dreaming between the lines

We've Moved!

2010-06-20T20:13:00.002-04:00

To all new visitors: dreamingbetweenthelines now has a new home at the following location:

http://dreamingbetweenthelines.wordpress.com

I'm a freak bitch, baby

2010-01-04T20:58:00.003-05:00

So, 2009 is over, and 2010 beckons: The Year We Make Contact, as the movie states. It's always interesting, reaching years that have been movies and books. I'm sure 1984 was a surreal year, with the 1984 novel-inspired imagery of Ridley Scott's Apple ad, and the subsequent breakthrough of Apple macs. Now we wonder, what will we make contact with? Truth, beauty, enlightenment, the Apple Tablet, also known informally as the "everything-killer"? It feels as though - culturally at least - the last 10 years have been a climb to the summit; the horizon of a new world is sweeping into view. 2009 is just a glimpse in the rearview mirror now. It's vanishing so fast that there's no time for a full recap; instead, I propose a little game: name the cultural event of 2009. The lists are always segregated: personality of the year, books, movies, albums, songs. The prize should be greater, all pitted against all: the 2009 Ultimate Culture award. Kind of like ultimate fighting, but more cozy, and with cups of tea. What one thing/person/event really captured the essence of 2009, defined it, represented it, distilled it? Something new, innovative, groundbreaking: it has to be an evolution, taking our awareness of what culture can be to a new level. Something we've never seen before. First contact. There are several, possibly many contenders. New Moon, Where The Wild Things Are, Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, Taylor Swift and Kanye West, Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner, Glee... These swirled in the cultural eddies of 2009, but we need to be more ambitious in our search, looking for the lunar forces that drove the cultural tides upon which these other things were carried. Using criteria of boldness, execution, brilliance, and impact, I nominate the following:

1) Jay-Z, Blueprint 3
2) U2 360 Tour
3) James Ellroy's novel, Blood's A Rover
4) Lady GaGa. Nothing specific, just Lady GaGa.

Jay-Z stepped up with a groundbreaking, brutal assault on the future, delivering his eleventh number one album in an unforgiving display of redefinition; U2 expanded the concept of the stadium show exponentially, taking it into space; James Ellroy's prose crackled and punched with violent arcs of raw electricity, each word a sharp spark, each page a cascade of live wires flipping with the power of the current flowing through them.

But. Lady Gaga. Hard to compare to any one of the previous three, let alone all at once. But Lady GaGa was, simply, everywhere, and not just famous for being famous; propelled into the cultural stratosphere by actual talent and creativity. Innovative costumes (Kermits! Spinning geometric hoops! Bubbles!), intricately brilliant, baroque-ly constructed operatic pop-dance mini-epics... It was as though 2009 considered what it needed, really sat down and thought to itself, what would best sum me up, and lo, it created Lady Gaga, a pop star and musician totally of 2009, totally of the moment, created by the moment, built from the moment. 2009 was a year for brilliance, boldness, confidence: we had recovered from our Y2K anxieties, the horrors of the start of the decade, the paranoia about what to call the damn decade (the aughts, the zeros, the noughties...), there was even a start to economic recovery - we surged forward with our bold Star Trek remakes, our uncompromising adaptions of Sendak picture books, really launched ourselves into an ever more densely packed cultural landscape (vampires, werewolves, Yankees), happily embracing more than ever world-changes wrought by visionaries (IMAX 3D, Harry Potter, iPhones, Pixar - seriously, Steve Jobs = man of the decade), and we found our stride this year, and in a moment of Taoist brilliance, the universe rewarded us with the perfect reflection of all of this: Lady GaGa. What a year. To use two of James Ellroy's many thousands of brilliant sentences to describe 2009: "It was all dizzying. It was re-situating, re-wire-all-your-circuits shit."

Shining a light

2009-12-13T20:45:00.004-05:00

It's always nice to get recognition; so much of what we do as writers is solitary, theoretical, awaiting the completion of another's perception. We wrestle with the old philosophical saw about the tree falling in a forest: if no-one hears it, is it real? Deep down, it's every writer's fear. Michael Chabon describes writing as a secret handshake that only makes sense in the presence of another; writing is a concept that needs to be received to be whole. Like love; the alchemy requires another consciousness: one won't do. When something we write is noticed and applauded, it's a kind of magic. It can be the subtle kind, or it can be on the David scale (Blaine, Copperfield). The only thing to remember is that it's real. The truth is that it was always real, but writers being what they are sometimes just need to be told. And so to the wonderful folks at Leaf Books, in Wales. With great kindness and generosity, in a recent Blog competition, they selected one of my posts as being commended: Subtle Fractures, from last year. They also published this post on their Showcase Website. Yes, I think they are lovely. The blog itself is a fragment of the writing world that I am building, word by line, chapter by book, novel by screenplay. All writers are building their own worlds - we love the control - and when a little piece of our world shines with another's praise, we feel a little warmer inside. Thank you, Leaf Books, for shining a light into my little corner of the blogosphere. Sometimes the satellites sent forth by the publishing gatekeepers detect our remote fictional worlds and report their findings, sending their signals back to the citadel. That brief transmission, that subtle pulse of acknowledgement, can make all the difference.

