THE JOURNAL

PART 1: THOUGHTS TUMBLING OUT OF MY MIND         

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.”

So begins Paul Auster’s City of Glass. It’s a mystery I still find irresistible, an invitation I can never refuse. I had wanted to use the phrase “Wrong Number” somewhere for quite a few years. Initially it was going to sit behind some film work I was doing, but the words later became the name of an almost imaginary journal. It was with this idea in mind that I finally started my WRONG NUMBER blog. And now it’s time to begin putting together the journal that the blog was designed to support. To make it real.

WRONG NUMBER was going to be an anthology of short stories. To put that in the context of me, I’d moved away from writing about music around 2007. The next few years saw me make a handful of short films. Although artistic failures, those films helped me get into the way of generating story ideas. That led to writing fiction, which had always been my goal; I’d just not been able to do it before. So, I would put out a fiction anthology, featuring my beloved SF&F and horror. Well, no. The more I thought about it, the more the idea didn’t seem the right fit. I know a number of awesome writers (some of you may be reading this right now), but they operate primarily within non-fiction fields, music being the big one. I obviously wanted to get as many of these talented individuals involved as possible, so it made sense to open the doors to include not only fiction, but non-fiction and everything else in between. That’s when the idea really started to take hold for me.

I loved being New Bands editor on Plan B, but eventually got burned out on new music. I retreated into films and books, as I do, then found a new lease of musical life through watching a lot of 1960s and 1970s European cinema. French new wave scores, Jean-Claude Vannier, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders – it all fed back into what I was writing at the time. David Lynch has never been far from the (formica) table for me and the likes of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me has been a staple soundtrack for reading to since the mid-nineties. Without boring you to death here, the point I am trying to make is that I may have stopped writing about music and ceased to make films, but music and films continue to have a massive influence on my writing. That’s the way I like it.

More recently, a growing obsession with classic Doctor Who sent me crashing into Nigel Kneale and Paul Cornell. It helped that weird fiction and H.P. Lovecraft had already been hanging around. I’d been writing to Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone, ephemera on Finders Keepers, the ever present Pastelism of Geographic and not forgetting the increasing lure of Shirley Collins and the Albion Band. Having been holed up in a hidden writing bunker, I’d somehow missed Ghost Box records. They were of course an obsession waiting to happen. And I’ve got to thank Joe Stannard for pointing me in the direction of Kemper Norton, Pye Corner Audio and Black Mountain Transmitter: missing sonic links to my reading, watching and writing.

Black Mountain Transmitter’s Black Goat of the Woods is a case in point: a 40-odd minute darkening ode to Lovecraft bookended by John Carpenter-esque excursions. Playing it whilst writing helped channel much of the mood I was after, even if it may appear far from the surface in the finished product. That’s the type of pathway I’d like to suggest for the journal. So, gates open. They need not open onto Hell. But I won’t mind if they do.

WRONG NUMBER will aim to sit on the borderland, like the house that William Hope Hodgson spoke of. Its realities need to be dangerous, its unrealities a little too inviting. It was meant to be another SF&F/horror/weird fiction anthology, but the wrong person picked up its call. Now it will be something else.

PART 2: TUMBLING THOUGHTS MASQUERADING AS INFORMATION

[This section of the document was distributed privately. It was not removed, as some have speculated, by a disillusioned future contributor.]

PART 3: SKETCHES ON THE INSIDE

Thanks for listening. Before you go, here’s an inconclusive list of things not quite mentioned in the above. Things that are on my mind and may relate to what I’m trying to do here.

• The all too real unfictions of Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation and A Dream of Wessex
• Hitchcock’s Vertigo (following Kim Novak down those streets, always)
• Stage magic in Celine and Julie Go Boating
• The Doctor Who of Holmes and Hinchcliffe, The Daemons and The Visitation
• Boards of Canada, Broadcast and Warp
• The Twilight Zone and Richard Matheson
• The Andromeda Strain, Altered States and Last Night (the Canadian end of the world indie from 1998)
• Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore
• Rodinsky’s Room by Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair (not only a real mystery reminiscent of early Auster, but one that centres around an East London street where I used to work)
• Scully’s dead father appearing to her in The X-Files Beyond the Sea
• Island films by Ingmar Bergman
• A mythic Bristol playing out to the sounds of Movietone
• Project Blue Book’s relationship with the Black Lodge
• Ken Russell’s The Devils and Mordant Music’s MisinforMation
• M.R. James, Arthur Machen and Shirley Jackson
• Electric Eden by Rob Young and discovering the house called Fairport near where I live
• Lev Grossman’s excavations of C.S. Lewis in The Magicians and The Magician King
• Watching Bagpuss and reading John Burningham picture books with my daughter
• The Wicker Man / Don’t Look Now 1973 double-bill
• Tarlair, an abandoned 1930s outdoor swimming pool in my hometown Macduff
• A dream of living on the coast of Cornwall… winding away into the future

SERIOUSLY, ROSEBUD ALREADY?

