1)Pop vs prose


"I actually remember the movie that was made about the band and the movie had gotten it pretty much right except the filmmakers forgot to add the endless paternity suits, the time I broke Kenny's arm, dear liquid in a syringe, Matt crying for hours, the eyes of fans and "vitamins", the look on Nina's face when she demanded a new Porsche, Sam's reaction when I told him Roger wanted me to do a solo record - information the filmmakers seemed to not want to deal with. The filmmakers seemed to have edited out the time I came home and found Nina sitting in the bedroom in the house on the beach, a pair of scissors in her hand, and they cut out the shot of a punctured, leaking water bed. The editor seemed to have misplaced the scene where Nina tried to drown herself one night at a party in Malibu and they cut the sequence that followed where her stomach was pumped and also the next shot, where she leaned into the frame next to my face and said, 'I hate you,' and she turned her face, pale and swollen, her hair still wet and plastered to her cheeks, away from me." (from Discovering Japan, by Bret Easton Ellis)

http://www.theherald.co.uk/fea.0.php?act=list

I've been looking for some of those. Ellis doesn't make it sound much like fun being in a band. I was reading Toby Litt's novel I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay not so long ago and he didn't make being in a band sound much like fun either. Wouldn't be jealousy, would it? Just a thought.

2) The face of monsters

Actually, reel back to that shot of Nina's face "pale and swollen" a moment. Prompted by the prospect of ghost stories being told at the East Neuk Festival this weekend (www.eastneukfestival.com) I looked out a book of ghost stories and read MR James's The Rose Garden. It's a pretty slight tale, not one of his best, its creepiness never quite outdoes its middle-English surroundings (in his best stories its the middle-English surroundings that intensify the creepiness). But its vision of a ghost in the box-bushes carries a momentary chill and sounds a little like Nina: "It was not a mask. It was a face - large, smooth and pink. She remembers the minute drops of perspiration which were starting from its forehead ... how the mouth was open and a single tooth appeared below the upper lip."
Meanwhile, anyone in the vicinity of Cameron Kirk near St Andrews on Friday at 4pm can hear a performance of The Ash Tree http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/jamesX05.htm] Now that's a proper scary MR James story. You want proof? Read this ...

"There is very little light about the bedstead, but there is a strange movement there; it sees as if Sir Richard were moving his head rapidly to and fro with only the slightest possible sound. And now you would guess, so deceptive is the half-darkness, that he had several heads, round and brownish, which move back and forward, even as low as his chest. It is a horrible illusion. Is it nothing more? There! something drops off the bed with a soft plump, like a kitten, and is out of the window in a flash; another — four — and after that there is quiet again."

Like a kitten. Ah, if only it were. Sweet dreams.