Year / 2005

by Edward Champion

Ames Update

Earlier this year, in March, I signed a contract not with Faust, but with someone far more pleasant. I believe his name was First. Mr. First was dressed in a dark oxford shirt, a pair of wrinkle-free Dockers, and had very polished shoes. He said, “Son, can you play me a memory. I’m not really sure how it goes. But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I know it’s complete. When I wore a younger man’s clothes.” I sat at the piano and played the only two things I know outside of “Chopsticks” — the riff for “Lady Madonna” and Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor. Mr. First told me that this wasn’t acceptable and that the two half-songs I played weren’t really memories, but melodies. I didn’t argue with him. Jonathan Ames’ name was brought up and well, you know the rest.

Or perhaps I’m getting my last karaoke experience confused with the papers that I’m sure that I signed — if I did indeed sign papers. (Was it the apartment lease?)

Either way, I’ve made it my duty to report any and all Jonathan Ames developments. And right now there are two: first, this Slate piece whereby Mr. Ames chronicles his midlife situation and this piece from The Stranger, whereby The Extra Man and Wake Up, Sir! are both used as cases against suicide.

by Edward Champion

David Mitchell — Red Alert

There are now galleys of it — it being David Mitchell’s new novel.

Since we’re repeatedly on record her as being major David Mitchell fans, since a character devised by Mr. Mitchell did, in fact, inspire our podcast, we’re wondering who we have to blow to get a copy of this.

Mitchell’s next novel is Black Swan Green. It reportedly tells the tale of a 13 year old English boy in 1982. In this interview, we have this information:

In one of the 13 chapters of ‘Black Swan Green’, a major character is a woman in her sixties called Eva van Outryve de Crommmelynck, now an old lady. She’s the daughter of Madam Crommmelynck, wife of Vyvyan Ayrs, who the composer Robert Frobisher, went to stay with in ‘Cloud Atlas’.

In the same section, there’s a very minor character, called Gwendolin Bendincks, who appears in the old folks home in the Timothy Cavendish section, about fifteen, twenty years before Timothy Cavendish meets her. She’s a waspish vicars’ wife in Black Swan Green.

So we have some carryover from Cloud Atlas. Black Swan Green will be composed of 13 chapters, one for each month. The Falklands war factors in. Interestingly enough, each chapter is a short story that Mitchell tried to write independently. In the selfsame interview, the very humble Mitchell remarks that it’s the best thing he’s written.

Some more info on Black Swan Green can be found here from the Oxford Literary Festival, where Mitchell is described as reading two segments from the book for the first time. One was a sex scene and Mitchell, in fact, got a bit embarassed when reading it. But he also asked the audience which version of a sentence they preferred during this reading.

Needless to say, we’re having someone hose us down with cold water tonight.

by Edward Champion

NYT = People-Style Profiles Can’t Be Too Far Away

LA Weekly reports on a development that may kill two mediums with one stone. Apparently, movie studios plan to kill their full-page advertising for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. (At $100,000 per full-page ad, that adds up to a lot of dough.) The justification? The studios want to attract younger, lowbrow moviegoers and they view these two newspapers as “older and elitist.”

This is a fascinating development for several reasons: (1) This only confirms the notion that Hollywood is uninterested in making adult films (or at least appealing to adult audiences). (2) Studios have previously thrown so much money at publicity that their lavish spreads have seemed almost inconsequential. Is this a sign that they’re starting to tighten their belts? (3) That entities as slow-moving as movie studios recognize the declining readership of newspapers suggests that, at least on the entertainment front, we’re about to see a real transformation in entertainment journalism and related media. I sincerely hope that online outlets aren’t co-opted, along the lines of the corrupt Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Of course, since this isn’t yet a fait accompli, expect to see Bill Keller promote more entertainment-oriented junk on the front page in a last-minute effort to woo back Hollywood.

by Edward Champion

Media Overload

We’re still sitting on two more Bat Segundo shows, all to come in the next few weeks. If podcast interviews aren’t you’re thing and you’re hoping to hear some steady reading, the incomparable Gerard Jones has, rather amazingly, kept quite busy. He’s put up podcasts for the first sixteen chapters of Ginny Good and he’s even managed to squeeze some Joan Baez into his introduction.