Jason's Blog, page 144

Read Norman Mailer

or get a new tailor.

Café

I guess I should visit some museums while I'm here, but I don't care too much about that stuff. What I usually do when I'm in a new city is walking around blindly, discovering things by accident and getting lost. I find a café and sit by the window looking at people. The local coffee shop is a good one for that. There are some interesting faces to see walking by. And I've been here enough times that I've started recognizing some of them, like bearded Brad Pitt guy.

The book: To be honest, I've struggled a bit with the ending, the final scene. Usually I have the ending one third into the book. I had an idea for this book as well, but it didn't feel right. I came up with some other ideas that worked, but were still not quite there. It was a bit too serious, but finally I changed it a notch to the left, that made it both a bit touching, I hope, and ridiculous. Which is always a good mix, I feel. And the book is ending up with exactly 150 pages. Still some work left, though.

If you steal

... be Robin Hood.

"Ralph, meanwhile

, turned his drink around and around on the table, as if the other side of it was going to show him something different."

Denis Johnson, Resuscitation of A Hanged Man

Almost finished with this novel. It's strange, but very good. I have no idea where it's going. You can really drown in the writer's language. I also brought along with me his The Name of The World / Le Nom du Monde, which I thought I'd try to read in French, being in Canada and all.

Lloyd Cole

          I haven't seen Lloyd Cole live. Seeing him play in a small place like this would have been great. It would almost be as if he played in your living room.

Top five concerts

1. Chris Isaak. Sardine's, Oslo 87. The first concert I ever saw.
2. The Pogues. The If I Should Fall From Grace With God tour. Shane McGowan wasn't too drunk, he was standing upright during the whole show.
3. R.E.M. Green tour.
4. Iron & Wine. Copenhagen, around 7 or 8 years ago? I had no idea who they were at the time. They had a concert with Calexico. It was during a comic book festival, my Danish publisher brought me there. They did a great version of All Tomorrow's Parties.
5. Martin Stephenson & The Daintees. Also in Oslo, during my art school days, for their debut album Boat to Bolivia. Warmup artist was a then unknown Melissa Etheridge.

Wish I had seen:
1. David Sylvian. Preferrably around Secrets of The Beehive
2. Tom Waits. The Asylum years or after Swordfishtrombones, but really - anytime!
3. The Waterboys. Raggle Taggle Gypsy period.
4. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Early sixties. This would require a time machine.
5. Leonard Cohen. He had a concert in Nîmes in France a couple of years ago, and I didn't go - the idiot that I am.

Metro

The place I rent is in a calm working class area. I have to go a couple of blocks, about 5 minutes, to get up to the street where all the shops and restaurants are, including the local hip café, where I get my latté and bagel. I bought a hipster hat in the hope of blending in. I should probably get a tatoo as well.

On the subway an old woman was singing loud in French. People applauded her as she got off. This never would have happened in Norway. Any person singing on a subway or a bus in Norway would be considered crazy. Or drunk. Or both. The other passengers would probably stare straight ahead and pretend she wasn't there, hoping someone would ask her to be quiet or to leave.

Okay, the book: I'm drawing the long conversation scene. Another sequence where I haven't done much work yet is from the end of the book where the detective goes to an island off Bretagne looking for someone. I've never been there myself, so I have to do my research by google. I've been to St Malo in Bretagne. I wanted the buildings in this sequence, where the detective finds the answers, to look different than the ones in the early part of the story.

Originals for sale

There's now a lot of new originals for sale at the Beguiling site - like this image, an unused panel from Werewolves of Montpellier. http://www.beguiling.com/artproductli...

Joan Baez - 1965

Dépanneur

That's what a corneshop is called around here. So that's already one thing that is different from France. I'm woken up around dawn by the chirping of birds. I've asked them to turn it down a notch, but noo. Outside my window there's a tree, sometimes with a squirrel in it. There was a cat watching the squirrel yesterday. It's a zen thing, looking at squirrels - I can do it for hours. Maybe not for the cat.