AWOL

Of course, the lack of recents posts here is purely so I can come across all mysterious. "I wonder what he's up to?" they'll be thinking. "Maybe he's writing the Great American Novel? Although he isn't American, so that can't be right. Saying that, what if his novel was set in America? Would that be a Great American Novel? Assuming it was great, of course."

But that person isn't very clever, so it doesn't matter what they think. A cleverer person might be thinking: "Hmm... the real gamble is not whether Gordon Brown should go for a snap general election now, but whether he should risk leaving it until next year."

Somewhere between those two, someone is possibly thinking: "I wonder if Charlie is writing something different? Like a screenplay or something? Or maybe a romance. A historical romance. The Great American Historical Romance... written by a Brit but set in Salt Lake City. Or maybe he's getting into poetry? I hear there's good money to be made in poetry these days. Or songwriting. What if he's writing a few lyrics for James Blunt?"

Meanwhile... alpaca bouncers.

Stai per entrare in una valle di lacrime

I'm still here. I have not gone AWOL. I'm doing a bit of this, bit of that. Sowing my seeds of creativity hither and thither. Some will take root and others will land on the harsh and stony ground (thither) and die. But they won't drive me out of town, oh no. I'm staying. I'm finishing my coffee. Enjoying my coffee.

Two's a crowd

Especially in the crime fiction world, you hear a lot of crap from writers about technique. Draw the reader in. Make him love that protagonist. Make her hate that villain. Make them care. OK, not all of it is crap, but I find it oppressive. Anyone would think writing is not a solitary thing.

Anyway, this is all just a means of pointing you towards this interview with James Kelman, who is lumbered with no such self-consciousness:

"I never bothered about alienating readers, neither then nor now. The priority was to write the story properly. The readers could take care of themselves."

Remake News

Will Smith has signed up for the proposed remake of the 1996 movie INDEPENDANCE DAY. Asked how he would justify a remake of such a recent film, he said: "In the modern world, time moves more quickly than in old-fashioned times. Therefore we don't have to wait thirty or more years before we can get away with a remake. More shit goes under the bridge. Also we thought it would be cool to make the president an African American. That's who I'm playing, actually. I've been doing intensive training with one of the world's top rousing speech experts and I can't wait to show you all my chops. And we thought it would be a fun twist to make the hotshot pilot a white man this time. Not only is he a white man now, but he is a woman. An Asian woman. Also we know more about aliens now. We know, for example, that they cannot in fact control our minds like we thought they could back in '96. It is actually our bladders that they control. So now we have the aliens making people urinate at their will, thereby giving us a new angle on the action."

Asked if he thought there would be more of an anti-war theme, Smith said: "The aliens are also going to look different this time. Instead of all those tentacles and shit, they are going to look more like us. We are going to have white ones and Asian ones and African American ones, to show that we are all the same under the skin. And there is going to be a couple of good aliens who try to sabotage the evil shit that is planned. They will be played by Cuba Gooding Jr and Lucy Liu. The evil alien boss will be Alan Rickman. Also some of the humans will have tentacles, to show that we are all the same under the skin."

In other news, John Carpenter's 1981 classic ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is going to get a remake.

NB: Those linking here from movie news sites should be aware that this post is TOTAL BULLSHIT. Apart from the bit about Escape From New York. Sheesh...

Cox in a Box

Alex Cox tells it like they don't want to hear it in the Guardian:

We are told 10 Rillington Place "brilliantly embodies the seedy degradation of the real little Britain of the time". Get Carter depicts "a Britain paralysed by strikes and a failing economy ... in short, a nation on the skids". Get Carter was made in 1971. I was a teenager then, and can assure the promoters of this depressing vision that, despite strikes and IRA atrocities, Albion was a long way from skid row. When I went to college, the government paid for it. I incurred no debt. The state owned the water pipes, the reservoirs, the airline, the lecky, the telephone system and the railways, which ran on time and were reasonably cheap. We weren't engaged in two wars of colonial aggression. Muslims weren't our enemies. And the weather was great!

Four films seen over the weekend

SIDEWAYS I loved this. A repressed writer goes on a booze cruise with his unrestrained mate. Could there be a better tag-line than that? (Actually I made it up.)

REVENGER'S TRAGEDY

What happened to this film? It's fucking ace. Clearly a lot was taken from Baz Luhrman, but the whole idea behind this film had me slotting her in the player short of breath and with tremulous fingers, and I was not disappointed. Christopher Eccleston was brilliant and hard as nails, and it was good to see Eddie Izzard playing the least camp of the Duke's five sons. Alex Cox and Frank Cottrell Boyce pulled the perfect trick - giving us a 400 year old play and making it fresh. That's all you need to do, 400 year old play-wise. But why doesn't this film have a higher profile? Ah, I know... Thomas Middleton's name is not William Shakespeare.

