Ve Haff Vays of Making You Talk

No this post isnt going to be about Kate Winslet's accent in the Reader or Dick Cheney's night-time activities in the dungeons of the Pentagon, rather this is going to be about talking books. Me own wee talking books to be exact. See, those nice chaps at Blackstone Audio want to do an audiobook of Fifty Grand and today we said yes to their fine offer. They've done four of my books as audios before including the Dead Trilogy (all of which won Earphones Awards and, incredibly, The Dead Yard won Audiobook of the year in the Mystery-Thriller category). Its a bit frakking odd to me that my books in print-form have more or less died but in audio format they're getting a second life. I have 10 times the number of ratings and reviews on Audible.com than I do on Amazon.com and I get far more letters and email about the audioversions of the dead trilogy than I ever did about the book version. One part of me is happy and one part of me is pissed off - what was wrong with the bloody book, eh? Still, back on topic, come the summer you should be able to get Fifty Grand as a hardback, paperback, CD book or digital download and if you wait a few weeks longer you can get it completely free as a bit torrent from Pirate Bay - the bastards.

The Best Irish Album Ever

A lot of people haven't heard of it and it took it thirty four years to go gold, but in my opinion Van Morrison's Astral Weeks is the best pop music record ever to have been made by an Irishman/woman or group. Although most of the songs were written in Cambridge, Massachusetts and it was recorded in New York, this is an album all about growing up in 1950's Belfast. Nostalgia wafts from every groove as words and harmonies take us to a city of record shops, greasy cafes, bread vans, trains, shipyards and tight knit neighbourhoods filled with the craic. Using a group of session musicians who were given free rein to improvise over a song collection about Van Morrison's working class boyhood this unlikely ensemble (no one even knows who the flute player was) produced a masterpiece which won't be repeated in this era of synth musicians who are all manufactured in a lab somewhere in North Bergen, New Jersey. If you think Irish music lurks in the interface between Enya, U2 and the Clancy Brothers or - God save us - Westlife then you need a brand new Venn Diagram that includes The Waterboys, Snow Patrol and Belle and Sebastian (actually they're Scottish) who were all heavily influenced by Astral Weeks. Not convinced? Elvis Costello thinks its one of the greatest albums of all time as do Mojo Magazine, Q Magazine and Rolling Stone

The emotional highlight of Astral Weeks is Madame George. A 10 minute song about a West Belfast drag queen who runs a shabeen. The only free version I found was this one to the right. Van is not firing on all cylinders here (he's 60 something) but it gives you an idea. (I tried to get rid of the letters on the screen but the record company put them up there for some silly anti piracy reason. The eejits.)

Twenty Years, Twenty Terrible Best Picture Winners

(or why Benjamin Button will triumph at the Oscars)

1988 Rain Man - an almost unwatchable movie in which Dustin Hoffman plays Tom Cruise’s mentally challenged brother who Cruise uses to win at cards in Vegas. No, really.
1989 Driving Miss Daisy - static, dull, pointless, patronising, now that Obama’s President let’s pretend this film doesn’t exist.
1990 Dances With Wolves - overblown cowboy epic about a white man learning the ways of mystical Indians. President Laura Roslin plays the love interest. Horrible from start to finish (at least I think so, because I walked out).
1991 Silence of the Lambs - campy horror flick, that depends on an incredible coincidence for the plot to work. Jody Foster is twitchy, Sir Anthony is so far over the top he’s in the troposphere.
1992 Unforgiven - ok, this is a good film.
1993 Schindler’s List - can’t get past everyvun speaking like ziss all ze time.
1994 Forrest Gump - the worst film ever made by human hand.
1995 Braveheart - a close second.
1996 The English Patient - ok it’s a tie for second place.
1997 Titantic - the ship going down was cool, the love story was ridiculous, nice understated performance from the iceberg.
1998 Shakespeare in Love - it had Ben Affleck in it.
1999 American Beauty - straight to video things-aren’t-great-in-the-suburbs rubbish.
2000 Gladiator - superb for the first twenty minutes then long winded, ponderous, oafish and dull.
2001 A Beautiful Mind - like Harvey but not good.
2002 Chicago - we all thought the age of the great screen musical was dead. We were right.
2003 The Return of the King - worst movie in the trilogy. The ending goes on for two hours. Hobbits weeping everywhere. Even geeked out supernerds were looking at their watches. (Yes, I mean me)
2004 Million Dollar Baby - Hokey, simple, false and predictable. People who live in trailers are scum is the subtext of this film. BTW Yeats wrote in English.
2005 Crash - finally JG Ballard gets the respect he deserv- oh it’s the other Crash? Yeah that was awful. Looked like it was cooked up in the Oscar bait shop.
2006 The Departed - Scorsese’s worst film. I can do a better Boston accent than almost everyone in this cast and I cannot do a Boston accent. Memo to Mr. S. this is your third film about a working class Irish protagonist and we’ve never seen a pint of Guinness. Stick to what you know.
2007 No Country For Old Men - the hero gets killed off screen, and Kelly Macdonald doesn’t talk Glaswegian but I quite enjoyed the movie.
2008 Benjamin Button ? - if you liked Forrest Gump you’ll love Button. Not Scott Fitzgerald's shining moment either.