Empire State Of Mind / falsetto prophecies

2009-10-15T20:02:00.005-04:00

It takes a certain state of mind to never settle, never accept; to always move onwards, deconstructing the past to make something never seen before. A certain kind of ruthlessness. To be new all the time is a fierce position to take. Constantly remaking your world is not an easy thing. Writers, painters, musicians, TV execs, all face the challenge of reinvention; sustaining relevance. Take Californication's third season: it's darker and more complicated, rougher than before. Its beautiful soul, in the form of Natasha McElhone, has drifted to the periphery of the show, at least for now. Without its soul it is lost somehow but still has its wayward charm, despite the rawness, the darkness. You fear for it, like you would fear for a charming alcoholic with a bottle of whiskey in hand. The intelligence and wit are there, but with more of an edge, a presence of rage beneath the surface. It's like a Kris Kristofferson blues, a Warren Zevon comedown lament. Like days ending. The sky darkens, the night brings rain, whispering on the surface of our minds. Massive Attack's new EP is that whisper. It's a remixed promo for a forthcoming album - remixing the future this time - a pensive set of tracks. Beauty and loneliness in peripheral vision, half-dreaming. It's a quiet yearning, an aching that never seems to stop. Much less quiet, disrupting the night with sound and fury, is Jay-Z, whose Blueprint 3 was recently released to a roar of critical approval, and the #1 spot - his 11th. It's a monument to the relentless pursuit of being the best, the newest, the one and only contender; the Ali of rap, the Beyonce of pop. The album is like a triple-triple-espresso in every beat, like the sentences in James Ellroy's latest opus, Blood's A Rover; brutal, condensed violence, densely packed yet overarching, epic - it has much in common with Blueprint 3. This Jay-Z of novelists went so deep into the darkness of his characters to feel them truthfully that he lost himself in a breakdown. It's the ongoing theme - the danger of journeying into the dark for art. Fortunately Ellroy made it back; truly a giant of American fiction, of any fiction - looming over the literary landscape. The U2 of fiction, towering like the Alien Claw set on U2's current tour. The monstrous structure rising out of Giants Stadium like a mothership about to lift off, past the intense line of the Manhattan night skyline ripping the night alive, heading away from NYC into a shimmering oceanic density of thousands of glittering lights. The entire structure rippling thousands of times a second with light roaring majestically into space. It's philosophically astute, this Spaceship set. It shocks you out of your usual ways of experiencing and your perceptual expectations like Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project, opening your mind to the pure, unmediated experience; what you "know" set aside in favor of what is. Exhilaration, over the top, like the skyline, too beautiful to be real; an empire state of mind. All writers need this state of mind over their own literary kingdoms. We need to build our spaceships and not be afraid to take off. Vision. Vertigo. The two often go hand in hand. Creating the blueprints for the future to rise alongside the skylines we've already made. Always hustling, looking for the greatest line, the most perfect four minute song, or riff, or story, or novel. Each one must be the best, better than the last, better than the rest. "I move onward, the only direction, can't be scared to fail in the search of perfection," raps Jay-Z in On To The Next One. What joins them all is the bold vision that deconstructs what went before and refashions the future according to their creativity, their souls. Like Lady GaGa deconstructing pop to build the mezzo architecture of Paparazzi, then deconstructing Poker Face into a metallic heliosphere and her own unprocessed voice, dizzyingly, exhilaratingly pure, her naked voice the most beautiful it has ever sounded, as though through the metal and light she's revealing her soul to us with eerie intensity. Like the Weather Project, like U2's mothership, the lights and fury and sheer unexpectedness of it all shock our perceptual framework sideways and then we experience unmediated exactly what the artist wants us to. With Lady GaGa, it's her lonely, lovely voice that strips back the meaning of the song and rebuilds it again. U2 do it with I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight, utterly dismantling the song and retrofitting it into a pusling techno behemoth that could only exist beneath the Claw. Ellroy does it in Blood's A Rover, attacking and restacking his narrative style. This might be the mark of the truest artist; they can fragment what came before into something new and beautiful, then deconstruct and remix their own creations into futuristic, stripped back yet magnificent new versions. Striving for the new, finding a new visual, verbal or musical language, a new language of movement in choreography; new ways of moving us and touching our souls. Like Michael Chabon's Trickster In A Suit Of Lights, the exuberantly talented mischief-maker who exists in the spaces between the things we know. Bono embodies this literally during Ultraviolet towards the end of the show, in his suit covered with red laser-like lights, hundreds of red lines piercing the blue otherworldy glow around him with chaotic geometry. The Trickster looks for the action in the borders between things, the places where new directions take form; this is where U2 dwell, more experimental and progressive than many give them credit for. After two straight-up rock albums, they returned with a quietly ruminative piece, from which they launched one of the biggest rock tours of all time, journeying around the planet in their Spaceship/Alien Claw creation, bringing out of the hushed quiet of No Line on The Horizon the behemoth of the 360 tour. True tricksters (in the best sense) of hearts and minds.
"I'm going in for the kill, I'm doing it for the thrill..." La Roux
This played before the U2 show, as the sun set beyond Giants Stadium, a cool breeze flowed around the massive set and 84,000 people slowly appeared, the crowd intensifying as the sky grew dark and Muse unleashed their stadium-sized post-apocalyptic bombast via screaming, squalling brutal guitar riffing, Matt Bellamy's falsetto prophecies ringing out loud and clear as the band roared out from beneath. Then the lights went out, U2 lit up, and for 2 hours and 15 minutes, the future came back through a massive rift in the time-space music continuum, spinning and flashing wildly, a close encounter with a future state of mind, an empire state of mind.

