The best thing about working on a TV series as a writer: Bouncing ideas off other people and receiving instant feedback.
The worst thing about working on a TV series as a writer: Having ideas bounced off you and being expected to provide instant feedback.
As my career as a non-sci-fi writer is going nowhere fast (for some reason I thought the market for boxing/refugee crisis/Berlin party town novels was blowing up. It isn’t), I have thrown my lot in with a plucky bunch of people looking to bring the next Breaking Bad to the small screen. It means I likely won’t be doing other kinds of writing for the next few months, at least. I have to say that feels liberating.
I’M FREE.
Book of the month: The Space Merchants by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl. Oh, what a shot in the arm this was for me. Critically acclaimed cyberpunk from the forward-looking days of 1953. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. Well, maybe not that, but a read that was actually enjoyable without needing to be grandiose or impart a Big Message or require me to have a qualification in horticulture in order to endure the flowery prose. There is - get this - a chapter of the book devoted to a protoplasmic, sentient mass of meat and tissue called Chicken Little that is regularly cut up into steaks to feed the downtrodden population of a neo-Victorian workhouse. This is all I want from a book.
Film of the month: Persona by Ingmar Bergman. Rumour has it the great director was unstable, but you’d never guess it from this descent into the depths of insanity, abortion, motherhood, homosexuality, sex and method acting. There are several shots in this film that cannot be topped, such as the moment when Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson lean toward the camera in profile, with Bibi’s face being overlaid by Liv’s in a kind of vampiric sexual synthesis that is more effortlessly, organically aesthetic than anything I’ve seen before.
Album of the month: For this already-too-cold month I will say Circuits by Moiré. Eight slices of tech house, nonsensically titled, metallic and tundra-like and futuristic. It’s what I’d expect to be listening to if I was ever transported to another planet with giant cities made of glass, where humans are made to fight android replicas for sport.
Music with which to stave off nuclear thoughts:
1 Joy Division - Autosuggestion
3 Ryuichi Sakamoto - The End of Asia
4 Iron Curtain - Tarantula Scream
