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Saturday, January 25, 2003
posted 5:42 AM
SOUL-DELAY CENTRAL
Mine’s only now being tugged out of the holding-pattern over Frankfurt airport, I think.
Four in the morning, the faithful Italian oil-filled electric heater in my basement office making quizzical ticking sounds at being turned on at such an odd hour.
Close my eyes and I see wide, cobbled squares in a sort of bluish-gray light, cyclists dressed for the office pedaling along in their own lane, a different disposition of electric light and candles (candles everywhere, relatively). It was a lot of fun. My thanks to Karsten, my publisher, and Adelaide, my publicist, and everyone else at People’s Press!
Here, kindly translated by Adelaide, are a few bits of the Danish press response (I wouldn’t ordinarily quote my own reviews here, but I usually don’t have any opportunity to read the non-English ones):
This is the book one needs when introducing the genre of science fiction to women.
--Børsen
A sensitive cultural and technological seismograph.
--Information
A sort of literary counterpart to Naomi Kleins’ NO LOGO, without the moral hangovers.
--Ekstrabladet
So: Are is his books neo-crap? Nope!
Are we not meeting the sarcastic and irreplaceable person that has always been behind the brand: William Gibson.
--Berlingske
I'd like stickers for the English-language editions, please, that say "NEO-CRAP? NOPE!"
Actually I can't have a NO LOGO hangover because I haven't read NO LOGO. This is indicative of my method, though: I saw the title NO LOGO, and literalized it into Cayce's logo-allergy. High-speed low-drag minimalism of sourcing, or sheer ideological laziness? ("Just say nope!")
My sensitive cultural and technological seismograph is telling me that it's time for breakfast, but it's still two hours 'til the good places open.
There really was an articulated human skeleton in the Business Center of the hotel in Copenhagen. Though I was made more uneasy by the Olivetti PC I was using. Somehow its drive was connected in some very nasty way to the speakers, which must have been set for max volume, so that the room was constantly filled with sounds of the drive doing its business. When I entered the room, in the dark, it was doing that, loudly, and it was doing that when I left.
I do, as someone pointed out, keep an eye on the discussions, and enjoy them, but there's already enough going on there that I can't hope to keep up with everything, at least in terms of responding to individual queries.
I'm particularly enjoying the thread on obscure cyberpunkoid cinema. In light of that, does anyone know the name of that wonderfully low-budget Italian effort about the superstar game-designer who gets dramatically involved with the sad-ass SuperMario-like character in the game he's designed? The game segments are like Pixelvision, and look to have had an even lower budget than the film itself. I had a copy of this a few years ago and loved it. Moments of wonderfully unpretentious brilliance, particularly in the throwaway bits of comically ultraviolent street-culture.
My favorite moments of c-punkish filmmaking tend to be exactly that, moments, and often to be isolated in really exceptionally bad films.
My goal for JOHNNY MNEMONIC, from the start, was that it should feel something like that but consist of nothing but those moments. A tricky act to pull it off, it turns out, but one sees these things so much more clearly in retrospect. (Among the many things I find charming about the Danes is that, uniquely among all the peoples of the world, they seem to have viewed JOHNNY MNEMONIC as having been made with a certain sense of broad irony. Which it was, though Sony's final cut did everything it could to cancel that.)
GUTTER HISTORY OF LONDON
Someone asked for a good one. Kellow Chesney's THE VICTORIAN UNDERWORLD (1970) is my bible there, and one of my all-time favorite books. I went back to it repeatedly for THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, but before that it was the major influence on the criminal milleau of NEUROMANCER and the sequels, which I always saw as being quite Victorian (my other source for that having been the original GANGS OF NEW YORK, which I'd read at about the same time).
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