The Meaning of Cool

In the case of Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 197 (1964) Justice Potter Stewart failed to come up with a definition of pornography but, he added "I know it when I see it." I thought of that this weekend with the death of the much ridiculed painter Andrew Wyeth who Robert Hughes once called so much "styrofoam and saccharine"; Justice Potter's name also re-entered my mind following an excellent interview in The Guardian with my favourite living poet Ciaran Carson. Neither of these gentlemen are hip to the in-crowd but to me they are a couple of bad asses. I can't tell you exactly why I think they're cool, but unlike Justice Potter I'll try.
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Andrew Wyeth's obituaries used terms like "middlebrow," "second rate," "dull" etc. Slate Magazine even called him a "con man." He was the antithesis of Andy Warhol and the New York hep cats. Art critics hated the fact that he lived in rural Pennsylvania and painted largely pastoral landscapes, "rejecting the twentieth century." But a closer look reveals something odd about these landscapes, something off putting, something creepy. Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling has talked about "slipstream fiction," i.e. fiction set in the real world but a real world in which everything is slightly off kilter. That's what Wyeth's pictures are to me with odd people and a hyper minimalist subject matter (as in Wind From The Sea above). This isn't a celebration of nature, this is nature after a catastrophe that has left only a few human survivors wandering around, dazed. Wyeth was popular with the general public and conservative Presidents so of course he was ridiculed by the intelligentsia, but to me his pictures (like Robert Frost's poems) are crafted in the architecture of weirdness. The perceptive Mark Rothko said of Wyeth, "his paintings are about the pursuit of strangeness," and that I think will be the final word, not the sneering from the supposedly cool crowd who wrote the obits.
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Ciaran Carson has won most of the major UK poetry prizes for his work over the last thirty years but he's largely unknown. He lives a quiet life on the Antrim Road in Belfast but he grew up in the turbulent Falls Road area. The Guardian's interview with him reveals a man more interested in the shape and sound of words than in ideologies. How a poem is made, Carson says, is just as important as what it says. Carson's work includes such masterworks as Belfast Confetti and The Irish For No as well as an award winning translation of Dante's Inferno and yet he is not as well known as Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney or Late Review critic Tom Paulin all of whom were at Queens University with Carson in the early 70's. Ciaran Carson's problem as John Banville sees it in The Guardian is that he made the singular error of not migrating from insular Belfast to cosmopolitan Dublin. I don't know about that, if he'd gone South he would have moved in a different set, had different influences and perhaps fame would have hurt him. Perhaps not. Still Carson seems happy enough where he is and I wouldn't trade any of his Belfast poems for any productons that might have come from living in Malahide or a year in Berkeley or Princeton.
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So what is cool to me? Cool to me is an artist doing his own thing, following his own muse and not giving a damn what other people are doing or saying about him. Of course how I exclude Bono and Chris Martin from this definition I have no idea.

Bono's Cultural Chernobyl Day 2

Uber blogger Andrew Sullivan has now noticed that Bono's new column (see Sunday post below) in The New York Times is an early candidate for worst prose of the year. A blogger that Sullivan links to is even having a contest to explain what the column was actually about. Personally I'm more offended as an Irishman than as a writer. I thought that this kind of twinkly begorrah Oirishness went out in the 1950's. Alas no. Incidentally The New York Times doesn't seem embarrassed by Bono's column at all. It's still there on page 1 of the web site with a moody pic of Mr Hewson and that audio link proudly beside it. The way the world works it'll probably win a Pulitzer.

The NYT Discovers Get Carter, & Bono's First Editorial

The New York Times has been on a roll lately. Last week they published a review of Get Carter 38 years late and just today I discovered our very own Bono's debut editorial for the august paper of record. First Get Carter...
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Nearly 40 years after its initial release the New York Times has finally realised that there's a pretty good movie out there called Get Carter (though this Copernican discovery is only made in a blog posting.)The Grey Lady is not the quickest to catch on to cultural trends but I suppose its better late than never. Get Carter is, of course, a cultural icon in the UK and always makes the top ten in lists of Britain's greatest movies. Roger Ebert was one of the few critics who appreciated Get Carter back in 1971. In his review he notes the superlative direction, the grittiness of the story, Caine's great acting but above all the film's wonderful sense of style. Here's a typical scene. Enjoy...
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Paul Hewson aka as "Bono" has joined the New York Times editorial page. This is how his first article begins: (BTW I'm not being satirical this is really it)

Once upon a couple of weeks ago ...I’m in a crush in a Dublin pub around New Year’s. Glasses clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season’s blessings, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.

It goes on like that for 800 words. Move over Mr. McCourt there's a new professional Irishman in town. The NYT has this on page 1 today and there's even a link where you can hear Bono reading the column out loud. I haven't listened to it yet because I will be hearing a loop of it for all eternity in the iPod Satan gives me in hell.

