits. One is not “better” than the other. Each is capable of effects that the other is not. There are things I can do in comics that would be near-impossible to even attempt in books, and they wouldn’t have the same effect anyway. (Also, be aware at all times that a comics script is only ever half a piece of art — it’s not a complete statement until your collaborators have finished.) Prose has access to a bunch of tools that comes can’t always get near. Comics and prose even have different ways of approaching time itself.
What does the idea require in the way of length? You need a very long graphic novel to tell as much story as in a mid-length prose book. Most things we think of as graphic novels would come in as novella length if they’d been done as prose. This can be the killer. If I know I’m going to need sixty thousand words to elaborate the idea, the decision’s been made for me.
But also: how does the imagery of the idea strike me? How specific is it, in my head? Describing an image down to its finest edges in prose can freeze it and kill it — you have to suggest it, so it takes on its own life in the reader’s head. If you need to see it on the page in all its clarity for the thing to work for you, then it’s a visually-led story.
I only had a handful of very strong images for GUN MACHINE, but they were simple enough that they’d have more life in prose. And almost everything else happening in that book was happening inside John Tallow’s head. In NORMAL, the visuals had strong and complex motions to them, and, aside from that book being very interior indeed, they would have been a pig to draw.
TREES needed the Trees. It wasn’t going to work unless you could see them, feel their massive presence in the landscapes, the sheer alien pressure of them on the seen world. It wasn’t enough, for the story, to just tell you they’re there. Their silent weight had to be present.
(Which is a weird thing to say because Jason Howard’s art is generally all about motion, as anyone can tell. But Jason can do anything, basically.)
What does the story need to be its best self? That’s the thing you learn by trying.
RELATED: Comics And Time, a short talk I gave some years ago in Dundee.
(Written 3 April 2022)
Proper fucking Cronenberg, mate.
As Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN seemed a summation of Lynch’s career, so too does CRIMES OF THE FUTURE appear to present Cronenberg returning to the scenes of his crimes. There is VIDEODROME in here, and EXISTENZ, CRASH, NAKED LUNCH, SHIVERS and RABID. Its very contained scenes suggest COSMOPOLIS and its capsule narratives. Indeed, Cronenberg has re-used the title of his own second film from 1970, and in this film Viggo Mortensen wears something reminiscent of the black cloak sported by the lead in Cronenberg’s very first film, STEREO. There’s even some head violence recalling SCANNERS, some reflections on “celebrity” that you could connect to MAPS OF THE STARS, considerations of mutation that echo THE FLY, and surgery and instruments that made me think of the very fine DEAD RINGERS.
I am, of course, probably reading a lot into what is in all likelihood just a nice story that Mr. Cronenberg wanted to tell. But, as a lifelong member of his audience, it carried all kinds of extra resonances for me.
Cronenberg had apparently been working on the script for a great many years. For some, the references may seem a little dated – Orlan, Stelarc, that whole old guard of bodymod pioneer artists. Many of the ideas herein have been in play for decades. But I enjoyed the innovation of the hub of the piece: a man who spontaneously grows rogue organs that he has removed in art performances. An art world celebrity and an accidental celebrity in the shadowy demimonde of body modification, couched within a future world where most people no longer experience physical pain and resist the majority of infections. A man being betrayed by his own body who distrusts the way the world is going. A man presented with the possibility that the path of human evolution is about to irrevocably change. He can collaborate, if he wants. All he and his partner have to do is perform the public post-mortem of a dead eight year old boy who ate a plastic bin.
The performances are generally wonderful: a measured Mortensen, Lea Seydoux as good as ever, Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart giving different flavours of secretive and horny. The blocking on McKellar’s scene with Mortensen was fascinating. Cronenberg hangs the whole thing on what is basically a crime story plot to give it attack and pace. It’s beautifully made, doesn’t drag for an instant, has delicate emotion to it, and leaves you with questions to consider. CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is, for me, a welcome return of Cronenberg the artist. He turns 80 this year, and, if this turns out to be his last major painting, it’s a fine piece to leave us with. Thank you for it.
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE on blu-ray and DVD Jan 31 in the US, right now in the UK, on Prime Video and probably elsewhere
Coffee machine isn’t working properly. I have All The Things to do, which list now includes cleaning the coffee machine.
I started ROOM TO DREAM by Kristine McKenna and David Lynch and then put it down. Here’s the idea: McKenna writes a chapter of David Lynch biography, and then Lynch writes a chapter commenting on McKenna’s preceding chapter. And, frankly, the first few chapters bored me enough that I put the book down. McKenna had nothing engaging to say about Lynch’s childhood, and neither did Lynch. Which tends to be an issue for me with biographies anything. Very few of us do much of interest when we’re eight. Anyway, I picked it up again the other night and decided to skip ahead to see if it got better.
Alan Splet worked with Lynch to create a wildly original audio-scape for Blue Velvet. When Dorothy and Jeffrey make love, we hear a groaning roar that morphs into the sound of a guttering flame; Frank Booth erupts with rage and we hear a metallic screech; the camera journeys into the interior of a rotting human ear and the sound of a sinister wind seems to deepen and expand.
“David has a wonderful handle on how to combine images and sound,” said Elmes. “There’s a scene where Kyle wakes up in the morning after being beaten, and the first image you see is a close-up of his face in a puddle. All you see is dirt and water and you hear this strange repetitive sound, but you have no idea where you are. Then you pull back and see he’s in a logging yard and that the sound you’re hearing is a sprinkler keeping a stack of wood wet. The quality of that sound is magical. If it had been the sound of birds it wouldn’t have given you anything, but there was something about that mechanical unexplained sound that made it special. David has an understanding of how things go together that’s purely sensory-based, and he knows how to play with sounds and images until they sort of ignite each other.”