you don't love me yet / the only truth

2009-10-10T22:10:00.006-04:00

You Don't Love Me Yet, Jonathan Lethem's smooth, spacious exploration of an LA band's potential moment of glory, is a precise and lovely book. As his latest, Chronic City, is about to hit bookstores, it's worth revisiting Lethem's charmingly motley collective: singer Matthew, guitarist Bedwin, drummer Denise, and lynchpin bassist Lucinda, whose personal journey forms the bedrock of the novel, grounding its more raw and experimental tendencies, just as her controlled basslines anchor the band's chaotic musical explorations.
The band is an elusive concept, to themselves and to the world: their name flickers and changes throughout; they cannot be defined and therefore never fully achieve cultural reality, or perhaps are the only truth in the city of make-believe. Lethem's finesse in evoking music is rare: the depictions of the band's rehearsals have the quiet assurance of authenticity; they read like Anthony Kiedis' descriptions of Red Hot Chili Peppers' jams in his autobiography Scar Tissue, which, like You Don't Love Me Yet, feels like a hymn to LA as much as anything ("...sometimes I feel like my only friend is the city I live in, the city of angels..."). In particular, Kiedis' recounting of a chaotic Saturday Night Live performance in the early nineties recalls Lethem's band's first radio moment, when all their possibilities coalesce, and anything could happen. In the early nineties, musically, anything could have happened: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Chili Peppers, U2's Achtung Baby and Zooropa albums, their Zoo TV tour, all of it an exhilarating collision and evolution of everything that had gone before. Lethem's novel is not so wild or chaotic: it's smooth, gleaming with a quiet glow from within, like listening to an iPod in bed, deep into the night. He shows us LA hipsters in the light of their own helpless gleaming. The city is smooth, measured. They exist in its contemporary spaces, its lofts and clubs, its radio stations, the static and sound waves that contain souls. Their life is music, they breathe chord changes and talk melodies. It's a world of legendary DJs, doomed art installations, ephemeral connections, and a misplaced kangaroo. It's also about sex, complaining, being a rock star, the last of the rock gods or the first of the new stars, living in the glass and steel of Los Angeles in what could be the nineties or the future. Lethem nails the desperate intensity of human couplings: the speed of the emotional vertical take-off, the slow spiral back to earth from the sexual cosmos, the pain of re-entry, the brutality of the hard landing. He handles all of this with grace, elegance, streamlined writing, the literary equivalent of gleaming, molded architecture, all reflective surfaces and hidden structures. The words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters change with digital smoothness, the barely perceptible transitions of an iPod moving from one song to the next. It's a world of smooth lines and clear light. It's the golden light over the Pacific as the world sinks into a clear dusk. It's deft. Even the kangaroo has an emotional clarity.
"Too many times I have wanted to turn around and walk away... you can't provide what I need from you anyway." The Ahn Trio.
Like dancer Kayla Radomski's anguished, strenuous yet light-on-her-feet interpretation of the Ahn Trio's All I Want, Lethem communicates the desperation and pain of wanting someone on their way to being, or already, out of reach. You Don't Love Me Yet communicates it with beautiful lines, sensual movements, and a deep appreciation and powerful understanding of love, music, souls and humanity.

In Search Of The Miraculous / lighting up the sky

2009-08-10T21:42:00.004-04:00

“….a riddle’s just the thing for a dreamer…” Tom Waits.

Not an easy thing, to talk about ‘the miraculous’ without irony. It exists, however you want to define it or refer to it, and we all, in our own way, seek it. And we all have our own version of what it means, which is miraculous in itself, that one concept can survive and in fact be enhanced by having six billion possible meanings, and probably more ways than that of finding it.

We’re human; aren’t we all really looking for the miraculous, one way or another? We might not call it that, but whether we look for it in love, religion, sex, dancing or reality TV, or maybe all of the above, maybe all at the same time, it’s what being human is all about. We need something beyond ourselves, which by the way, just to help you out, is usually found within us. We just need help bringing it to light, if we’ve gone into the darkness to find it, which, being human, we often do, especially as writers, artists, dancers, dreamers and other holy and degenerate chroniclers of the human condition.

