This one’s coming to you closer to the weekend, if not quite within it. I count that a victory.
I mentioned last week that I was planning to buy a camera. I finally chose one and booked it on Friday. It’s a rare one, so I have to wait for about a month to receive it, but from everything I’ve read so far, it seems like it’ll be worth the wait.
This one’s a digital camera, but since I’ve been doing a lot of reading and YouTube-watching around photography, I realised that I also wanted to go further into the past. I already have an Instax Mini, but it’s very much a novelty item, and I wanted to buy something to get me started on a journey towards film photography. So I impulse-purchased a Kodak Ektar H35, which is a half-frame 35mm point-and-shoot film camera. Half-frame means that instead of shooting a full 35mm frame, it shoots two photographs in the same space. This means each roll of film lasts twice as long, and since I have no intention to go pro with this stuff, it doesn’t affect the picture quality discernibly. So the idea is to spend less money on it so you can play more with the format. I also went ahead and bought a few different kinds of films to play with, including a black-and-white roll.
I also purchased a rather absurd number of photography books – not books on photography, but books collecting photographs. One of the best pieces of advice I received about photography was not to focus on the camera and lenses and other equipment, but to look at photographs and figure out what appeals to me, and what I feel drawn to produce. This made a lot of sense, and I plan to lounge on the sofa, surrounded by photography books, and spend days poring through them to see what I like.
I’ll keep you posted, and I’ll most likely be posting photos on the blog as I (hopefully) keep getting better.
In work this week, Dawnrunner #4 came out, written by Ram V, drawn by Evan Cagle, coloured by Francesco Segala, and lettered by me! We also, on the same day, submitted Dawnrunner #5 for print, that being the final issue.
Also, I have a feeling I might lose track of this around that time, but San Diego Comicon at the end of the month is likely to have two or three announcements for things that I’m involved with. One of them has been in the works for almost four years, and another was originally concocted before the pandemic, so it’ll be exciting to see these out in the world.
Links for the week:
- Two days to go on the Kickstarter for The Wicked + the Divine: The Covers Version, which is a tenth anniversary celebration of The Wicked + the Divine, collecting every single cover that was made for the series in an oversized package.
- Happy As Lazzaro (mentioned below) uses Super 16mm film as a medium, and this comes through both in the artefacts towards the edges, and the way colour works in the movie. Alice Rohrwacher and her DP Hélène Louvart talk about how they shot the movie on film.
- If you, like me, have been enjoying House of the Dragon Season 2, then you might have a good time listening to the podcast Boiled Leather Audio Hour, which covers each episode, and also key moments from the Ice and Fire novels.
- Writer extraordinaire (and my occasional editor) Philip Purser-Hallard writes about the Jodie Whitaker-era Doctor Who highlight “It Takes You Away” for the Psychic Paper newsletter – one of probably two episodes from that whole era I might brook rewatching.
- I listen to a lot of noise/ambient music when I’m writing, and shoegazey post-rock works great for that. This is one of my favourite tracks to start any sessions with, and recently I ended a session with this on a loop. I have also been listening to NIN’s “Together” a whole lot since it was used in the first episode of The Bear Season 3. Finally, in non-instrumentals, a BlueSky mutual linked to this gorgeous Nepali song recently, and I’ve been listening to it and the whole album since.
I finished reading only one book last week, and it was one that I’d been taking my time reading.
On Writing Fiction by David Jauss is very different from standard books on writing, which largely concern themselves with structure and character – to a degree that has become annoying, because it encourages a certain efficiency and ruthlessness in writing, which too often leads to fiction that is inert and lacks both surprise and humanness.
In this collection of essays, Jauss concerns himself largely with matters like “how much of yourself can you put into your fiction?” or “how does perspective and tense affect how your writing is read?” or “what do we mean by ‘flow’?” And when he does speak of structure, he talks about how one might organise a short story collection (which I found to be the most boring and skippable chapter, I’ll be honest).