ZIDANE: A 21ST CENTURY PORTAIT

I could destroy this film. I could attack it from every angle, like a turn-of-the-millenium Real Madrid side, picking at every glaring defiency bit by bit before firing home with the unstoppable fact that the directors are artists and not film directors. But... I liked it. I fucking loved this film. I want to watch it again! Ninety minutes of Zinedine Zidane's every move and gesture, totally ignoring the ball and the other players, is fine by me.

TV ADDICT

The edited video diaries of Rick Kirkham - TV news anchorman, loving father, all-round American good guy and hopeless crack addict. Rarely have I been so compelled by the fruits of our self-obsessed, self-documenting age. Absolutely harrowing viewing, but it just seemed so right that one whose whole identity is built around TV-friendliness should have a desperate need to fill himself full of crack cocaine.

Hatton vs Mayweather - it's on

Wow, never thought it would come so quick. The biggest fight in boxing is going to take place, probably in November. Trust me, non-boxing fans, you are going to know all about this fight by then. Expect major hype.

Of course, this is on top of the other biggest fight in boxing.

French Interview

If you are au fait with the gallic tongue (or actually possess one), you might want to check this interview on the SNCF site. LES ALLONGÉS (DEADFOLK) is up for the Prix SNCF Polar this summer, in case you didn't know.

Past Blasts

Seeing as I am currently bored, creatively bankrupt and more interested in sitting on my arse watching films than doing something as taxing as an interesting new blog post, I have dredged the archives for vintage stuff to show you. So allow me to take you back through the mists of time, to a moment when I was just as clueless as I am today but slightly more deluded about it... about it... about it...........

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Did I tell you I was on the cover of a magazine? Yes? OK. Did you believe me? No, thought not. Well get ready to eat those words, sonny boys and girls. Allow me to present WRITING MAGAZINE (Feb 2005)...

Honest to God, I can't leave my house now without people pointing at me and whispering "Hey, there's that guy from the front of Writing Magazine..." And the other day in town, when I went to pick up the mag... ah, I can't bear to think about it. People were following me from shop to shop, quickly hiding behind pillars and letterboxes and things whenever I turned around. But they couldn't fool me. I could feel them...

I knew I had to do something about it. I just couldn't let them get away with it. So I ran back and looked behind the letterbox and confronted the little old lady there, who was pretending to post a letter. "You leave me alone!" I screamed, blowing her blue rinse all over the place. "I have a right to privacy!" Her Yorkshire terrier was yapping like crazy now, biting my shoes. "It's people like you..." I said. "It's people like..." Words were obviously not working, so I kicked the dog hard and ran off, hoping that would send out a message to the public...

It seemed to work, too. For a while. Then the police came after me, chasing me down Friar Street and through Woolworths and onto the ring road...

I shook them by slipping into the multi-storey and hiding under a silver BMW on the top level. It was dark when I came out. No one could see my face in the dark. I drifted out into the night, weighed down by the futility of man's struggle in an indifferent universe...

Jeff Bridges and The Wisdom of Fingernails

Personally I believe everything Jeff Bridges says, no matter what he says. And this time he happens to be talking about The Big Lebowski, so it's extra special.

I had one of those trinity moments yesterday. The thing I'm writing at the moment, someone has just got coshed senseless, so he's left unconscious. Then I picked up the book I'm currently reading (a Fred Brown) and the protag, where I left off, had just been knocked out. And all day long, over and over, I had The Stranger in my head, saying "Darkness washed over the Dude..."

Congrats Al

A different sort of book gets the prize at last. And a top geezer. Shout it from the rooftops. And if you see Al lying unconscious in a gutter this morning, somewhere in Edinburgh, just walk on by. It's a trick. As soon as you lean down he'll dematerialise, reconstitute himself behind your back and give you a kick up the arse before running off, singing "The Devil Went Down to Georgia".

Comics

I have been developing a comic/graphic novel with the very talented Worcester artist Jonathan Dukes. So far I have written the script to the first issue/chapter, and Jonathan has been sketching out some characters. The whole point of it, besides me wanting to do some comics work, is that we both come from Worcester and share a certain vision of the town. We also both love warped stuff. Wanna see more Jonathan Dukes? Check out his PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A CHEF comic. His site is here.