“I tell you that I wanna go, but I wanna stay…” The Ahn Trio.

Hubert Selby Jr has words quoted elsewhere in this blog about the risk of not coming back from that darkness. Transforming yourself emotionally in the name of art can be dangerous. You can read that figuratively, emotionally, psychologically, or simply literally. Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader vanished at sea while attempting to complete his enigmatic work, In Search Of The Miraculous. Even back in 1973, it was meant with ironic detachment. It was to be comprised of photographs of a walk through Los Angeles from the freeway to the ocean; photographs from a similar trek in Amsterdam, and details from the Atlantic crossing he undertook, just him in a small boat, the solitary journey during which he disappeared. The Los Angeles photos are evocative in their directness, William Eggleston by way of Weegee. Each one is accompanied by a lyric fragment of a song by the Coasters’ (“I’m searchin’, I’m searchin’ every which way…”) and what could have been mundane and everyday is now something other, something more. It’s simultaneously a deconstruction and a celebration. They coexist, and their coexistence is essential for the miraculous. Like lovers. Transcendence can only occur from opposition.

“All I want is what you got… I know I’m gonna lose myself this way…” The Ahn Trio.

It doesn’t really need saying at this point, but let’s say it anyway: the miraculous is everywhere, and often shows up when you’re not even looking for it. It’s re-watching the first twelve episodes of Californication and realizing all over again how deftly the irreverence sits with the emotional body blows, the brutal human truths. It’s watching a dancer called Kayla Jenee Radomski from a place called Aurora delivering a wrenching performance to the Ahn Trio’s All I Want, lighting up the sky with moves drenched in wanting and loss and desperation that remind you exactly what it feels like to hurt for someone. It’s watching a performance like this and realizing that writers just have to grasp that sometimes words just aren’t even close to being enough to compete with the eloquence of the body. It’s seeing your lover smile for the first time as your lover. It’s seeing your lover smile for the three thousandth time, and still feeling it light you up. It could be a first kiss… or the last kiss… slow-fading memories of how it used to be, or what could have been… or knowing how things could be. Or breathing clean air on a bright shiny morning and for once, not feeling any pain.

“…why’d you have to wait, where were you, where were you?” The Fray.

‘The miraculous’ can be any or many things, and it’s probably not what you expected. It may not be what you were hoping for, and it might come later than you wanted. You might call it and it doesn’t return your messages… but it is there, always. And if it isn’t (and forgive me for this, because I’m writing this on an iPhone), there’s probably an app for that. Once your higher power of choice gets into the app development market, we’ll all be OK.

Until then, you could do worse than follow the lyric that starts this post, and listen to some Tom Waits. Whatever you choose, miracles await.

"...tiptoe through our shiny city, with our diamond slippers on..."

2009-04-28T21:14:00.006-04:00

The National, singing in Fake Empire, a song which recently achieved exposure during the closing moments of Southland, a new cop show set in LA, directed in the unforgiving glare of the sun and the submerged, deep shadows of the LA night, with pin-sharp, brutal clarity. The track contains a multitude of emotions tightly wrapped in the beaten cadences of Tom Waits' poetry and the loneliness of Jack Kerouac's American nights. The moment when despair and hope collide and it could go either way. This constant wonder of being alive. Everything is bright, everything is in shadow, and you go quietly through the shades in the valley of the sun, because to go any other way might make it all real, and you don't know yet if you want darkness or wonder. Tiptoe, then, for now. Just like falling for someone, just like writing a novel; you plunge in with abandon and yet you tread carefully, because you don't know yet what this thing may be, what it could become. You sense its power but don't know it, although you want it more than you can say. You can only will it into existence. You want it, you want him, you want her. It's all so close in your mind, so faraway from where you are. The chorus of the song tells us: "we're half-awake, in a fake empire." Maybe that's the state we're all in. Maybe that's what it means to be conscious, to be human. To feel, to be in love. It's our job as writers to find this out; it's something only we can do.

"the worst of us are a long, drawn-out confession; the best of us are geniuses of compression..."