I'm cheating this week. Only my second blog post and I'm mining the past. Soon I'll be retreating to Xanadu to live an isolated, godlike existence, but until then...

Back in 2007, I was delighted to be asked by Stephen and Katrina of The Pastels to help make their idea for a film club in Glasgow a reality. It was very much Stephen and Katrina's baby, but Al Kingsbury and myself were involved at the start. (I believe it was our status as big movie nerds that got us the gig.) Monorail Film Club at the Glasgow Film Theatre was born. Musicians, artists and writers were invited to select and introduce a film. The cinema goers were invited to discuss "music, cinema and life in an informal and random way" in the bar afterwards. White wine was consumed on a Sunday night. 

Now, I wasn't planning on doing a history of Monorail Film Club, but just to give you an idea of the content, early screenings included: Masculin Féminin introduced by Stephen Pastel, Grey Gardens introduced by Roxanne Clifford (then of The Royal We, now of Veronica Falls) and The Servant introduced by Alex Kapranos. In November 2007 I introduced Orson Welles's astonishing F For Fake.

If any of the above suggests the past tense, then that is only my involvement. The arrival of my daughter meant less cinema visits and then we went and sealed the deal by moving to London. But the film club is still going strong and I recommend you check it out if you can. It has also spawned Film Club Bristol, which I am going to attribute to psychogeographic investigations by an ex-Monorail regular.  

I dug out my notes for the F For Fake screening from the old Monorail Film Club myspace page (check out the GFT site for current details). Don't know why exactly, except I had recently been thinking about not only F For Fake, but also Céline and Julie Go Boating, which I compare it to. Perhaps it is vaguely related to the fact that I've been looking into hauntology, getting ready to watch some Nigel Kneale and contemplating the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Trying to locate suitable music in the house to accompany these musings, I put on the Valerie and Her Week of Wonders soundtrack and was magically transported back to when I first saw the movie, at the Monorail Film Club of course. 

Anyway, I wrote the notes at a time when I was transitioning from writing about music to getting involved in film. I was able to do some film criticism for Plan B, helped with the Monorail Film Club and made some short films with my friend Paul Darroch. Just to be clear, Paul is a real, true and dedicated filmmaker. Me? Well, it soon became apparent that I am a writer and have no business directing or producing or doing anything else that doesn't only involve sitting in a room putting words to paper. But that's a story for another day. Or not. 

The below notes are therefore a glimpse from 2007 that might think they point towards today. 

F FOR FAKE

Exposing unreliability at each and every turn, F For Fake successfully questions authorship and wonders at the individuality of the artist. In perfect documentary fashion, trust is placed unreservedly in our host. A grand master of ceremonies, Orson Welles draws us into his confidence from the start. He may be about to lead us into a labyrinth of lies and deceit, but it's reassuring to know that his steady hand will guide us.

All well and good, but the steady hand is gloved and he begins by asking for a key. Like all good magicians, he makes the offering appear completely under the spectator's control. You would expect to see an upright bastion of good sense and order, but here we are introduced to Orson Welles, magician. He is inviting us to trust in everything he says, while at the same time offering up the very real possibility of some sleight of hand.

Ostensibly taking an art forger and purported hoax on Howard Hughes as its subject matter, the film establishes itself as being about something else altogether: the magic of cinema. It comes off as a strange hybrid of film essay, manipulated documentary and poetic study of Welles the director. Even today it proves hard to compare it with anything else, let alone try and pigeonhole the work. It almost feels like it approaches a blending of Jean-Luc Godard's later video essay work with his sixties features starring Anna Karina. And by that last remark, I mean to infer that F For Fake is immense fun.

Welles casts himself as charlatan, fraudster, trickster – in other words, movie director. After years of being shut out of his own editing suites, it is as if he decided to bring out his full arsenal of cinematic tricks on a completely new type of picture. The editing alone on F For Fake reputedly took a whole year to complete, and it shows. A virtuoso, at times dizzying job, reality and fiction crash and tumble amongst one another as we are thrown down the rabbit hole, down the rabbit hole, down the rabbit hole. Make no mistake, F For Fake is a wild ride, although you may not realise it all at once.

I'm somehow reminded of Céline and Julie Go Boating, Jacque Rivette's 1974 masterpiece. It too begins with a magician of sorts – a woman reading a book of magic on a park bench in Paris – before leading us down its winding narrative paths. Clearly a work of fiction and, at 192 minutes, it stays around much longer than Welles's piece, but the two share a fascination with the workings of cinema, without necessarily dealing with them directly. Theatricality, showmanship, the slippery nature of truth – these things seep through the pores of both films. And there's the sheer joy in it all, the desire to entertain and to mystify in equal measure. F For Fake may well reveal the magic of cinema's innermost workings, but only if you're watching very, very closely.

Director: Orson Welles. 

Starring: Orson Welles, Oja Kodar. 

France / Iran / Germany 1974. 

1h25m, English