As most of you know, I’m working on audio dramas right now, so that bit just nailed me to the floor. Once the book gets going, you get multiple viewpoints on Lynch’s working practises. I’d have liked a little more on INLAND EMPIRE, one of my very favourite Lynch films, but the book becomes littered with interesting or curious little details. McKenna, a very readable writer, does interview around Lynch, and gets forensic on occasion, and Lynch tells stories. Lynch on Robert Blake: “His parents put him on the stage when he was three years old and he hated his parents, his mom in particular. I remember him saying, “I hated being in her womb.”” Blake’s gig on LOST HIGHWAY was his final film role: some years later, he was accused of the murder of his second wife, acquitted in criminal court but found liable in civil court. That one line from Blake in that anecdote absolutely chills me.
Lynch’s career fascinates me. He’ll try anything, without fear. Film, tv, painting, music, sculpture, whatever moves him in the moment. He also seems incredibly selfish, and every in his world is bent towards making the space for his art. He is, of course, a huge advocate of Transcendental Meditation, which is a kind of pay-as-you-go Zazen, but, hell, it seems to work for him. I doubt it’s the superpower that people attribute to him, but I can see how deep meditation twice a day for decades could lend him that fearless resilience. The use of meditation is that it is, essentially, a procedure for disconnecting from the jabbering superprocessor in the front of your brain and turning your head into a river.
Anyway. If you’re interested in Lynch, this book is more valuable than it immediately appears, and worth taking a look at.
ROOM TO DREAM, Kristine McKenna and David Lynch
And then I went to rewatch INLAND EMPIRE (“I kick him in the nuts so hard they go crawling up inside his brain for refuge!”) and a bunch of TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN episodes.
ON DECK: scripting, consultation gig, document drafting, production, finishing the newsletter, all the things
INBOX: 71. I’ll be in the inbox a lot today.
LISTENING: Night Tracks 8 Jan 23
SHIPPING FORECAST: I have two scheduled pieces today, I think, and then I need to catch up here. Onward.
Directed attractively by Mark Mylod, whose name I recognise from SUCCESSION, and written with energy and wit by Will Tracy and Seth Reiss, with a very nice score by Colin Stetson. Inspired by Tracy’s visit to a restaurant in Bergen, apparently in much the same way that FAWLTY TOWERS was inspired by John Cleese’s visit to a hotel in Torquay.
I have a passing interest in food innovation and art. I have read the Noma and Faviken books in much the same way I read science fiction or futurism. (Redzepi and Nilsson have the advantage of being good writers, and all their books are a pleasure to read.) One of my favourite episodes of Bourdain was his final visit to El Bulli, home of the mad scientist Ferran Adria. I’ve never eaten at that sort of place and will never get to, but the thinking and the level of invention is fascinating to read about. Hawthorne, the restaurant alone on an island in THE MENU, is that sort of place. And, like Bourdain at El Bulli, it is Hawthorn’s final night of service. But the twelve people who just paid two grand to eat there don’t know that. Yet.
Anya Taylor-Joy has become the kind of actor who can rivet the attention just by visibly thinking. There’s a moment where she sits and processes, extrapolates, tests and decides, that is completely convincing. Ralph Fiennes starts of as something of a caricature of the genius celebrity chef, and has fun as he descends into full movie villain. The script depends on him being able to pull off a tricky transition in the third act. This is why screenplays are part of a collaborative art, right? When you need exactly the right actor to pull off what the script requires in its crucial moment. Which is a real high-wire hold-your-breath moment. And Fiennes changes gears within the shape of the character as established to produce a human shift so delicate and gentle that it’s quite wonderful to watch.
THE MENU compares interestingly with GLASS ONION, another recent film about a group of people trapped on an island with death. THE MENU is earthier and nastier, and all its laughs are deep dark ones. The laughs are there, don’t get me wrong – it ends on two gags, too, one over the top and the other marvellously understated –but THE MENU is more strongly scorched by anger, regret and loathing. Its satire, sad and furious, is a bit of a sawn-off shotgun compares to GLASS ONION. But then, everyone’s a target.
THE MENU is a fable. A fable about stories and storytelling. And it operates like a fairy tale, which gives it a freedom to operate outside reality, but inside the truth of stories.
THE MENU – DVD and Blu-Ray released 17 January 2023.
I wrote this for my newsletter, several weeks ago. I received many responses asking me to put the piece on a permanent web page. So here it is.
The other week, I ended with the sign-off: ” So do the thing that makes you smile, look after yourself, and I’ll see you next week.” Someone replied to me with: “Sadly, right now nothing makes me smile.”
I know a bit about that.
A while ago, someone else recommended to me a book about depression in men. It was the wrong time of year for me to want to pick up that book right then. I want to talk about that a bit, and to talk about the thing that makes you smile.
(ADDITION: per many requests, I add here the name of the book: MALE DEPRESSION by Terry Real.)
My dad worked on the factory floor for much of his life, but there was a period where he worked as a buyer for a timber firm. What we didn’t know at the time was that it was too much work – he was doing several peoples’ jobs at once. At home he was angry, stressed and distant, and I didn’t know why.
It was the habit to meet him at the door when he came home from work. For some reason, that day, I went to the front door alone, to open it when he got out of the car.
He didn’t get out of the car.
After what seemed like an age, I went out to the car to see what was going on. Inside the car, my dad was slumped over the steering wheel, half-conscious and crying hysterically. I got the car door open, and he didn’t even register I was there. I called for help and nobody came. I tried to pull him out of the car myself. I was eight, maybe nine years old.