2009-03-07T15:35:00.004-05:00

Words from U2's latest album No Line On The Horizon, released this week; a quiet, hypnotic set that yet thrums with the hidden but sensed force and latent danger of distant power lines. Occasionally thunder breaks and a storm races through, but the insistently meditative rhythms soon resume to carry us to the album's Sopranos-like sudden conclusion. In the lines quoted above, Bono is writing in the character of a war correspondent, but those words could apply to all writing, that character could be any writer: "I'm here because I don't want to go home," he sings at one point. Writers take the long journey away from themselves, like actors, even as what they write or perform reinforces who they are; who we are. Throughout the album, Bono, perhaps the only rock star to truly channel the kinetic, elusive spirit of the Beats, attains sharp, brutal poetic heights: he has never been such a genius of compression as he is in these songs. "I'm running down the road like loose electricity," like Kerouac in his original scroll for On The Road, full of restless, shifting energy, the need to escape, to move, to be alive. U2 channel the Beats, the rawness of punk, the immediacy of Japanese poetry, and even Ezra Pound, for they always follow his command to "make it new." Take everything you know and remake it. That's what Shakespeare did by turning established stories into new plays; that's what Baz Luhrmann did when he adapted Romeo & Juliet into an utterly contemporary, furiously edited masterpiece of kinesis. That's what U2 always do, to varying degrees. Achtung Baby was likely the biggest leap they have ever taken, from the traditional sincerity of The Joshua Tree to the new, heavily disguised, digitized, synthesized sincerity of Zoo Station and The Fly. The Zoo TV live show, while on the hand being utterly of the moment and groundbreaking and new, still carried echoes of Ezra Pound's Blast magazine, published in 1916, with its one-word-per-page slogans, its cutting up and fragmenting of the cultural norms of the time, its exploding of conventions. The form was deconstructed and technologically rebuilt; this is what U2 have been doing ever since The Fly's distorted sonic reinventions. By the time of their Pop album, Bono was openly referencing William Burrough's philosophy of cutting up the past and re-forming it. True invention and innovation demands the highest level of sincerity and dedication, to the soul of the piece, to the craft of realizing it. No Line On The Horizon is a beautiful, almost silent meditation on a long journey with no end in sight; it's also sonically, musically and lyrically inventive. Unlike Achtung Baby, that invention is here absorbed by a minimalist soundscape. It takes many listens; all of U2's layers are compressed into a smoothly digital rendering of loss and hope. It's a writer's showcase in many ways; whether you write poetry, music, lyrics, stories, screenplays or novels, at some level the same needs and demands will eventually apply.

one path through the wilderness

2009-02-25T20:28:00.011-05:00

In The Living Mountain, excerpted in Ali Smith's fascinating anthology The Book Lover, Nan Shepherd describes the moment when flowing water becomes frozen: "...the struggle between frost and the force in running water is not quickly over. The battle fluctuates, and at the point of fluctuation between the motion in water and the immobility of frost, strange and beautiful forms are evolved." She could have been describing the process of writing. In the process of evoking a particular truth, new truths emerge, in the capturing of "the moment of equilibrium between two elemental forces," the writer and the world. The moment of fluctuation becomes the moment of equilibrium as the writer makes the choices, transforming the endless torrent of beautiful possibilities into something new and unusual; finding its one true form; or at least, the form that is true in that moment. It's tempting to say the process is never truly over. As writers we observe our chosen world flowing around us while we stay still; when the moment is right, we reach out to feel, and to bring something of that world back to the page. The wild rush of life in motion is given permanence, a lasting shape in words. It's a process that we return to, that we obsess over, giving form to dreams. As Neil Davidge, one of the fundamental figures behind the group Massive Attack, has said, "I've locked myself away for days to stay in the same emotional place, capture something, and see a piece of music through to the end. You're always chasing what you imagine in your head, so you just keep going." The elemental forces: reality and creation. In the song Life Itself from his recent album Working On A Dream, Bruce Springsteen evokes the first of those forces: "You were life itself, rushing over me, life itself, the wind in black elms..." He wants us to feel the reality of the character, and so he takes that wildness and gives it a smooth form, choosing just one of the infinite ways he could have used; taking one path through the wilderness.

"...[the novel's form] arises in a freedom that no-one can delimit and whose evolution will be a perpetual surprise."

2009-02-01T15:30:00.008-05:00

Milan Kundera speaks in concise philosophical truths. His recent essay in seven parts, The Curtain, is a characteristically precise analysis of the art of the novel, and the art of being a novelist. He wields a critical scalpel like a master conceptual surgeon, with complete steadiness of hand and purpose. The text is studded with hard gems of insight. "Description: compassion for the ephemeral." His cultural world-view can be rigid, and he admits as much, although he follows this by letting us know that it's the correct view. We can allow this; he's earned it. "The unbearable lightness of being," "the beauty of a sudden density of life." Even in translation, his aphoristic tendencies survive with clarity. He marshals a global coterie of authors, and culls their writings (novels, stories, letters) to weave a tapestry of thought and novelistic philosophy. In the process, he generates a steady stream of ideas, any one of which could fill a chapter, or even a book. It would be breathless were it not for Kundera's utter control of the material, his iron grip on the evolution of the novel across societies, cultures, nations and moments in history. Naturally, any writer reading The Curtain will find resonance with those ideas that most closely dovetail with their own, but there is much to learn in this book, from the many writers included within. Kundera calls on Flaubert for assistance on multiple occasions, most deeply when he quotes the author of Madame Bovary talking about his mission as a novelist: "I have always done my utmost to get into the soul of things." What more could we ask for from a novelist? By truthfully, genuinely getting into the soul of your story, your characters, everything else will follow. As Kundera says, "in the art of the novel, existential discoveries are inseparable from the transformation of form." It's the one and only real rule of writing: be true to the story. Get into the soul of it, and it will take the shape it needs. The characters will inhabit their organic world, truthfully. Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth, a brilliantly composed contemporary noir thriller about werewolves and dogcatchers in LA, is written in brutally spare, beautifully simple blank verse. When asked why, Barlow described how, once he started writing it, starting deep in the heart of the story, the form it had to take became apparent. From Flaubert's cinematic journeys into the modern consciousness, through Kundera's conceptual renderings, to Barlow's lovelorn wolves howling up at the dying skies of LA, one thing is always necessary: get into the soul of it; or, as Oasis put it in their most recent album title, dig out your soul. The truth will be there.