The Bruen Verdict

The Archbishop of the modern Irish crime novel Ken Bruen was kind enough to read Fifty Grand over Christmas and had nice things to say (below). It means a lot to me coming from Ken, a man who kicked serious Irish crime fiction from the 1950's into the 1990's. Mr Bruen, of course, is still firing on all cylinders, his latest American Skin is another in a long line of masterworks. Anyway here's what the swan feeding bard of Galway City had to say about Fitty G:

“Adrian McKinty has been blowing us out of the mystery water for quite some time now. The Bloomsday Dead—superb, Dead I Well May Be, phew-oh, but he has totally taken over the whole field with Fifty Grand. Think Don Winslow’s masterly Power of The Dog combined with José Latour and the sheer narrative drive of Joe Lansdale and you'll have some idea of this amazing novel. It has riveting mystery, politics of just about every shade, thrills on almost every page and the most compelling heroine in a Havana female detective named Mercado. I've rarely read a novel that had it all—human and drug trafficking, Hollywood excesses, illegals, ferocious vengeance—but what I found most compulsive was the wondrous compassion of the book. It moved me in ways I never anticipated. This is going to be the BIG BOOK of 2009.”—Ken Bruen, author of The Guards

Books of the Year

As per requests and to help insomniacs everywhere here is the fascinating list of the books I read last year in rough chronological order: (I've *ed the books I particularly enjoyed and + ed the books that I read before i.e. a reread). Being a lazy so and so I'm not going to give the authors except where its absolutely necessary and some of the titles aren't exactly correct (I forgot what the Steve Martin book is called).

1. The Kindness of Women 2. The Big Nowhere 3. Crime Always Pays* - Declan Burke 4. Steve Martin on Comedy 5. The Birth of Tragedy 6. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo 7. Out of Africa 8. Kenneth Tynan Diaries 9. Matter - Iain Banks 10. The Old Devils * 11. Best American Essays 12. The Sheltering Sky +* 13. The Corrections* 15. Austerlitz 16. Meeting Mrs. Nabokov 17. Flaubert's Parrot 18. 1974* 19. 1977* 20. 1980* 21. Tokyo Year Zero 22. The Damned United 23. Arthur & George 24. Enemies of Promise 25. A History of the World in 10 and a half Chapters 26. Fingersmith* 27. A Users Guide to the Millennium* 28. The Book of Dead Philosophers 29. The Human Factor 30. Tolkien's Gown 31. The Swimmer as Hero* 32. What's it all About? - Julian Baggini 33. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Zafon 34. Dirty Sweet - John McFetridge* 35. Borderlands* - Brian McGilloway 36. Slouching Towards Bethlehem* 37. The White Album 38. After Henry 39. White Tiger *40. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star* 41. In Search of Conrad 42. Hotel du Lac 43. Ali and Nino* 44. The Guards - Ken Bruen+* 45. Master and Commander +* 46 The Long Goodbye +* 47 The Victorians - AN Wilson* 48 The Secret History*

I know there are a couple I've forgotten about (I vaguely recall reading something about a housewife from Australia who has an erotic adventure in North Africa and I read another one by Gavin Young about travelling across America) but this is pretty close. A big suprise was The Sheltering Sky. I'd read it years ago about the time of the disastrous movie version and hated it, but I decided to give it another chance when I found a four buck pbk. It's a truly wonderful novel by a prose genius - definitely worth a read.

Apollo Bay

We spent the week in Apollo Bay, Victoria, a seaside town just round the corner from the bay where Patrick Swayze (SPOILER ALERT)dies at the end of Point Break. (If you haven't seen Point Break and you're a fan of prime cheese then get thee to a Netflix Queue.) Apollo of course is the sun god and patron of the muses, but alas during our week it rained hard every day, we saw little of our local star and the muses didn't give me or anyone else any great ideas. It was all rather like my childhood summer holidays in Ireland with parents bundled up in scarves and coats, driving freezing blue lipped children into the sea. Except this time I was one of the parents in the coats and the sea was the churning waters of the Southern Ocean. Yes I know its churlish to complain about the weather when North America is buried in snow, but even so Scrabble and Connect Four can only provide a limited amount of entertainment while rain constantly lashes your windows and the whisky runs low. (I did finally read The Secret History (Tartt not Procopius) and that was pretty good.)

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We arrived back in Saint Kilda to find our house unrobbed, Arwynn's fish still alive, our Christmas tree wilted and skeletal and my box of Fifty Grand undelivered. So that Fifty Grand giveaway I promised is going to have to wait a week or two yet. (Apologies for that.) Anyway hope everyone had a great new year and do stay in touch - 2009 is either going to be the year I make it as a writer or I jack it all in and have a major rethink about my life. (Literature's loss will be light opera's gain.) Either way its going to be an exciting and no doubt whingy and complaint filled ride for readers of this blog. Still for the moment "happy the man who from the sea escapes the storm and finds harbor," - Euripides, The Bacchae.