If you’ve been digging in the trenches of popular fiction for too long, and would like to elevate your thinking about your writing, you could do much worse than this book. Jauss is clear and thoughtful, and much less given to the kind of woo-woo that, to me at least, ruins books like Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which you’d do well to stay away from, lest the woo-woo infect you.
Movies I watched last week:
Lady Bird: A very respectable work of Americana, with an affecting mother-daughter story in the centre of it. I’ll be honest, though, I was far more impressed with this before I watched The Squid and the Whale (below). In too many ways, they’re the same film, except this one was made 12 years later. Worth a watch nevertheless – Saoirse Ronan is great.
History of the Occult: On paper, this should be very much my jam – framed as the last broadcast of a show-within-the-film, it’s about the intrusion of a magical reality into our own, executed in black-and-white, in (mostly) a 4:3 aspect ratio, with narrative information leaking out of it that you need to piece together. K, in fact, pointed out that everything I was describing in terms of the film sounded very much my jam, so it seemed to be the execution that didn’t work for me.
Therein lies the rub. While this film is full of ideas, and it’s bursting to convey them to you, it is also dramatically inert. It demands your attention to sift through the clues and work out what’s going on, but once you’ve done that, there’s nothing more to it – no human concern, no philosophical question it grapples with. All technique and no heart, and the technique isn’t particularly impressive beyond some (admittedly) gorgeous camerawork.
I looked up the filmmaker after I’d watched it, and realised the director also made the Netflix show The Kirlian Frequency, which I’d abandoned after a couple of episodes because I had the exact same problem with it. Pity – I think he could do some great work if he got a co-writer to compensate for his flaws.
Happy As Lazzaro: An imperfect, yet absolutely gorgeous film about kindness, morality, exploitation, and human relations in an alienated world. I was recommended this by a friend who is currently obsessed with Alice Rohrwacher’s films, and I can see the appeal. There’s a clarity of thought here combined with a sincerity that never tips into irony, but that doesn’t seem naïve either. The central character is perfectly cast, and despite lacking any big twists and turns, you never know where this film is going to go next.
The Squid and the Whale: As mentioned above, a sort of spiritual ancestor to Lady Bird, but about men rather than women, this is a beautifully shot and put-together portrait of, let’s say, a certain kind of man. We all know this guy, who is disconcertingly invested in being seen as superior to the people around him, particularly to his loved ones, so that everything in his vicinity functions as a prop to his self-proclaimed brilliance. If someone doesn’t like what he’s doing, they don’t understand him. If he’s a failure, it is because the world isn’t ready for him. All things are divided into things that are worth it or not worth it, and he is the arbiter of this divide. You are only useful to him as long as you are in awe of him. The moment you see through him, he discards you, but the official story (his story) will be about how you betrayed him.
This is the story of a boy who grows up in thrall of a man like this, until he figures out a way to escape this influence. Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney are brilliant as the parents on the verge of a divorce, and Jesse Eisenberg gives a great performance as the skin-crawlingly honest-seeming authorial self-insert. Owen Kline plays the younger brother (and is great), but I couldn’t help notice how much that kid looks like a tiny Mark Duplass, who has also been in Baumbach’s work.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers: An immaculate execution of a near-perfect horror script. Each scene is chockfull of thoughtful visual filmmaking. There’s nearly no shot here that I might describe as lazy, which extends to the visual effects, which were all executed in-camera.
But the secret weapon of this movie is the absolutely crackling chemistry between its leads – Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams. In their very first interaction, you get a sense of their playful dynamic, and an attraction that isn’t addressed onscreen till the end, but which is very clear in the way the two look at each other. I think the film would be far colder without this genius stroke of casting.
But that made me think of other horror films that work because of the chemistry between the leads – David Naughton and Jenny Agutter in An American Werewolf in London, Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis in The Fly. This kind of chemistry gives you leeway to do things with your movie, because the audience just enjoys watching the leads interact.
It’s a pity we’ve lost the art of making horror films with this kind of onscreen chemistry. But then, our romcoms these days have all the chemistry of a plank, so it’s perhaps a bit much to expect it from horror.
There we go, short and clean. See you folks next week!