making the choices

2009-01-04T16:26:00.007-05:00

Evolution, transformation - perpetual motion. New shapes, new forms. Having finished the novel some time ago, after multiple edits, it became clear that one more pass at it was necessary. An intense experience, to take the apparently finished product, and find it opening out again to reveal new shapes, new chapters, a different structure. Editing and revising can sometimes be the most rewarding part of the always intense experience that is being a writer. I used to find the complete opposite when I was starting out. The initial burst of creation was the thing back then; the beautiful coalescing of underlying emotional structures, the elements of a dream forming into a specific memory. That draft would contain all its possibilities. I used to prefer that stage, because it contained the possibility of the final perfect version of the vision. One of the most important things I learned though, was the importance, and the sheer joy, of locking in the possibilities. Making them real and vivid. Making the choices. In the first draft, all the different directions, mixes, and edits are all there. It's like the demo version of a song, or the rough cut of a movie. It seemed like a herculean task to move the piece beyond that stage. But the process of editing is now the most exciting part of the enterprise. Taking that raw material and shaping it, sculpting its new form, its true beauty. Adding the soundtrack, fixing the visuals, moving scenes around, shooting new material. Adding the sheen that pulls everything together. And the momentum continues when you adapt the work from one form to another, changing everything, throwing it all into a new light. A story becoming a poem, a novel becoming a script; evolutions and revelations abound.

evocation

2008-11-02T19:43:00.006-05:00

How much should a reader bring to a story, and how much should a writer give? Should a work of art be a monologue from its creator, or a beautiful dialogue with the one experiencing it? The less representational the work, the more the reader/viewer/listener can bring to it, to make it their own, to personalize and deepen their experience. Walter Murch, the renowned film and sound editor, has described how brevity can have more effect on the consciousness of the viewer than full revelation: "the danger of present day cinema is that it can suffocate its subjects by its very ability to represent them. It doesn't possess the built-in escape valves of ambiguity that painting, music, literature, radio drama and black and white film automatically have, simply by virtue of their sensory incompleteness - an incompleteness that engages the imagination of the viewer as compensation for what is only evoked by the artist." Evocation rather than realization; the former seems more powerful, more compelling. Olafur Eliasson, an Icelandic creator of sublime and beautiful art installations that defy our everyday ways of perceiving and thinking, redefining the usual perception of conceptual art, has this to say: "I do not see my work as any kind of manifesto. It's a dialogue. Always." He created The Weather Project for Tate Modern in 2003, a hypnotic, sensual, and seductive experience that involved turning the ceiling of the Turbine Hall into a giant reflective surface, and installing the sun at the far end of the hall, its light refracted through slow-moving mist as watchers wandered beneath it all, staring in wonder. To call it an installation does it no justice; it was a majestic redefinition of what art can be. The experience was undoubtedly the dialogue that Eliasson was seeking. It created that moment, the shock of something other that dislocates our usual ways of seeing and perceiving. It took all those who witnessed it outside for a moment of their usual way of understanding. Into that gap rushed new perceptions, new realizations, and everyone who saw it came away changed in some way. In the face of such transcendence, the rigid ways that we insist to ourselves are the ways in which we see, may relax. Habits can form a defence against experience; art like this can open a gap in these defences, and allow experiences your usual concepts would not normally allow. By not giving a viewer everything, we give them the ability to bring themselves into the equation more fully. The Weather Project gave virtually nothing in terms of information; it contained no easy narration. Yet it had astonishing resonance with over 2 million viewers. Giving readers gaps that they can fill, lacunae in which they can remember, and create. This can draw the reader deeper in, allowing them to move in their own ways in the beautiful spaces between what is known; dreaming the dreams between the lines.

beyond the darkness lies the truth

2008-10-19T19:40:00.009-04:00

Emotional truths are risky things to obtain. To place yourself in the emotional abyss in order to tell us something about the human soul is a dangerous enterprise, whether you are an actress, writer, philosopher, musician, creator of art installations, dancer... Why do we search for this? What possesses artists to go on the difficult journey to bring us some kind of truth? Showtime's series Californication gives us some insight into this journey, telling the story of Hank Moody, a New York writer forced to stay in LA by a relationship that subsequently disintegrated, leaving him washed up in the brutal city of artists and dreamers. The first episode of this series was a masterpiece in miniature. It revealed the writer, played by David Duchovny in a manner described by the Guardian as "revelatory," tormented by the emotional realities of a life truly messed up. The writer whose "exercise in nihilism", God Hates Us All, was turned into a romantic comedy. The writer whose insistence on an alternative, punk, rock'n'roll, Bukowski-loving, tradition-shunning outlook on life has separated him from the love of his life, and his daughter. He journeyed into the darkness to write brutal truths, and perhaps didn't come all the way back. That first episode ended with Hank staring helplessly into the darkness of an LA night, with My Morning Jacket's version of Rocket Man drifting mournfully in the background. It conjured an intergalactic loneliness, the lonely voice of God murmuring truths about the dark night beyond the lights, the lizard kings and run-down bars, strange creatures moving around out there, and nothing human left in the universe; a perfect encapsulation of isolation. By the end of episode two, Hank was alone, again, sitting in his car at night, desperately haunted by the emptiness of the passenger seat, while a voice on the soundtrack described how "some nights I wish that the sun would never show its face." Hubert Selby Jr, author of searing, unflinching portrayals of the human soul such as Requiem For A Dream and The Demon, writes of the requirement to to go as deep into the darkness as possible to bring back the truth into the light. He notes that, "obviously, there is always the chance that you will go too deeply into the darkness and not come back." He took the risk of the artist in placing himself in unsettling and terrible emotional places; walking the emotional and psychological high-wire out to, and back from, from the loneliest of places. Searching in these lonely places for truth, discovering things about what it means to be human; this is not the end. The journey back still awaits; the truths must be conveyed. It has been said many times that writers lie to tell the truth, since words on a page are not truths or things in the world; they are words on a page, symbols, non-representational. How should the artist convey the things they have discovered? What language should they use? Words and movements, art and music, can evoke these elusive emotions. The most non-representational form can convey the most exact truth. Acting, for example, is not real, but the transformation of consciousness it requires cannot be faked. Who really knows what transformative effects the truth will have upon one's consciousness? One cannot truly know without experiencing it. It's why we do it.

they come to live with Angels and chase their dreams

2008-10-12T11:57:00.004-04:00

That's James Frey writing, in Bright Shiny Morning, a huge, sprawling metropolis of a novel, an LA novel, maybe the LA novel. It's as fragmented and made of shards of life and dreams as the city itself, as America, the world, our consciousnesses. It's a million little pieces of existence, a thousand synapses firing while the soul of it all - big, brash, beautiful, brutal LA - emerges as a hidden quality gradually brought into the bright light of day, from the artificial neon of the night into the fierce light of Frey's insight. Through Frey's freewheeling narrative we see haunted souls, dreams moving just beyond their ability to grasp them, just beyond their capacity to dream them; humanity doing what humanity always does: reaching for something other. The dreaming and the reaching in this novel occur in one of the most brutal arenas in which hopes could possibly come to compete with others, the city of angels, of the unflinching guardians of dreams. Interspersed or entwined with the stories of the many is the story of LA itself, from its first settlement in the 1700s through to the modern day; Frey allows himself free rein to insert key historical and sociological moments from the city's history into the other narratives, each of which in itself adds something to the momentum of this city ravenously consuming the land around it, the resources, the people, their souls, their dreams. All of it may be true; it may all be nothing at all. As Frey is careful to point out in the opening pages of the novel, "nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable." Whether his facts are really that, or modified versions of the truth, is not important. The emotional truth is the thing. And in this monstrous collection of stories, Frey has constructed a fragmented masterpiece from which emotional truth emerges, despite, or, let's face it, because of, the fractured structure of the whole. Frey concentrates on four central narratives, five if you count the city itself, but there are many more rushing past us in a torrent of humanity, brief glimpses of a moment in a life soon replaced by another, like flashes of the sun on the Pacific. It's the nature of humanity and capacity to dream that underlies this enterprise at the deepest level; but closer to the surface, these many narratives are held together by the most important character, Los Angeles. Just as Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days was unified by the poetry of Walt Whitman, Bright Shiny Morning is a novel about LA, and its fragments are made whole by the overwhelming presence of the city. It's a complex example of the fragmented novel. When Frey says that nothing should be considered reliable, he might also be referring to the publisher's and bookseller's labels - this is memoir, that is fiction. Those labels are as unreliable as remembered truths may or may not be. Is this a novel? Is this a collection of stories, some of which may only last for a paragraph, some for a few pages, and some for the duration of the entire work? Is it more fragmented even that that, thousands of shards laid together to form something larger than themselves, like a collection of poems that is really many things but is published as one thing. Does it matter what we call it? Artists convey emotional truths; it is others who decide how to categorize the results. Even the process itself, from creation to publication, is a series of fragmented experiences, the end result of which is a nicely packaged product, a bright shiny novel that of course is one thing because you can just pick it up, one object that belies the thousands of aspects that went into its existence; you may sit there in the coffee shop reading this novel, and actually you are consuming many stories, many lives, many dreams. Bright Shiny Morning is a novel, a great one, but not in the sense that we used to think of novels; the hierarchies are changing, because that is what hierarchies do. We cannot stop them. In 2008, monolithic entities hold less sway than fleet of foot, swiftly moving new forms; twenty-first century concepts that are mutable, and ever-changing.

subtle fractures, hidden structures

2008-08-30T12:11:00.008-04:00

"As the variety of the environment magnifies in both time and space and the structures that were thought to describe the operation of the world become progressively more unworkable, other concepts of organization must become current" - Brian Eno

"One story just isn't enough... I think I'll keep going until every sentence is a different story" - Michael Cunningham

What makes a novel, a novel? What makes it "one thing," one cohesive object? How disparate can a work's elements be for it still to be considered a novel? These questions come to my mind as I read and reread my novel, because it began life as a short story, and then another, and another... until suddenly I had a whole book of stories focused on the same characters, their lives, their places - in one way, it contains multiple emotional trajectories, but in another, more profound way, it's one trajectory, one "moment." All the stories, or chapters, weave together as the one story progresses to a conclusion (of sorts). So, it's a novel. As I thought about it more, I realized that this a scene that has been quietly developing: works published as novels that may be collections of stories in disguise. I trace it back to David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, back in '99. Published to great acclaim as a novel, the connections between each chapter are minimal. It does not fully involve the same people, places, emotions or atmospheres. It's disparate, diverse. In Tessa Hadley's Accidents In The Home, published in 2002, the fault lines are much more subtle - the chapters involve the same characters at least, but in different times, different situations, far away from each other. Michael Cunningham took this further in Specimen Days, published in 2005: it features the same set of characters in the same city (New York), but in three completely different times (the past, the present and the future), and in different incarnations of themselves (human, android, alien). It could be three novellas, or one novel, depending on your preferred perspective. We'll leave aside the marketing and commercial perspective for now, save to note that publishing something as novel is clearly commercially more viable (interesting though that this commercial imperative creates these hybrid works). In 2006, David Mitchell (having published Cloud Atlas in 2004) returned with Black Swan Green, which he described as thirteen stand-alone stories that happened to be a novel. It's fascinating, this crossing of the lines. This is where the energy is. Michael Chabon, in a precise and cogent essay entitled "Trickster In A Suit Of Lights," references Lewis Hyde's notion of the Trickster, the maverick creative spirit that resides in the borders between between genres; the intersections of the known forms of writing. "The Trickster goes where the action is," writes Chabon, "and the action is in the borders between things." The Trickster dwells at the threshold, the crossroads, the places where new directions take form. Chabon urges writers to uncover "the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore." Once we step outside of what we think we know about genres and structures, interesting things can happen. Once we realize that what we used to consider "a novel" is changing, we can discover beautiful things, wonderful possibilities, like those brought to light by Mitchell, Hadley and Cunningham. How contiguous does a novel really have to be? Could its 'novel-ness' be an emergent quality from a swirling mass of narratives? There are underlying, hidden structures, felt rather than seen, that can allow a diverse collection to be considered "one thing." If we look to other artforms, it seems easier: an album is really a collection of songs, but is seen as one coherent item. Maybe if we think of these fractured novels as concept albums, we'll have an easier time of it. Maybe the individual stories are movements in a symphony. It seems as though we need a new philosophical landscape for the novel; we need to move, as Brian Eno describes, from definitions that are fixed, to definitions that are "multiple, shifting, blurred, experimental and adaptive." Theories are stories, theorists are storytellers, and existing hierarchies are comfortable fictions. It seems that it's just a story we tell ourselves at this point in time, that this is a novel, and that is a short story collection. We can tell new and different stories about what we consider to be novels. As Chuck Palahniuk has said, "any long story, any novel, is just a collection of short stories." Our whole world ("one thing") is of course a collection of many stories. Our consicousnesses are a blend of all the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and why we did this, or that. Our "consciousness," which we think of as one unbroken flowing thing, is a beautiful emergent quality of many millions of things. Once you explore beneath what Michel Faber calls the "narrative exteriors," any number of wonderful things might be happening. It's incredibly exciting to me that a book could be a novel and a collection of stories at the same time, that we can not just be held to one linear definition, but can move to quantum states of multiple ideas coexisting in the same space; novels evolving in fluid motion over time, into newer forms.

the first post...

2008-08-26T20:58:00.000-04:00

So here it is, the inaugural post on "dreaming between the lines" (thank you Flaubert), my first foray into the world of blogs... I should probably start by explaining what all this will be about. To put it simply, I'll be writing about writing. Helpfully, I'm a writer, of novels, stories and screenplays, and I'll be exploring thoughts about writing, theories, ideas, philosophies - manifestos - as well as sharing tales of my own experiences as I try to gain my way into the citadel, the promised land of publication. I've had a small taste of this so far, with stories published in two anthologies (Bristol Tales, Watermark). The story published in Bristol Tales is the first chapter of a novel, which I will be sending out into the writing world in the hope of finding a lovely agent... Having completed numerous and brutal edits, I now have the fully realized version of that original dream...